The chances for avoiding the "Fiscal Cliff" are not looking good at the moment. Obama is chillin' on a warm beach in Hawaii, and congress has closed shop for the holidays.
I am amazed and irritated that a deal couldn't be done. I really thought a deal would emerge after everyone had their turn at calling names and laying blame. A last-minute scaled-down compromise could still happen, but even so, it would likely amount to punting the tough decisions once again.
The bulk of the blame should be reserved for the Republicans. Even though the election was lost and their Raison d'être under question, enough anti-tax hysteria prevailed in the House to humiliate Boehner's negotiating efforts. It's hard to believe these folks would place the nation at risk for the sake of their passionate belief that the wealthy should be shielded from paying an additional dime in taxes, but there you have it.
Some blame could be handed to Obama as well, for he seemed determined to push Boehner to the wall and continually rub the election result in his face. It seems as though Democrats have concluded that it's best to leap over the cliff at this point as long as Republicans can be squarely blamed for it. A large chunk of mandated cuts would be from defense programs, which isn't all bad. Tax rates would simply return to where they had been prior to the Bush tax cuts, although in the absence of the annual AMT patch some middle-class families will be hit hard.
The short-term risks of going over the cliff are obvious: A stock market crash and renewed recession as working families shoulder a large tax increase. What most don't seem concerned with is that no one has yet proposed a comprehensive solution to the national debt problem. If Obama had proposed more serious restraints on spending in exchange for higher taxes on the rich, perhaps Boehner would have had a chance at selling it to his colleagues. The irony is that by doing nothing, rates rise for everyone, and it's difficult to see how Republicans gain from that.
Whatever happens by years end, the next congress will likely continue the debate. The concern is that partisan divisions are so deep as to preclude the type of compromise we used to take for granted. So what if Obama wins points in public opinion and further vilifies Republicans; the next election is two years away and much damage could result in the near-term. If the rift becomes too wide, it erodes the ability to govern, and no one wins in that outcome.
Another example can be found in the debate over gun control in the wake of the latest school shootings. The emotional ground-swell of opinion in favor of more restrictions on guns collides with an equally emotional (and more irrational) viewpoint that claims Obama wants to disarm everyone. There are in fact some bizarre and disturbing aspects to the Sandy Hook tragedy, which will take a future blog to discuss. While it seems possible that the PTB somehow conspire to promote such shootings in order to sway public opinion, any benefit to public safety from increased gun control would be offset by deeper cracks, divisions and widespread cynicism among those opposed. The latter is my primary concern, and the present meme of revolution and national disintegration will need to be watched.
Lynn
In a recent post on my companion blog at earthwaterwellness.com, I dismissed the chances of anything catastrophic occurring on the solstice date, and focused instead on the spiritual aspects. However, I want to examine the "doom n gloom" thinking a bit more. Not that my mind has changed on this, but just that the subject is fascinating and won't go away. Plus, it is abundantly clear that extinction-level events have visited Earth in the past, and there is no amount of "love and light" thinking can guarantee that won't happen again in a year or 5000 years. This is just plain, realistic fact.
Well, for starters, you can forget the photoshopped images of Planet-X depicted in plain view near the sun, or of Mercury, Venus and Saturn all neatly lined up over Giza. Ignore the colorful diagrams of the galactic plane that illustrate the solar system somehow magically aligning with the core on December 21. I explained the celestial mechanics of alignment on the solstice in the aforementioned blog.
One disaster scenario that has at least a plausible risk is damage from extreme solar flares. Although some psychics and remote viewers foresee vast destruction as the Earth becomes enveloped in hot plasma ejected from the sun, this appears as likely to me as the prospect of a large asteroid or comet decimating the planet - not impossible, but not worth raising one's anxiety level over.
A much more plausible scenario would be a repeat of the 1859 Carrington Event, in which a massive solar storm erupted. Auroras were spotted in the tropics, and were so bright in the night sky that gold miners in the Rocky Mountains thought dawn was breaking and began cooking breakfast. The electrical effects were severe enough to cause fires at telegraph stations and cause arcing that zapped telegraph operators. One can only imagine the damage such a storm would cause to the modern electrical grid and to satellites in orbit. The huge electrical currents that are induced are capable of melting the large transformers in power substations, and this actually happened on a minor scale during a 1989 storm. Some experts have speculated that a modern Carrington-sized event could cause the grid to go down for an extended period - perhaps months or years. The amount of damage to electronics and infrastructure could be mind-boggling. It could push civilization back hundreds of years.
Power outages are usually brief and inconvenient, but a widespread and sustained outage would lead to the end of the world as we know it. Stores would find it difficult to conduct business and refrigerated food would quickly spoil. Modern life is extremely dependent on power and electronic gadgets. Most of the populace would soon be hungry and cold (or hot depending on the season), and order would certainly break down.
The preppers in bunkers with stored food and water would fare better for a while, but emergency generators only have fuel for a limited time. With civilization giving way to anarchy, survival would be dicey at best. And besides, who would want to survive like that, sitting with a shotgun over your dwindling hoard?
At the moment, the Sun is doing something strange. The expected sunspot maximum seemed to be finally underway earlier this year following an extremely quiet minimum. At present, activity has tapered off again instead of continuing to rise as expected. There were predictions of massive solar storm activity and large earthquakes for early December, based on a supposed correlation with planetary alignments. This was supposed to be but a prelude to much larger events near the solstice. However, as of this writing, the largest earthquake worldwide was a 6.4 on December 2. Even earthquake activity seems to have tapered off of late.
Is this just the calm before the storm? Your guess is as good as mine, but there is nothing to correlate the 2012 solstice with increased chances of solar or earthquake activity. The projected 11-year solar maximum is supposed to occur in 2013, and CME activity seems to peak following the solar maximum. Even so, the current cycle seems more subdued than recent ones. There is always a chance that the increased levels of galactic dust we are currently heading into will instigate large upheavals in the sun. This could be part of the same long-term natural cycle that caused the last ice age, the flash-freezing of woolly mammoths, and subsequent rapid melting of the glaciers 12,000 years ago.
Many spiritual and intuitive people shy away from discussion of possible catastrophic scenarios. Of course there is a lot of fear mongering regarding 2012, but we can't ignore that destructive cycles are part of nature. Also, as the Kali Yuga - Age of Iron draws to a close, we realize that a new age is dawning. I suspect that ages don't transition as quietly as we would prefer. Something must breakdown to make way for the new. This process could get ugly at times.
Right now, the Shift is already underway, and intuitives can feel it. There must be tension building between the emerging conscious awareness, and the iron grip of the dark ones in control. They are afraid, and they are watching.
Will we suddenly wake up one day and find the world has transformed overnight for the better? I don't have answers to that, but I sense that something is transforming in our midst. Dolores Cannon has much to report on this. She feels that there will soon be a split between Old Earth and a New Earth. I suspect this is correct, but have no idea how it will take place. Actually it might be explained by the parallel timeline theory. Perhaps prophets of doom who foresee hellish scenarios could be focused on the Old Earth timeline. That would explain why remote viewers see such divergent conditions when they attempt to foresee the future.
Could be that the airy-fairy scenarios are correct, but for now I'm putting more stock in Dolores Cannon's research regarding the New Earth.
Lynn
