How it is going to head

IMHO

All of this is guesswork, done in the middle of the night. It is an old custom in my family, when the times get hard and direction is to needed to navigate an uncertain future, the paterfamilias retreats to a private place and casts the mickle runes. It is a ceremony unsuited for the faint of heart, involving as it does,

• latex gloves,
  
• a two-pound jar of orange marmalade,
  
• the carburetor from a 1967 Camaro,
  
• a rubber spatula, and
  
• the family cat.

But the work has to be done.

Taxes: Of course these are going to go up, you jackasses. The fed has been slinging money around like a horny sailor on shore leave. You can bitch and moan, whine and complain all you wish. We have been paying one of the lowest tax rates in the world and spending money like crazy. You gotta end up paying for it all. All of the fancy roads, bridges, space shuttle flights, oversized FBI, trips to Iraq for the troops, schools, laid-up mcmansions, blowed up HumVees, judges, food stamps, and other such ancillary have to be paid for.

We are gonna be the ones doing the paying. Get over it and tighten your belts.

Civil Rights: Will stay pretty much the same. For a bit. Don't get too cozy, keep a low profile, and don't go marching around outside. The vast majority of folks will do anything and tolerate anything to stay safe. They will cheer their government when it stomps on the outliers.

This is a great country, you can do pretty much what you please as long as you are discreet and keep your mouth shut. Holing up in a compound with a shitload of guns, screaming for the overthrow of the illegitimate government is certain to have unwanted visitors with agency names on their windbreakers come a knocking. Great for wanna-be martyrs, I think I'll pass.

Military: This ties in closely to the economic sphere. The worse the economy gets, the sooner we will declare victory and start bringing troops home. But be aware, the sooner that we declare victory, the sooner that some 4-Star will throw his hat in the ring and run for office. The Praetorians don't like the way things are looking, they will try for control.

Economy: The old game is over. No one has a clue of what the new game will look like. The only thing we know is that it will be a lot less. Start living small. You might even find out it suits you pretty well.

The stock market is now completely dissociated from the real economy. It rallies when only 623,000 jobs are lost instead of the expected 632,000 jobs. At some point the hallucinogens will run out and the price will drop like a rock. My prediction is towards the end of the year or first quarter of next year, the stock market and the economy will resume the tanking. I am guessing S&P ≈ 300-400 with unemployment in the 15-20% range with pockets of very bad 35%

Politics: This administration and the current congressional whorehouse will patch and patch and patch. They will man the pumps and pump and pump and pump. They aren't going to do anything too radical, they have too damn much to do just keeping the boat afloat.

I'll continue this on Monday....gotta go bathe the cat.

Monetize (or: to go a'whorin')

Let us speak of vanities.

There is a little place in your blogger dashboard where you can "monetize" your blog with AdSense. In other words, you can begin wearing a sandwich board for Google.

I could use some extra coin. Clicked on the link and went exploring.

Nope...ain't gonna happen.

This is my little vanity. I say what I want and if you don't like it, go someplace else. You don't have to give me any money, and I don't want to be part of advertising for someone who is trying to get you to buy crap that you really don't need.

This is a reminder of what the internet has become. It is a mass media, same as the rest of them. Most of it's bandwidth is spent feeding the machine. Large behemoths like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft skimming off a gazillion little fish.

I think that when the machine starts winding down, the internet will go away

Hmmm

Here is my latest stab at trying to explain unsavory things.

The current US population as of 052409@0821 is 306,500,959

The current world population at this time is 6,781,962,472

Using official numbers from the guv'mint, I reckon we are about 4.5% of the world population.

Trying to find exact figures on what we bring in is dicey, but it appears that we suck up around 25% of the energy used in the world and about a third of the other resources.

We spent 600 billion of the 1.1 trillion making up the worlds military expenditures (54.5%). We have military personnel stationed in >120 countries.

Some folks say that we are not an empire.

From my cold, dead ass

I am going to speak heresy.

You are going to have to give up your car.

Let's face facts folks, you know that it is true. Not wanting to sit down, think it through, and start making the necessary accomodations is nothing better than your four-year-old sitting on the floor, drumming his heels, and repeatedly announcing "I can't hear you".

