Channeling Abe Lincoln

Today's quote:

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves."

— Abraham Lincoln

He would have been excoriated in the modern day media as an elitist and racist bastard.

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Here's some interesting info I received in an email today from a reader. It SEEMS the facts are in order... if anyone disputes them please comment accordingly...

Interesting Info:

City, State, with % of People Below the Poverty Level

1. Detroit , MI 32.5%

2. Buffalo , NY 29.9%

3. Cincinnati , OH 27.8%

4. Cleveland , OH 27.0%

5. Miami , FL 26.9%

6. St.. Louis , MO 26.8%

7. El Paso , TX 26.4%

8. Milwaukee , WI 26.2%

9. Philadelphia , PA 25.1%

10. Newark , NJ 24.2%

U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 American Community Survey, August 2007 What do the top ten cities (over 250,000) with the highest poverty rate all have in common?

Detroit , MI (1st on the poverty rate list) hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1961;

Buffalo , NY (2nd) hasn't elected one since 1954;

Cincinnati , OH - (3rd)...since 1984;

Cleveland , OH - (4th).....since 1989;

Miami , FL - (5th) has never had a Republican mayor;

St. Louis , MO - (6th)....since 1949;

El Paso , TX - (7th) has never had a Republican mayor;

Milwaukee , WI - (8th)....since 1908;

Philadelphia , PA - (9th)...since 1952;

Newark , NJ - (10th).....since 1907.

The sad fact is that there is not shred of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats any more regarding their fiscal rectitude. Cheap energy showed up in earnest in the American economy in the second decade of the 20th Century, and our political sensibilities were destroyed (with a great deal of help from Haber-Bosch). This was no particular entity/political party's fault or genius any more than Plague showing up in a city's port during the dark ages was G-d expressing his displeasure with church attendance - its just phenomena.

Still, doing the same thing over and over and over again....

The End of "Growth"

I am bearish on most equities. Not much of a secret around here. The equity market in the U.S. is pricing in future "growth", and there is no "growth" to be had.

When you see conditions where stocks are priced at 20X or 30X or 50X earnings, that stock market believes that earnings growth, and eventually top line growth, will be commensurate.

I see little chance of this (growth). Ergo, buying stocks as investments that do not pay, and do not have a history of increasing, dividends is a fools errand. In most cases I would prefer corporate bonds to corporate stocks. I do like big dividend payers, but WHEN you buy them, and at what price, obviously matters a great deal.

The most likely course of events here is continued deflation followed by currency disaster and U.S. sovereign debt default. If I knew exactly when (and if I were correct in the first place) these events would play out... the Russian mob would be looking to kidnap me, so I guess its ok that I do not.

The Silver/Gold ratio is back to 70. Not sure what it means, but I think I will be buying a little Silver here at some point. In fact, I have sold out of the money puts for our Hedge Fund - more than that, I cannot say in this forum. I am not going to "back up the truck", because I still fear some kind of dislocation that will bring sellers to the market looking to raise money for margin calls. A long Silver/short Gold strategy might make sense for sophisticated traders... and it might not. My sense is I will put a trade like that on at some point, but have not as yet.

It is my sense that we are about 25% through the U.S. Oil import crisis give or take. This phenomena will not be linear, so there will be flat periods and accelerated periods, but by 2020, it will mostly be done with, and the next 10 years will be among the most interesting decades of the past couple of centuries.

It will be interesting to see how population is distributed in the U.S. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. population migrated to the major cities, as has been the case in much of the world. Each country, though, has different reasons for this phenomena. In the U.S., financial services grew from less than 4% of GDP after WWII (and was roughly 5% in the mid 1970's) to over 23% of GDP in 2007 (as a percentage of earnings in the S & P 500, the percentage was somewhat higher... in some years financial services earnings totaled nearly 50% of the S & P 500's earnings). This work was in the cities, not in the country side, and we built the office towers, dry cleaners, and restaurants et al, in the cities to support the burgeoning industry's work force.

