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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

Well James; I'll have to ponder and re-read this again.  I'm on my way to 
resolving the issue which I talked to you about privately and have casually 
made reference of on the list.  I think afterwards, We will either move 
together or I will move alone.

I'm not talking divorce.My neighbor's parents have had houses in Phoenix and 
San Francicsco for years, living apart, in different cities much of the time. 
 My parents have an extra house on the river.  It is close to the home where 
I was raised, but my father can spend time at either place when my mother is 
at the river for the season.

  I can move to land I now own or go in a different direction and rent a 
rural place in an area of more interest nnow, if she doesn't want to go until 
I have things settled. Then I will know the area well, before I buy. 

That way, I can put a year or so of work in and she can come and visit; 
before we make a huge move together.  Or, we might just move together.

  A lot depends on my personal situation and the way it is finalized and also 
on the world economy.  Many people seem to think that things are getting back 
to normal.  I don't think we have even seen the beginning of the economic 
paid to come. 

I've never been a gold bug or a survivalist type.  I don't think I ever even 
really understood the Y2K deal; but I am very worried about thisd country 
when other countries start to call debt.

  Next week's G-20, you can expect some countries to try to move the IMF away 
from the dollar, and then the price of oil.  If that were to happen, we could 
be paying thirty dollars for a can of tuna, before people even realized 
things were changing.  The only outcome then would be 'big' war.

Anyway.  Thanks; I may follow with a question or two in the next few days 
.....bobford


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--- On Fri, 11/7/08, Clansgian AT wmconnect.com <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com> wrote:

> From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com>
> Subject: Re: [Homestead] The longest post yet-Anger
> To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Date: Friday, November 7, 2008, 6:57 PM
> Desert Bob, this is an odd amalgam of points but there are
> some things I’d 
> like to say about them:
> 
> 
> 
> >And you are not poor. 
> 
> Technically I am.  My household runs on about 1/6th the
> cash established for 
> the poverty line for a family this size.  As the government
> reckons it, we are 
> in searing, grinding poverty.  Let me add quickly that this
> household runs on 
> that much money alone, we receive no assistance of any kind
> and none of us is 
> on SS or disability or any such.  No one here receives a
> stipend, pension, 
> dividend, or any such.
> 
> 
> 
> It’s the straight dope, the real McCoy, we have devised a
> nearly cashless 
> economy in the modern world.  Nearly.
> 
> >But, I could not even come close to what you have done.
> Not even close. 
> 
> 
> 
> You have allowed that part of the phenomenon is the
> "will", which I would 
> reduce to a more simple "don’t want to."  Not
> many people want to live this way.  
> You have to derive some dark pleasure from hard physical
> work and also from 
> thwarting the "system".  Not everyone, not many
> in fact, are of a bent to be 
> that way.
> 
> I have always hated debt, and I had some so I had good
> reason to hate it.  
> IRS and state department of revenue were the worst, and the
> latter was the worse 
> of the two.  But I have never had a credit card in my life.
>  I took a car 
> loan once in my misspent youth, regretted doing so, and
> never did it again.  
> Naturally being at 23 a  snarling, teeth gnashing old Silas
> Marner or Ebenezer 
> Scrooge when it came to debt, when it came time to buy land
> a few years later, I 
> did not have to borrow much money for it.  And I parlayed
> that into a more 
> valuable place and that into a more valuable one still, so
> that by the time I was 
> married (at 36 years old) we could buy this farm for cash
> and have enough 
> left over to buy the materials for he house.
> 
> I often have people say, "But what about me?  I’m
> not 23 and I have this 
> mountain of debt and I’m in bad health etc,"  (This
> question comes up in another 
> forum, a blog where I have expounded my philosophy of
> economics and free living 
> in detail, and which will remain nameless here).  And this
> is my unfeeling 
> arrogant bastard reply:
> 
> What if someone said "I was careless with my 12 ga.
> shotgun loaded with 00 
> and I accidentally shot off my right foot.  What do I do
> now?"  My answer is, 
> "You limp through life with one foot."
> 
> Some things are not easily undone.  If  someone made bad
> debts, got cleaned 
> out in a divorce, got in trouble with the IRS, ends up like
> the couple on Green 
> Acres with one not willingly leaving the city for anything,
> ….then,  sucks to 
> be you.  You’ve been foolish.  Don’t be foolish any
> more.
> 
> 
> 
> Now, I’m quite up for walking along with someone limping
> on one foot.  I’m 
> not in a hurry and there’s no place I’ve got to be. 
> That is, there is a great 
> deal to be considered from people who are living and
> independent life.  It 
> has little to do with how you skin a deer or malt barley or
> plant onions.  It 
> has to do with viewing the world a different way.  My
> reason for participating 
> the way I do on this list isn’t because I  hold up my
> household as a model for 
> anyone to emulate nor duplicate, but rather so that you can
> see things from a 
> different point of view.  Where that point of view takes
> you will vary, if 
> indeed you want to make any practical use out of it at all.
> 
> 
> >I think they just work, play, buy cars and houses, have
> babies, and listen 
> to the media, and stay so busy that they don't realize
> they are spending most 
> of their time working for someone else's benefit and
> profit.
> 
> Bob, this is the most important point, and the hardest one
> for most to deal 
> with:  It isn’t so much spending one’s life working for
> someone else’s benefit 
> and profit, it’s spending YOUR life benefiting from
> someone else’s labor and 
> misery.  It is the very thing that causes people like Moon
> to flare up.  They 
> just don’t like thinking about it.  In modern America we
> swill at the trough 
> of the resources of the world paid for by the lives, blood,
> and misery of the 
> rest of the world.  That is why I speak out against the
> abomination of blaming 
> our aggression around the world on the whim of George Bush,
> and that as soon 
> as we get rid of him, we need never be aggressive again. 
> That’s true only if 
> everyone in the country is willing to live closer to the
> bone than even we on 
> this homestead do.  For this sort of life to make any
> sense, you have to be 
> able to look beyond the sort of PC drivel we’ve addressed
> here
> 
> 
> 
> .>You must be stubborn as hell, and also hard willed to
> get the wife and 
> family to carry it as far as you have. 
> 
> Again, let me see if I can express this.  Stubbornness and
> hard will can lead 
> you astray as easily as lead you where you want to go.  It
> isn’t a matter of 
> stubbornness, it’s a matter of  clarity.  We have
> clarity.  Since we don’t 
> use much cash, where does our "stuff" come from? 
> Mainly we live by the largesse 
> of Nature.  Nature is a Mean Mother.  If you come here to
> the backwater to 
> live, leave all notions of nature as seen in Disney
> cartoons behind.  It doesn’t 
> work that way.  When you begin to let go of the
> consumerist, industrialist, 
> agribusiness mindset, you see that Nature has no tolerance
> at all for any of 
> the PC claptrap we have been addressing.  Nature cares not
> a whit whether you 
> are young or old, male or female, fat or slim, well or ill,
> black or white, 
> insane or sound.  She will behave toward you with compete
> impartiality.  You will 
> learn clarity, the ability to discern what Nature is about
> and act 
> accordingly, or you will perish.
> 
> On a post about making choices, one commenter remonstrated
> that disaster 
> could strike in ways you did not anticipate and so the idea
> that you could prosper 
> by making wise choices was invalid (that same argument has
> been advanced 
> here).  She told that she and her husband had been
> homesteading on 2 acres and 
> when he became ill (and eventually died), she could not
> tend the 13 goats and so 
> had to get rid of them.  As you know, this region is severe
> drought central 
> and so realizing that, because of the dryness, the carrying
> capacity of the 
> place was diminished for the present, we reduced our number
> of goats to just the 
> opposite of the poster in question.  Instead of 13 goats on
> 2 acres, we have 2 
> goats on 13 acres.  If something happens to one of us, the
> goats can fend for 
> themselves indefinitely.  13 goats on 2 acres is an
> agribusiness model since 
> it requires purchased feed and someone present to feed
> them.  
> 
> 
> 
> So, Bob, on this list you will talk with people
> ‘homesteading’ on the basis 
> of many different paradigms.  Some allow the homesteader to
> wander around in a 
> PC fog and it doesn’t much affect their operation.  Some
> make no apologies 
> about the fact that their husbandry is on an agribusiness
> basis rather than a 
> subsistence basis which they do not value.  Each of these
> models and more has 
> its price and its results (rewards and consequences).
> 
> 
> 
> If you don’t want or don’t desire the results of this
> type of life, by all 
> he powers don’t approach it or attempt it.  It is a
> radically different vision 
> and it requires seeing things in a radically different way.
>  The rest follows.
> 
> 
> James
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