OK Christmas is over

(No, these aren't my preps, but what a great picture)
Now it is back to work on everything.  Kids have been properly spoiled, enough food to choke a small horse has been consumed, sleep has been caught up on.

So now a little prepping.  I think that the next phase of the operation is organization and inventory.  The trouble with the creation of even a itty-bitty stash such as mine is that you really have to keep on top of it for it to remain useful in a pinch.

The nice thing about organization and inventory is that while it is every bit as important as the more glamorous (??) aspects of prepping, it doesn't cost a dime and makes prepping more likely for success.

So, for now, on the prepping front, I am going to get things into plastic totes and label everything clearly.

But, what would this blog be if I didn't take something simple and useful and expand it into something pompous and arrogant.  Such is my burden.  In a sense, this next year might strongly resemble this task.  Nothing elegant, nothing really noticable, just moving pieces into place.

We doomers like our go to hell quick scenario.  Don't kid yourselves though kiddies, history is a frightfully slow process.  Yes, sometimes you get something that can be covered in the networks news cycle, but most of the time, it is as thrilling as watching the weeds grow in your back yard.

I figure that this next year is going to be a steady, slow slide downhill, when it ends we will be close to the bottom, but still holding our breath..

This here is what will take the next year to run its course.  How we handle this will define a lot of thing for the next twenty years.

Have a Shameless Saturnalia

Peace

The real problem with the health care plan

We don't have the money.

All the rest is hogwash and political posturing.  The government doesn't have the money to execute it.  The people don't have enough money to buy it.

All the other issues are dreck. 

A Test of Google Docs as a Blog Editor

I doubt that most folks will want to read this one.  Mostly, it is an extended test of using Google Docs to write the blog rather than the clunky/crappy user interface that Google provides to us "consumers" (this is written in 12 point Arial and extends to two line

This is what happens when you set a single return (comic sans 12point).

This is what happens when you set a double return(Garamond 12 point).
 

At least this guy is open about it

Was over reading Mish and came across this Gem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/education/16college.html?_r=1&hp

It is interesting to say the least. But it is a sign of things to come. The self-absorbed will take everything from future generations to fund their golfing and pederasty.

A Joyous Holiday Season

And the truth of the matter is;  I am not much interested in being gloomy right now.   Since the truth is pretty gloomy at the present, there is a disconnect between my desires (a happy holiday) and the purpose of this blog (talking about things in what I consider to be a truthful manner).

So, I think that, unless something inspires me otherwise, I will take the rest of the year off and immerse myself in the mundane avoidance of inconvenient and unpleasant truths that is the hallmark of American civilization and political discourse.

Have a great holidays, forget the crap around you for a bit and treasure the joys that the world can bring you.  I think that the ability to accomplish this simple act is a survival skill that you should hone along with the rest of them.  It might just be the difference between surviving and living.

Benedictio Dei.

The really hard question

Is health care a right ?

Two Taters

I buy big bags of potatoes.  When you have two big, growing boys, they can go through food mass like there is no tomorrow.  Taters are cheap, good for you, food that fills up growing teenagers.

When I get to the end of the bag and they are just starting to get a smidgen squishy, they get wrapped with aluminum foil (this is not at all a necessity, it just makes them easier to deal with in the fridge) and get baked in the oven for use later.

The easiest

The Big Play

Now, this is an add-on to my last post.  In a sense, I will be speaking out of both sides of my mouth here, so deal with it it.  It is called the dialectic and unless you are an unwashed fool, it is how anyone with a modicum of intelligence deals with the world.

The world runs on energy.

Despite all the claims to the contrary, the US is a net energy importer and our native supplies do not meet the demands by a large margin. Drilling the currently known reserves and ramping additional production out of our current wells will no get us to the promised land either.  If we wish to maintain our standard of living and our stuff, we have to get oil from other countries. 

Afghanistan sits astride the routes where the bulk of the known and exploitable energy stocks of the world has to travel to get to us.  If, and folks, this is a huge if, we can control Afghanistan, we might be able to eke enough energy resources out of that region to allow us to downshift and keep the party here in the US going for a while longer.  Maybe, just maybe, if we can keep the external energy supply coming in long enough, we can set up a barely adequate energy infrastructure here in the US that things won't go completely to hell.

Now, let's not for a minute think that this will be a moral act.  When you boil it down, it involves us taking things from other folks who own them.  The other nasty aspect is that fossils fuels are a zero-sum game, there is only so much of the shit and we are proposing to keep using it up as fast as we can.  This simple act means that there will be less for future generations to use along with less for other folks to use.

But, and I don't like this a bit, that appears to be the nasty truth of the matter.  I wrote on Saturday "what are our strategic goals for the area?"  Right now it appears to boil down to two:

• Kicking the Taliban and Al-Qaeda's ass.
• Providing safety to the Afghanistan People.

