Short and Sweet

And right to the point.....thanks again Dan.

Reprise: Limitations on the Discussion

James Ussher made the remarkable statement that the world began sometime in 4004 BC.

This has been the butt of centuries worth of mocking, maybe even justified mocking. But let us turn this idea on it's head just for the sake of argument. Let us take the step of saying that that perhaps mankind came into being around 4004 BC.   There can be not proof for this, just a different way of looking at the problem.   As this is a matter of faith, proof in the empirical sense in not strictly necessary.

I am not going to argue that the universe came into being in 4004 BC. I am not stupid. The evidence for the age of the the universe at approximately 13.7 billion years is too solid to ignore.

I will not argue that the earth came into being in 4004 BC either. I feel comfortable with the age of the earth at around 4.5 billion years.

Nor will I be caught into the trap that the bodily form that man inhabits came into being in 4004 BC. The bodily form that we use has been around quite some time, thank you very much.

What I will propose is that to be a member of mankind is to:

1. Possess a soul.
2. Have the same basic set of genes as >99% of the current human population

So what I posit as a working hypothesis is that the first ensoulment of mankind took place in a couple of folks in the middle east around 4000 BC.   The physical bodies (which we share >99% sequence homology with) prior to that time were for all intents and purposes, animals as they did not possess a soul.  From a straight biological point of view, we are of a common species with these "pre-men" and it would be impossible to differentiate them from ourselves morphologically, but as the lack of a soul exist, this (from the definition above), precludes them from being a member of mankind.

This cannot ever be proven. Perhaps it is merely a facile argument to rationalize my personal faith. That being said I will work on this idea over time and add supporting evidence if I can find it and if I think of anything to refute it, hopefully I will be intellectually honest enough to include that as well.

(Note)  There is no way to prove or disprove this.  It actually has a bunch of nasty implications when you sit down to think of it.   I am not all that fond of the idea, but there may be some merit.  Who knows, just woolgathering.

Just Gambling

So, I always look at this website

 

http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html 

 

every Friday night.

 

Now, I am thinking about running a raffle of us tin-foil hat types.  Send your entry as a comment.  Write down the week of the year (Sunday to Saturday) which has the most bank failures and how many bank failures in that week.  The person with the closest entry gets a silver eagle.

The week with the most failures will be the first judging criterion, Ties will be broken by the number of failures.

I am choosing June 21 through 27 with 23 failures.  If I win, No prize will be given and you will all genuflect at my truly amazing genius.

Fons et Origo

Hippie, yuppie, boomer. Different words for the same problem. They all speak of the same primary phenomenon, a very large, very spoiled cohort of Peter Pan’s with not a Wendy in sight.

They took their first bows in an extended tantrum called the Anti-War movement. If the main reason for the anti-war movement was pacifism and a reaction to an unjust war, I would have been cool with that. But as anyone who was there and who is honest with themselves will tell you, the prime driver was probably cowardice. Cowardice and a deep-seated desire to smoke dope, screw every member of the opposite sex in sight, and listen to some really righteous music.

The boomers like to take credit for the anti-discrimination movement. Naw…that dog won’t hunt. That was done by the prior watch. The hippies stood around and were photogenic foot soldiers, but they didn’t have shit to do with the process.

Once they had went back to the land in the commune movement, they came running back screaming. Apparently you had to work. Zounds. So they plunged into the same morass of grey flannel that bred their fathers with a verve and became the yuppies. These were hotshot young business types, devoid of any morals and intent on amassing wealth.

They succeeded and became the boomer establishment that handed the shit on a plate we are currently eating. Nothing came in between them and their mindless greed and self importance.

American jobs…get rid of them, outsource them to China and India.

Regulations keeping them from the money (Glass-Steigal et al) dump what you could, bribe the inspectors for the rest.

Build any bubble….tech, houses, commercial real estate, bonds….build it, piss on it it’s my money.

All of this happened on the boomers watch. Their poster children are Bushie II and Gore and the Clinton’s. If these aren’t the poster children for this pathetic excuse for a generation, I don’t know who else to blame.

I am a boomer

I am ashamed.

Falò Delle Vanità

We are headed towards what appears to be a uniquely American take on that self-flagellation which always occurs after a good party.  Since the current pickle that we are in is pretty much self-inflicted and a direct result of our communal greed, we will be going through a phase where we will peg our virtue to how little we consume and how virtuous and frugal is our existence.

But, lets not get too carried away with this.  As we are spending time looking around for things to throw on the bonfire of the vanities, we have to very careful not to go overboard.  We will be looking for ways to economize.  Good.  But lets not throw away support for the arts, they will give our lives a richness and texture.  Lets not throw away our charity, that will give our lives meaning and substance.  Lets not throw away our connections and our far-flung conversations, they will give our lives the depth and intelligence to find a new way.

So start thinking hard about what it is you wish to throw on the bonfire, but also make sure that you have a good firm list of what you wish to keep.

Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?

Missionaries are an odd lot.  I grew up in Utah and believe me, missionary work is part of the culture there.   Most of my friends in high school went on their missions.  Some of them spent quite a bit of time trying to explain it to me.  I could never really understand it though.  I suppose that there is nothing wrong with it, I just don’t get it.  But since I liked and admired the people and the culture, I kept my mouth shut.

