a mandala for our times

It’s a mandala, I tell you. The road goes on forever and the party never ends (sorta).

I began writing this blog a little over six years ago. I’ve been looking at old stories on this blog, and there’s something like 650. Some of those were reblogged from other sources (Hello Kevin Hester) but I wrote the bulk of them. I think I’ve broken a few original stories here, but most of what you’ll find on my site is a sharing of information not out there on the corporate-heavy social media you’re getting from feed-your-Facebook. And as I look at the many articles I’ve posted, I feel there’s a kind of cycle at work. When I see a new article on, say, oil and natural gas, I remember an article I wrote on the subject in 2015. When I see new outrages about the healthcare system, I remember the five or six articles I talked about American healthcare as ‘Hostage Capitalism‘. There’s a cycle at work, and I feel like I’m back at square one.

I try to avoid big honkin’ mistakes, but they happen. And I’ve been catfished more than once, though I was hardly the only one. Remember the rumor that Trump would fire Mueller over the Christmas break? I thought the evidence was pretty compelling, but it didn’t come to pass. And later it appeared that it was fake news deliberately launched by… someone in the WH to try to sway Trump (who was about to fire Mueller but was talked out of it). Meanwhile I apologized. But it turned out that my original assertion (i.e, that Trump was angling for a way to fire Mueller)  was correct. It’s a matter not just about ‘fake news’, but the idea that things in the current administration are, shall we say, ‘mercurial’. A recent article pointed out that the WH is frequently forced to scramble when the POTUS makes an abrupt decision that no one has prepped for. The recent detention of immigrant children is exhibit A. Once Jeff Sessions announced the ramifications of the ‘zero tolerance’ policy for deportation of undocumented aliens (even those who were here to apply for asylum), there was a foot race to prepare detention spaces for the thousands of children swept up in the arrests. And yet, spaces were ready within a few weeks. Imagine that. Wish they could spring into action about other problems, such as Flint’s water supply. 

Anyway, that incident intrudes on my retrospective. What’s weird is that the other issues I was writing about in 2012 or 2015 are back again. I was warning about gas prices going up in 2014 and 2015, noting that they had to go up if the oil companies were going to make good on their junk bonds. Gas prices fell steadily in 2014 and 2015, even though oil derived from shale or tar sands needed to be priced at $95 to service the bonds for it. That’s a larger issue about whether we were in recession that no one wanted to acknowledge, but oil was relatively cheap during those years. And suddenly, there’s something that looks like recovery and oil prices bounce back. We can’t have a recovery with oil prices trending to three figures a barrel–that was what kept us out of recovery for the Obama years. But I digress.

As for the economy, I’m in fear of becoming another Gerald Celente, a prophet of economic collapse. It has been said of Celente that he has predicted seven of the last two recessions. That said, I had noted in my writing that absent the ACA, we would have been in recession during Obama’s tenure. Basically, American expenditures on buying insurance was about the only thing propping up the economy for a couple years after the ACA was implemented–absent those payments, we would have been in a negative growth point called ‘recession’. That said, the new rules being passed by the Trump administration are going to make all of the excesses of the ACA far worse. And they’ll hit a really vulnerable population–Americans over 50 who are too old to find new fulltime employment and who won’t qualify for Medicare until age 65. The tail-end of the Boomers generation won’t be able to do discretionary spending needed to pull us into recovery if their healthcare costs go up as much as anticipated. The stories about the fight for affordable healthcare in the US will continue. I don’t know if our prospects will get better. 

And actually, most important of the issues I’ve written about is the continuing writing I’ve done about global warming and our almost non-existent chances of heading off near term human extinction. Dr. Guy McPherson, of whom I’ve written a great deal since 2014, has now moved forward his extinction clock, based on projections of complete loss of Arctic Ice (sometimes referred to as the BLUE OCEAN EVENT) by late this summer or mid 2019 at best. The ice is the world’s A/C, and once it’s gone, things are going to get warmer very fast. Of late, more and more scientists have joined Dr. McPherson in bringing us the bad news. Despite that, the current president (and his party running Congress and the Senate) are in full denial mode.  There is no way to head all this off through constitutional removal of Trump and the Republicans through the ballot–We don’t have two years to wait to get rid of the denialists (not that the Democrats have a great record on this either). Revolution, anyone?

Related to this is the ongoing disaster at Fukushima. It still isn’t fixed, it probably cannot be fixed, and even if I have another six years to complete the cycle of life, it will still be poisoning the planet. The late Michael C Ruppert said that it was an extinction level event, and I suspect he was right. I think its presence in his documentary (completed a few weeks before he took his own life) says that Ruppert probably considered Fukushima a far bigger existential threat than climate related extinction.

Finally, I’d like to mention (once again) that I have several plays that explain all this. I can tour. I’ve rewritten HOW TO STOP THE EMPIRE WHILE KEEPING YOUR DAY JOB to address both the Trump Era and the prospect of near term extinction. I’ve put out info on the show to various entities, and it explains our prospects. I’m also rewriting Planet Hospice (a play about near term human extinction). It is now Planet Effit! and I’m hoping that a slightly more optimistic outlook might save it from depressing people. I need to learn to juggle. 

So for the next six years (assuming we’re still around), I will be trying to write a bit more about the arts, perhaps. American politics are a mess and I’ll write about them when appropriate. I hope you enjoy what you’ve read here in this six-year cycle of research and blogging, and I hope you stay around.

copyright© Daniel Kinch