Don's blog

Sabbath eve, November 6, 2009

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:05:27 -0800

Sean Paul Kelly asked a number of Agonist readers to predict what the world would look like in 30 years. I am hesitant to comply. For me, to predict events in the future is to prophesy. To prophesy incorrectly makes one a false prophet. So I am very cautious with even the simplest statements regarding the future.

I rarely say I will do anything tomorrow without adding, good Lord willing, as a qualifier.

To be honest, I have had mental images, glimpses if you will, of events I think may be part of this country’s future and they are quite scary. I don’t know if these images are divinely inspired or just creations of my own mind.

Thoughts I’ve had are disjointed and full of gaps, like looking through a key hole that remains blocked most of the time.

I interact routinely with people that claim insight into our future or who see things the rest of us don’t, hear voices the rest of us can’t. Many of these people are deemed crazy by the majority, as I am sure were prophets and seers of old. I am influenced by what they say, think and do.

I read prophetic writings almost complusively and have only recently read a book that altered the way I understand history and therefore our future: The fourth turning, by Strauss and Howe.

Before I start, a disclaimer: I am not predicting the future or offering much in the way of anything original here. Instead, I am interpreting what others have prophesied after trying to reconcile their predictions to the world in which I live. This is a narrow glimpse: it’d take a library full of books to consider all possibilities that have coursed through my head since the late 1970’s when I began studying this subject in earnest (and believe it or not, this has been an ongoing concern of mine since that time). I will provide very little in the way of detail, because to put it simply, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Stauss and Howe will tell you that history repeats itself, or comes near doing so in patterns resembling seasons of a year. Each season lasts roughly twenty years (some more, some less) and four seasons complete a saeculum.

The firt season, always following a period of crisis, is called the high, and corresponds with the spring of a year. Those born into this time are referred to as Prophets. In this particular saeculum, that’d be boomers, of which I am part (born 1943 – 1960. I’m doing this from memory as I gave the book to my dad after reading it and no longer have a copy.)

The second season is called the awakening; those born into this period are referred to as Nomads. Current nomads are Gen – Xers (born 1961 – 1981). This season corresponds with summer.

The third period is the unraveling. People born in the fall season are referred to as part of the Hero generation. This because they will become young adults during the fourth and last season – the crisis or winter season. Children born during the crisis are referred to as Artists. Today’s heroes are called Millenials. We’ve yet to come up with a name for the next crops of artists, the majority of which probably have not been born. For what it’s worth, my dad is part of the previous generation of artists, referred to as the Silent generation (born 1923 – 1942).

It took a book or several of them for Strauss and Howe to describe the patterns that define our history so I won’t rewrite what they suggest. Read the book. Suffice it to say that I am convinced. Seasonal patterns presented are similar to those an individual human goes through: birth, young adulthood, maturation, decline, and of course ultimately death (and rebirth, if you will). If you live a full life expectancy you will likely die in a time similar to that in which you are born.

Each crisis period since the founding of this country and for centuries before dating back to the Roman Empire and even before ended in a major war. The last three crisis periods here in the United States culminated respectively with the Revoltionary war, the Civil War, and World War II. In each case, the hero generation bore the brunt of fighting those wars. Notice that each of these occurred 80 years apart and came near the end of a twenty year economic, spiritual and moral collapse. Also note that each successive war was larger and more destructive in nature than the last. (Also notice that the stock market collapsed in 1929 and were are now living in 2009, eighties years later.) We just recently entered a period of crisis.

Here’s where I depart from Strauss and Howe’s predictions. I see these repetitive cycles like a harmonic vibration of sorts. Each wave of movement back and forth progressively gets larger and more powerful. Have you ever seen video of wind whipping a suspension bridge back and forth, up and down? If you have, you know at some point the structure fails and flies to pieces.

And that is what happens to empires as well. They survive a number of cycles but at some point a crisis period becomes so severe that they are broken to pieces, relegated to history. So not only are there saeculums, but also larger groups of saeculums, or epochs *probably not the word Strauss and Howe would use* that define history and denote the end and the beginning of a new era.

I don’t know if America, or the world at large survives the current crisis period in a form that would be recognizable to someone born antyime during the last century. Of course, each generation of prophets along the way asked the same questions and considered the same possibilities. Can we, will we survive this turbulent time?