But what I really want to talk about today is the missionary nature of our government and the American culture.  From the beginning, we have always said that ours is the best and right form of government.  We have always seemed to have it in mind that our odd mix of populist democracy and cutthroat capitalism has God’s personal imprimatur.

The cause of America is in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.  

Thomas Paine, Common Sense    

But, as the edifices that we have built are teetering and falling apart, we might want to reconsider the urge for missionary work in the world.  Maybe we ought to consider that we have our own problems to take care of. 

I am kind of pleased that Hillary Clinton is thinking this way.   Now, the morons in the Free Tibet movement and Amnesty International are shocked that they aren’t first pigs at the trough, but that is how it should be.  We deal with the world as it is, our way of thinking is not uniquely correct, and the wailings of frustrated überliberals is just the wailing of children when the game doesn’t go their way.

China is a mess and we can’t save them from their long history and desperate need to keep a too-large population under control.  Tibet is a province of China with delusions of grandeur.   So I for one see this backing off from our missionary work as the first step in growing up and minding our own business.  What I am really hoping is that maybe, just maybe, this kind of mind-your-own-business thinking will extend to the Middle East and we can begin getting out of that mess.

Shallow thought

Spent time knocking about SE Asia in my salad days as an E4.  Had a first hand view of hell during the fall of Phnom Penh (over my shoulder as we were bugging out).   It was a nightmare.

That being said, I have been reading folks here on the edge of blogdom writing about their sincere hopes for the fall of the US government.  I really don’t know how to say this,  so I will say it straight out, you are fools.  You have no earthly comprehension of what true anarchy and an ineffective government looks like.  Instead, you appear to have a turgid fantasy of yourself reprising any number of Mel Gibson roles.  In this fantasy you have may or may not be wearing ripped clothing with your massive muscles showing through.

An unfortunately large minority of survivalist writing is in this genre.  But sit down and think of what the fall of government has meant for the greater bulk of the time encompassed by “civilization”.  For the most part it has meant savage repression of the general population by competing power centers, famine, massive social dislocations, and abject poverty.  The “velvet”, and “Orange” revolutions were nothing of the sort.  They were successful political changes, not revolution.

So there are folks out there who want it “brought on”, let’s fragment, lets go back to the good old days.  But I am arguing right here and right now that the folks who wish this have too much time on their hands and not enough thought in their heads. 

A much more fruitful use of your time if you are that disaffected is to emulate Dan W. over at Ashes, Ashes and get thee to your state legislature and start trying to change the system we have. 

Beanie Babies and McMansions

You all know one of them.  A die-hard collector of strange things.  Certain in the belief that they are making an investment for the future.  Consider for a moment my Aunt Megaera.  She has gone hither and yon through the course of collectable fads, thinking that her possessing something gives it an irresistible allure to others.  She has brought this feeling of omniscience to anything from beanie babies to Appaloosa's  to real estate.

Well, maybe in the real estate arena she isn’t all that strange.  It would appear that a strange wind blew over the country around ten years ago, convincing folks that the business cycle and the laws of supply and demand no longer applied to them, they put their homes up on a shelf and garnished them with granite counters and Pergo floors, assured in the belief that their tastes would be reflected down the line in the significant increase of their personal wealth from their now highly desirable home. 

But now the world is telling them what Adam Smith told them a long time ago, that a home is just a home, not an investment.  Just like a toy is just a toy. 

But here in the USA we have the peculiar institution of democracy which allows a nation of beanie baby owners (BBO’s) to elect corrupt and venal officials who will pass laws and allow the government borrow money in order to permit the BBO’s the continued fantasies of a Petit-bourgeois status.

The bailouts that are in place and that are coming probably won’t work.  They seem to have little effect so far.   I would even venture to guess that, hidden in the fine print, is language that allows the real owners of the corrupt and venal officials (read here: the big banks) to turn the morons with underwater loans into true debt peons.

Reprise: I don’t post often enough

A reprise of an article I wrote back in March of 2007, I polished it up a bit.

The purpose of a blog should be primarily that of a diary. You show it to other people, and if you are like Samuel Pepys, some will even read it. For the most part however, blogs have become where the self-absorbed choose to spew out whatever ill-thought-out tripe that the blogger is thinking at that moment. The definition of a "good" blog is one that mostly agrees with your own ill-thought-out tripe.

The world is a complex place, but us bloggers usually take a small section out of it and grind their teeth on it like it was a piece of meat until it submits to their world-view. The trouble with this methodology is that once the process is complete, the subject, like a piece of meat so treated, is usually unfit for consumption by others

But now that I am getting to be an old man. As such, I have to be careful to keep myself from becoming politically and culturally myopic. Like the rest of the boomers, I was brought up to believe in the "truth" that the world cares about and values my opinion. That "truth" is becoming more and more transparently false every morning that I wake up and open my eyes.

The world has its own agenda, one that we do not form, but rather we swim in like fish in a sea. We are minnows in a sea where predators exist, and we try to convince ourselves that we can vote the predators into extinction. If we are not careful in our blogging, and in the blogs that we read, we will start to think that we are uniquely correct in our views and that the world agrees with us because we have found a string of folks who see things our way.

But the predators in our world are not democrats, and they don't listen to or even acknowledge the existence of these little schools of similar fish. They will swim away for a while, mostly because they are not hungry right then, but they will be back when it is time.

Innovation of whores

The real problem with both the parties is that they are nothing more than whores for the big money.