Now that process has come to an end, and is in fact in reverse. It is rather bizarre that 23% of the nation's GDP came from moving bytes around on a computer screen... and this does not take into account the industry's legal, accounting, and technology support cast... unto themselves no small percentage of GDP... Remember these bytes are merely ownership interest in the world's finite: Ranching, Agriculture, Fisheries, Forests, Minerals, Energy, and Water assets. You can increase the number of bytes. The amount of those underlying assets? Not so much.

(Somewhere along the line it seems that we expected that 100% of the work force would work moving bytes around a screen and we would "off shore" everything else... )

For better or worse, the financial services industry over the next decade or 2 will revert to 4 or 5% of GDP, down from 23%. That means a lot of things... like 80% of the office space that was built to house these workers will no longer be needed, and 20% of that is already empty. There are many more impacts and outcomes on the way... this is the very definition of "no growth" - and that's if we are lucky. In a mature economy there is a great deal less to do. "Maintenance" is very much different from "Growth", and this is very hard to manage politically. For instance, let us say the new, no growth economy requires .97X automobiles, not 1.00X. Overly simplified, either we pay each worker less, or we fire a certain number of workers, or the industry goes bankrupt. Of course, the first 2 are politically unacceptable, and so we go for option 3... sound vaguely familiar? What if its 3%, or 5% or (gasp!) 12% less per year, every year?

This is what is going on all over the economy. Our governments, local, state, and federal, budgeted growth in perpetuity. Government unions were fantastic marketers during the good years, pulling at the heartstrings of populace, most whom have never heard of the mathematical concept "e", and were able to negotiate tremendous pay and retirement packages for school teachers, police, fire, et al, based on never ending growth. Then the growth stopped, as it must must by mathematical necessity, and here we are- with the "have nots" struggling and suffering to pay the pension and healthcare benefits of the "haves". Welcome to Oil and Water, or socialism mixed with capitalism.

Given the lunacy of the political extremes, there is no hope for a rational, negotiated outcome. It then follows that debating and inserting macro solutions will fail. This makes a great deal of sense of what we are seeing in government at every level. Government is in the business of making macro adjustments and solutions, and I as I just laid out macro solutions won't work under ANY circumstance. This is why your "Hope and Change" has turned out to be more of the "Same old Sh*t" - and it is not anyone's or any political party's fault.

"It is what it is".

Libertariananimal (at) gmail

Anger in the Heartland

There's a lot of anger out there in the Heartland. Folks are p*ssed off.

Why so angry?

Does it matter?

Our systems have bullied people and the media/internet/political outlets (including bloggers like me) seems to have whipped up and played into this anger.

Gerald Celente has a great line that goes something like: "When people lose everything, they lose it". Real or imagined insults and injuries matters not. The 1960's Civil Rights movement was the blowoff of pent up anger. To read the comments on my site and the sites of other bloggers it would seem to me that we could be approaching that kind of level of anger now.

Anger is a spectrum of emotion. People have an intense sense of fairness. When that sense is violated they act. When that sense is reached by a critical mass of people, those actions can be volatile.

I read with interest James Howard Kuntsler's stuff among others in the Peak Oil Blogsphere, and I am somewhat disappointed at the condescending position taken in regards to religious, working class, gun totting, nose picking folks residing in fly-over-land (non-coastal elites). These people are angry for a reason, whether rightly or wrongly is up for debate... but I think it is suicidal for our society to continue to ignore this anger. There are millions and millions of these folks.

After WWI the allies brutally repressed and gouged Germany resulting in an anger that cost the lives of 60 million or so people in WWII.

"When people lose everything, they lose it". Indeed.

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Obama points out that people saving for college should not be wasting money on gambling, alcohol, drugs, and hookers in Las Vegas and gets his A$$ handed to him. WTF??!!

You mean a sitting president told Americans to act prudently and make "sacrifices" for their children's future? That they should accept some responsibility? Somebody alert the media! Well, somebody did.

Am I the only normal person left?

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Social Security payments versus receipts went negative. Well, we all knew it was going to happen... only our government was saying it wouldn't happen for another 15 years or so...

