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.

Opens today.

NY Times review.

In case you missed it, video after the jump.

Educate yourself.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

Lying pieces of shit:

Denninger.

Ilargi.

Once again, James Howard Kunstler has written an insightful piece describing the condition of our condition.

Read it here.

Wonder if that's far enough removed to no longer be considered incest? (Just kidding of course. Kinda. Great grandma was hot.)

From the automatic earth, a real look at our economic situation.

More from Denninger, here and here.

Here’s the numbers. I sent five men out into the field. They harvested 16 cabbage sacks of fresh green black eyed peas. I paid each of the five $60 for their effort. The men harvested the peas as I directed—the way we would harvest them for home consumption—mostly semi-ripe peas for shelling with an occasional snap or green pea in the mix. $60 X 5 = $300.

I'd been told that fresh black eyed peas are selling for $28/bushel. But they’re not. They’re selling for $28 per cabbage sack and right on the sack it says each bag contains 1-3/4 bushel by volume. $28 a sack is what vendors at the produce stands in Luling sell them for. They pay $24 per bag from a man in San Antonio. My guess is that those peas come from Mexico where labor is cheaper. And the men at the produce market rarely if ever sell a whole bag at a time. They’d make no money if they did.

Friday, October 02, 2009. It’s morning and I need to be outside, turning the chickens out, milking the cow, getting ready for the onslaught of pea pickers, hay haulers, hay buyers, chicken catchers, mesquite sprayers, garden planters, barn builders and house remodelers that will soon assault the various farms under my watch. But when am I to write?

I recently read The Fourth Turning, a study that not only looks at generational patterns in our past, but also extrapolates into the near future to predict coming seasons and events. I say seasons, for part of the thesis implies that generations are born into a repetitive cycles marked by turnings that approximate the four seasons of the year, each of which lasts more or less twenty years (some more, some less).

Every time I turn on mainstream news, which is less and less often, (I tire of lies), I hear how things are turning around. Tell me, why do I suddenly have lines of people willing to pick Goddamned blackeyed peas for $60/day? Brutal, back-breaking work no one--not even wet-backs--would do two years ago.

Charles Hugh Smith has answers. 26.5 million unemployed or underemployed with prospects of another 10 million job losses on the way. Green shoots, my ass.

PS. Blackeyed peas turn into Goddamned blackeyed peas after about the fourth hour stooped over a bucket.

predicts a revolution. Video after the jump.

Mike Ruppert has caught all kinds of hell for the things he believes and has tried to teach the rest of us. Now, a film he's in has taken the Toronto Film Festival by storm. CoLLapse is nothing more than an extended monologue: Mike Ruppert in what appears to be a bunker of sorts, chain smoking and talking.

An excerpt from a review at Entertainment Weekly:

I said in my first post from Toronto that you could feel the anxiety of the economic crisis in any number of the films here. Yet even as I wrote that, I could never have guessed I’d end up seeing a movie that would tap into those anxieties with the power and terror of Collapse. It’s one of the few true buzz films of the festival (by the time I got to it, I’d heard a dozen people talking it up), yet the movie, which is 82 minutes long, consists of nothing more than an on-camera interview with Michael Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who became a rogue investigative reporter and author.

We can hope:

Saturday, September 12, 2009. Rain, blessed rain. So far, almost four inches have fallen over the last three days. The pastures are greening up and we’re getting a little rest due to the mud.

I took a pesticide certification class and passed the private applicator license test last week. While there, I asked the county agriculture agent administering the test about my yellow black eyed peas. He suggested iron chlorosis might cause the condition.

Quintin Holtz had already suggested an iron deficiency could be my culprit so I looked up iron chlorosis on the internet. The article I found had pictures of soybeans afflicted with the ailment and they looked exactly like the black eyed peas in my field. The article went on to say that the soil in which plants grow that exhibit symptoms may in fact have plenty of iron, but other conditions such as soil ph or an overabundance of other elements may prevent the plants from absorbing iron from the soil.