Consider this little nugget, where Ballmer the dog faced boy of Microsoft lectured the democratic scum on the future of innovation in America. Well, folks, it has always been my opinion that Microsoft is a poster child for what is truly fucked up in America. My take on the arc of their success is as follows.

1. Greedy little ivy-league puke leaves school early and fast talks himself a deal with IBM to provide OS for their experimental personal computer project. Sweet bit of smooth talking this, as he really didn’t own one at the time.
2. As soon as the ink is dry, runs over to shaky little Seattle startup company and buys their OS for a pittance. Gives it to IBM.
3. With revenues earned from IBM, goes out and buys up every small company who innovates and folds them into the Borg-Cube of Redmond.
4. Tries to patent everything in sight (for god sakes, they tried for a patent on smiley faces) to freeze out competition.
5. When sufficiently large, uses monopolistic business practices to enforce their will on the market.

Now, if this is innovation and the person at the core of this whorehouse named a corporation is lecturing our political leaders on “Innovation”, it may be that we deserve what we get.

Shame

We Catholics have it easy. Guilt and shame are for the most part hardwired into our collective psyche. As such, we pretty much understand the truth that it is probably our fault. But, by being faithful, mindless minions of the Pope, all we have to do is tell the priest, pay some money, fumble around with some beads for a bit and voilà, absolution occurs.

But the Catholic consciousness isn’t what is at issue right now. It is the American Consciousness. As a country, we are coming to the end of a particular road, and the road appears to be have been tragically wrong. More so than any other nation, we have gone ripping through the earth’s resources and pissed in the streams. We have sent our armies throughout the world to enforce our will. Our economy is a primer on how to best incorporate the seven cardinal sins into a culture. As the collapse starts to pick up steam, we will go looking for culprits.

But we are just now starting to look for who is at fault for our downward arc. We are at the point where we are picking up the usual suspects. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, perhaps we had better go Catholic for a bit (you Fundamentalists and Pentecostals out there, please make an effort to stifle your gag reflex) and do that least-American of all actions, self-examination.

There are vanishingly few in America who have not reaped from the boom of the last twenty years. Oh, when you compare your gleanings from this time frame compared to the full harvest brought in by the corporate and financial elites, it isn’t that great, but it is there. We all lived a little past our means, we all saved little and partied hardy. Its OK, but we were all in on it.

In a real sense, we were much like old time pirates. You have to remember that one of the euphemisms for piracy in England was “going on account”. This was because, in a pirate ship, even the lowliest cabin boy got a piece of the action. We all got a little piece of the action.

But now the cupboards are getting bare. Our piece of the action is getting vanishingly small.

Now, I think that the main drivers of the financial crimes should be brought to justice, but seeing who BHO has brought in to mind the store, I don’t think that will happen. So we will go on a witch-hunt soon to try and bring someone vaguely resembling the guilty parties to justice. This is fine with me, just keep expecting me to remind you that you were there “on account” as well.

Please Sir, may I have more?

So the car companies are back, hat in hand, wanting more money or they will (gasp, shudder) be forced to go into bankruptcy.  Now, just an an aside, who didn’t see this one coming?

The trouble is, that companies of this size and power just aren’t in anyone's best interests.  They just make flat out too many cars for the world we are heading into.  They also have shown that they have an innate ability to pick the worst type and models for the what is needed (oh, don’t get me wrong, they have a wonderful ability to tap the cupidity of the American middle class). 

So the powers that be have to make a decision soon.  They will no doubt bail these behemoths out.  The big three have spent way too much money bribing politicians for the past fifty years for any other outcome to occur.  But these dinosaurs are dying and the money we spend will be just as useful as the money that we have thus far thrown at the banks. 

I wonder what will take their place?

Looks like good news week

You know, having the news media be the tame poodles of the corporations is something akin to Lieutenant Frank Dreben in this scene. 

They perk up and shamelessly tout every cockamamie, half baked bailout plan and downplay every big boom (my favorite line today is when the Dow dropped 250 pts, within 20 minutes of opening, their adjective was  “flirting with losses”)!!!

So keep an eye on the raw data.  The fools that are reporting the news are reporting it as their corporate masters wish it reported.

The first toke

Talkin’ with my old buddy Locutius.  He was swilling Maker’s Mark and pondering taxes, I was swilling George Dickel and pondering the same.  So, needless to say, we topped up our glasses and got to talking about taxes and who pays them and how, not matter what amount of money you make, it still pisses you off.

Then, probably due to the ingestion of good whiskey, I started to realize how we got to the mess that we are in.  It was Ronnie Reagan on Miltie Friedman that got us thinking that we could have our cake and eat it too.

It is kinda like the old culty film “reefer madness”.  Those two lovable thieves offered us the first toke.  Where we are is the unravelling of lives of excess that started back in the late seventies and early eighties with those two charming con-men.  They told us that we could ramp up the military, and cut taxes.  They tried to cut all the unnecessary dreck like lunches for poor children, but the squeaking of enraged liberals made them laugh so hard that the forgot to finish that project.

But they sold us the first toke that led us to ruin.  They got us used to the “facts” of government should be gutted and taxes were unforgivable intrusions on our personal freedom.  Hell, the pull of “no taxes” and “lower taxes” still ring strong today.   But the progressive taxes of the time would have gone a long way to reining in the greed that so permeates the banks.  The close supervision of the banks and the separation of functions under Glass-Steigal kept the banks from becoming so powerful.

