There’s a very good blog on the housing crash – The Housing Bubble Blog that I suggest you take a look at. HUGE increases in foreclosures (551% in a year, oops, 725%).
I’ve noticed a lot of strangeness here in my own search for a new homestead. Land prices remain high, but nothing and I mean nothing, is selling. Lenders won’t loan on bare land either. They want you sign on the dotted line for a “stick loan” (construction loan), something I don’t want or need. Doing so would only increase a modest mortgage to a stupidly ridiculous mortgage (any mortgage right now is undesirable, but I’ve got to live somewhere).
Land owners aren’t selling their properties because of both these factors. I suspect there’s a pent-up demand of buyers waiting for the lenders to relinquish their policies and for land owners to lower their prices or carry contracts.
The pendulum swings both ways. The danger is the cutting stroke as it slices its way through lenders, buyers and sellers.
Maybe this is why I’m seeing so few people preparing. It’s confounding – the news is increasingly bad, the evidence is piling up higher and higher and even higher towards collapse, and yet the actual numbers of people who are bothering to do anything about it is incredibly small. Someone called today and asked for my estimate of this number. It’s way less then 1% of the population. It’s so low I can’t make an estimate.
Perhaps we should start calling this the “deer in the headlight” syndrome, that frozen, shocked look that suddenly everything is not well and imminent danger approaches. Whatever it is, the indifference is SCARY.
Your neighbors are not preparing. Your family members are not preparing. Your coworkers are not preparing. I’ve seen several recent comments and emails to this effect. And yet the news and the data supporting the news is growing increasingly bad, daily.
Just what do people think is going to happen if they stand stock-still and do nothing? There’s no magic pixie dust that’s going to resolve our energy problems. Most of the plans being laid by this Administration are going to backfire into a global holocaust. It’s extremely clear that nobody is going to look out for you – not corporate America, not the government, not anyone.
America and most of the world operates on the profit principle. If it’s not profitable, we don’t do it. Contraction and collapse is anathema to profit. But we really, really need to get past that concept. Not everything we do should be based on profits. What about self-preservation?
There is no price that you or I or anyone could pay for our own future security. None whatsoever. I’m not talking about asking someone else to pay it for us, I’m specifically referring to what I would pay, or you would pay. We would pay whatever it cost. We would do so because of our own self-interest in living and staying alive. We would not use a balance sheet or a calculator or any device to even bother estimating it’s value, because we know the value already – it’s priceless.
Yet even though we know this to be inherently true, we sure not acting like it. We’re being bombarded with bad, bad news threatening our future security, individually and collectively on a global scale from a dozen different directions. And for the most part, we’re not interested in paying any price to rectify this situation. Nor are we even willing to take the step necessary to save ourselves. In other words – we’re still operating on the profit principle.
This may last just as long as the economy manages to stay afloat. Then, when it’s already far, far too late and we’ve been to hell and gone, we’ll realize that we failed to truly appreciate the value of our own future security.
It has come to my attention that this is indeed what will happen. The dominant paradigms (which are now all failing) are too strongly embedded into our consciousness to be easily dismissed, even for our own survival.
That is why, as much as anything, I don’t bother to argue with people anymore. What’s the point? You cannot convince them against their will to believe something that is totally outside the realm of their experience. I am probably consigning most of these people to their deaths, but I’m also preserving my own energy and efforts towards more productive activities. It’s very likely that they will die anyway, because they lack the necessary mindset and attitudes that will help ensure their survival.
At some point in time, people HAVE to take responsibility for their own lives. That time is right now, here, today. We can no longer ‘wait’ on someone else to decide for us what we should or shouldn’t do. More importantly, we can no longer rely upon someone else to tell us everything is going to be ok. Everything is NOT ok, not even close and it’s high time people woke the hell up and realized it.
Read the news (I didn’t say watch it, you won’t find what you need there). Study what is happening in our world today. Take decisive action to secure your own future security. It’s patently clear that nobody else is going to do it for you.