I would posit that these two goals are nothing but window dressing.  The discussion today presents a brief overview of the real reason behind the troops and the cost and the blood and the pain.

If you look at the situation through the official lens of the stated goals, it is not an acceptable action.  If you look at it through the lens of the real goal, it may be distasteful, but acceptable.

It might be worth it, though I am not sure, I am undecided.

There was one a place known as Dien Bien Phu

A place where a European power attempted to impose its will on a contry far away from its borders.  Oh, I think that the French had gotten over the "Mission Civilitrice" nonsense at that point, but the thought was still there.

Froggie controlled Hanoi and Haiphong, while the Vietmihn attacked the periphery and worked furiously to squeeze the supply lines.  Sound familiar?

Now, there are a lot of things still lacking from the equation.  Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap were ruthless geniuses.  Time has lent them this patina.  It remains to be seen if the Pushtun can come up with a leader of their caliber.

So, we had better start reading and thinking.  Our peace-prize toting president has delayed the inevitable by saying we will begin pulling out in 2011.  But truthfully, I give that statement the same credence I would give the promise that a teenage boy gives a teenage girl.

From what I have seen and what I have read, the Pushtun do not appear to have the word "quit" in their dictionary.  I believe that the Russians and the Brits might have some advice for us concerning the chances of the Pushtun laying down and doing what they are told.

What we had better start asking is "what are our strategic goals for the area?"  Right now it appears to boil down to two:

• Kicking the Taliban and Al-Qaeda's ass.
• Providing safety to the Afghanistan People

I can't say that either of these are legitimate goals for a foreign country.  I would posit that these are the sole responsibility of the Afghani people.  The Taliban were the de facto, if not de jure government of Afghanistan before we decided that wouldn't do.   But this comes down to one point that I wish to state over and over again.  If a country puts together a government to rule its people, does another country have the right to remove that government? 

An Interesting look at things

How can you think that even for a minute?

(The stage directions for the actor uttering these lines are to feign a look resembling revulsion mingled with pity)  Usually the line is delivered in little more than a shriek.

I get this a lot when I mention my firmly held belief that we just might get through all of this shit OK.  Not easy, not without pain, but OK.

You see, when you are talking with true believers in the collapse scenario, they are all 100% convinced that things are going irreversibly to hell (BTW, I give this scenario a sixty-percent chance, with thirty percent going to painful change of government and ten percent chance of working things out).  They cannot comprehend the idea that someone could think that things aren't completely and irredeemably fucked.

The same thing is true with the global warming issue.  The subset of folks who are married to the idea of catastrophic climate change cannot understand why us unwashed lumpen cannot understand the desperate need or the truly desperate straits we navigate. 

You see, we navigate into the furture blind.  What is really happening is that some folks are claiming gnosis with the future and are willing to do anything to lead us into the promised land.  But as with prophets in general, most of them really don't know where or what we will become, they just have blind faith that they are correct.  Anyone who carries the taint of doubt must be less than pure in their eyes.

So be careful in the next little bit of time.  Whether your prophet was Roubini or Panzer or Erhlich or Obama or Mann there is going to be a need to think for yourself and ignore the invective and sloppy thinking that dominate the extremes.

Simply saying that you suspect the conclusions of some practitioners of abtuse and fuzzy fields (population biology, climate research, and politics) is not a mark of stupidity in a lot of cases, but rather a mark of a healthy skepticism.

Which in my mind is the hallmark of all true science.

Not much to say today

Yesterday, my sense of irony was just not up to the task.

Permanently tethered to the banal

It seems that a bunch of folks around here are permanently tethered to the banal.  It probably is the same way where you live.

The biggest obstacle to the society coming to grips is the deep seated desire found in the majority of the population that nothing is happening, nothing is different, can we just get back to the good times thank you.  That majority drives the decision making process in this country.

So we have a merry go-round of politicians who promise to fix our problems, to return everything to the place where all material wants are handled and all problems are massaged away.

This is where we get the lying pieces of shit we call leaders.  They are all lying to us, we know that, but we want the one that lies the best, because he lets us keep our lottery ticket fantasies and our dreams of salad shooters.

Consider for a moment the "anti-war" president Obama who just won the "Nobel Peace Prize".  Just sent 34,000 troops to Afghanistan at the tune of a million dollars a year per soldier/sailor/marine.  Now if that isn't cognative dissonance, I don't know what is.

I didn't expect anything much out of Obama.  I am not disappointed, just amused.  The poor sad sack has such a shitball choice of advisors and bureaucrats and military chiefs leading him around by the nose that the poor sod doesn't know which way is up.

The country will keep going this way until "we the people" grow up.  As long as we believe that someone is there in the government to save us and to make things better, we are nothing but grist for the mill of thieves that run the country.  They will spin the lies and the false dreams as long as we continue to buy them.

Until we are content with the real world and perhaps our own suffering in it, we will be saddled with someone else's solution.