Message from a Shoe-Shine Boy

Homemade Cider and Current Reading

Blue Sky and sunshine returns. The temp is a touch lower today (cloud cover is a great insulator) at 45℉ with humidity pretty stable at 30.2 in/Hg.  There is a whisper of a breeze.

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I have always been suspicious of anything that comes out of the collective mouths of major governments or media or humanities professors.  Experience has taught me that by the time these folks have worked up a rationale for action that will benefit one subset of the population at the expense of another subset, the actual physical characteristics of that action will be so shrouded in hand-waving and false advertising that I have to grade them, oscar-like, on the quality of their performance rather than the truth of their utterings.

I do spend time every morning (≅ 1.5 hours) going through a series of websites to try and get a bare breath of the winds that day.  I can’t for a minute say that any estimate is all that accurate, but I do flatter myself that by reading different discussions my overall accuracy goes up (I figure that any single “article” tells you around 30-35% of the entire picture.  When you read different POV’s, you can usually manage to get up to around 50-60%.  You will still be misinformed a substantial percentage of the time, but you have a better chance of a better (but imperfect) understanding and will thusly be better equipped to make accommodations in the truly minor part of the picture that is your individual life.

Reading today about all the folks in major capitals talking about war and making preparations for such leads me to think that this is hand waving trying to distract you from the fact that the economy is in the toilet and a hand is on the flush lever.

For a while there (2018 to late 2024) the gloomy/doomy economic types were in the background bleating half-hearted beats.  The bezzle was going to well for them to make much a fuss.  But lately the bezzle has been tapering off and they have ramped up their “reporting” to enhance their wallet thickness.

Now, this does not contradict my suspicions, but it does increase (in my estimation) that the dollars and cents aspect of my life might start looking more tenuous.  

All I am saying is that all the shouting is just about the simple fact that you may well be living leaner soon.  It might well behoove you to make provisions for that decline in choices.