New Year's Eve Ramblings

I’ve enjoyed reading prognoses of the year to come, and even more, some who recapped prognostications from the year gone by. Makes one tentative to go off half-cocked in the prediction business. Not only did the world survive the dreaded 2012, we managed to get through the year afterword. It’d be a mistake to think all is well, nonetheless. The list of maladies facing our nation and the world at large is so long, I’d be hard pressed to cite even a fraction of potential ongoing catastrophes. But here are a few: The economy has recovered, or so you’d deduce if you note that the stock market has reached all-time highs. Of course the fed has contributed some 85 billion dollars a month to keep the beast alive. Only sometimes it was more. Makes it hard to believe them when they say they’ll begin to taper next year… From the above referenced article: The top eight Wall Street banks have set aside a modest $91 billion for 2013 bonuses. The cost of providing food stamps for 48 million Americans totaled $76 billion. In my world, thoroughbred horses sold for millions while a trip to the local racetrack looked like a reenactment of the hunger games for farmers and ranchers: the winner got to pay his bills and celebrated over a late night meal at a fast food restaurant. The rest…. I was one of the rest. A bit of good news: Nicole Foss tells us how we can print local scrip to continue to conduct business when the coming depression kicks in. I sold milo for $8 a hundred and can buy it back in a fifty pound bag for $12 to feed my yard chickens. We had a good crop of pecans, but a sizable portion of my crop remains unsold to date. I did get $1.80 a pound for good paper-shells, but I am told the rest are worth less. They’ll cost you between $5 and $6 a pound in the shell at the local grocery store. How can people afford that? Most can’t. I raise and sell cattle. Cattle numbers remain at lows not seen since the 1950’s. Beef prices have reached all-time highs. But production costs also are at all time highs, especially when matters such as recurring drought are taken into account. And meat is getting too expensive for many to eat. In my neck of the world, this year will go down as average where rainfall is concerned, yet, there’s a shortage of hay. We had a terribly dry summer, with almost no rain, and then the spigots opened, resulting in a late fall flood to skew the numbers. Now we’re getting dry again. Hay barns are low and grass in short supply…. The war in Iraq is over. Kind of. We still have troops in Afghanistan guarding the poppy fields. We started a bunch more wars to keep our troops employed. The people thwarted an attempt to start a new war in Syria. Kind of. (I’d be remiss not to point out that the war continues, just with surrogate troops.) We stopped our government from arming drones surveilling the home front. (Or did we?) But we’re getting damn good at killing folks in other countries with them. Some of my friends think Fukushima is the end of the world. I don’t. It’s far worse than advertised, but only a prelude of things to come. I lived in New Mexico as a kid, just east of where our government was blowing up nukes. Even played in the pretty white sand dunes near Alamogordo. (We fucking wonder why people die of cancer.) A sizable portion of our continent houses nuclear reactors. It takes something along the lines of 25 years to decommission one. We haven’t begun the process. Others focus on climate change, predicting mass die-off in the near term future. I don’t dismiss what they say, but remain in the chaos theory camp. There are too many potential variables to point at the ongoing trajectory of events and extrapolate with any certitude. How does a world war involving nukes affect those equations? An electromagnetic pulse, either naturally occurring or man-made? A major volcanic eruption? The impact of an asteroid or a comet? Like I said: too many potential variables. Not much sense worrying about any of the above when you consider there’s no way to be ready for any of this. No sense worrying about the food you eat either, considering most of it has been genetically modified by your friends at the Monsanto Corporation. Counties in the state of Oregon voted to make it illegal to grow genetically modified grains, only to shot down by higher law. Attempts to require the labeling of food containing genetically modified ingredients were shot down in the state of Washington. Every phone call you make is recorded. Every stroke of your computer can be recorded in real time. All your email is recorded and stored. The guy that revealed this is hiding in Russia and if he comes back home, he’ll go straight to jail. Another journalist can’t leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London without being arrested for letting you know what our governments are up to. The man (woman?) that provided the data he revealed resides in a federal prison in these United States. Stores now have the ability to track you with your smart phone, building a profile of what section of the store you visit and for how long. Sounds like that phone may be a bit too smart for me. If you accept that there’s a rhythm to events on this planet, I’ve got good news for you. 2014 probably won’t be the end for most of us. Because the next major event in the ongoing crisis won’t arrive until 2015. Of course, the false flag event of 9-11, 2001 was preceded by the stolen election of 2000, and the stock market crash of 2008 really began in 2007. Notice the seven year intervals. My friend Manuel is serving a 320 day sentence in a nearby jail. The guy that shot him is out on the streets and getting a government check. He pled guilty to a crime he didn’t commit. That’s what happens in our legal system. You can’t take on big brother and win, so you give in and do what you have to do to survive. You don’t see what you look at, you don’t hear what you listen to and you damn sure don’t speak truth without getting punished for it. I found a quote by Mark Twain I like. It goes something like this: I see no reason to fear death. I was dead a long time before I was born and wasn't troubled in the least by any of it. To top it all off, my website won't recognize paragraph breaks. Reckon the goddamned spyware has anything to do with it? Console yourself with the fact that many think I am crazy.