In the end, Ronnie and Miltie sold us the seeds to our own doom.  They were little different than our old buddy Gordon Gecko in their praise of greed.  Now the greed that as a society we have so assiduously cultivated is reaching out to strangle us.  

Listen to this one

Yes….I know Bill Moyers stands significantly to the left of most of y’all.  But he is smart as a whip and has some good interviews with folks.  It really is worth your time

Bill Moyers has an interview with former IMF Chief Economist and MIT professor Simon Johnson

or read the transcript

Catsup

What reeeeaaallllyyy pissed me off last time I went to the store was the price of catsup.

• #10 can of tomato sauce from Costco
• 12 oz can of tomato paste
• 1/3 cup molasses
• 1/2 cup cane sugar
• 4 cups chopped onions,  
• 1/2 cups  balsamic vinegar
• 1 cup white vinegar
• 4 tablespoons garlic powder
• 2 teaspoon pepper
• 2 teaspoon whole allspice
• 1 teaspoon mace
• 2 teaspoon cloves
• 3 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1-1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1 teaspoon Cayenne
• 4 tablespoons salt

Preparation:

Puree peppers and onions, combine with tomato sauce and  paste, and pour into a large stainless steel or enameled kettle. Cook and stir occasionally over low heat

Meanwhile put garlic, pepper, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, and cayenne into the vinegar in a small pot and simmer covered for 1/2 hour to steep spices in the vinegar. Pour the spiced vinegar into the stuff.

Stir.

Also add molasses, sugar, mustard,  and salt at this point.

Bring it up to a boil real slow, I keep my electric stove on 2. 

Pour into jars fresh outta the dishwasher with an inch of head space. Process in a pressure cooker by bringing the pressure cooker up to 10 lbs pressure and then turning the heat off and leaving on the burner.   This will allow you a good twenty minutes of boiling time, which for something this acidic is plenty

Tastes damn good on taters too!

A consensual hallucination

What we are really facing nowadays is an inability to let go.  It is somewhat akin to those sick-making moments between the time when you begin to realize that your marriage is broken and unfixable and the moment when you sit down with each other and begin the process of forgiveness and moving apart.

We are suffering from a loss of the dreams we have set as a society.  The ownership society that we desired so fervently has been shown to be a mirage.  Our oversized dreams of big cars, big houses, big retirements have been removed.  I would say that this does not necessarily constitute a loss, except for there seems to be a huge hole in place within our cultural psyche where the motivations and goals that drive us reside.

So we need to start ignoring the calls for more credit, more expansion, more, more, more.  We have to sit ourselves down and rethink the process.  We need to shrink our dreams back to reasonable.  We have to stop the mad growth of our lives.  We have to start living in a way that will be sustainable and within our last reduced means.

But at the end of the day, that means truly turning away from the false and destructive dreams that have defined us as a culture for the past generation or so.  It is all right to mourn them, but we have to walk away.   That will require same mourning and some anger and a painful readjustment.  Please get on with it.

Seeds

Now I have to go out and buy some hippy seeds.

The hybrids that give me such bounty aren’t going to be lasting long. Nor should they. They are an artifact of the disposable world of excess we are leaving. They gave me great yields and they made me feel like I was a stud farmer with their pumped up steroid-like growth and yields. But the truth of the matter is I grew them cuz I was lazy and wanted yield. The taste isn’t as good.

But if in fact the fewmets are hitting the fan, they will not be a good thing. I know they idea of saving seeds, but I have never done it in practice. Looks like this year is the year. Lots of good folks to talk to up here in the NW Victory seeds is looking like the winner for my needs.

But I haven’t found a decent purveyor of spuds. As you old time readers are well aware, my love for spuds is only exceeded by my love of piggies.

A little help here?

The Big Gorilla Sleeping in the Living Room

It is called the medical “system” here in the good old USA.

It is an odd thing, part medieval guild (doctors) part modern union (nurses) part governmental intrusion (medicare), part straight out oppression (ancillary workers),  and part feudal fiefdoms (hospital administrators and for profit hospitals)

This abortion of a system employs around 10% of the workforce.  It is has an extremely stratified pay structure that allows the top to glean the great majority of the rewards and the benefits while ruthlessly suppressing the bulk of the workers who provide services.  It is also very inclusive.  You must buy into the system with excessive homage to their cousins in the higher education sector.

It is attended by the scum of our society, who cruise remora-like searching for scraps.  The trial lawyers (read here: ambulance chasers) lure the unaware into expensive and foolish lawsuits that act as parasites decreasing the viability of this Frankenstein creature.

It is also attended by big and small pharma and biotech.  These mangy parasites are claiming the cure to every malady ever seen by man.  All they need is more time, unlimited funds, and no review of their questionable use of statistics, questionable moral practices, questionable business practices, or the complete suborning of the FDA to their wishes.

But right now this is the only decent cashflow in the country.  They have no intention of serving the uninsured, they believe that Mr. Darwin has the solution to that morass.  They only have intentions of providing “the best healthcare in the world” to the moneyed classes and hypochondriacs of the middle class.  They will take the money of the frightened soulless who fear their reunion with God.

This one isn’t going to be fixed easily if at all.  The boomers are coming, with their electoral votes and their rights and entitlements.  They will demand the tribute of the young and poor to extend their shallow lives.

I’m gonna trick them all.

I’m just gonna die when it is my time.

