Seduced by Curiosity

Things are pretty good at the homestead.


by freeacre

“I, too, have been seduced by the Intellect - obsessed with "understanding" and "knowing what is going on," I can while away hours, big hunks of days and years, trying to put it all together in my head, despite wrong information, lies, deception, with enough just enough truth thrown in to keep things going.” From freeacre

Zoner shared in the comments from the last post, that he has come to terms with not knowing, and now he has more time for his kids and his guitar. Somehow, a balance between awareness of the world and a subjective immediate immersion in one’s own life and location needs to be established, it seems to me.

I was mulling over the conversation regarding a “fast” or a “slow” crash as I walked around the property in my pajamas the other morning. I was checking out the garden and the greenhouses while being followed by the poultry posse. After all, it was upon reading Michael Ruppert in 2002 and 3 that we began to anticipate a fast crash. Ruppert nailed the timing of the real estate bust. It gave us time to take out a home improvement loan, pay off the car and the credit card debt and re-model the house. We figured that we had a year to fix up the home and sell it before the housing market tanked. I am grateful to that “knowing what is going on” fixation. As you all know, we sold the house in Tahoe, moved to central Oregon, and bought the cheapest acre with a mobile home in the local MLS listings in September of 2004. And retired.

That was seven years ago.

Anticipating the crisis that would manifest once Peak Oil became a household term (we figured around 2006), we began stocking up on food supplies, and began to compost our leftovers and planted a garden a year after that. It’s a good thing that peak oil has not caused the disruption that we thought it would. I mean, it has led to all sorts of political and financial mischief, wars, etc. But, so far the gas is still in the pumps. The oil barons are just pumping it now from deep waters where the damage will not only be to the land and air, it will now extend to the seas as well. I guess the big plan was to reduce our use of oil by getting rid of manufacturing. Americans can all be waiters, stockbrokers, bank tellers, ski-slope trimmers or whatever… Yeah, that was a plan. We can see how that one is working out. I guess it did buy some time. And the rich have been able to get richer, so their plan seems to have worked. I had a different plan. But then life hit.

That food we stored up is going bad now that the expiration dates have long since expired. I guess we were not as diligent as we should have been regarding the “rotating” of the canned goods. For openers, it took murph about two years to convince me that rotating the cans didn’t mean turning them upside down. Well, anyway, I digress…

I was walking around in my p.j.’s thinking about a “fast crash” with a sense of irony. If and when things ever really fall apart it might seem fast. But, it will be like the actress who works her ass off for years in small plays and bit parts, all the while learning her craft and making the right contacts. Then “all of a sudden” she gets a part in a film that puts her on a whole new star track for the foreseeable future. So, was that sudden or not? Depends on how you look at it.

So, for us, living in a way that anticipated coping with immanent disaster, has led us to the way we are now. We’re feeling pretty secure on the crisis front. We have not slacked in our efforts to cope in a post electronic and post petroleum world. The latest effort that murph is making with the help of this young couple who are our friends, is to build a well house over the well head that will shelter a hand pump installed in the well. I figure that if an EMP from the sun or some man-made weapon takes out our electricity, we had better figure a way to get water than standing outside in the winter dipping it out by hand with an Amish dipper. So now, thanks to the Lehyman’s non-electric catalog, we have the hand pump, and soon we’ll have the shelter as well. Just, you know, in case…

Peak Oil doesn’t seem to be the critical issue right now. But, after reading Matt Savinar’s blog for years (Life After the Oil Crash – Breaking News), there is no doubt that it is having an impact on our lives – and fortunes. It’s probably part of what drove the money mutants to ramp up the finance industry with real estate and assorted derivatives when they couldn’t depend on Oil anymore. So, The Rich have been squeezing it out of the The Rest for the last thirty years or so. They also have been enriching the military-industrial complex, running the international drug trade, and propping up the stock market with the laundered drug money. They’ve managed, world-wide, to centralize banking to the point that sovereign nations are secondary to the regional currency, as with the Euro. The plan to institute the Amero for us, Canada, and Mexico seems to have stalled after many of the neo-cons left Washington D.C. It’s probably still on the books.

