Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

I would have to endorse all three of Gene's points.

You can tell an old list by reading it's last month's, or perhaps its last 
week's posts.  New lists are just getting around to discussing the meat of 
the topic.  For old lists like this one (very old by list standards) we have 
discussed every aspect of gardening, hubandry, subsistence living, alternate 
everything to such a degree anything that appears to be new ground must 
needs be mostly a rehashing of old ground.

As a list matures, its archives will needs be more valuable than its 
traffic.  I joined a list last year on medieval musical instruments.  The 
traffic 
is nil, but if you type in a key word to search the archives, you get 
ponderous tomes of information in great detail and enthuiastically and hotly 
presented.

And like most I' ve joined a number of other lists on allied or congantive 
subjects where the discussion is new.

> >Alas, the wisdom has become deeply diluted by our human need to  
> feel important. 

Perhaps.  But it has equally become diluted by our human need to feel 
secure and hopeful, even if we must fabricate the basis for that security and 
hopefulness.

A few years ago some began raising the hue and cry about a financial 
disaster on its way based on unrealistic rise in real estate "values" and the 
financial skulduggery that supported it.   On the internet were in equal 
amounts 
passioned warnings and flippant dismissals.  Yet, amongs all that blather 
the numbers were there and could not be explained away.  Turns out the 
pessimistic were right this time (the numbers were always pessimistic).

I bring this up because that was round one.  Round two is soon to start and 
is widely known by those who have not forgotten their sixth grade math 
skills.  Crushing federal deficit (debt), virtually no productivity, and a 
pathological dependence on imports (oil and Chinese crap).  No amount of 
cheerfulness and optimism will make the numbers go away.

This means that embracing (or more important, having embraced) a 
subsistence life on the homestead is far more to the point today that it has 
been in 
the past.  Sixteen or seventeen or more years ago when many of us were first 
participating on this list, homesteading was a curiosity ... a more serene 
life, better food, etc.  But he way this country and the world is heading 
subsistence living may soon cease to be a curiosity and be in earnest one of 
the few feasible paradigms available.

We are not in a cycle.  We are at the crux of a paradigm shift.  That's 
whither homestead.

James
</HTML>