Tough History Coming

Yeah, there's a whole long list of posts here under that label, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I think it's Ayn Rand's oncoming train.

I've concluded that it really doesn't matter much who triumphs in next November's snout-count, our President and all our Congressweasels aren't going to pull our chestnuts out of the flames - they're just going to keep pouring coal - sorry - sustainable cellulose fiber on the fire.

In Europe the EU is about to crumble, but our banks have decided to try to help "save" them from themselves.  Yeah.  That'll work. I've seen a lot more Titanic references in relation to the U.S. and world economies lately. The iceberg may very well be the mound of Euro debt that Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal or even France are impaling themselves upon. Mixing metaphors further, there seems to be a long stack of dominoes that The Anointed™ have been placing oh-so-carefully for the last four or five decades just waiting for that first one to tip over.

And bear in mind, whether you like it or not ours is a global economy. When one collapses, the rest will feel it, and it will be painful.

In Greece there have been riots over "austerity measures." In England there have been riots over ... what, exactly? Oh, yes: because they were "good fun"! We've got "Occupy Wall Street" idiots rioting in Oakland. If our Congressweasels do try for "austerity measures" here, do you doubt there'll be widespread rioting?  And immediate appeasement?

Meanwhile the current Administration has blocked the "shovel ready" development of an oil pipeline from Canada's oil sands to the U.S., and is prepared to unleash the mighty power of the EPA on companies developing oil and gas deposits in the Bakken and Marcellus formations.

Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and somebody (*cough*Israel*cough*) seems to be throwing monkey wrenches into their mechanisms. But you have to wonder if it's just not enough. I mean, Pakistan already has nukes, and they're pretty pissed off at us right now. Plus China has given us an ultimatum: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China".

I look at the world, and I cannot help but assume that we're just fucking doomed. We're apparently way overdue for another massive die-off, but Mother Nature hasn't come up with that elusive superbug, nor have we figured out just what it'll take to motivate us into throwing nukes at each other - yet. Our energy supplies haven't run out, but unless we stop shutting down drilling and mining, that's going to happen. We've already proven that wind and solar aren't going to cut it. Nuclear holds the most promise, but after Fukushima, there's a snowball's chance in hell that any new reactors will get built before the turn of the next century.

And our government has concluded that if you have guns, ammo, seven days worth of food, or are missing a couple of fingers, you might be a terrorist and they should be able to abduct you, take you out of the country and hold you indefinitely without charges.




Good thing this wasn't in effect when Richard Jewell was a suspect in the Olympic Park bombing. He'd have probably died well before the age of 44.  I'm sure there are many more we've not heard of in the intervening years.

In December of 2003 Donald Sensing wrote:

When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

I asked him in October of 2008 if his opinion had changed any. His response, in part:

Yes, most definitely it has. The demise of freedom in this country has accelerated even faster than I imagined back in 2003.

--

The only difference between the outcomes of McCain's or Obama's presidency is how quickly they will accelerate the robbery of the people's rights, not whether they will.

One author of the bill in question above is John McCain.

I will once again repeat the apocryphal but descriptive ("fake, but accurate" if you will) quotation attributed to Alexander Frasier Tytler regarding democracies:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith

From spiritual faith to great courage

From courage to liberty

From liberty to abundance

From abundance to selfishness

From selfishness to complacency

From complacency to apathy

From apathy to dependency

From dependency back again into bondage

According to the latest statistics, more than one-third of the total wages and salaries paid in the U.S. come from .gov payouts. If that's not dependency, what is?  So the next step is...

But hey, the wealthy have made their separate peace and are planning for the collapse. I guess they don't have to worry about Uncle Sam thinking they're terrorists or anything. They won't do anything so gauche as stockpile MRE's.

I don't fault them. In their position, I'd probably do the same. But I'm not looking forward to a return to feudalism, that's for sure. This peasant intends to remain armed and free. There is a reason the Second Amendment was written, and it didn't have anything to do with "sporting purposes."