The China Syndrome

No, this isn’t a digression on Jane Fonda or her lackluster film career (though her appearance in Barbarella can still elicit smiles and prurient fantasies), but rather a brief discussion of while we have it bad, those poor saps in China are sitting on a powderkeg that makes ours look like a firecracker.

In a sense, the political leaders in China are now sitting in a position roughly akin to Brother Flounder in this scene of “Animal House”. This scene and the whole movie is just steeped in delicious irony and too-easy metaphors related to the current meltdown. Paulson as Belushi? Flounder as Hu Jintao? Geithner as D-Day? Who shall we cast as Otter?

China trusted that the West knew what they were talking about when the west sold Deng Xiao Peng the idea that capitalism and working with the capitalists would make China rich. But the black cat of capitalism did not catch mice, rather, it seems to have been trained to hand the key of the Chinese house to its old owner, the West.

Now with the banking Ponzi scheme collapsing around our ears, the export based economy that raised the expectations of the Chinese Proletariat is coming crashing around their ears. Factories are being idled, grain harvests are looking real bad, drought is going in a big way, things are looking like a serious shitheap in Beijing.

While we have the same worries as everyone else on the planet (Global Warming, Peak Oil, Credit Crisis, greedy and incompetent elites), China has these AND massive overpopulation, a seriously degraded environment, and a population that is fairly sick of getting shit on in a way we here in the west cannot even imagine.

So now we are in a place and time where the idiots that led us down a path to the possible fall of the West are trying to figure out a way to make everyone happy. China is also making some threats about how they want their loans guaranteed. Sorry boys, that ain’t gonna work. We can only save China by paupering ourselves and actually pay them back what we owe them.

We all know that isn’t going to play in Peoria.

Heresy and other such social niceties

There are people out there who can define the current conditions beautifully. What usually happens is that those same people usually go out and make some really bad suggestions about how to fix the problem.

Hence our old friend Karl Marx. If there was anyone who had a complete and systematic critique of the excesses of the banking system, it was he. Capitalism is a mess. It has a lot of money, so it can buy great PR, but it is still a system that is parasitic and counterproductive. The wealth it has generated grossly distorts the high-priced politics of the US. Because it uses massive amounts of the ill-gotten profits. There is little or nothing that it touches that it does not taint irrevocably.

Now the bankers have imploded. This is something that has occurred fairly routinely since the days of John Law. What is amusing is that this fraud and charlatan’s reputation has been rehabilitated during these last years of excess. Maybe he can be proposed as the patron saint of the current collapse, resembling as it does the Mississippi Bubble that may well have started France down the road to the end of the Ancien Regime.

So, after Law, there were many messes in banking. The Land Bank in England, the First Bank of the United States was a mess, the Second Bank of the United States may well have been worse. Marx wrote Das Kapital as a reaction to the depredations of the Banks in Europe in the Crisis of 1857. There is 1907 to think about. The Federal Reserve seems to go out of its way to choose the wrong path.

The point of all this is that one should always remember, the Federal reserve is not a Government Agency, it it wholly owned by banks and exists for their purposes. We may think that the Fed is under our control, but the ownership structure shows just how wrong we are. The Central Bank of the United States is nothing more than a political front-man for the bankers who have every intention of draining the People of the United States dry.

But lets not for a moment think that Marxist methods of addressing the problems will work. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the withering away of the State are opium dreams, little better than the visions of Xanadu that was so rudely interrupted by that “person from Porlock”.

So now we are saddled with the “Cavaliers of Credit” so aptly described by Marx. They are the big money center banks that the Clinton’s, Bushes, and now the Obama Presidencies were and are in thrall to. What now faces us is that we have to figure out how to break these big money center banks and their chieftain, the Federal Reserve. It isn’t going to be easy, and when it happens, we will most certainly go through a serious contraction, but hell, in case you haven’t noticed, we are heading that direction anyway.

In the end though, we will return to a rational and organic growth rate. We will also break the stranglehold that these large banks and the Fed have on our system and some of our souls.

Status Quo Ante

It is what everyone appears to want. A quiet return to the fabled past of easy credit, rising home prices and a fairly polished simulacrum of the good life. I really can’t say as I blame them, given my druthers, that would be where I would want to return, provided I could forget what I have seen in the last few months.

Like the character Cypher in “The Matrix”, we want to go back into a hallucination. In the scene where he sells out, one of his demands to Agent Smith is that he not remember any of the truth and that he comes back as somebody important, like an actor. In a sense, that simple twenty-second scene is a wonderful exposition of the concept of hedonism and its appeal.

We have seen the truth now, that is the old paradigm is dying. The world leaders of today are just trying to keep it on life support long enough for a miracle to kick in.

I just don’t see how this can be done. The hard truths of peak oil, climate change, overpopulation, and a poisoned financial system have sealed our future. These hard truths have cast our lot into a future of material scarcity. But that scarcity does not constitute a loss of a good life, it merely means a life of fewer trinkets.

The truth of the matter is that as a culture and a world we are bereft of ideas, money, and accessible credit. The barrel is leaking and the governments of the world are trying to fill it up with garden hoses of money. They are not fixing the holes, just trying to get it back to full. But it is still leaking. I would even go so far as to suggest the barrel can’t be fixed, it can only be filled up with the money of our grandchildren.

An Odd Promise

I very much enjoy reading Dan W. over at ashes, ashes, all fall down, but one of his recent posts has me puzzled, and, after considerable thought, may be at the core of the problems that we face as a species.