"Opps! Our Bad" said the government.

I can just see the hordes of rioting seniors now...

Medicare is in FAR WORSE SHAPE than Social Security.

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Those two social program baskets cases (not Medicare and Social Security... the OTHER 2), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rescued from the edge of darkness last years, are about to go Chernobyl. This would be amusing if it wasn't so frightening...

The crazies do the wildest things, like S.S., Medicare, Fannie & Freddie, and then excoriate the free market for not working! What a scream!

Only now we have 10's and 10's of millions of taught-to-be-helpless people just as the wheels are coming off.

We are beyond solutions for these past mistakes. G-d is going to have to sort all of this out.

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Given the above, what would be the outcome of some other external shock?

Rather an Interesting Coincidence

On occasion, I read John Michael Greer's excellent blog "The Archdruid Report".

I find the coincidence that we both used a chess analogy in our February 3 posts - the title of his post is "Endgame".

I recommend his post highly. Greer possesses a fantastic mind, and his prose is infinitely better than my sleep deprived posts of late (2 kids in diapers).

I wrote this article for another blog in June of 2009, and I republish this as a precursor for some posts coming in the near future:

"Revisiting Self-Sufficiency"

I try to approach this in a very practical way, and to report back that way, too.

So... if you really want to be "self-sufficient"...

Well, you can't be 100% self-sufficient, and you don't need to be. Youcan produce most of your own, food, but not all of it, and you don't need to - and you can do it and still have a life and a job.

The first misconception is that you can garden your way to self-sufficiency... egh! wrong, thanks for playing! You can grow most of your own vegetables - growing spinich, brocolli, peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, kale, carrots, etc... sufficient for a family of 4 or 5 is no big deal (preserving it all IS a big deal). Of course, if you tried to subsist off just this you would be dead or pretty sickly pretty soon (if you either have to earn money or farm full time that is... I guess sedentary couch potatoes could get by with just veggies, though their teeth and bones would certainly miss dairy in their diet). That produce is easy for a kitchen garden to produce.

Corn, potatoes, and beans in sufficient quantities to sustain your family is going to take a bit more work. Actually, a lot more, but still doable.

I get nasty emails from vegetarians on a semi regular basis lately. I always point out to them that they kill more animals with their consumption of fossil fuels than I do by feeding my family, but never mind hard facts - we are talking sensitivities here.

You see, I am a card carrying member of PETA... no not that PETA, the other one: People Eating Tasty Animals (and their milk and eggs, and using their manure for fertilizer). Animal protein is an absolute necessity in agrarian cultures with little fossil fuel inputs (try getting Omega-3 in your diet without animal fat), and as I TRY to do everything with as little fossil fuel input as possible (just look at my pictures... does it look like I cut the grass very often? NAFC.) they are necessay here, as well.

(I wonder if vegetarians consider the road kill from truck and trains carrying their grains and vegetables to them, or killed by climate change and pollution caused by operating farm and transport equiment, producing chemical fertilizers, pesticides used on the crops (bugs are animals, too), animals killed by farm equipment (rabbits, birds, snakes, toads, etc... call those fields home), I could go on and on but a "true beleiver" Vegan would not have read it anyway. Am I the only one to notice that, well, let me rephrase... I have NEVER met a vegan that was not pro-abortion. How's that for being STUNNINGLY full of sh*t?)

If you were looking for politically correct self sufficiency, you came to the wrong blog.

But I digress...

Organic Farms need animals for fertilizer and food - simple like that. Not want, should-have-if-possible, or ONLY for the manure (what would you do with all of the excess bulls, billy goats, roosters, and Boar hogs? They would quickly destroy your home and fields, eat every blade of grass, and injure and kill your children (think I exagerate? Leave your children in a field with a bunch of Bulls and Boar Hogs for an afternoon, let me know what you find when you come back), etc...

Let me repeat: Organic farming means animals for traction, for food, and for fertilizer. No animals, no organic farming - and no organic farming means continued factory farming and long distance food transportation, and that means climate change, pollution, etc...