Just because we survived three previous periods of crisis, doesn’t mean we survive the next.

Never before have > 6 billion people inhabited the earth. Not even close. So you can’t say that just because humans have never before affected the climate, we aren’t doing so now. In less than 100 years we have consumed half the known supply of extractable oil from the earth, oil that probably took millions of years to form. We’ve cut down trees, paved over swamps, ripped open land and allowed topsoil to erode. Balls of tar and plastic float in our oceans; coral reefs die, ice caps melt, species disappear.

Never before have we been so dependant on machinery, most of which is powered directly or indirectly by fossil fuels. Never before has such a large percentage of our population been so far removed from the land that feeds them. Never before has a single farmer fed some many others.

Naseem Taleb says the larger and more complex a system, the more redundancies that are built into that system, the less likely the system is to fail. But… When it does fail, (and it will), the greater the consequences of that failure.

Pride comes before destruction. The more you tell me how we can or won’t fail, the more I am convinced we must. We (not just the US, but modern man as a whole) built something approximating the tower of babel. It must be destroyed in order to save the planet.

There are some, the most evil among us, Malthusians also, but of a much more radical strain than I, that see the same things I see and decide they will engineer the collapse to the favor of their own based on race, religion, region, class, gender etc. They say, if it’s them or us, it’s going to be them and then they proceed to make it happen. Bush, Cheney, Gore and even your boy Obama are counted among them. Worse than these lie ahead.

It’s not that there aren’t non-violent fixes out there, it’s that they won’t be employed.

It will not be geologic constraints of peak oil that seals our fate, nor will climate change get us, although either of these in time presents grave threats. It will be the anticipation of these events and the reactions of those in power that bring about the worst disasters this world has seen.

Plans for the destruction of others will backfire. We will fall victim to devices of our own construction. We are entering a time of great upheaval: wars, famine, disease and natural disasters unparalleled in the history of this planet are soon to come if I don't miss my guess.

I’d say more, but it’d take a book. More than a book. And I don't have the time or space to do that here.

But take heart. The old must pass away so the new can rise. If something isn’t done to destroy civilization as we now practice it, the planet will be destroyed. And I don’t think that’s going to happen.

You see, in the end, I am an optimist.

My guess: Thirty years from now, the United States of America will have collapsed. The world’s population will number less than 2 billion. I don’t expect to be one of them. But you never know.

And the planet will begin to heal itself.

Collapse (the movie)

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:39:13 -0800

Opens today.

NY Times review.

Ryan Bingham played on the Letterman show last night

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:20:26 -0800

In case you missed it, video after the jump.

Michael Hudson

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:51:02 -0800

Educate yourself.

Ruppert on 9-11 " truthers"

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:24:35 -0800

Mike Ruppert is distancing himself (or trying anyway) from the 9-11 "truth movement", despite the fact that he wrote a book (Crossing the Rubicon) that laid out a scenario of means, motive and opportunity that points in the direction of a false flag event.

I understand his position. And I am glad to see him do this. We've more important matters at hand. Here. Now.

While we're at it, I'm distancing myself from the legalize drugs so we can all get high and save the economy movement.

Audit the fed bill gutted

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:10:39 -0800

Damn these guys are good. At fucking us over, that is. Remember when the public rose up and rejected the TARP bail-out? Congressmen were flooded with calls, did their duty and voted against the bill. Then the propoganda machine went to work. A few meaningless concessions were made, the bill was repackaged and passed.

Not only are you going to eat shit, you're going to like eating shit. Got it?

Now it appears Ron Paul's audit the fed bill is doomed to similar fate. Congress can't ignore public outcry for tranparency so they're busy removing teeth from the bill. They'll pass some meaningless drivel that allows the powers that be to continue fucking us over and claim victory on behalf of the American public.

Ain't democracy wonderful?

Manuel's vision

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:04:07 -0700

Earlier this week, Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian came up for air after a number of months of immersion in the Mexican border scene. Julian Cardona, a mutual friend, suggested that he visit me. I suppose Ed figured I might provide additional insight into the murky world of Mexican gangs, violence and drugs, but he knows more details about the current wave of madness than I would. And, this is a subject of which I am tired of addressing. Drugs, violence and the rest of that crap are symptoms of the disease, rather than the cause, although at some point all of these contribute to each other in a seemingly endless feedback loop. The drug trade doesn't exist in a vaccuum.

