Troubles abound

Sabbath eve.

It’s raining outside. We’ve had healing showers on and off again for a couple of weeks. There’s still little or no tank water for livestock and grasses are only now stirring back to life. Late season rain is better than no rain at all.

I’ve sold calves, giving me a bit of breathing room at the bank and the pecan crop looks good so far.

Troubles abound, nonetheless.

A front tire to a tractor was ruined by the stub of a tree branch. The tire dealer told me a good tire is $610. A cheap Chinese throwaway is $385 and a cheap but decent off-brand $460. I don’t know in what universe a cheap tire costs $460. The back tire three weeks ago cost $1,200 and change.

Fuel is high and likely to get higher.

Grain prices have been cheap, all on rumors of a bumper corn crop in the Midwest. Probably below the cost of production, here in Texas. How long do you continue to produce goods below the cost of production?

Forget all the cheerleading about shale oil. Yes, there’s oil to be had but production costs are far greater than any other source we’ve exploited in the not so long history of the petroleum age and all costs cannot be measured in dollars.

As James Howard Kunstler would say, you’re not going to power Wal-Mart with wind and solar energy.

The PNAC (project for a new American century) is failing quite spectacularly, less than two decades from its inception.

Attempts at false flag events are harder than ever to pull off when most walk around with a cell-phone/recorder/computer and get their news from bloggers. Old geezers calling the shots got left behind by the frenetic pace of technological advance and don’t even know what their own devices are capable of.

Those that do understand these beasts (mostly Millennials) are not all on board with the manipulation of world events through deception and fraud, as people like Edward Snowden have so aptly demonstrated.

I’d like to punch John Kerry in the face. And bitch slap John McCain. Your goddamned lies are paid for with someone else’s blood, innocent people’s blood, and you are not innocent.

Don’t think for a minute some Russian piece of work like Putin is any better than our own reprobates; he does serve a useful purpose in helping to out degenerates, but that sword will cut both ways. He’s up to no good.

The whole damned scene in the Middle East from an American perspective is about maintaining the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and now a significant number of Latin American countries are working to free themselves of these economic chains.

Forget all the religious and political bull shit; the American army gets called out for one reason and one reason only, to control the world’s natural resources. The rest of the reasons issued are lame excuses designed to herd the masses.

Climate has continued to generate surprises; only this week Colorado had massive flooding and a large swath of Mexico was ravaged by two not-so-powerful but extremely persistent hurricanes.

Crop failures continue the world around, not everywhere, all the time, but often enough that it’s hard to feed the people. No amount of money printing alters this fact.

Much of the world is standing up and saying not only no, but hell no to Monsanto and their goddamned genetically modified food grains. We continue eating the shit and suffer the consequences of doing so. Obesity, diabetes, infertility, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, etc, ad nuaseum.

Don’t worry; the pharmaceutical giants are more than happy to sell you drugs for all of these ailments. And then some more drugs to curb side effects of those fucking drugs.

Migrations are fueled by shortages as are most uprisings and revolutions. Changing parties does nothing to heal ills when there’s not enough to go around and what is available is unfairly distributed. Check out Egypt and Libya, both of which got rid of dictators and now once again face irate masses.

Fukushima continues to smolder, slowly but surely emitting invisible poisons; think how many more nuclear reactors could and will go off in the event of an electromagnetic pulse event or something along those lines. Going nuclear will likely prove a very bad mistake.

I don’t have answers to all these ills or the power to do much about them, but I refuse to lie to myself and say all is well when it ain’t.