It takes time, effort, and practice to be self-sufficent. You cannot learn it on the web. You could still be a doctor, lawyer, or indian chief - whatever it is you do for a living - and still produce most of your own food at home (if you live in the country or the burbs, that is). You don't need a lawn whatsoever. Every inch around your home can grow something edible. Fruit trees and berry bushes instead of ornamentals. Grapes instead of fences or hedges. Raised beds instead of a front yard. Housing 20 chickens and 2 dairy goats instead of a dog and a cat will give you eggs and milk rather than hookworm and dirty kitty litter, and the chickens and goats have a much better carbon foot print... it ain't even close. (I have a dog and barn cats... but they are working animals).

You would have to have the cooperation of your wife - good luck - and your family. Why do I say "wife" and not "spouse"? Because, there will be damn few single women, or men, moving to the country to start a self sufficient homestead, and even fewer single mothers. Nope, the demographics say it will be married people with children, with Dad providing and mom feeding the family and raising and educating the children - who'd a thunk it?! (Nothing is absolute. We have some lovely gay women neighbors (they describe themselves as "bull dykes" among other things... I love people that can laugh at themselves) running a self sufficient farm, and they are a hoot!)

So why'd I say "good luck"? I live half the year in Boca Raton, FL, where the poor people have a million dollar net worth, and the rich quite a bit more than that, and I should know - I manage their money! I hear their concerns like a priest in the confessional. Any of those guys even TRYS to move his family to a small holding homestead or ditch the landscaping for a productive garden, or try's to downsize the familY'y consumption... and it is off to divorce court for his troubles (I truly wish the "Real" American Housewife were more like Sharon Astyk but that that just ain't the case - America is fascinated by the Reality Show "The Real Housewives of Wherever" precisely because it is, in fact, REALITY). Sorry, but "family law" has left the successful "king of his castle" nothing more than a neutered figurehead, a laboring eunich that, if he so much as steps out of line, will lose his home and life's savings in addition to the family jewels he lost to the marriage/divorce industrial complex by marrying without a prenup agreement. What is the point of marriage in a society that promotes divorce?

(I am sure to get some winning emails and comments with that. Funny thing about the "truth", it gets people's piss hot. If I were to speak untruths, no one would care because we all know they simply were not true.)

There is good news, though. The Great Recession AND Peak Oil, in addition to making people poorer and requiring them to be more self sufficient, is going to demolish the marriage/divorce industrial complex. People (men - I mean, come on, have you ever heard of "GROOM" Magazine?) are already:

1. Putting off marriage


2. Not getting married, ever (over 40% of American children are born out of wedlock)


3. Those that do marry are Engaging a pre-nuptual agreement more often to level the playing field

These were the unintended consequences (along with our SKY HIGH divorce rate and destroyed families) of Gloria Steinem, et al, and their Feminist revolution (one whose putative benefits went to 30 to 50 year old women AND THEN SPLIT WITH THEIR LAWYERS at the direct expense of 0 to 20 year old women (girls) and men (boys). The Great Recession is going to remove the incentive to divorce that was an unintended consequence in the 1960's and 1970's revisions of family law here in the U.S. People are going to NEED their family in a world without Medicare, Social Security, and Food Stamps.

Back to Organic Farming... So what does the previous couple of paragraphs diatribe have to do with Small Holding, Homestead, Organic Farming, whatever...?

There was a reason they were called "Family Farms"!!! Family, as in a husband and wife and their children. Not that that is necessarily what a family has to look like, but it was themost successful model for the building blocks of "community" for Millenia prior to the industrial age.

In an agrarian society do you know what women without husbands DO FOR A LIVING?? I'll give you 2 1/2 guesses, and a hint: It is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, professions around. If Peak Oil means we are going back to an agrarian system and the collapse of industrial society - why is it verbotten to discuss ALL likely outcomes.

Don't like the political commentary with your victory gardens and dairy goats? My apologies, but it was politics that got us into the mess we are in, politics that writes the nation's laws (including family law) and it is the analysis of those political errors that might lead the way out of it. Besides, this is my blog.