Why do you think all the car companies are going tits up? They know.

Do you really think that you will be able to pay for gas to live the dream when the gas prices start going up to the $6.00-$8.00 level that they will be heading towards? Don't kid yourselves pally-bucks, when the inflation caused by dumping a couple of trillion hot-off-the-press dollars into weak economy meets the decline of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency meets the 3-4% decline in oil production, that is what you will be paying.

Start making arrangements.

You are going to need them.

Mexico as a spot of bother

Mexico is looking pretty bad.

Now, in case you don't know, Mexico is one of our biggest providers of oil for Barbie's SUV.

Crude Oil Imports (Top 15 Countries) (Thousand Barrels per Day)
Country	Feb-09	Jan-09	YTD 2009	Feb-08	YTD 2008
CANADA	1,913	1,946	1,930	1,920	1,933
MEXICO	1,219	1,299	1,261	1,231	1,214
SAUDI ARABIA	1,099	1,337	1,224	1,614	1,544
VENEZUELA	960	1,172	1,072	945	1,043
ANGOLA	671	527	595	341	458

Mexico's oil production sucks. It is also a sweet deal for the bastards at the oil companies here in the US. They have bribed the shit out of the Mexican authorities to prevent Mexico from developing their own refinery capacity. So there is a sweetheart deal where we get their oil, refine it, and sell it back at a profit. The only thing that they don't do is kiss them on the neck afterward. You will notice the flat numbers for our imports from Mexico. Couple this with the production losses and you start to see the progressive impoverishment of Mexico for our benefit. Please note, this kind of rich-grabs-from-the-poor does not usually sit well with folks.

Anyway, the oil money pays for about a third of Mexico's budget. If the production falls off at the 3-4% a year it has been showing lately, things might get pretty ugly, pretty quick. When shit goes bad in your country, and there is a country next door with good stuff a-plenty, you can't really blame folks for heading that-a-way.

No. I don't think that the best solution is to put up a big fence and shoot the bastards as the come across. The Romans tried that with the Rhaetian Limes as a frontier rather than the Rio Grande. Didn't appear to work very well. No amount of high-tech stuff will stop folks who are desperate.

But to be honest with you, that distasteful solution may very well come down to being the solution that we have to implement. But if we do execute that plan, you had better set your timers, because we will have to set the modern day equivalents of Blackjack Pershing through to Veracruz on a reasonably frequent basis.

When we do that, we will enter our own era of Diocletian.

Memorial Day

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Planning

OK Folks:

This is a three day weekend. You will please note that there is not a cloud in the sky within 300 miles of my home.

I hope that you don't get the odd idea that I am going to write something of substance.

But I will hoist a beer for you

Hey La, hey la Dorcas' Daddy is back

About time too.

So, the first thing will be to replace him in my blog lists.

The second thing is to put up his best post to date.

so here goes:

Well, my main referrer has delisted me (understandable, I was on hiatus) and my only other readers make me nervous (try not to log in from a military server sis, I don't want my door kicked in!). So, to all 5 of you, here's my worldview (with apologies and thanks to JMG, Cnulan, and many others)

---

Our standard of living is defined by energy use per capita. The more energy inputs that go into the things we consume, the richer we are, both individually and collectively.

The 'crisis' most people seem to fear, be it financial, social, or political, is basically the same complaint: someone wants to take away the energy you consume.

POLITICS

American political conservatives seem to be of the opinion that the energy they currently enjoy, in the form of material goods and money, are theirs fair and square. Others are trying to take this energy away, for redistribution. They object to this redistribution of wealth either on fairness grounds ("I earned it,") or efficiency grounds ("the government can only fuck it up.")
American liberals rarely address the topic of their own energy consumption, regardless of their own personal wealth. Instead, they focus on the inequality of energy distribution, or rather, they demand more inputs to bring others up to their level of energy use, while lowering the rate of extraction of energy to preserve it for the future.

Politically, both sides operate from a position of insanity. Conservatives have done nothing to 'earn' their wealth, except in the classic sense that they brutally exploit other people at home and abroad to enjoy the fruits of their labor. I would define this view as deluded accounting; pretending your outputs of energy somehow balance your inputs.