A different warning that Ruppert, et al, also trumpeted years ago was about debt. He and many money gurus counseled avoiding being crippled by personal debt. But, back then they were really pissing into the wind. Advertising, media, and international corporations merged and became the communications arm of the globalist bankers. Computers, cell phones, desk-tops, iPads, television programs combined with social networking – all commercials for stuff and more stuff to purchase with a credit card, of course. And now banks are going to charge a fee for us slackers who do not maintain at least a $1,500 balance of debt!! It’s like a pimp telling his lady to not come home without at least five hundred dollars. What a pimp job.

Most of the kids growing up didn’t have a chance. Everybody told them they had to go to college at all costs if they were to have any chance at all to jump onto the gravy train. Many even signed up for the armed services just to get the chance to someday go to college. Now, on average, they are graduating at least $25,000 in debt at an interest rate that most of them will never be able to re-pay and from which there is no bankruptcy recourse. Debt servitude. That’s slavery without the housing. With not near enough jobs in site, for them, the shit HAS hit the fan. And, on top of that, the country just put them in the position of footing the bill for the trillions of dollars of national debt – all owed to the same detestable douche bags (Yes, that’s you, the Federal Reserve). And there is no real promise of any social security or any other help from the government for them.

Engineered or not, this is getting pretty close to the spontaneous combustion stage. If you think back to most of the rioting in the world, it’s mostly youth who feel that they have nothing to look forward to or to lose. Who can blame them? School loans and growing up with no medical and dental have taken their toll on a lot of them. With the “take over” movement, maybe the oldsters will stop whining long enough to take a look at what young people’s suffering looks like, what families are going through, Reminds me of the poem by Langston Hughes,

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?


Well, here in my backyard, I’m not sensing any explosions. Even the comets and asteroids, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, earthquakes, planetary alignments, stuff falling from space, the marching magnetic poles of the earth, and the alignment with the Galactic Center seem to be managing to hold things together without my help. One of my biggest problems is that my pole beans only produced two beans in the greenhouse. Why? Why?
But, still we build a hand pump onto the well. By now, it’s not so much for the Crash – fast or slow. It’s because more and more it feels good to be connected – to the land, the water, the garden, the animals. It tastes good to eat mostly stuff that is not contaminated with godknowswhat. We like the neighbors and friends we have developed here. We are on a first name basis with our city and county commissioners, as well as the DEQ and the planning commission’s steering committees.
Sometimes I have to remind myself to tear away from all the things that are sick and wrong, and focus on what’s around me that has worked out right, even though it was not a well-controlled event.
But, once again, I think the Overlords already have a plan to deal with the troublesome Useless Eaters. Take a look at Clif High’s most recent post. He anticipates a Shock & Awe event around the 15th of this month if I am not mistaken.
There goes that Compulsion to Know thing again. Rats!

Related:

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONv-xrjC9Qg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWgwJP3YCPk&feature=email

http://www.halfpasthuman.com/grunch.html

Off to the "Real World"

This is who murph is going to be talking to next week. It's Henny Penney, his other girl....

by freeacre

Next week is going to be interesting for me because I will be out of town…and away from my computer for a week. I will be in Corvalis, OR, attending the State Grange Conference, where we have submitted a proposal to stop the sale of Millstone herbicide for hay that becomes toxic to gardens when the manure of horses who eat the hay is used as fertilizer. I am looking forward to attending the conference because I believe that the National Grange organization is potentially a very good resource for those who are attempting to empower the localization of food production and sustainable agriculture. I want to meet the other activist Grangers in Oregon and see if my hope for the organization is viable or not.

At this point they have activities scheduled like “Dress in green and yellow to show your support for the Ducks” and in “orange and black to show support for the Beavers”. I had to look up the Ducks and Beavers on Google just to figure out what the hell they were talking about, since I am not a fan of collegiate football. Guess I’ll go with the orange and black since the college in Corvalis is the Agricultural School. Go Beavers. Anyway, beavers are good.

