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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

Everything you say makes sense.  The only difference in my thinking is my 
personal selfishness.  I figure that I have between 2 and 15 years left to 
worry.  I recently did several of those online medical lifespan calculators.  
Given my age, prior habit (tobacco) and family and personal medical history.  
Out of three calculators, the longest calculation was that I should expire in 
2011--one was for this year and the other was 2009.  Of course,  my GP and my 
surgeon both believe in prolonging the inevitable, but.....

So, I only have to worry about my wife and stupid dog and a small payoff to 
the girlfriend.  I have given my brothers tens of thousands of dollars over 
the years, and their kids barely know me.  I'm trying to figure out whether 
to stay within or move out of the mainstream system.  (Since this is on the 
regular list, please do not reply to anything I might have told you in 
private email).

I don't really care about oil is long as we don't run out before I die, 
having taken care of the future for the aforementioned couple of women and 
one dog.  I don't care about much of anything else, either.

I saw a black comedian on TV the other night saying that the most dangerous 
man you could ever meet was not some big n*gg*r in a dark alley.
Instead, it was an upper middle class , middle aged white man that just lost 
his job/career. 

 He said it in a funny way that I can't duplicate, but he had a point.  I've 
not worked for another man for decades, but I am middle age,  upper middle 
class (by most generic standards of income) cognizant of my mortality, and 
not happy with certain the changes going on around me.  I have no religous or 
spiritual beliefs.  If I were not concerned about the women and the dog, I 
could be an unpleasant individual.

My point is that hope is probably good for the hopeful.  Looking at the 
starkness of reality is probably good for a realist like you.  

Me, I have little hope, but don't give much of a damn about reality.

Life is not what you make of what you are given , as we were taught as 
youngsters.  Life, istead, is another illusion of vanity.  One of the 
apostles in the Christian religion, said "vanity of vanities, all is vanity". 
 I am no longer vain......bobford




--- On Fri, 8/29/08, Clansgian AT wmconnect.com <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com> wrote:

> From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com>
> Subject: Re: [Homestead] Total disbelief-oil
> To: bobford79 AT yahoo.com
> Date: Friday, August 29, 2008, 7:44 AM
> > How badly is the game rigged?  These are rhetorical
> questions, of course.  
> 
> Might well be rigged in ways we will never be aware of, but
> with oil there is 
> one sobering difference.  In the case of food, if the price
> of meat goes up, 
> you can just not buy it and you will be fine.  If the price
> of clothing goes 
> up, you can just wear last year's jeans another year. 
> But most poeples's lives 
> revolve around oil use.  If the price of gas goes up, they
> pay it.  They 
> borrow the money if necessary, and they pay it.  The
> alternative it ... well, 
> there isn't one.  
> 
> People really aren't anywhere near the mindset where
> they could do something 
> besides drive to work, shop at the Mart, put their kids on
> the school bus, 
> etc. as easily as they could have tomato soup for supper
> instead of beef roast.
> 
> So when the price of most things rise, a lot of people can
> say 'no'.  But 
> when the price of oil rises, all they can do is pay.  This,
> I'd say, tends to 
> make manipulating the price easy and easy to make it stick.
> 
> >You mentioned in another post about us (Americans)
> being a nation mired in 
> debt, but since modern money is simply a figment of debt,
> where is a problem? 
> 
> The problem is in expectation.  As a homesteader who
> managed to raise a 
> pretty good crop of potatoes this year (as well as hard
> corn and beans and other 
> things) my expectation is that this winter we will have
> potatoes to eat if we 
> had nothing else.  Also with plenty dead standing trees on
> and near the 
> property, I have expectation of the fuel with which to cook
> them.  It will matter 
> little what goes on in the world, my expectation holds.
> 
> But a very great many people have the expectation that  the
> shuffling of 
> piles of money (or the blips that represent that money)
> will provide them with 
> something to put on the table and heat their homes.  As the
> financial debacle 
> unwinds, those blips can evaporate.  For example in the
> past few years hundreds 
> of thousands (if not millions) of people had the
> expectation that the real 
> estate they had endebted themselves for would continue to
> go up in value unabated 
> and this is what would supply them with their potatoes in
> the future.  In a 
> short period of time several trillion dollars of that value
> evaporated.  Much of 
> that value was the expectation that the property would sell
> for $XXX but the 
> new reality is that it will only sell for $XX if it would
> sell at all.  Now 
> they have no means of procuring potatoes.
> 
> The problem is in people's expectations.
> 
> 
> James
> 
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