Dan is an educator, and if his writings are any clue to his abilities in this area, he would be one of those teachers with whom I would be most pleased with his job performance. But his recent post

On This Subject, Don't Fuck With Me

Leaves me to ponder our “inborn” need to provide for our children. This is a critique of his post, not a critique of his character. I do not wish to begin a battle, but instead a discussion.

I have two boys, and I adore them. But they have been given their own souls and their own fate. I can only give them the abilities to physically meet those. I cannot give them the ability to meet the future days with joy, that is the function of their soul, not mine. I cannot promise them the luxury of thriving, that is just a luxury that we may have squandered for our own selfish desires. I cannot provide them with the moral strength to resist the temptations of the flesh, I can only provide an example that they may or may not wish to emulate.

Probably the single most important personal virtue is that of humility. I would venture to say that Dan is infected with the arrogance found in the root disease of the current educational establishment in the United States. That is that the ability to teach is more important that the ability to learn. That the teacher can dictate the student’s success.

The promises which Dan speaks of are the artifacts of a people steeped in hereditary wealth. But those things that he wishes to promise are not inalienable rights, but a temporary distortion of the laws of entropy. Each generation will meet their own challenges, most of which will be inadvertently foisted them on the generations that preceded them. I fear that promising them our outdated desires and expectations may well lead them into a dead-end of our making.

So, Dan, you may promise to give those things to your children, but in truth, they are not yours to give. You can only pray that you have given them the strength to weather the storm.

Winter is coming.

A thousand motives will excite them thereto

I cannot stress strongly enough the need for folks to think about the shape of the government that will rise to take the place of the current government.  Whether the change be in six months or sixty years, the need to think about the nature and goals of that unborn government is imperative to the survival of the future generations that will judge us in their history books.

In a sense, this may very well be the best survival tool that you will ever own.  It will cost some money and time as books and thought are neither free nor fast.  But by being able to assist in the creation of a new government you will allow you and yours the breathing room necessary to live and move into the future.

His writing are dated, but they are clear and concise.  Tom Paine is a good starting point.  For the sake of starting a discussion, the following is offered (with profound thanks to Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce) as a starting point into the writings of this firebrand.

Some convenient tree will afford them a State House, under the branches of which the whole Colony may assemble to deliberate on public matters. It is more than probable that their first laws will have the title only of Regulations and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament every man by natural right will have a seat.

another

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will say, 'tis right.

and one more

Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones. How impious is the title of sacred Majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust!

Needless to say, I recommend buying a physical book.  If that isn’t possible try this

A good read

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/04/global-recession-protectionism-regime-change

Mercenary

Michael over at Staying Alive, who is a daily read for me, commented on an earlier post of mine and it got me thinking. Below is a response.

I am a soldier who got out. I was pretty good at my trade and I studied the history of warfare fairly extensively as part and parcel of my tradecraft. I am not an academic, but an interested amateur.

It has only been in the last couple of hundred years that the state has maintained a “monopoly” on the use of violence. Prior to that, mercenary companies provided the bulk of the punch in warfare between crowns.

The West and the current system of states is an outgrowth of the Peace of Westphalia and the system put in place to end the Thirty Years war. In a certain sense, the growth of the nation-state state can be traced to the desire of states to wrest control of violence from military contractors such as Albrecht Von Wallenstein.

Bear with me for the history lesson here. I will come to the point soon.

So mercenary companies were relegated to the fringes for quite a bit of time. But they started to peek their heads out about the same time that we started to realize that just maybe were going to run out of oil, that magic fluid that gives the nation states their power, (always remember that great line in Leon Uris’ book “Exodus", “the Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, the kingdoms of earth run on oil”). I am not sure whether this is coincidence, correlation, or causality.

Anyway, the merc companies started coming back in the seventies. Some of the senior NCO’s who trained me were trying to sign on. They were sick of the post Vietnam VOLAR and the incredible problems that it was facing. When they couldn’t easily sign on (a lotta Brits in that market) they started their own companies. Over time these started getting richer and more powerful.

Then along came Cheney and then 9/11. In the 90’s, when he was Secdef Cheney set KBR off to integrate the merc companies into our war plan….Aaahhh privitization. Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and MPRI were there to serve. When 9/11 hit, they were there in a big way.

So, now that the history lesson is over, I am starting to think about the comment that Michael on one of my recent posts.

Small little groups of maybe 200 will start out in the country. They will grow as they produce the food to feed people. Food will come quickly as they will either produce or die. I liked the comment about folks not not bothered about shooting back!
There is a balance to be maintained. Beans, Bullets, and Band-aids. You gotta have all three to make it work. Just be ready to put it into play!
Michael

What I am concerned about here is that, while good in concept, these groups could quite easily (and perhaps inevitably) devolve into something quite different.

While their initial plan would be to go out and grow food (noble that), most of the folks would be city-types completely unused to the drudgery and hard labor involved in the simple phrase “produce the food”. They will go out with good intentions and a buttload of guns. When the reality of producing food in a oil-poor world slaps them around enough, they will reassess and figure out what has been figured out so many times before. That a coherent company (lets say around 200 people) who are heavily armed and hungry decide to eat, they usually can drum up something to eat.

Pizza as poor food

Yes it is.

