natures ass

NATURES ASS


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Let me paint you a not improbable picture, to set the stage for today’s article. Three smelly guys with bones through their noses are sitting around a campfire, scratching their flea infested armpits. One says to the others, old timey dudes, I wonder if the river will overflow and nourish the grasses and attract more grass eating steaks on the hoof. The other replies, Only if Gog The Magnificence wills it. Well, that was pretty easy, because they all know Gog loves them as they are the purest of the tribes and always follow his will. The rains should come any day now, so there is no need to move. Fast forward about thirty thousand years, when their malnourished bones are discovered in the same spot by a trio on all terrain vehicles. They had been playing off road on their snazzy ten thousand dollar vehicles, toed by their forty grand diesel getting twelve miles to the gallon. After a time zipping up and down trails scaring off all the wildlife with their noise, they decided to shoot up rocks and bushes with their rimfire rifles. The bones were discovered after one dug a cathole trying to eliminate three days worth of MRE’s. Their only mental exercise being limited to players stats for watching the NFL, they thought nothing of them, surmised they were coyote bones or something, kicked dirt back over them and then got on their vehicles and scooted a few miles back to the truck. Then they proceeded to drive to the intersection in front of my trailer. One noticed a loose tie down and they stopped to fix it ( the ATV’s still had five years of payments to go, so they were very protective of them ). While doing that, one knocked over a box of shells. As the sand was powdery and mixed in with sharp goat tail thorn balls, they deemed it unworthy to scavenge the shells and left them. My bet is that their bones will be in a shallow grave nearby very soon.

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No one talked to the other of their superstitions. They didn’t verbalize their assumptions. But implicit in their actions was the belief that Free Market Capitalism The Magnificence would provide for them when their provision grew low. America The Magnificence would send more rimefire shells their way whenever they prayed for them ( and sacrificed colorful pictured paper slips for them ). What is the fundamental difference between believing in an omnipotent deity that saves your ass, or a belief that a system of economics can magically provide anything at will? You might as well believe in a huge Magic Ass In The Sky that you can pull anything out of. We are little better than the island idiots that built cargo planes out of bamboo to summon more free stuff. The day after the Chief Of Security observed the Redneck Conveyance and its mysterious loitering, I saw the beckoning glitter in the dirt, which turned out to be .22 shells. Sure, it was time consuming and dirty and cramping and I poked my finger tips a few times, but I recovered 414 shells. People with illusions of wealth and security from an overpaid job at the mines ( overpaid to both keep out Unions and prevent disgruntled sabotage, but vastly overpaid for the required monkey work ) think nothing of throwing away hundreds of rounds of ammunition when the salvage will take more than a few minutes. I mean, I know I’m virtually alone living in my fear and paranoia of an apocalypse, but to me that pile of loaded brass equals months if not years of self defense and or hunting. It is only currently worth about $13, but to me it is priceless. But these folks just need to sacrifice a few pieces of paper and magic is created and solves all their problems.

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From the bank that created loans to the builders putting up homes to the town that created roads and put in more water storage, etc., everyone is going on the assumption that these mining jobs are forever ( or at least thirty years ). And that as long as these jobs exist there will be more magic totems to buy anything. In the last ten years, total ore from northern Nevada mines has been falling. But no one looks at that, or the surrounding ghost towns. Really? Did you know that Canadian tar sands now account for more “oil” than from Mexico or Saudi Arabia? This is far more energy intensive to mine and process and ship, so we are getting far less BTU’s than before. Just as ethanol provides 10% less energy than petroleum oil on burning, and also takes more energy to produce. Yet no one is worried. Even if the last five years has seen at a minimum a 25% decrease in our total energy availability ( between import declines, substituting ethanol for gas, lowered BTU output in lower grades of coal, the higher energy cost in frac gas over natural gas, tar sands substituting for Mexican crude, etc. ), and I’d personally bet it is closer to a third but I’ll be conservative in my figures, folks are just looking at the Magical Ass Pull to save them from anything bad. We believe in magic just as our distant ancestors did, but at least they had the excuse of not spending three to five years wages on a worthless college degree to teach them to be stupider.

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Look at all those business “leaders” out there. Their holy grail is GROWTH. All Hail Growth! Year over year sales growth. I can forgive politicians being stupider than a box of rocks. They are just east coast mafia crooks, uneducated but ruthless ( one poll shows Congress has a 12% approval rating. The Tory population of the Colonies was higher [ those that approved of the English king ] ). But supposedly those getting a degree in business ( or, those without a degree but informally, OJT types ) are actually educated. But how can you believe in perpetual growth? If every business grows, and hence every customer gets more income derived from selling more at their business that is growing, where do all the resources come from? Do they believe in a hollow earth filled with oil and ore, or do they think it comes from that big ass in the sky, where You Can Always Pull More Out Of Your Ass? This is what we are, collectively, a nation full of Ass Pullers. Darwin weeps.

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