Instead, Ed found me doing what I now do: farming, ranching, writing, contemplating on and preparing for the collapse of the country where I reside.

Before you relegate me to the doomsday shit pile and hit the X in the upper right corner of your computer, allow me a brief explanation. Collapse can but doesn’t necessarily mean total destruction. When the USSR collapsed, homes weren’t leveled; there was no instantaneous annihilation of people. It was the government and the economy that collapsed; the people were left to continue muddling along through a new and different world.

I handed Ed a copy of Ruminations from the garden and he devoured the book in short order. Then I took him out into our fields and found Abraham and Manuel gathering and burning fallen pecan limbs in anticipation of what I hope will be a meager native pecan harvest. Both Abraham and Manuel appear in the book. I figured meeting them makes the book real to Ed.

Abraham and Manuel, for those that haven’t read my book, see and hear things the rest of us can’t. I accept this at face value. Neither has anything to gain by sharing what they see and hear; both in fact open themselves up instead to possible derision and or villification by doing so. I consider the possibility that they commune with or are aware of spirits or beings which I can’t or don’t see, and I also consider the possibility that their minds generate these visions. A psychatrist would say they exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia.

Ed speaks some Spanish and something approximating the English I speak. Both Manuel and Abraham speak Spanish and some English. So Ed and the men conversed back and forth and I added clarifications in the language of one or the other when I detected that one hadn’t fully understood the other.

When I told Manuel that Ed was a writer, Manuel suggested that Ed should write down what he had to say, which, of course, I have been doing for some time now. Then Manuel began to share a vision he recently received.

Manuel said a time would come and soon, when highways are lined with people, wandering aimlessly. Their clothes will be worn and tattered. Those that try to help them will be unable to do so. They’ll be hungry, yet refuse food. Like Zombies, damaged somehow.

I have a brother, Bill, that told me he had seen a similar vision a few years back. He called them the wanderers.

Before you discount what Manuel told Ed or my brother Bill told me, consider this. In or about 2004, Manuel told me he had seen a vision. Birds in a huge cyclone shaped funnel, reaching up into the sky with the light of the sun shining through.

In 2006, while I was writing Ruminations from the Garden, for some yet unexplained reason, an abundant number of hawks and eagles gathered in the pastures near our farm and stayed for week or so. They numbered in the thousands. One day, as I was driving back from Gonzales, the whole lot formed a tornado-like swirling cloud of birds that reached as high into the air as the eye can see and the sun shined down through them.

And that is a fact.

America's soul is lost. The saga of Lolo

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:51:17 -0700

I came across an article via Matt Savinar's Peak Oil breaking news page called America's soul is lost. For those that say capitalism is dead. Things are going to get one hell of a lot uglier before the final throes. And I shudder to think about what waits on the other side. Here's a little anecdote closer to home, from my diary.

The Saga of Lolo

October 26, 2009. Once again I have failed to stay current on this diary of sorts. Today’s a Monday. It’s raining again. We got about 3,000 bales of good horse quality hay cut, baled and stacked in the barn between waves of rain. But I have fifty acres of hay grazer on the ground here at Belmont and today is the second rain we’ve had since we got it cut. I also have coastal grass cut down at Gonzales and grass on the ground at Seguin and all of it is soaking wet.

Four horses stand in a trap with no shelter, rumps to the cool north wind. Fifty degrees isn’t cold to a horse, but fifty degrees with wet and wind is cold to just about any warm blooded mammal. I need to build a walk-in shelter. I have stalls I could put them in but the forecast calls for clear weather by morning, so they’ll just have to tough it out. As it stands the cows have access to the one small shelter available and this is where I milk Smiley. There’s no good way to allow access to the horse and the cows at the same time and I’m not inclined to sit out in cold wet weather while milking a cow. I don’t think most people want to drink milk mixed with brown water dripped from a cow's hide. I know I don’t.

continue reading after the jump

I got a call from Lolo. He’s looking for work again. Tyson’s contract chicken ccontractor got in trouble with the IRS and was arrested. He went to jail owing Lolo and the rest of the chicken catchers he employed $1,500 apiece. But the man was a private contractor and Tyson wasn’t the only company that he provided services to.

