80F and 95%RH early this morning. Sunny and hot yesterday. Sunny and hot forecast for today.
I’m getting up earlier and earlier this week and waking the kids in a vain attempt to ease into the school year schedule. Heck, I want to be back in bed, they’re practically catatonic.
The world is continuing to change. India and Pakistan are rumbling. Iran, Brexit, Italy….Hong Kong, France….
Financials are starting to show the cracks I’ve seen in the economy too. Gold is up pretty dramatically. Silver too on a percentage basis. Stocks are all over the place but the indexes are generally down. Hedge funds are losing money and closing, with famous guys admitting fundamentals don’t matter anymore, only twitter and headlines and programmed trading. Oh, and Argentina had its stock market lose half its value in one day on political news. Does that sound like a robust economy or a fragile house of cards? In what way is ours fundamentally different?
The “pig ebola” is still wiping out pork in China, and the flooding in the midwest will have an effect on pricing and availability of staples here and abroad.
Real ebola is still spreading. The vaccine has slowed the spread, but if it jumps outside the ring in someplace like Goma, then it’s “game on”.
Lots of doom and gloom.
But, people lived through the collapse of Rome. They lived through the collapse of the British Empire. They lived through the Argentinian collapse, and they’re living through Venezuela’s collapse. Economic collapses don’t kill millions, as Sarah Hoyt points out on her blog. They DO cause severe disruptions in peoples’ lives though. Venezuelans who have taken up prostitution to live are probably not happy about it. Venezuelans who have fled their country by the millions are not happy about it. The ones left behind facing violence, starvation, and lack of medical care aren’t happy, although many will “live through it”.
How we live through it, what we have to do to get through it, those we have some influence over. It may not kill you, but wouldn’t it be nice not to have to eat your pets or sell your daughter to slavers?
n