The more things stay the same, the more things change.

Presidential elections always felt huge to me. Four years. That's a long time. A lot can happen in four years.

This last election felt like 2008 was yesterday. So this journal is as much about pinching myself as about collecting.

INTERNATIONAL: Mubarak and Qadaffi fell. Bin Laben's dead. Japan, for a year or so, got 0% of its energy from nuclear. The Euro is dead, the players are just buying time on how to kill it. 25% unemployment in some Euro countries.

NATIONAL: BP oil spill. Fracking. Cars for clunkers. Citizens United and these ridiculous elections. Nobody cares about anything except the economy.

TRENDS: Global warming and the accompanying extremes are real. Half the US had a hard, snowy 2010 winter; most the US had NO winter in 2011. Freight has traversed the Arctic ocean. The North Pole will be open water in less than a generation. The Oglala Aquifer will fail in less than a generation beneath the high plains, causing millions of acres of cropland to change to rangeland or other uses. The range of folks who call themselves MIDDLE CLASS now stretches from $400k salaries to folks starving on part-time jobs. The US is now a net-exporter of oil, thanks to the global economic slump. Domestic oil drilling, despite the BP oil spill, increased under Obama.

TECH: Twitter. Apple, Facebook and the NSA alike will be able to monitor 95% of most folks' whereabouts in the next five years, and nobody cares.

SOCIETY: Most folks in an airport terminal glue their eyes to their phones or IPad-like devices. Four years ago, that was obsession. Ten years ago, that was psychosis.

PERSONAL: One daughter in 2008, three daughters in 2012. Three moves in the interim, but living at the same address now as in 2008. Slab and registry collecting discovered in 2009. Currently unwinding (selling) the consequences, including a couple PCGS bulk orders (at the time, 5 dates, 100 coins).

WHITHER COLLECTING: While the psychotic masses carry some bar code implant in their head which doubles as a credit card and telephone, the rest of us while fall back to cash. Congress, in a perpetual state of suckage, will continue to fund unneeded jobs by never abolishing the penny and allowing us collectors to keep on collecting. Some sanity will return to the marketplace. 5-oz. silver hockey pucks will be sold for what they are, and no more. Rarities won't be recognized in the marketplace right away, but over time (like - a century?), they'll be seen. Compared to the SMS years of 1965-1967, hardly anyone is collecting rolls or other quantities of biz strikes from 2005-2010. Maybe not today, but in a hundred years, biz strikes gems from the Satin Years will be rare and highly desired.

SUMMARY: Everything changed in four years, but we are all so obsessed with the economy, that nobody saw it. To repair our elections, pass state constitutional amendments for open primaries. To collect something widely available but soon lost in the bag marks of counting machines, grab your satin-era biz strikes! I am sufficiently PINCHED - four BIG YEARS have passed.

PHOTO: the 10c 2009-D MS67FT from my registry- the only satin year biz strike anyone's bothered collecting yet ...

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