Homestead mailing list

["Jerry W. Shepperd" <shepperd AT austincc.edu>]

I think it was someone on this list who mentioned this website:
http://www.feedthepig.org/AboutUs.aspx
which encourages people to stop spending on every whim and taste, and 
take control of one's finances.  It is likely that most people here 
are into savings because of their lifestyle choice, and not because 
they are trying to build a large savings account, but the basic 
principles are the same.

If the next president of the United States, whomever that may be, 
wants to preside over a changed society, she or he must attempt to 
convert all of us to the gospel of savings and self-sufficiency, if 
we expect to see fundamental changes happen.   Neither individuals 
nor nations can spend themselves into prosperity.

As to what the future holds (not necessarily what it ought to be, 
unless one believes in fate or kismet), after rolling the chicken 
bones and reading the tea leaves, here are my prognostications:
1.  Barack Obama will be the next President.
2.  Political forces both within and outside the U.S. will prevent 
the next president from immediately ending the war in Iraq.
3.  Many of these same political forces will prevent fundamental 
economic changes from occurring in the U.S.
4.  So, in the short run, business as usual.
5.  Almost anyone can come up with a similar list without chicken 
bones or tea leaves, but not necessarily without snake oil.

-- A deluded liberal imbiber of snake oil poisoning.... Which doesn't 
sound nearly as good as the discussions made Poteen sound, when TVO 
was holding court.



At 04:07 PM 6/5/2008, you wrote:
> > >I was having a little quiet sadness about your McCain position. I'd
> > love to know what happened to change your mind, I guess I ought to go
> > back and do something crazy like read the posts, huh?
>
> I haven't changed my mind.  There were a couple of times that I saw a remote
> and unlikely reason to believe, but then McCain would wipe that out the next
> day.  At first he came out four square against a homedebtor/gambler bailout,
> and then recanted.  A few days ago I heard him deliver a brilliant foreign
> policy speech, good delivery too, so good I didn't know who was 
> speaking there for
> a minute.  But then the misbegotten coporatist followed that with a speech on
> why Globalism was such a good idea.
>
> There have only been brief, and I mean BRIEF, moments of thinking maybe I
> should take another look.  Nah.  Nothing there.
>
>
> As to the preference for  a Dem, you poor deluded  victims of liberal snake
> oil poisoning!  Obama is NOT going to withdraw from Iraq, at least 
> not for two
> or three years (unless it is a default withdrawal on our collapsing economy).
>
> We are not in Peak Oil, the housing bubble aftermath, the currency and credit
> crisis, and the food shortage because of Bush or his policies.  We are there
> because at every juncture of our miserable lives we've believed the 
> next clown
> in office is just going to make everything OK, no matter how illogical our
> decisions and lifestyle.  Bush is the reflection of our common 
> proclivity, not
> the cause of it.
>
> So I'd prefer a Dem in the White House too, especially one that is falsely
> percieved to be the antithesis of Bush.  Then in the next couple of years as
> things continue to deteriorate unabated, maybe, just maybe, it will 
> begin to dawn
> on people that our fault lies within ourselves and not our (political) stars
> that we are underlings.