No, not when you order out and have some stoned, pimply-faced denizen of the World of Warcraft deliver it to your door. Hell, having pizza delivered or made by someone else is a great way to go broke fast.

Pizza was always poor food around our place when we were kids. A little flour, a little cheese, some cheap sausage and you were on your way. A good pizza made at home should cost around $3.00 and feed the family pretty well. Ten bucks and you have a party.

Just remember you have to set up for it the day before. This ain’t no fast food.

The night before

Pizza Dough:

It is:

• 5 cups of flour
• 1.75 cups water
• teaspoon of flour.
• 2 tablespoons of sugar.
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 2 teaspoons of yeast

Throw everything together and knead the hell out of it for 10-15 minutes. Get a good gluten stretch going and then put it in the fridge and let it rise for 24 hours. I use a #10 can with a snap lid to keep it in the fridge.

Pizza Sauce

Mix equal amounts of tomato sauce and tomato paste. put it on the stove over low heat and heat slowly until everything is hot and mixing well. Toss in some garlic powder, some onion powder, some basil, some oregano, and some beef bouillon powder. Don’t use any salt, the bouillon is plenty salty. Let it cook for about a half hour and put it in the fridge to cool overnight.

You will notice that I didn’t give any specifics here. I would start with a teaspoon of each as a starting point and then adjust your recipe to your taste. Sometimes it works better if you mix everything into the watery tomato sauce first, then add the paste when everything is mixed up

Cooking night

Prepare the crust

You have to pull the pizza dough out of the fridge a couple hours before you want to eat. It should be around double the size of what you started with the day before.

Let it warm up a little and then use a rolling pin to flatten it out as thick as you wish the dough to be. The recipe above make two pizzas. When you have it rolled out, oil it up on one side and put it oil side down onto a cookie sheet and cover it with a towel. Let it sit for an hour or so. It has done most of the raising already so don’t expect to much to happen here. After an hour or so, go turn on the oven to 425 F and let it warm up

After it has sat around for an hour, Oil up the side facing up(you've already done the down side) spoon on a cup or so of the pizza sauce, sprinkle with some Kraft parmesan cheese (My family is Italian an we always buy the Kraft in a can parmesan cheese…so if any of you poseurs use fresh grated, us real Italians mock you) then throw on some toppings. cover with about a half pound of mozzarella and you are off to the races

Total Cost:

Ingredients: Flour: $0.40, Sauce: $0.45, parmesan: $0.20, Mozzarella Cheese: $1.00, Toppings $1.00

Oven: 3kWh for 2 hours at $0.08 kWh = 0.48

Pizza Cost $3.53

Additional benefits, kitchen is quite warm.

This is really gonna suck

I don’t know how many of y’all have played American football, but I am going to write here a fairly extensive post using football as the central metaphor. Now for all you folks in other countries who aren’t familiar with the game, bear with me, I think that you will be able to puzzle out what I am trying to say.

We have become a nation of quarterback wanna be’s. In a sense, the changes to the pro game reflect the desire of the nation for a fast-moving exciting game. Lots of scoring, lots of flashy plays that play well on the jumbotron. It is exciting, the stars are well paid and flashy, fast and glib.

But now we are moving into a different time and place. The opponent we face is tough and relentless. The rush is withering and our fancy-pants fast stars are getting their ass pounded. This sucks for them, as they aren’t really big and strong and mean enough to handle the punishment.

Now lets pan to the lineman. These folks here have no illusions about the elegance of the game. No one volunteers to be a lineman. Lets face it, the linemen are usually the big, fat, slow kids when they start out. But somewhere along the line a transformation happens to the linemen. They start enjoying the game, they get strong and fast and they work harder than hell. They are in the furball every single play. They smash-mouth and move forward come hell or high water. Getting your ass kicked is part and parcel of every game. But you play it anyway because it is your shoulders that win the game.

So now we as a country are moving away from the fancy plays. They have shown us just what they are, smoke and mirrors. We are going back to smashmouth football, where the fullback goes up the middle and grinds like hell for a couple of yards. Then his linemen help him up and they go at it again and again. No elegance, no flash, no deception, just football as a team, just beating the other guy straight up.

We have to get over the idea that the skinny elegant man in the white house can whip out a touchdown with just brains and a plan. How we are going to get through it is hard work and sacrifice and getting up every day and going at it again. We will get our asses handed to us sometimes, not because we didn't try hard enough, but because the other guy wants to win too.

So, stop thinking like a prima donna QB. It is time to become a nation of linemen.

A Razor’s Edge

Got two co-workers over at the fedguv ranch where I draw my paycheck. Both of them have good hearts and I do like them well enough, but both of them are as ditsy as the day is long. Let us call them Scylla and Charybdis. We will leave Scylla for another date. We will be applying societal stereotypes and descriptions that may offend some. I do not think that these stereotypes detract at all from the truth of the following statements.

Charybdis is a long-term government employee. She started twenty-two years ago as a GS-4 and has now advanced to the exalted rank of GS-5. She has no easily discernible skills other than a dogged determination to show up daily and perform the least amount of work possible.

She is married to a man she met in a bar several years ago. He is a welder in a small shop in town that makes the canvas awning-type covers for RV’s and such. It would appear that the courtship was a whirlwind of pleasure where money was spent freely and she was quite swept off her feet. They purchased a house together four or five years ago and were quite pleased with their new found prosperity. Their home equity line of credit allowed them to have a Martha Stewartesque lifestyle that was the envy of the other folk at Wal-Mart.

