Dr. Paul smells something big happening, and is entering a statement about it into the Congressional Record. When the history of the early 21st century is read a hundred years from now by my descendents, I sincerely hope they are reading the inspirational story of how the ideas of Dr. Ron Paul saved this nation and the liberty of her citizens. I don’t believe those children will be reading about an evil Bush family who plotted to steal those freedoms from us, but rather a greedy and bungling clan who misused the trust a nation placed in them to put us all in a very, very difficult place.
I’d be happy if there were no villains in the story, just heroes and dolts.
On November 4th, please write-in Ron Paul for President.
We cannot afford the inexperience of Obama or the ignorance of McCain. It’s too critical a time for our Republic, and many, including myself, see it coming to bad end if things don’t change for the better very, very soon.
There are a number of factors that effect Americans’ daily lives becoming unstable and the near future is becoming more and more unclear. Peak Oil is starting to have its predicted effect on the everyday, and I’m not just talking about $4 plus at the pump.
I’m talking about food.
As many have been lecturing us for a long time, we are a civilization made possible by cheap petroleum. I was listening to the PTB’s apologist/chief spinologist Rush Limbaugh a few days ago as he was attacking Obama’s statement about “failed policies of the past,” translating in the way only el-Rushbo can, saying that the Democrat’s nominee is calling the development of petroleum a “failed policy.” Once again, Limbaugh evades the point. The failed policy isn’t the development of petroleum, but rather the continued reliance on cheap petroleum as the foundation of our civilization. Rush is wrong when he says that America was built on petroleum. It was built on cheap petroleum, and our failure to wean ourselves from the stuff and use our great ingenuity and the wealth that temporarily inexpensive resource made possible, is indeed a “failed policy.” (ed note: I used to be a Rush Limbaugh fan. I’m a basically conservative American who feels that Limbaugh and the Republican Party no longer speaks for me)
Most people think that petroleum only goes in your car’s gas tank and oil reservoir. That’s only the beginning. Cheap petroleum is the very foundation of the cheap consumer culture that is most garish in the Wal-Mart, Costco and Sam’s Club culture. From the packaging to the physical store construction to the semi-trailered transportation system, everything you see stocking the 3 storied Sam’s Club warehouse is made possible at ridiculously low prices by…You guessed it, cheap oil.
But that ship is sailing. Fast.
There have already been spot shortages of staples, and as the long, hot summer continues into fall, I predict we’re going to see more and more of that. Prices are already climbing, and that’s only going to accelerate. It’s going to be along time, if ever, until prices are at the level they were a couple years ago again. Sadly, or maybe predictbly, the biggest factor in this equation working against us, is the fact that the people running things – baby boomers – have never experienced shortages, scarcity or anything resembling what their parents lived through in their younger years. And the generation who lived adult life in the Depression? Those of them left are 100 years old. There aren’t many of those still around and writing of their experiences and sounding warnings about today, which is why even though the smart ones among us can show us charts and equations and historical parallels, few are listening to them.
We’d better start. Shortages are coming. You may experience difficulties in finding food to buy at any price. I can’t repeat this enough. The era of cheap oil, and the bounty it has delivered to us is over. Get used to it, if you can.
I read with much head-nodding this morning, Jim Kunstler’s “Clusterf**k Nation Chronicle” posting “Slip of the Tongue,” about Barack Obama’s comments in Pennsylvania. Listening to news reports about Obama’s comments, I couldn’t help but agree with him. What about small-town Pennsylvanians who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” isn’t true? The only thing I could add to guns, religion and antipathy to people not like them, is Nascar. Kunstler agrees with that as well, and he’s right.
What humans tend to understand very little about, is the cyclical nature of civilization, and more specifically, society. Apparently, evolution of our species has built into it the assumption that things will either a)stay the same pretty much forever, or failing that, b) improve a little or a lot (depending on just how grand your sense of optimism is).
But that’s sadly, a misreading of how it all works. Everything in our world and universe, for that matter, works through the machine of cycles. It’s built into the source code of our existence, and to deny it, is just self-delusion. We see it and teach it in our educational institutions, study it in our labs and think-tanks and even applaud it in our entertainment (Think The Lion King’s ‘Circle of Life’. But when it comes to life in the U.S. and the Western World, we think it can only get better, bigger and faster, forever and forever.