Liberals seem to think that the proper solution to inequality is to bring everyone in the world up to their (self-servingly appropriate) level of consumption, while also entering an energy stasis, only using what we consume. This basically means they expect currently unknown energy reserves to pop up and world population to decline voluntarily. I would define this view as happy-face wishful thinking.

FINANCE
Same story, different game. The US dollar is the worlds reserve currency. Money is not manufactured by the government, but by the request for debt by the consumer (HT). Fiat currency is indeed, a Ponzi scheme, but one that functions well for longer than a human lifetime if you do it properly, therby ensuring that it won't upset too many people in too short a time.

So the rich guys on Wall Street made fat coin, and now your 401K in a 201K. The majority seems to believe that those who took larger share of the spoils are somehow the bad guys, and that they are in cahoots with the government.
I think Wall Street is in cahoots with the government too, but being mad at Wall Street for plundering the rest of the world and only giving you a penny on the dollar seems silly to me. You're a penny ahead, and I bet privately the Kings of the Universe feel the same way: they orchestrated the plunder of the world, and were kind enough to give you some for your assistance and looking the other way. Now you want a bigger piece of the pie. Fuck you.

SOCIETY

The common opinion on the sites I read is that wealth disparity has gone out of control and lead to the collapse of our economy--the only way to restore prosperity is a more egalitarian society.

Um, no. Excluding brief periods over the last 100 years, the world has never been so equal for the haves and the have-nots. While all of us are much wealthier today energywise than the nobles of the past several millenia, the difference between the haves and have-nots is less than you'll find in the past.

We're riding high on tons of unlocked, nonrenewable energy: coal, gas & oil. As peak oil adherents say, were on the downslope for the AAA rated energy source of the three, oil.

What's the solution? If you read The Archdruid, or at least his book, you know he doesn't think it's a problem, he thinks it's a predicament. Problems have solutions, predicaments are shit that you deal with, cope with, die from--you don't solve them.

I see four things coming, either exclusively or all together.

1) Population reduction-either through war, pandemic, starvation, nuclear plant explosion, etc.
2) Explicit Empire and Facism- before we give up our stuff voluntarily, we'll give up our notions of fairness, morality, and equality. Expect nationalism, stifling of dissent, and acceptance of plunder as a neccesity. These may take the forms of racism, sexism, cultural genocide, social classes becoming social castes, or probably a big soup of all of them.

3) Nuclear power and environmental degradation- You will not accept quietly your 'energy neutral future. Even at 25% of current population, stasis energy use is basically the life of a medeival serf. Not super fun. Expect environmental laws to disappear, nuclear reactors to spring up everywhere its feasible, and much more provincialism

4) Loss of morality- Our modern morality is based on wealth, not inherent characteristics. Genetic survival is the fundamental truth IMHO, and inherent individual liberty and rights are a pretty new concept. Expect your rights to go away, expect that what you can get away with will be what's right (take one step down Maslows hierarchy from where you are now), and expect your value as an individual to diminish as your value as a groupmemeber to grow, either as a gang member, citizen of the nation, or member of a social class.

COPING

Get over yourself. Prepare to lead/join an organized group, hoard energy and accumulate power to the largest social structure you can at any given time. Your access to energy and COMPLEX material goods will decline going forward. Select the largest social group you can effectively organize and be (secretly) ready to drop down a level to the next largest group when that one goes away.

In my lifetime? Probably best from a survival standpoint to be a fervent nationalist who also protects the interest of your social class above all others. Probably best from a moral standpoint to organize a dirt farmer collective and teach sustainable practices while building community that's resistant to external exploitation.

Are you John Michael Greer or John Wesley Rawles? For myself, I'm a little bit of both, going forward, only time will tell--maybe it's better to be Daniel Plainview.

Welcome back my friend

Fan Speed and Shit Velocity

Things are proceeding. Folks everywhere are trying to find solutions that will work for them. Some of the solutions will work. Most probably won't.

