Sunday, June 27, 2010

The handbasket is getting cramped.

Still wrassling with the cruddy tummy; plus, we're one of those places where it's been raining constantly.  Last night I was up until midnight, watching the weather radar; waiting to see if I needed to head for the root cellar.  We lucked out; the storms lost a fair amount of intensity just before passing over; an inch of rain and a couple near lightning strikes was all we got.

As many of you know, I frequently comment over on The Automatic Earth.  (There are a lot of days when I can manage to read and react; but don't really have the energy needed for a coherent and worthwhile post of my own.)

One of the readers there took some of Stoneleigh's words, and some of the pictures Ilargi uses to introduce each post there; and edited it all into this video.

   For some reason, the embed process wasn't working for me today.   Watch it; it's not long, nice music.  And pretty pessimistic.  But if you're not feeling pessimistic these days, I'd have to think you're not paying attention.  The rate at which really bad news hits us seems to have doubled from only 6 months ago.  One million people in the US have lost all unemployment benefits recently; and many more will be in the same handbasket to hell shortly.  They will have nothing to pay any of their bills with.  Which means some of the people they've managed to keep paying will now be unable to pay their bills.  Even Joe Biden admitted last week that many of the jobs lost so far will never come back.

  One good thing.  Listen to the tone of Stoneleigh's voice.  She knows how bad things look, in an astonishingly lucid way.  But you will not hear despair in her voice.

5 comments:

Sharlene T. said...

I just have to listen to my friend's and their children's tales of being out of work and having been out of work for more than a year... it's very frightening for young people, today... prayer is good but money puts food on the table...

knutty knitter said...

We've been lucky so far. Unemployment is taken care of with a minimum weekly payment per person permanently. It isn't much but it does put food on the table (including ours sometimes). The idea is not to starve but not to encourage peeps to stay on there either.

The levels of unemployment are nothing like as bad as you have....yet!

I saw that video yesterday - really good too. I mostly wonder what there will be left for our kids who are just into their teens. Looks like a poor outlook to me but plenty of local hope yet.

One thing in our favour is that being pretty isolated anyway, we always have depended on the local economy for the basics. Anything from outside is just too expensive generally.

Things will go back to the way they were when I was growing up I suspect. Which isn't such a bad thing. It is the climate stuff I find really scary. There I have no answer but to cut down and use only our own fair share and then hope for the best.

viv in nz

Greenpa said...

Knutty Viv- I think you're in one of the best possible places; maybe. The ocean will prevent hordes of barbarians from wandering through, and you're not so overpopulated as to be desperate. And you have those gorgeous mountains, which will really help with global warming; you can go both up, and in.

In 1970; Oberlin college had Paul Ehrlich come to speak; The Population Bomb came out in 68; and he was a huge deal.

After the talk, which was great; he sat down on a chair up on the stage and talked with us, for a good long time. Somebody eventually asked THE question.

"What would YOU do; if somebody gave you $10M?" (think billion, in today's money).

What instantly just popped out of his mouth, obviously with no filtering whatsoever, was "Buy New Zealand and put a fence around it."

Everybody laughed, of course- but it's a very telling remark.

Anonymous said...

I've noticed that you get frequent tummy bugs....maybe some raw milk to help?

Greenpa said...

Anon- raw milk. Could be you're on the right track there; take a look here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/science/03milk.html

The number of potentially salacious comments that this brings to mind is astonishing... :-)