One of the things that always surprises me when we travel to the UK to visit family, is how we use so much more stuff in the U.S. than everywhere else. I first realized this years ago, when I first travelled there. A large portion of my family lives in the U.K. and when we go there, we live, not in hotels, but in our family home. Which means, for the most part, that we live like natives. In the particular town (a village on the West Coast of Scotland, actually) that means we transport our trash and garbage to the dump ourselves. At first, I was amazed at how little of that we generated while living natively.
It’s a simple, well-reasoned look at the religion that, unlike all other major faiths of the world, seeks to be the only religion on Earth. In other words, radical Islamic fundamentalists demand that we all become Muslim or we die.
It’s so sad that we spend billions of dollars on a war in the Middle East when our President is cozy with the government that spawned the 9-11 hijackers (Saudi Arabia). We must wake up and realize that unless we stop CAIR (The Council on American-Islamic Relations) using our own laws and beliefs against ourselves, we will find ourselves on the defensive in a losing battle and our grandchildren will face the choice:
As the economy “implodes in show motions,” as a number of analysts believe is happening, we’re still plagued by the “permabulls” and those who simply believe that it’s always turned around quickly, so it will do the same this time, too.
How naive. One of the design flaws we humans seem stuck with, is a short memory. Sure, we remember bits and pieces from our childhoods, good and bad, and we even remember certain things from almost every phase in our development as adults. What we don’t seem to have, is a very sharp collective memory. I got out of the late 90s Mutual Fund fiasco before it happened, because of an annual report I got from my particular fund. It was essentially a catalog bragging about the smart people they had managing the funds. All I saw were a collection of people who had been going to Jr. High sock hops when the 1987 crash happened. I realized that the people managing my money had no experience in any kind of market, other than one of the bull variety. So I pulled my money, shortly before the wheels came off the market. I moved money to metals (Gold was in the $200 range) and never looked back.
Everywhere today, the evidence of the wheels coming off the bus is present. Whether in complicated matters like the subprime and derivatives disasters-in-the-making, or in simple things like the fact that corporate budgets are demanding zero-expense-growth in the face of significant increases in the cost of doing business (meaning layoffs to hold the budget), the story is clear. We’ve got some economic hurt coming. But yet, there are those who say “it’s always gone up, and it will, this time, too.” Well, the economic tide will rise again, but the questions are these:
1. When? Certainly not in a couple months. Too much voodoo has been used to keep the balloon inflating. It will therefore, take a lot longer to reinflate.
2. Will our economy, nation, even society look the same when it does start back up? No guarantee of that. Make no mistake, the status quo has put us in a serious, serious situation that it won’t survive. The longer the correction is delayed with artifice and voodoo, the more substantive change will be required to start upward again. It may even take a reboot.
Speaking to promote her new book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Naomi Wolf makes a compelling argument that what the U.S. is currently seeing with the Bush administration is right in line with what happens when a democracy falls to dictatorship. She makes some good points, but hits a bit of a pothole when she makes a quick reference to Hillary Clinton reversing all of the illegal surveillance when she’s President (!). I have a hard time understanding how someone who understands that there’s a dangerous cabal running our government, could miss the fact that Hillary Clinton’s smack dab in the middle of it. She’s a danger, not a solution.
Ron Paul (who Wolf does mention as the sole Republican who has signed on to the “return to the Constitution” pledge) is the solution to the problem.
Dr. Paul smells something big happening, and is entering a statement about it into the Congressional Record. When the history of the early 21st century is read a hundred years from now by my descendents, I sincerely hope they are reading the inspirational story of how the ideas of Dr. Ron Paul saved this nation and the liberty of her citizens. I don’t believe those children will be reading about an evil Bush family who plotted to steal those freedoms from us, but rather a greedy and bungling clan who misused the trust a nation placed in them to put us all in a very, very difficult place.
There are a number of factors that effect Americans’ daily lives becoming unstable and the near future is becoming more and more unclear. Peak Oil is starting to have its predicted effect on the everyday, and I’m not just talking about $4 plus at the pump.
, Naomi Wolf makes a compelling argument that what the U.S. is currently seeing with the Bush administration is right in line with what happens when a democracy falls to dictatorship. She makes some good points, but hits a bit of a pothole when she makes a quick reference to Hillary Clinton reversing all of the illegal surveillance when she’s President (!). I have a hard time understanding how someone who understands that there’s a dangerous cabal running our government, could miss the fact that Hillary Clinton’s smack dab in the middle of it. She’s a danger, not a solution.