So Tyson informed Lolo and the men they would not pay their back wages—those are the responsibility of the man in jail; he got paid; they didn’t. The men also picked up chickens for a Tyson rival, Holmes Food, so to be fair to Tyson, not all the money owed benefitted their cause. That’s not much in the way of consolation for those that got fucked out of their wages. Tyson did however rehire the men to continue catching chickens until another contractor could be found. That arrangement lasted a little over a month.

Last week, Tyson found another contractor; Lolo and the rest were once again laid off. I asked Lolo why he didn’t seek employment with the new contractor. He tells me that the previous contractor paid the men $215 per thousand birds. The new guy will pay $180 per thousand chickens.

$215 per thousand was a step down from what Tyson originally paid, before the first contractor showed up. I guess this globalization thing is working as planned. Soon all workers will be earning third world wages with no benefits.

Oddly enough, had not Lolo continued to work during this period of upheaval, he’d qualify for unemployment insurance. Now, he doesn’t. So he joins the ranks of 7,000 Americans that lose unemployment benefits each and every day and are no longer counted as being unemployed by the oft quoted official unemployment statistic.

Green shoots, you say?

Geting old is not for sissies

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:27:22 -0700

I have free weights, a squat rack and a bench press in a stall of a horse barn near my house. As recently as five years ago, I competed in powerlifting competitions. But I haven’t lifted weights with any regularity in the five years since and haven't lifted a barbell at all in over two years. We have a mirror in the house, now that we got moved in, and I made the mistake of looking at a reflection of my naked ass the other day. Not a pretty site, I’ll assure you.

And then a couple of hands had a throw down the other day and I got to thinking the day might come, once again, when I’m faced with a physical confrontation. I’m of the school of thought that being physically prepared for conflict is in and of itself a deterrent to getting in fights. I don’t want to be in a fight; sometimes fights find me.

I also read a comment about how repetitive manual labor can break a man down. When you work, you do things the easiest way possible, often with limited range of movement. Some sort of full range exercise actually helps keep a body strong and healthy and can help prevent injury, if nothing else during slack times.

If all of that isn’t enough, my brother Kyle has been training with weights and I’m sure he can now kick my ass. He looks much better than he did the last time I saw him some six months ago. He suggested I go to the gym with him. Not a fucking prayer. Not yet, anyway.

So today I loaded some weight on the bar. I’m writing about it and making the record public to shame myself into continuing with at least a couple times a week program. Here’s the numbers: I did three sets of five reps of full range squats with 205 pounds after a warm up. Three sets of five reps on the bench press, also with 205 pounds after a warm up. And three sets of pull ups for 5 reps. The first set of each exercise felt heavy as hell. My head felt like it was going to explode on the squats. By the third set, I felt a little better as I remembered how to concentrate my strength. I may not be able to walk tomorrow.

These numbers might sound OK for a 52 year old man and it would be worse in my case if my job didn’t require a certain amount of physical exertion. Less than five years ago, I routinely worked out with 405 pounds for sets of five squats and could do 455 for five reps at maximal effort, did 315 pounds for sets of five on the bench press and could easily do multiple sets of ten pull ups at a body weight of 230 pounds. I dead lifted 584 pounds and placed second in the state of Texas in a statewide powerlifting competition for my age and weight class (220 pound class after cutting weight). I won a state-wide drug free event.

Today I weigh 210 pounds, not all solid. I don’t have the secure foundation I once had. I know that in the end, I will lose this battle and get weak, but I hope to fight the condition as long as possible.

Vanity? Probably. But Moses climbed a mountain when he was 80, or so the story goes.

Collapse

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:35:06 -0700

OK. So if you watched Alex Jones' movie and have relegated me to the trash bin for having brought it to your attention, here's a trailer from a soon to be released film that's much more in line with my thinking.

That won't provide much in the way of salve to your wounds with some of you. But neither would what I believe.

Mike Ruppert does believe humans have affected our climate, that we have depleted half of the world's oil, and that getting rid of a few elitist bad guys won't fix the world's problems. Movie trailer after the jump.

At youtube for those like me that can't see it here, for whatever reason.

Alex Jones' Fall of the Republic

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:58:07 -0700

I don't figure I'll endear myself with the editors or the viewers this site with the following post. But I'm not here to make friends. Last night I watched Alex Jones most recent movie at youtube. Fall of the Republic is a hard-hitting wide-reaching film documenting the demise of our nation. I don't agree with all of Jones' points, in particular, those concerning climate change.

