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Thanks for signing on.I’m Bob Carkhuff, and this is Freedomblog.com.

The theme for today is We the People.

For Freedom-Lovers and Freedom-Builders, this means We the People have been eliminated from our roles as policy-makers in governance.

We the People.

“We the People” are the three most precious words ever inscribed in any document. When the U.S. Constitution was framed in 1789, “We the People” were not only the beneficiaries but also the policy-makers for its freedoms.

As beneficiaries, we were entitled to maximize our freedoms. As policy-makers, we were “empowered” to maximize our future freedoms. Like captains of our own ships, policy-making empowered us to determine the degrees of latitude and longitude of ports of destination in our “voyage of discovery.”

Freedom is synonymous with policy-making. Policy-making is the power to “position” ourselves—as individuals, families, organizations, communities, and cultures. “Positioning” defines our mission and strategies in our environment or marketplace. Most often, we attempt to “position” ourselves for some “comparative advantage” in our marketplace. It is the policy-making function that makes us most free. And we have lost it!

Throughout the more than 200 years of our “Great Experiment,” We the People have shaped our country’s policies to reflect our values in relation to the various marketplaces of our world-cultural, economic, governmental. As a nation, we have thrived with this great policy-making power of We the People. Sadly, it is no longer so!

Our leaders no longer represent us because they are already serving their constituencies—Global Multinational Corporations that have no commitments to the freedoms to which we are dedicated.

Our representatives manage only the self-serving special interests of the lobbying and other pressure groups that contribute to their Political Action Committees and Individual Retirement Accounts.

Our media have abandoned their commitments to freedom as they “spin” their messages to generate “buzz” rather than truth.

Our educational systems educate us to the limited “truths of our time”—the artificial “Go – No Go” decisions dictated by the binary functions of our information technologies.

We are confused by the assaults upon the integrity of our brainpower. We are no longer policy-makers in “The Land of the Free.”We feel like dependent minions in “The Land of the Unfree.”

Our fall has been so precipitous that We the People are in denial: We have surrendered the very policy-making power that made us free.

Signing off for Freedomblog, this is Bob Carkhuff.

Remember, We the People… must take back the reigns of leadership.

We invite your comments. Send to Bob at Freedomblog.com.

“May the road rise to meet you,
And the wind be at your back.”

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Thanks for signing on. I’m Bob Carkhuff, and this is Freedomblog.com.

The theme for today is Defining Freedom. For Freedom-Lovers and Freedom-Builders, this means Freedom is thinking.

Defingin Freedom.

Thomas Jefferson said: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

Freedom is the most precious of all human experiences. Religions require it. Politicians espouse it. The media represents it. Protestors “assemble” for it. And advocates “petition” for it. Yet no one has defined “it” in today’s terms. What is the 21st Century definition of freedom? And why is it so important today?

Our Founding Fathers who blessed us with our First Amendment Freedoms failed to empower us with behavioral definitions. Defining freedom only as “the absence of prohibitions,” they never defined the presence of positive behaviors. Even Thomas Jefferson, who defined the price of protection, could not define the values of expression.

No one in history has given us an affirmative definition of freedom: how is it that we are to behave in the absence of restraint?

Webster defines freedom in the negative: “The exemption from slavery, servitude, confinement, or constraint.” Modern Americans, in particular, think of “The Underground Railway” of Pre-Civil War as the defining moment of freedom: runaway slaves following “The Freedom Road” north.

But what if the blacks came to a crossroads on a cloudy night when they had no stars or instructions to guide them? Were they free to choose? Moreover, were they free to make enlightened and freeing choices? These are the essential questions of freedom. No choices are as profound as thos e made by the runaway slaves! Yet we must ask: Were they truly free choices?

Throughout history, thinking and freedom have been inextricably bound together: the more we think, the more free we are; the less we think, the more unfree we are.

First, we expand our possibilities by thinking. Then, we narrow to the preferred possibility.

Put another way, thinking generates possibilities. Freeing narrows the possibilities to the preferred way of meeting our personal values and the requirements being imposed upon us.

It is the mission of freedomblog.com to provide a voice for thinking people, and to define freedom operationally in terms of its “infinite brainpower” and its “infinite transfers” to real-life circumstances.

In short-hand terms, freedom is “unfettered thinking!” Thinking occupies and expands the space created by the absence of prohibitions. It is the quality of thinking that affirmatively defines freedoms.