Yours for a better world (by starving out divorce lawyers)

libertariananimal at gmail (d0t) com

You can't get a little bit Pregnant

American foreign policy combined with our current social, monetary, and fiscal programs are putting our nation in a very challenging national security conundrum.

The very wars that the U.S. is fighting to "protect our freedoms" are part and parcel to the very thing that can bring the U.S. low. I have no doubt that the strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is to surround and control Oil deposits in Iran and Iraq. As my regular readers know, I am a recovering chess fanatic. In chess you have an opening, a middle game, and an end game. If Korea and Viet Nam showed us anything, it is that our policy makers have little concept of middle game, and NO CONCEPT for an end game.

What is the ultimate outcome for Iran and Iraq oil? Answer: In less than 20 years these nations will not be able to export ANY OIL as their domestic consumption will consume ALL of their production. The U.S. is risking the demolition of its currency, and with it a debt default, among other very, very unpleasant outcomes... in order to kick the (Oil) can down the road a couple of years.

This is the very definition of insanity.

And while the loss of lives, treasure, and moral mandate that the U.S. will suffer as a result of prosecuting these inexcusable wars, these will only be a contributing factor in the coming political disaster. You see, the U.S. will "win" these wars, whatever that means, but will lose ALL because of the debt created by the Wars, Medicare, Social Security Medicaid, Disability, Farm Subsidies, et al...

There will be a day of reckoning, there will be an "End Game", and there is nothing to be done for it because our policies and political phenomena have created a huge class of the delusional or just plain FOS (the perfect example? Pro-Choice Vegetarians. These knuckleheads race to save dogs in Haiti and then back again to help hack an unborn baby to death. These people represent the worst mankind has to offer, yet are firm in their delusions of superior intellect).

Life requires hard work, frugality, planning, provisioning, parenting... non which can be provided by the government. We continue to delude ourselves that these simple truths are no longer true.

The Vermont Secessionists...

Time Magazine ran an article on the nascent Vermont Secessionist movement (I am certainly NOT advocating any secessionist talk, which I think to be nothing short of dangerous - a case of "be careful what you ask for, you may get it". In most other countries, these guys would have disappeared already - that says a great deal about our Constitution).

I was struck by a couple passages in the article:

A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up the Second Vermont Republic, which he describes as "left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding philosophy."

AND

With 20 or so mostly middle-aged attendees looking on, the candidates each stood at the podium to deliver a remarkably unified message: The U.S. government, they said, was an immoral enterprise — engaged in imperial wars, propping up corrupt bankers and supersized corporations, crushing small businessmen, plundering the tax-base for corporate welfare, snooping on the private lives of citizens — and they wanted no more part of it. "The gods of the empire," Steele told the room, "are not the gods of Vermont."

Vermont has the reputation (Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy are the state's Senators!) as one of the most Liberal states in the U.S.... but does the above quote sound Liberal to you? Naylor's claim of "Left-Libertarian" and "anti- Big Government" is really just LIBERTARIAN with with the word "Left" thrown into the mix for marketing purposes. Heck the "engaged in imperial wars.... private lives of citizens" line sounds like something I WROTE. I mean, come on... when was the Left so concerned about Small Business? Or anti-Big Government? This is a major shift, and one to which I say "Welcome! Come on over! Good to have you here!"

If you have been reading my stuff for a while, you know that I firmly believe that there are not that many issues separating the majority of American's who describe themselves as "Left" or "Right"... actually, I have been saying that for the most part, the VAST most part, that the only issue separating these Americans is abortion (and that the TPTB be are terrified that the non-feminist Left will come to their senses on this issue) and aged American's support of Social Security and Medicare (seniors can't focus on anything else, and understandably so. If you addict someone to heroin or free services... well, what the h*ll did you expect?).

That Tea Parties and Vermont Secessionist Movements are coming into ideological alignment tells me that we are approaching some kind of political tipping point, and it would appear that aging, childless feminists are finally losing their grip on the former "Left".

One can only hope.