What always shocks me is how folks seem to look at secondary phenomenon and treat them as causal. I have a tendency of looking at things as an energy flow equation. The reason that we are seeing dropping car production, loss of jobs, increased prices, etc., etc., etc., is that some of the smart guys at the top have realized that we are at the end of our rope with increasing energy inputs and the resulting "economic growth".

No one seems to want to mention this uncomfortable little tidbit. The big boys at the top want to cash out in orderly fashion. So them standing up and saying "all is fucked, we are skedaddling" would significantly cut into their ability to cut and run. The carmakers and the banks have been riding the orgy of consumption and are loathe to part with the continuation of their ill gotten gains. The lumpen still love their cars. The liberals still need increases in energy flow to fund their efforts to save the world.

But the oil is running out. Saudi production is down, Mexico production is down, China production is down, US production is down. We are at the crest of the wave, and the production ain't a comin' back.

So all of the epiphenomenon that we are obsessing about are going to keep creeping toward us, as surely as the lava flows from a Filipino volcano. Can we stop the changes. No. Can we live just dandy under the new lower-energy regime? The results from Europe and other developed countries would say yes.

So we have to change. As good Americans, we will go kicking and screaming and bitching about how our "rights" have been violated.

Such is life.

Chorin'

When I read about the middle ages, I was always taken by the descriptions of life in the winter in the northern climes. How things effectively shut down and the folks hunkered down in their hovels, drinking and being depressed.

Well, buckaroos, there is a bit of that in my life as well. Things kinda go into slow motion in the winter, with lots of reading, and the house getting progressively more yucky.

Well, then spring/summer comes around and you have to spend some days getting the house back in shape. Thats where I am right now. Lots of scrubbing and vacuuming and cleaning and tossing out of crap. The boys are actually helping this year. Being twelve and thirteen years old, they aren't giving 100%, but there are better things to do when you are twelve and thirteen. But the whining is diminishing and the work is getting done (albeit slowly).

So if I seem a bit surly in my writing, rest assured that it is because of this yearly ritual.

The Automakers and Other Dinosaurs

There has been considerable hue and cry about the way that the govmint has acted during the crisis of the automakers. Now, anyone who has read my rantings on a reasonably regular basis know that I have as much sympathy for the automakers as I did for the soldier who came into the sick bay the third time for the clap. We have to get some issues straightened out here.

There are a bunch of folks out there screaming bloody murder that the government shouldn't interfere with the market. My witty response to this would be "Huh, what the hell are you talking about?" The government has always been involved in economics and the market. Just because Milty (Fuckball) Friedman ran a show on PBS doesn't give "Free Market Capitalism" the imprimatur of holy writ.

Look here guys, business at this level is all political. Everyone knows that the big three are effectively dead. Barry and Timmy aren't stupid, they are just trying to slow the rate of descent sufficiently so that we might, just might, increase our chances of getting through this mess. The chances aren't good that these folks will succeed, but as I see it, they might keep the thing together long enough for us to assume the crash position.

Try reading this. Sure, it is written by a passel of folks that are beholden to the car companies, but whe I try to cross check it, the numbers look like they are in the ball park. Losing a couple of million more jobs would be bad news. Of course the guvmint will want to stick its nose in the mess. The reason it doesn't bother me too much because the only other folks who have sufficient juice to make a difference would be the hedge funds, the big banks, and auto firms from other countries. I trust Obama and his crowd a lot more that that time-proven batch of thieves and rapists.

So stop your damn whining. The end of the day message is that the "car culture" that we have maintained for the last fifty years or so is dying. All we are doing now is figuring out how to dispose of the body so that it won't stink up the place.

Fallaces sunt rerum species

Went shopping today. Good buys on Milk, cheese, chicken, and hamburger. So the freezer got a treat. Boneless pork roasts at 99 cents, milk $1.87, chicken 0.99, hamburger $1.29. Loaded up the freezer. The best part is we can get hold of Tillimook cheese for $3.99 for a 2-lb loaf.