Nonetheless, good points raised in this film outweigh points of contention to the degree that I think it worthy of your time.

Watch it here for free.

Denninger calls for boycott

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:57:52 -0700

Here.

Have you had it with the scams, frauds, "mark to myth" and lies?

Tired of this sort of garbage - being punished for being responsible?

You may believe that your exemplary behavior shields you from unexpected credit card fees. Sadly, that is no longer the case.

You can stop it.

Yes, you.

All 330,000,000 of you.

Here's how.

Go withdraw all your money and business from the following institutions:

Bank of America
Wells Fargo/Wachovia
Citibank
JP Morgan/Chase

Those four.

Place your business with a local community bank or credit union in their place, and tell the above four institutions to "piss off."

I've resisted doing this, but the idea that banks are now going to try to penalize those who do not carry balances or pay late fees is the last straw.

This is a call for a boycott.

I quit doing business with those guys a long time ago. Read the rest at the link

A question for Diane Sawyer

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:51:18 -0700

I turned on Good Morning America. Diane Sawyer began an interview with Karl Rove with the following words: We all know that almost one in ten Americans is currently unemployed…

Excuse me? I know no such thing. John Williams of Shadowstats.com says the unemployment number is over 20% when calculated by the method employed previous to Bill Clinton. That’s one in five Americans, not one in ten. Even the government’s own U-6 figures now list the number at 17%. And they under-report the fact.

Your statement excluded tens of millions of people, real people with bodies needing food, water and shelter. They have bills to pay, kids going to school, health issues. Your statement is a lie. The question is: Do you know that you told a lie? Or do you just read the words you are given without question?

A tale of two companies

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:39:06 -0700

Leah and I went to see Michael Moore’s movie about Capitalism last night in Austin. As you might expect, the movie will not be showing in small town Texas. Attending the show became worthy of a story in and of itself. We arrived late but were able to park near the entrance to the 14 screen theater complex because there were almost no cars in the parking lot. A single security guard stood in front of the facility; he looked to be a bored off-duty policeman earning a few bucks on the side. A sign at the ticket booth said, buy tickets inside.

All but one set of doors at the entrance were locked. Two employees stood behind the refreshment counter. One sold us tickets and then moved over to sell us popcorn and a soft drink. Between the cost of admission and our refreshments the toll came to $37.

We went into the theater to discover the entire place contained only five people. And it wasn’t just Moore’s movie that had failed to draw a crowd; the whole place was deserted. Of course it was a Monday night, but nevertheless... We’re talking a movie complex valued around 10 million bucks or so, right off of Interstate-35 on a piece of prime Austin real estate, and it’s empty.

The movie was a mixed bag. Moore, like so many others of left-leaning orientation does a good job in identifying the evils in this world. But I think part of the point that he’d have us to believe—that capitalism is the real culprit—and that somehow good honest American citizens are the innocent victims here doesn’t ring true to me.

As we were leaving the theater I began thinking about this company I had watched grow during my life. The company instituted a profit sharing plan that guaranteed a decent retirement for anyone that stayed with the company; they provided health insurance, paid decent wages, stressed company loyalty, going both ways, up and down the ladder. They favored well-made American made products.

Then I thought about this other company. This company paid horrible wages, moved people from full time jobs into part time status to avoid having to provide worker benefits. Cut-throat product acquisition teams beat producers out of potential profits to the fraction of a penny and scoured the world for the cheapest prices available without concern over the conditions under which products were created or the compensation that workers received for their labor.

Both companies are the product of capitalism. In fact these two companies are one and the same: Wal-Mart, before and after Sam Walton’s death.

I also think back to people of my generation, of the period in the sixties and early seventies, the awakening period, Strauss and Howe would call it. I remember back-to-earth hippie drop-outs I knew, smoking grass, getting back to nature, caring for the environment, eschewing the drive to make more money, be rich and the idea of surrounding themselves with creature comforts and trappings of wealth. Others that weren’t hippies still weren’t worried about jobs or overly concerned about how they’d make money. They listened to music and sought ways to enjoy life. They weren’t driven.

