Tuesday--

Oh, yeah!!! Charles Hugh Smith makes hash out of the official inflation statistics and tells us pretty much what our experience has already confirmed: the official inflation calculations are bullshit. His "burrito index" seems to be very accurate. The second part of his treatise on inflation (Inflation Hidden In Plain Sight) also includes phenomena we have noticed: getting lower quantity, quality and durability for the same or only slightly higher prices. Government statistics have become a scam just like so much else in our public and commercial lives.

Here is an interesting take on the "minimalist" movement--if you want to call it that. I used to read several blogs by self-described minimalists and have stopped reading most of them. Their brand of minimalism just doesn't resonate with me. It took me a bit to realize why. We have pared down a lot over the last almost 20 years. Some of that was out of necessity. Cramming two of us into a two bedroom apartment when each of us had our individual homes before crammed with stuff meant clearing out a lot. Since then we have gone through a number of purges of things that no longer fit our lives (or didn't fit at that time) while actually adding some things that do fit (like canning jars, hot water bath canner, and pressure canner.) We are minimalists but in the sense of looking at what we need and not accumulating what we don't. I don't think there is any true spiritual quality to minimalism any more than there is any spiritual quality to poverty.