But, being the glass-half-empty guy that I am, I started to to wonder what was up. So a call went in to my buddy Agricolis, who owns a dairy farm. Well, after talking to him, I started realizing the way things are turning. The big corporations have cut back seriously on what the pay the farmers. Agricolis is thinning his herd by a third, selling the stock to the hamburger grinders. Apparently the other farmers are doing the same.

So, I am thinking that we are going to be entering one of those time where we will see a drop in prices as an artifact of previous overcapacity, then the prices will start zooming up again. Now is the time to stock your freezer.

The Reason I Am Hopeful

In the long run, it really doesn't matter who is living on one end of the mall and works on the other. It really doesn't matter who gets rich on Wall Street. At best, the so-called "Elites" make up about 1% of the country. In a very real sense, they serve in the same role as the football team in your local high school. A distraction that is tolerated, serviced by cheerleaders, and with a sense of self-importance far in excess of their true worth.

When times are good, we ignore them. We do pretty much do what we want to do.

When times are bad, we ignore them. We pretty much do what we need to do.

Taxes will go up and down, depending on the vagaries of programs and current political fashion. Vague promises will be made to "do something" about one problem or another. But the folks out there will shrug and make do. Old folks aren't going to starve, we'll manage to take care of them. Kids will get educated, you can do that in class sizes from twenty-two to forty.

We will spend the next years coming to a new balance. Consumerism is coming to an end and we haven't dreamed up what will replace the resulting hole in our collective soul.

Prose I Can Only Dream About Writing

The Epicurian Dealmaker and Equity Private are a couple of my favorites on Saturday. I usually only update my RSS reader once a week and these guys always make the grade for excellent reading. They are witty and very well read. Their writing styles are a wonderful and they have a great ability to allow me insights into the workings of what is happening. Good, good stuff. I cannot compliment them enough. Please take the time to read both of them.

However, they have recently engaged in a bit of a shrieking hissy-fit/sissy boy slap fest over the goings on at the Chrysler takedown.

This is my comment: you guys need to spend more time at a NASCAR track and get over it. Get back to your writing and who gives a flying fuck which bit of folderol you see as out of bounds in the race to the bottom.

You see, this is just a race. Chrysler will never, ever be the same. A shitload of folks are going to be out some coin, big whoopee. Like that hasn't been happening everywhere of late. How they debone the carcass is about as important as whether Dale Ernhart Junior has a tendency of playing smash-em-up in the course of a race.

Cuz' the race is coming to an end. We are going to load the coolers back in the truck and head home for work on Monday. That is when we can crack wise about the race. It is the asshole next to you who describes the race in gritty detail while it is underway who is a pain in the ass.

So folks, grab a beer, watch the race, and make your bet how its gonna end, but stop your whiney "he was mean to me" crap.

6:00 AM Saturday

(The above illustration was swiped from Jesse's Cafe Americain, which is as good a read as anyone could hope for)

The week is over, thank God.

When I applied to the fedguv ranch, I wanted one of the high paying jobs, with good benefits, consisting of little or no work that I had heard tell about. Well, I didn't get that one. Nuff' said.

So anyway, I have been taking peeks at what has been happening in the phony world of the stock market lately. It would appear that there are a lot of folk out there who are trying to ignore the evidence that the game as changed. They are ignoring the change as hard as they can.

Now, I have no issue with hope. But anybody who buys into a market that is defined by the above graph has been smoking hopium even more potent than the stuff bandied about by BHO and the gang. I think that the bulk of the gains have been made by big houses selling to other big houses, hoping to convince the folks in the street that the water is fine, come back to us.

Everyone that I meet has downshifted. No one that I know spends money the way that they did six months ago. Not a one of them think that "the bottom is in".

Keep prepping.

Gimme a couple of days

Gotta bow out for a couple of days.  Have to get in an application for a job close to home. 

Walking to work and not having to pay Oregon income tax would be very sheen.  So you can take a breather from my inchoate ramblings.

A Grey Age

Intellectually, I tend to ride a slow pendulum back and forth between triumphalism and the world of the thunderdome. Most of my time is spent thinking that was are a pretty mediocre lot. If we are the best, then we live in a pretty small world. But occaisionally we do something well enough to begin thinking that we are pretty hot shit. A lot of the time though, we run about like the Three Stooges.

