Investing in Durability
Durability has always been a wise investment. Now is the perfect time to make a personal investment in durability, for myriad reasons. For one thing, most sellers still think fiat currency is valuable.
A tale of three cities
I’ve returned to the U.S. after a trip to Italy. My goals for the trip were three-fold: (1) Visit the heart of western civilization before we complete our ongoing trip to the new Dark Age and then the neo-Neolithic, (2) collect anecdotes about the collapse of a large, powerful, seemingly invincible empire, and (3) try to determine if the hatred for a living Earth by Homo sapiens, which at this point is nearly all-consuming, was initiated — or at least accelerated — by the Renaissance. These goals echo the general themes I’ve considered throughout the history of this blog, so they seem appropriate to my one hundredth post.
Celebration and Cognitive Dissonance (But Not Celebrating Cognitive Dissonance)
As I break away from the shore, I have been given many opportunities to ponder the extraordinary nature of my life (so far). I’m reminded by this week’s post at survival acres that “you cannot change the system from within, all you’re doing is playing musical chairs as it is too entrenched and has too much inertia to effectively be changed,” and “departing from the system is the first critical step, you must stop feeding the beast.”
I’m done feeding the beast, but not quite done feeding my stomach or my ego. So the week has been filled with at-least-daily celebrations, and they continue through the weekend, when a dozen students will be visiting the mud hut and meeting with the locally famous primitivist.
Back Into the Belly of the Beast
For the most part, of course, we prefer to look the other way, rather than staring into the unflinching eyes of truth. Civilized people don't want to know the consequences of our actions, which include oppression, murder, and extinction, among other uncomfortable costs.
Staring into the economic abyss
As the sucker rally on Wall Street passed the four-week mark, your president, Congressional delegations, and media worked themselves into a lather explaining how a recovery was under way. To which James Howard Kunstler appropriately asks, “recovery to what?”
A matter of life and death
If you believe your life depends upon water coming out the taps and food showing up at the grocery store, you’ll defend to the death the system that keeps water coming out the taps and food showing up at the grocery story. News flash: If your life depends on that system, you’re a very unusual human, especially historically, and you support a culture of death. And you’re sorely mistaken, besides.
Let’s review.
Down for the count?
From my email in-box:
“Muhammad Ali used to jab and jab and destroy his opponents before the final blow. The outcome of most fights was never in question even if the opponent was standing.”