Weekly Musings #4 (1/29/11) from
oftwominds.com
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Summary of the week:
By good fortune the essays submitted by
Eric A. and
Zeus Y. fit right into the events unfolding domestically and
internationally. A
week after my analyses of Social Security comes the CBO announcement of
SSA's
"permanent" deficits
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110126/ap_on_re_us/us_social_security
),
and the upheavals in Egypt and elsewhere fit into broader themes of
inflation
and over-reach by ruling Elites described by Zeus' 3-part
series.
As the entitlement programs bankrupt
the Savior
State, we will be on our own: my "Survival+" term is radical
self-reliance.
Civil disobedience (aided and abetted
by
self-organizing social media networks) can take a number of forms,
including
calls for debt forgiveness and opting out (a.k.a. starving the
Beast).
In Revolutionary France, the cost of
bread peaked
in the week the Bastille was torn down by mobs.
The cost of food is affected by
weather,
speculation and State controls, of course, but ultimately it is a
supply-demand
imbalance caused by rising populations and depleted soil/climate
changes, Elite
over-reach, etc.
The probability that further
inflation/food-energy-water supply issues (what I call the FEW
resources) will
trigger political unrest is high. China is next in line IMO, as food
prices are
out of control there and State price controls are a
temporary
"solution".
The bloated McMansion in America is
obviously
doomed demographically, as the "nuclear family with children" is no
longer the
norm. Furthermore, the end of Cheap Oil dooms exurbs to the margins: no
jobs, no
output, costly commute--not an attractive matrix of value. This is why I
have
long predicted (along with others) that McMansions will become the
new
boarding houses. We might usefully recall that many fine
Brownstones in
19th century urban America were chopped up into flats and they
became the
crowded slums.
As Mike Davis pointed out in "Planet of
Slums"
(book), crowded slums are immensely profitable for the building
owners.
McMansions are not as durable as old Brownstones, but those within
walking
distance of transit to job centers might have a second life as boarding
houses/profitable slums. Those in distant exurbs will be occupied by
squatters
or bulldozed.
I have long reckoned that scale is a
misunderstood
metric. Raising a million chickens in vast confined sheds shares
virtually
no characteristics with raising a dozen chickens in a small
farmlot.
Food safety is an issue in large-scale
enterprises
where disease can be spread to thousands of animals and vectors of
disease
introduced via dodgy feed. These issues are basically non-existent at
small-scale enterprises.
Similarly, when I discuss taxing the
top 1/10th of
1% (annual incomes of $10 million and up, ownership of 60% of all
financial
assets, etc.) then readers invariably respond with principles such as
the flat
tax, etc., as if having $10 million in income has any relation to
earning
$100,000 a year.
The concentration of political power is
a direct
function of the concentration of wealth. It's just more difficult to
plot or map
political power.
this week's
quote:
"All fixed
set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is
outside
of all fixed patterns." Bruce Lee
Thanks for reading--
charles hugh
smith
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