I think that concept is what scares a lot of folk. The idea that we aren't the pinnacle of God's creation, that the world doesn't rotate around us. Scary that. We might have to assess our past actions and find them wanting. We may have to assess our future plans and find them shallow.

So we stay here in a grey age, looking around us and seeing that we can't quite keep up the march to triumphalism. The grade is getting steeper and we are still the same apes-with-attitudes we have always been. Even worse, a lot of us are starting to suspect the "technological progress" that has been shoved down our throats.

So now, a significant subset is screaming that we will be entering some to-be-discussed flavor of apocalypse sometime early next week. Hmm, I am beginning to question that flavor of thought as well.

I spent a couple of hours writing down my predictions and passing them around to some folks. I see some dislocations, but I don't see the end of the world. Just folks having to buckle down and make do with a lot less.

Welcome to the grey age.

Another Batch of OT

No pictures today.  I am still kinda gun-shy about the one yesterday.

 

Sitting at work and being a government stooge early on saturday morning.  Overtime does not hurt my feelings.  Since this is my break, I thought that I would send in one of the blog-by-e-mail postings.

 

Today the corn goes in.  I am going to try a variation on the three sisters theme.  Five corn in a 1-foot pentagon,  each pentagon 1 foot apart.  When they are a foot or so, 5 beans filling in the sides.  I'll put alternating, squash, cucumbers, pumpkin and watermelon throughout after the beans get to six inches.

I'll have a single row of tomatoes in the southern front row, and six potato tires on the west side.

Gotta get going.

Gardens as tuition

Gardening is not going to save Americans from the ravages of the recession. It might help a bit, give some folks some relaxation and some veggies, but it isn't going to haul us out of the recession.

This message was brought to you by a couple of twits in Safeways yesterday. Apparently twit A had put in an "huge" garden (almost 10 x 12) and was explaining to twit B how soon the aforementioned garden would "cut her grocery bill in half".

What a garden is going to do for most folks is begin the process of paying "sweat tuition" on becoming less attached to the corporate teat. It will teach you which plants grow well in your area, what amount of weeding needs to be done, soil conditions will be addressed, etc., etc, etc.

Unless you have a huge garden and excellent skills, or are John Jeavons you are not going to harvest much over 200 pounds or so out of the average garden. Most of us aren't that good of gardeners. But what you are doing is learning how your plants grow and how to deal with them. That is best done by starting small and working up.

So, get thee back to school in your yard. Learn what grows and what doesn't. If you have been gardening for a bit, see it you can increase the size and efficiency of your plots.

And pray that you have a while before the process becomes truly necessary.

Slow Ride

I think that one of the main uses of a garden is the opportunity that it offers a person to find center and pacing.

Lets face it folks. The world is a bit too much to wrap your arms around. We come up with our frenetic theories and grandiose ideas. We try to solve to problems of several lifetimes in a day.

The real world is that of a garden, where the seeds are planted and tended patiently. The surplus is reinvested and the next years crop is put aside.

Take the time.

Encroachment

You have to be careful with the amount of noise that you allow to enter your life. It can come in many forms. You have to take a look at your own barely-unique circumstances and decide for yourself what constitutes signal and what constitutes noise.

I have written about this obliquely several times. The cable TV was an easy call, the cell phone went recently, and I have went through one abortive attempt at getting rid of the high-speed internet. I cannot say as I miss any of this. We just don't watch much in the way of TV, so cable was the easiest to let go. The loss of the cell phone went barely noticed, you can live quite nicely without being in constant contact with the trivial and overblown fretting of your friends and loved ones. As soon as the free six months end, I will probably get rid of the high speed internet.

You allow the things that distract you to enter your life as a series of decisions. Most of them are done for fairly innocent reasons; watch some TV; be able to talk in the car; the internet is an educational opportunity. But they begin to carve into your life. flooding you with spurious noise that distorts your already feeble chances of being having sufficient time and thought to make good decisions.

Try getting along without some of the essentials that you have defined. You will find that your life is not less rich without them. From my experience, the loss of noise allows me to better see the signal.