On another day we are supposed to wear Red, White, and Blue to show our patriotism or something. Personally, I think all these so-called patriotic displays are just delusional activities that obscure the sad fact of the demise of liberty in the nation, the truth that the country is being sabotaged from within by the globalist central bankers and corporations, and to justify imperialism. This is corn-ball, to say the least. I guess I have to be grateful that they didn’t declare a “Lawrence Welk Evening of Music with Champaign Bubbles.” Like I said, this organization is ripe for the next generation to take over.

I think I will suggest that next year we have a “Dress Like a Pirate” day. Aaaaaaarrgh, Matey!!! I already have my costume.

At any rate, this will be a challenge for me because it will be a major disruption in my routine. Unless I frequent cyber cafes in Corvalis, I will not begin my day with George Ure’s latest projections of bear markets and web bot predictions of chaos and “people behaving badly.” I will no longer be kept in touch with the differing radiation levels in the country by Deutchsince, or the approach of Nibiru or Elenin. I won’t know if the planet is aligning with the sun and assorted planets and the approaching comet to instigate earthquakes and volcanoes. I won’t be warned about possible tsunamis or death rays from the Sun. I won’t be given conflicting information about whether the weather is warming or getting colder, whether Obama is a Kenyan or an American, if we are headed for inflation or deflation, if cell phones are giving people brain tumors, if cures for cancer are being suppressed, or even if I am one of those who have been “left behind.” I won’t be e-mailed by one Christian friend after another who sends me prayers and blessings in the name of Jesus, or informed for the 40^th time this year that’s it’s International Girlfriend’s Day. In short, it’s just going to be me and the “real world” for a whole week.

Now, that’s really scary.

And, I ‘m going to be by myself in a motel room with a TV that is hooked up to cable. The last time this happened, there was some sort of Jesse Ventura Conspiracy Theory marathon going on, so it wasn’t too bad. And, I caught up on several missed episodes of The Iron Chef.

The good thing is that Corvalis is a really cool college town that is a center for learning about sustainable farming and permaculture. If I have time I plan to explore the campus and pick up literature. I was happy to read in our comments recently this from gamedog:

”I have weaned myself off the daily doomster research, I felt I was stagnating, I can still keep up with the headlines, but no need to research in depth these days. I now spend more time researching solutions, implementing permaculture design within our community, and generally quietly getting on with it.”

I do think that permaculture and homegrown health and traditional skills are the hope of the world. I find myself changing in my orientation to our alternative living situation. We have chosen a more or less post-collapse lifestyle. Like Gamedog, we were greatly influenced back in 2003 by Michael Ruppert and his From the Wilderness website. Back then, it was all about preparing for what we thought was the immanent arrival of Peak Oil and the Real Estate collapse. Then is sorta morphed into Peak Everything, the global takeover by the banksters and mutant agriculture and Big Pharma. All still true, but impossible to convince anybody of.

So now, if asked, we just live the way we do because we like to. We like to eat healthy food that we grow ourselves. We like to not be in debt to the banks. We like to not sit through a zillion commercials on the tube. We enjoy our chickens and rabbits and garden. We feel more free when we cultivate a sense of “enough” and don’t feel compelled to buy the latest thing or watch the popular programs. And, we find that the less we speak of our rational behind the activity, the more popular it has become. See our website: www.LaPineCoopandGarden.com.

I don’t know if we are on the vanguard of a religion or a revolution or just two old eccentric goofballs, but whichever it is, I feel happier about it all. I feel more secure knowing that our mother, The Earth, can put the kibosh on human foolishness at any time; that the frightening march of tyranny has within it, seeds of failure; that Time will take out even Dick Chaney and those miscreants of his ilk; that life on Earth has prevailed despite encounters with other celestial bodies, hideous war-mongering despots, famines, plagues, pole shifts, ice ages, and calamities of all sorts. I am still appalled by the prevailing idiocracy in America. But, then, I am encouraged that not everybody is brain dead – witness anonymous. Let’s just hope we don’t form a circular firing squad.

Anyway, my dear troutclan, I will be leaving Sunday and hoping to visit the Campfire once or twice through some cyber café or something. Keep an eye on the murphinater for me. He’s going to have a lot to do while holding down the fort around here.