Life Sucks Die

How's this for cynicism? The Wall Street Journal last week advised savvy investors to stock up on food. Yeah, as in the kind you eat. Cans of Tuna, bags of rice, basically the sorts of long-term, non-perishable food items that any Yankee Hill militia-man or God-fearing Millennialist would have in his stockpile. But the WSJ wasn't warning of any sort of forthcoming apocalypse, I mean if you don't count the food riots that are already happening overseas that could very well start happening here in the near future if food prices keep skyrocketing they way they have. Rather, they were advising that this very skyrocketing in food prices has made food a better short-term investment choice than putting your money in the bank. " If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you'll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax," says the story. "Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year. And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%." Anyone else getting hungry?

The only real problem with all that, besides the fact that its utterly and completely fucking stupid, is that, not really a lot of people seem to have any sort of short-term cash sitting around these days. I mean, food ain't the only fundamental living cost that's getting expensive. Beer, pussy, gasoline, drugs, everything seems to be inflating these days. Maybe it'd be easier to try to list the things that are getting less expensive. How about houses! Houses are dropping in value left and right. Hell a house that cost $400,000 two years ago can be had for $280,000 today. That kind of rules I guess, unless you're the person who owns that house, and probably still owes $385,000 on it. And besides, even if the house itself costs less , unless you have a few hundred large sitting around your house, getting a loan is definitely getting more expensive, thanks to all the lopdicks who bought 4-bedroom villas with granite counters and swimming pools with interest only mortgages thinking they were gonna make a killing when prices went up another 200%. Instead, they fucked the entire US economy, accelerating the demise of the dollar as the worldwide currency standard, and ending the post-Cold War pseudo-hegemony enjoyed by the good old US of A. Thanks guys!

Not like it matters, though, really. After all the world's gonna end soon enough anyway. Four years, to be exact. You see 2012 is the end of the current Procession of the Equinoxes. Plato called this the Great Year. Astrologers call it an age, as in the Age of Aquarius, which coincidentally is the age in which we will be proceeding into (we're currently in the Age of Pisces. Whatever you call it, 2012 marks the end of it, and also of the earth. You don't believe me? Ask the Mayans, man! They called that shit WAY back in the day. Like back when post-Roman White Europe were to busy dying of the plague to read, write, bathe or really do much of anything. Don't trust them, ask the Hopi Indians, the Egyptians, the Hindoos, the Sumerians, all sorts of people knew what was up with 2012, but we're just now starting to figure it out. I mean, sure, people said the same thing about 2000. But that was just too obvious! 2012 sounds way more believable. And if it makes you feel any better, the end of the world isn't as bad as it used to be. Once upon a time, the "end of the world" was all about hellfire and pain and death and disintegrating into nothingness, but these days, the end of the world is almost a good thing: a paradigm shift into a more utopian state, or at least something other than what we've got now. I don't know about you but I'm ready for a change. Maybe the next world will have some cheaper gas.