The effect of spring on blogging frequency

Wow:

Seems that there are better things to do in the spring. Gardening is a huge time hog, taking walks out of the rain and scouting fishing holes is serious business. Gotta fix the bike. Work still raises it's ugly head.

So blogging either gets done early in the AM or late at night or on weekends. Add this to the fact that I don't take as much time to raise my blood pressure by reading news and things get pretty sparse.

For some odd reason this silly journal is important to me. I am flattered by other folks taking the time to read this. It also allows me an outlet. But sometimes there are better things to be doing.

So, forgive me if things get a bit sparse, the greener pastures are just over there.

Coffee in hand

I guess that I am burned out at the constant harping of the doomers. This is difficult as I am one of the same. But the truth just sits there.

In a sense, one must go back to the fable of the little boy who cried wolf. Yes, the story has been beaten to the ground, but it is time to beat it up one more time. I am not going to harp on the obvious, but instead go to the point of view of the villagers who ignored the little creep.

We put the watchers out so that we can try to do all the necessary things. We know that there is bad shit out there, but we have to go to our jobs and tend our gardens. Because if we spent all our time watching for the big bad wolf (BBW) we wouldn't get anything useful done.

We have corporate media and bloggers now as the little boys keeping their eyes peeled for sheep. The bloggers are all looking for hits to make some point and even perhaps (gasp, sigh) be interviewed on the mainstream media. The mainstream media would sell their mother into a Burmese whorehouse for a 1-percent ratings increase. What causes these hits and rating increases is telling folks how shitty things are.

So here we sit, getting told on a daily basis how TEOTWAWKI is the day after tomorrow. We have used the information to take off down a unique path.

I am thinking that maybe we should sit back for a bit and ponder the implications of all of this. There was a reason not to pay a great deal of attention to the little bastard.

But the wolves are still out there.

Cleaning out the RSS Reader

Some of the folks that I have to thank(??) for my current status as a fourteenth degree tin-foil hatter are the folks who write the financial dissection of the current fall from excessive affluence that we are experiencing. Mish, Yves, Jesse, and their ilk have been johnny on the spot concerning what is happening.

But now they begin to bore me. In a nutshell, they are still whining about it, a chorus of paunchy middle aged men and women gasping in exasperation at the way that the rules of their favorite game have been bent. They have watched and documented a financial event with huge moral and social implications, yet all they seem to care about is the loss of wealth. My current source of amusement with these guys is their demonization of Greenspan. This to me is roughly equivalent to a bunch of pampered frat boys suing the bartender at their party for making the drinks too strong.

The way that I see things, the money is gone. In all reality, the money was never there. Folks sent streams of zeros and ones hither and yon, those zeros and ones got really slutty and Voilà, more zeros and ones appeared. This phenomenon was documented in slips of paper sent about by mutual funds and brokerage houses. The owners of these odd bits of paper then ran to the local bank and got loans for new houses replete with marble counter-tops. The banks got greedy and then the game got really crazy.

But these folks are bent on retribution now. They are necessary in order to document the charade that led up to this mess, but the problems that they outline are going to be passé soon enough. I think I am going to start checking them only once a month or so. That is sufficient frequency to keep abreast of the current digging for recriminations and sulking about imaginary lost wealth.

What I want is to stop pining over the loss of a flawed past. I also want to think that the financial is not the be all and end all of human experience.

A Slow Afternoon

Sometimes thought fails you.  That is where I am right now.  I am so completely overwhelmed by the near-total corruption of the data available to me, I have to fall back upon those things where I have clear sight of the data that I need; gardening, cooking, and the vagaries of child rearing come to mind right now.

 

The fate of the US is a big mystery right now.  We are seeing things that, on their own, do not constitute evil, but do seem to constitute a radical departure on how business is being done.  Seeing as the old way of business has proved to be lacking, this is not necessarily a bad thing.  But the trends shown don't lend themselves well to the "warm and fuzzy" moments I so relish in my politics.

 

I keep looking for a concrete data set to base my actions on.  But until then, I will try to sift through the actions and putative intentions of the powers that be.  Maybe I can make sense of it.

 

I am not holding my breath.