With due respect to Jefferson, we would like to propose a modification of his admonition: “The price of freedom is continuous thinking.”

Signing off for Freedomblog, this is Bob Carkhuff.

Remember, We the People… our Freedom is defined by thinking.

We invite your comments. Send to Bob at Freedomblog.com.

“May the road rise to meet you,
And the wind be at your back.”

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Thanks for signing on. I’m Bob Carkhuff and this is Freedomblog. The theme for today is Thinking—The Engine of Freedom. For Freedom-Lovers and Freedom-Builders, this means we are free who believe we’re free and have the thinking skills to become free.

It is no random occurrence that the first use of the adjective “human” happened in America: human relating, human potential, human resource development, human capital development, human processing, human possibilities, human technology, human freedom. No other people of any other culture or nation in the history of the world has focused such a concentrated effort upon understanding the effects of human beings upon each other and their worlds.

R&D began in earnest with human relating. In the “ideal”, America conceived of itself as a “melting pot.” In “reality,” America was a “boiling cauldron” which required human relating if it was to work.

Extensive studies of hundreds of thousands of people discovered the basic principle of human relating: the core of dimensions accounting for most of the effectiveness in all human relating is interpersonal. When participants respond empathically and initiate operationally, they stand a 95 percent chance of being effective in any human endeavor.

When we respond empathically and initiate operationally, we facilitate thinking or reasoning:

Responding Exploring
Personalizing Understanding
Initiating Acting

In a very real sense, human relating was the parent of human reasoning. The power, however, is in the generative reasoning. People who reason generatively make “breakthroughs” in all areas of endeavor. For example, individuals who think generatively make “breakthroughs” in their career endeavors; nations that process generatively are “positioned” to influence the commercial marketplace.

Let us get a quick overview of the phases of generative human reasoning or thinking:

• Exploring where we are in our experience;
• Understanding where we want to be;
• Acting to get to where we want to be.

In short, when we explore, understand, and act for our own values, we are reasoning.

There are specific sets of skills involved in each of these phases of reasoning. Generativity means we create new and different ways of doing things. Basically, we expand our possibilities in order to narrow to probabilities which we then act upon.

Once again, the sad thing is that we have abandoned these principles of thinking. For example, by electing and appointing people who have been “fast-tracked” through a “Chain-of-Command System,” we have gone in the direction of the conditioned responding now popular in our corporations and our government, as well as our military.

Indeed, we prepare our children for the very jobs which the Multi-Nationals are out-sourcing to the Third World.

Alas, even our schools are retrogressing. Labeled “No Child Left Behind”, this legislation has ensured that every child in need will be left behind indeed.

There is no retreating from standards of processing for our leaders as well as ourselves. Toward this end, we are going to attach Freedom Scores to candidates over the next election. Hopefully, some will drop out and make our job easier.

Signing off for Freedomblog, this is Bob Carkhuff.

Remember, We the People… are as free as we think!

We invite your comments. Send to Bob at Freedomblog.com.

“May the road rise to meet you,
And the wind be at your back.”

(Listen to the audio of this blog.)

Thanks for signing on. I’m Bob Carkhuff, and this is Freedomblog.

The theme for today is Defining Totalitarianism.

For Freedom-Lovers and Freedom-Builders, this means the price of totalitarianism is the surrender of thinking.

Ironically, it is left to totalitarians like Hitler to point us in the direction of the true meaning of freedom: “What luck it is for rulers that men do not think.”

Indeed the price of totalitarianism is the surrender of thinking to those who restrain its application. The totalitarians—at home and abroad—are linear, one-dimensional people. They operate in “chain-of-command” sequences, a manner unrelated to any people or experiences in their environment. It’s all about following orders with blind, non-thinking allegiance.

The totalitarians are not one or two generations behind advanced civilizations! They are several millennia behind on all empirical measures; they are dedicated only to terrorizing the most advanced thinking people and cultures and to aborting their progeny. These totalitarians, while impotent dimensionally, are powerful “dementially.” They have no vision except continuous struggle between cultures and classes. Because of their own conditioning, they have only destructive initiatives for others and themselves—including suicide. They would rather die than be exposed as abominable miscreants who have wasted and nullified God’s greatest gift: Human Brainpower!