I remember revisiting these people in the 80’s. The hair was cut and styled, the hippy clothes were now business suits; they now carried brief cases. They’d moved to suburbs, had big new houses and a couple of brand new cars. They’d given up pot for cocaine and coffee, perhaps pharmaceuticals as well so they could sleep at night, and they were on the point for ways to make money any and every way possible. They had joined the establishment they once railed against.

For those of you just a few years younger than I, you missed seeing these changes. You came of age during the unraveling. Take my word for it. Something happened and we the people, virtually all of us, made a turn for the worse. I don’t know why or how, I just know it happened.

Capitalism is by design a system that entails unequal wealth distribution, but when people are compassionate, the effects of capitalism can and are mitigated by charity and good will. Socialism, in theory, seems the fairer way of dividing wealth, but in real practice can be and is corrupted by those of bad intent. Someone has to be in charge of the distribution of wealth; privilege and favor can and will be sold by corrupt officials. I tend to believe socialism disincentivises people, but that’s not the point of this article.

Problems with each of these systems begin with the individual. But individuals are not immune to the prevailing tides of an era. The hyperindividualism of the 80’s and the 90’s combined with a loss of social conscience destroyed this nation, and other nations as well, some which call themselves socialist. The wave affected people from three eras, those of the silent generation, boomers and Gen-Xers. Boomers probably deserve credit as the worst of the worst, but that’s just because Gen-Xers didn’t have the opportunities we did due to the stage of life they happened to be in when the unraveling began. They hadn’t yet achieved positions of power and control.

Laying all the blame on capitalism oversimplifies the condition and the state of affairs we now encounter. Notice I did not say problem, because problems entail solutions and we have no solutions for the ills that beset us.

You can’t vote it away. You can’t tweak the rules. We didn’t follow the rules we had and we won’t follow the new rules until we reap what we have sown and come to understand the consequences of the choices we have made.

A period of crisis is upon us and will be for a number of years to come. It is going to hurt like hell. It may kill a bunch of us. But the crisis is the cure.

Accept it and learn from it. Or die a fool. That choice is yours.

Singing bye, bye miss American pie

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:27:07 -0700

Saturday evening, October 11, 2009.

I came across an article written by Richard Heinberg today called Dilemma and Denial. Richard articulated things I’ve been feeling but couldn’t quite address. I’ve grown disgusted with arguments of both the left and the right, simply because they spend all their time pointing fingers at each other, arguing over minutia while we are headed into a serious time of crisis and the real issues killing us aren’t even allowed on the table.

Being an ex drug addict, I know that the first step in changing is an honest evaluation of your situation. Where are you? Why are you here? How did you get here?

But we don’t want to ask these questions. We just want things to get better. It ain’t gonna fucking happen. Not until we have an honest accounting and go to cutting heads off of the people and institutions that fucked us over. And that won’t happen. We cannot find it within us to judge ourselves.

We came up with a system that packaged and stole the profits from the next 20 years of business and spent them. And now, it appears that future business may not be realized, not as anticipated anyway. This happened at the hands of both Democrats and Republicans.

We have stolen not only from our own citizens but also the rest of the world.

The fucking money is gone. Stolen. Blown. Vaporized. Gone. You’ve been Enroned. You have no retirement. You have no fucking social security. You got no health care. You may think so, but you don’t. You ain’t got shit because these motherfuckers stole it. You’ll be lucky if you have food to eat in the near future. The sooner you come to grips with that, the sooner you can get well and you won’t get well until we have a true and accurate accounting of what has been done.

But we’re not going to get well because we’re hiding all of this, denying it happened, denying that it exists. Today’s America lives in a state of denial.

We wasted our money and our resources destroying things instead of building things. And now the money is gone.

There’s no fucking money for health care reform. There’s no money to continue fighting wars. The ranks of unemployed continue to grow. Tax revenue is falling precipitously. Government spending is skyrocketing. State budgets are going bust left and right—they’ll soon be asking for federal assistance. And the federal government is already writing what are in essence hot checks to continue to function. They’re monetizing debt and lying about it.

New wealth is not created in some goddamned bank or our government’s treasury department, it’s created out in the real world and the dwindling numbers of people that create wealth are being starved to death to support a herd of swine that have never worked an honest day in their miserable lives. (What happened to the horse in Orwell’s Animal Farm?)

The United States of America that we have known is about to fall flat on her face. When it happens, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

But I’m not a total pessimist. The old must die to make room for the new. I can’t help but wonder what will rise from the ashes.