But bad things started happening about the time I started to work at the fedguv ranch. For some odd reason, they could not get another advance on their home equity loan. Ooops! Without the added "income" of the HELOC, their credit cards were put off and used to further fund the lifestyle that was so obviously a God-given right.

But recently, a great injustice has occurred. Apparently, and beyond any conceivable prior understanding, the people to whom they owe money have actually begun to request rather forcefully that they be repaid. And with interest and penalties to boot!!

Needless to say, this completely distasteful requirement that the money owed be repaid is not going over well. A great deal of the workday is now spent on the phone with rather insistent creditors. Add to this ignominy the fact that, oddly enough, the landed gentry have not been purchasing canvas awning-type covers for RV’s and such. A truncated workweek for the hubby is now the norm, and it looks as though he will be going to a three-day, 24 hour workweek. Needless to say, his salary is not going to stay the same.

So Charybdis is desperately trying to make ends meet. But the truth of the matter is that she is well and truly screwed. Her inability and lack of desire to work has made the possibility of getting a pay increase very problematic. She also is afraid that her credit rating will suffer, so she can’t tell the credit card companies to take a hike. She is afraid to lose “her” house, even though she is seriously underwater. She will not ask for help from family because that would paint her as a failure. In a word, her life is shit.

She is now going to food banks to make ends meet. It would be a secret, but the small office we work in tends to preclude secrets when she is doing all this on the phone. What astounds me the most is that she is constantly whining about having to cook and how she can no longer shop.

I have a real feeling that her story is not that uncommon. As a matter of fact, I would posit that this story is being replayed far too often in the USA currently.

The point of this story is just this. Is this truly the stuff of revolutionaries?

The Real Problem With The Education System

In my mind, it goes back to an earlier article that I wrote. We are sending young folk (they aren’t kids any more, but they sure aren’t truly adult yet) off to school at eighteen with no real experience other than sucking mama’s tit. They thrash around for a couple of years and then get spit out as educated fools.

Let’s consider a really obvious example here. West Point. This is a school that takes in eighteen-year olds, indoctrinates them into believing that they will soon be water walkers, gives them book learning on strategy and tactics, and lets them hone their “leadership” skills by bullying underclassmen. All in the name of tradition.

Now, I know that I have some military types reading this, so I am here to tell you that in my experience, it is a rare ring-knocker that doesn’t have to have sense kicked into him by a crusty senior NCO. They come out from an insular, artificial mockery of a military society and think as such they can “lead” real troops. Hell, they even have “leadership” classes, thinking that this is a skill that can be taught. The real problem with them is the way that they form they the equivalent of a “Skull and Bones” society within our military.

ROTC isn’t really much different. But they do have the advantage of not being elitist pukes like most Pointers. By having contact with real folk, they usually turn out more human and for my money, better officers.

But let’s talk about mustangs. The officers that came up through the ranks. These are my favorites. They carry around their own inner sergeant. They know how the world really works. They are the best leaders. Men die for them because the men know that these guys are usually there to win the battle, and if they had to send men off to die there is a damn good reason for it.

So what I am thinking is that we have to change our education from a system where the best schools are reserved for the rich and the well-connected to a system where adults (lets say; 24 YO or in the case of West Point, a full enlistment in the Combat Arms) are selected because they have shown themselves to be worthy of advancement.

I realize that his probably won’t happen, but it is nice to think about.

For those of us who are cheapskate, non-cable types

http://uhfhdtvantenna.blogspot.com/

Superbowl

Why is it that every screaming meemie blue stater, regardless of his politics wants to sneer at watching the superbowl? 

Of course, if you enjoy football, you must be fat and stupid.  (OK OK  I got a gut, I’m 55, I have earned it)

It is so freighted with implied meaning that when you watch it, people accuse you of anything from being a mindless stooge of the corporate masters, to a raging sexist, to a evil zionist.  Sometimes I don’t want to continue my ongoing fretting re: the decline of Western civilization.

I just like to watch good football.

Would you all please shut up and let me enjoy the game.

Those Greedy Bastards at Davos

Davos is a beautiful town.  When I was stationed (too briefly) down at Bad Toltz in Southern Bavaria, I toodled around and went over to see it.  This was in 1977 and it was gorgeous.   Got to ski, got to hang around bars.  I even managed to buy the most beautiful woman I had ever seen(or for that matter, that I have ever seen) in my life a drink and talk to her for a half hour or so, it is one of my most pleasant memories.  Failure to launch on that one, but it actually might be better that way.

But recently, Davos has taken on a different cast in my mind.  I see it now as a infestation of greed, where the world-rapists gather to preen and inform the low of their latest plans to abuse us.

Nothing good has ever come from Davos since it has been used as a sounding board for greed.

So when you read this article, they are now concerned that when the current iteration of benighted bailout foolishness is passed, it will have a “Buy American” label on it.  What this means is that the foreign greedy useless banker analogues of our batch of greedy useless bankers will have a harder time getting hold of our tax dollars.  Well, fuck them.

If we are going to pull out of this one, we can’t save the world this time.  We will be damned lucky if we managed to save ourselves.  We cannot allow Ford to spend a billion of our money down in Brazil to save jobs there.  That money needs to work here.

You already know my opinion on protectionism, it hasn’t changed.  I think that this time it is in our interests, the times have changed.

She was beautiful.