For example, with “9/11” as the battle cry and ‘WMD” as the driving rationale, America went to war. How did this happen? How come We the People were ignorant? We were told that we had satellite intelligence for both crisis and response.

Indeed, we still do; but even today we cannot figure out its meaning and implications. We cannot even “postdict” crises, let alone predict them!

The battles of freedom versus totalitarianism are continuous. They begin with parent “fibs” and teacher “myths.” They progress with manager “attaboys” and executive “edicts.” They culminate in political “spin” and media “buzz” about artificial issues:

• Do public officials interview publicly or privately? (If you answer this question correctly, you probably also know who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb.)

So what can we do about the increasing secrecy and the controls being imposed upon us? In short, what are The Freedom Standards? They constitute the fundamental issue of our time.

There is one basic mission, The Freedom Mission: Tell the truth to the policy-makers, We the People!

Signing off for Freedomblog, this is Bob Carkhuff.

Remember, We the People… must cut through the spin and get to the truth.

We invite your comments. Send to Bob at Freedomblog.com.

“May the road rise to meet you,
and the wind be at your back.”

(Listen to the audio for this blog.)

Thanks for signing on. I’m Bob Carkhuff, and this is Freedomblog.com.

The theme for today is Self-Evident Truths and Abuses.

For Freedom-Lovers and Freedom-Builders, this means our historic successes are exceeded only by our current failures in freedom-building.

Building upon the fundamental assumption that governments derive “their Just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,” our Declaration of Independence dedicated our governance to the achievement of growth “ideals” for its people.

With this foundation, We the People created a Constitution to pursue Life, Liberty, Safety, and Happiness. Over the course of a little over 200 years, We the People have built the greatest nation in the history of the world, The United States of America:

• Its 50 states, some of them larger than most countries, have lived together peacefully and productively over nearly 150 years, thus reflecting the freest political system ever known.
• Among its 50 states, the GDPs of several number among the top 30 countries in the world, thus reflecting the freest and most wealth-generating system in the history of the world.
• Perhaps most important, the citizens of its 50 states have been designated by the Constitution as the policymakers of the freest representative democratic governance in the history of the world.

So what’s the problem? The U.S. has truly demonstrated itself to be The Great Experiment—nay, The Greatest Experiment in the history of humankind.

We reached from the “real” to the “ideal.” We climbed the highest mountains in the history of civilization. We viewed the “peaks” ahead of us. Then we retreated!

Self-Evident Abuses

The problem is that we are now abusing the very truths we have established.

1. We, the People have erected the most culturally related society ever, both within our national boundaries and between ourselves and other nations, even enemies—witness the collaborative Hoover Plan after World War I and the Marshall and MacArthur Plans after World War II.

The First Problem, then, is This: We, the People no longer collaborate culturally. We, the People compete independently!

2. We, the People have erected the most productive and profitable economic system ever, both within our borders and between and among those of the rest of the world—witness the continuing initiatives to generate Free Enterprise Trade Relationships throughout the world.

The Second Problem, then, is This: We, the People no longer sponsor entrepreneurially-driven Free Enterprise! We, the People, now support the totalitarian command-and-control market systems of Global Multinational Corporations, corporations which have no loyalty to the American freedoms that bore them.

3. We, the People have erected the most representative democratic governance system ever—witness the historic flow of democratic changes within and between generations of our representatives and administrations.

The Third Problem, then, is This: We, the People are no longer the policy-makers our Constitution empowered. We, the People have been reduced to the dependent minions of the authoritarian edicts of our now-evolving “Chain-of-Command Society.”

On these dimensions alone, We, the People—We, the Policy-Makers—have failed to elect leaders who serve the “ideals” that ensure our Life, Liberty, Safety, and Happiness. Indeed, we have elected representatives who have intentionally undermined these ideals in our time.

We simply cannot raise generations of people with First World Freedoms, and treat them with Third World Tyranny.

On this topic, The Declaration of Independence has its own recommendations:

But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Objective, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

In 1776, The Declaration of Independence told us this: “If you don’t like it, fix it!” This admonition still stands today.

Signing off for Freedomblog, this is Bob Carkhuff.

Remember, We the People… must take back the reigns of leadership.

We invite your comments. Send to Bob at Freedomblog.com.

“May the road rise to meet you,
And the wind be at your back.”