David Rauschenbach ("Leader by default")

In 2000 I started reading that water tables were dropping worldwide, and that government subsidy-based clear-cut monoculture farming had destroyed the soil's ability to retain water, causing most continental fresh water to now rush straight into the ocean, while taking the remaining topsoil with it. This massive wealth destruction pattern is similar enough to one credited with contributing to the toppling of the Roman Empire, which may have been the very cause and driver of monetary debasement, or cause for the need of credit. The fall of the empire may have merely been expedited by the other convergent factors.

Analysts conclude that future wars will be fought over water, and history is packed with tales of drought devastation woes (including several civilization busters), so I set out to discover what, if anything, people were doing about it. Not much, as it turns out, unless you move to Turkey. It seems that most people are perfectly willing to take their blind faith in government or technology to the grave, even though they should know by now that such faith is totally unwarranted.

So after failing to discover any leaders by choice in the game, I realized that I would once again have to become a leader by default, in order to get what I needed done.

Fortunately I discovered Ray Swangkee around that time, who was building a hand-made 75,000 gallon concrete cistern with his brother Vern, which had been under construction for over 3 years, and which was being built with First Class Quality craftsmanship for maintenance-free permanence, reliability, and as a good inheritance for future generations.

Ray's cistern consists of stepped, hand-poured solid concrete walls ranging from 2 to 3 feet thick. It might very well last 5,000 or more years. Its robustness as a cistern is further aided by the site's situation, being built in conglomerate bedrock, a super-dense clay impregnated with small dense rocks that can barely be chipped at with a pick axe, which almost makes any future structural failure irrelevant. Not that the immersion-cured solid concrete blocks stand much of a remote chance of cracking, since they are 2x3x8 in size, or 4 tons each (more than a little shy of the 5x8x12 40-ton blocks used in the great pyramid at Giza, however). The mortar-less cold joints between the massive blocks are watertight, which is something the Mayans never even achieved. And because of this, there has not even been any reason to float any hydrated lime in the water, which is the traditional method of sealing up a porous concrete cistern.

In other words, this thing will last.

Naturally I was thrilled to sign on as the new lead investor for the project, and I continue to showcase Ray's permanent construction prototypes to my associates. Ray calls permanent construction the key to accumulative wealth, which the Romans and the Mayans seem to have known all about, but seems more like "lost common sense" in our day and age. I blog more about that here.

When asked to summarize his motivation for kicking off his impressive cistern project, Ray had this to say:

“There is no Guarantee from God nor Government that it will always go on Raining. Therefore, there is no Harm in having millions of Cisterns full of Water for Social Security, which Cisterns will also provide Security from Terrorists who might otherwise Poison large Bodies of Water in Lakes and Reservoirs. Indeed, you NEED your OWN $wangkee Cistern!”

Now that is something that all religious and secular men alike can appreciate. And to that end, I say Amen!, which means "so be it" in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, but could be further translated into secular Star Trek speak by saying "Make it so, Number One!", which is exactly what I have done.

(Full project details are available at the ThePeacock website)