Bison Prepper: October 2015

Friday, October 30, 2015

boots and leather

BOOTS AND LEATHER

One of the funnier moments in life is watching Seniors ( or, Q-Tips ) act all ancient and decrepit. Besides watching one try to see over the steering wheel, or turn the wheel for that matter even though you couldn’t possibly make it any easier than with the power steering that all cars have had half the damn life of these fools, and besides making bets with your buddies if one of the relics is going to tip over the curb on the way to the crosswalk and break a hip, I love their wardrobe. Even the ones who don’t look like they just walked off the golf course still experience every day as a fashion crime. I gotta smell your Depends, AND see you dress yourself funny? Really, slacks, dress shirt, tie, John Deer ball cap AND tennis shoes? What the hell, dude!? Luckily for my future integrity, I can’t wear athletic footwear. Between being outside all winter in the snow and slush, I also have to worry about those damnable dogs biting my ankle. I have to wear leather boots, and as you’ll recall this has led to the last few years of searching in vain for an affordable pair that lasted at least a year ( this is a good time to yell to the heavens once again what vile scum suckling anal spelunking monkey molesters PayLess Shoes are, their no longer cheap hiking boots splitting open in a mere three weeks. Not once, but twice ).

I’ve finally found one at Sportsman’s Guide $65 cowboy boots ( half the price as at a retail outlet ) which last longer than the $50 Amazon combat boots which went five months before nails started poking into the bottom of my feet. I can get a years worth from the Sportsman boots before the sole is worn away ( perhaps longer, but I’m walking at an angle on my right side ), BUT with one proviso. Within one month of wearing, the heel started separating from the upper. Bless her heart, not only is the girlfriend funny and has a huge rack, she can also sew. We got a leather sewing needle at Wal-Mart for a buck and change, and a spool of nylon upholstery thread for about the same, and she re-stitched them together. If you do this prior to wearing them, you can use the same holes already threaded by the cheaper thread and it will be much easier. By spending an additional $3 at the start, along with a little time and effort, you won’t have any issues with these boots.

As for preserving leather, I was starting to get sick and tired of spending $4 for a tiny can of shoe polish. They didn’t seem to last as long as they used to, almost as if they were less dense. So I looked around a bit online and ran across a recommendation to use coconut oil as a frugal preservative. Which was a darn sight better than what I was spending, but still I wasn’t satisfied. At work, as you might recall, we had just got in a new delivery truck ( a FedGov grant, as a backdoor bailout for Ford ) which the boss spent no end of time in demanding I kept pristine and clean every day. Well, being a bit of a smartass, making a point that I was never going to get the tools I needed to do so, I started using vegetable oil in place of Armor All to shine up the front plastic grill. I figured, what the hell? Shortening seems to be acting nicely in keeping my leather boots oiled up, at no cost to me ( and as a bonus, long stored turned rancid shortening can be used for your leather goods ). Now, I might be wrong and I am damaging my boots, long term. If I am right, a $4 can of oil will condition your boots for months and months. Proceed with caution, this is just a heads up for a possible solution.

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Thursday, October 29, 2015

monkey balls 4 of 4

HAPPY MONKEY BALLS 4
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NOTE: Gary, got the snail mail. Thanks, and Happy Festivus to you also!
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I had seriously prepped prior, in mid 90’s and overdrive the last year and a half of the decade ( prior to that was the “one year food and one firearm“ limited stockpile ), but the prepping was more an in depth personal stockpile. It ignored free and clear land, being out of debt, a more secure job and other far deeper preps than mere beans and bullets. Four years later I started covering all the longer term more serious preps. I declared bankruptcy the first few months of starting at the casino ( to get my foot in the door I started out on graveyard, while we were living right next to the auto dealership. Try sleeping in an RV with pneumonic wrenches shrieking nearby all day. I was a friggin zombie ), upgraded to a bigger trailer I got for about the cost of my old jobs cashed in 401k, and got serious about re-doing my preps on a more intelligent scale ( we had moved from Florida with just a small van ). Every day we shared tips from jackpots, and while most of the girls found a way to spend that quickly, I put the minimum towards living expenses ( trailer rent, eating from the discount grocery and child support ) and everything into preps. More than one lot of E-Bay land, a little gold, a lot of silver ( at $5, $6 an ounce and they were selling it like it was coming out their ears ), more guns and ammo, failed attempts at going from writing to publishing ( the blogs have stayed my primary writing pay since 2006 ), a cheap bug out van ( both the van and trailer were $700 each ), solar panels and the like. I was planning and investing to move off grid years before I did.

All the time, I was working at the casino, hating everything about it. I loved the girls I worked with but they were like herding cats and always full of drama. I didn’t love the customers but since they tipped I kissed their asses ( competing with idiot bosses for the most stressful part. Yes, I felt like a whore, but knowing I‘d have the last laugh helped some ). I certainly didn’t like the idiots that signed my paycheck, as they kept implementing one stupid policy after another driving customers away and eating into our tip income. All in all, high stress. But they weren’t done. First, they laid off all the management. They then re-hired half of them back ( at reduced pay, naturally ). I played along with that one but knew this was going to be the new normal. My preps were almost done so I started accumulating cash and made plans to de-ass as needed. Which was a good thing since next they laid off the entire department and hired half of them back. I just walked away so not to cost anyone else their job ( a lot of the others transferred to other departments ). That was Capital S Suck, for two years. But I had invested rather than spent and knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Of course, besides improving my life by trading temporary stress for money to invest in drastically reducing my expenses AND prepping, which was a salve to the stress, I also had my writing. That saved me more than the knowledge of the necessity of what I was doing. Biting the bullet knowing it is temporary is all good and well, but I think diving into your lives passion is the only sure way to deal with the high stresses in life. Find your love and even if it pays marginally, the real non-monetary pay in stress release and soul fulfillment is what is important. Spending money can’t be that soothing, so supplement that with your dream activity. Then don’t screw around investing and sacrificing to limit the time living in Suck-Ville. Then you’ll spend the rest of your life, or until the die-off whichever comes first, as happy as a monkey ball deep in a box of bananas.

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Wednesday, October 28, 2015

monkey balls 3 of 4

HAPPY MONKEY BALLS 3

We’ve all had suck ass jobs, subhuman manual laborer or god favored big boss. 99% of all jobs suck. But some jobs suck so much worse than all other jobs that the suck level belongs in the Guinness Book Of World Records. So much suck that it causes sleep loss and hair loss ( and I’m not even talking about truly suck ass jobs like getting shot at or cleaning sewer pipes). I’ve only really had one truly suck ass job and that was as a shift supervisor in the slot section at a casino in early 2000’s. Far worse than being in the Army, even ( which didn’t suck so much daily but just because you couldn’t quit ). All through the first half of my two decades of child support I worked hideous jobs for the money because I had no choice ( the second half I was able to get out of management as minimum wage caught up with the old pay ). The casino was my last management job ( managing the Food Bank was a solo gig and hence no supervision so in my eyes not management. It certainly didn’t pay like it was one ). At the time I didn’t know that, but that was the level of stress it delivered, forever more burning me out on a marginal pay increase in exchange for ten times the stress. The pay was for the first time a substantial increase-three times my norm rather than a 50% bump. And what I did with it and how I quite was the secret of dealing with a high stress job.

You all know how cheap I can prep. I didn’t need a middle class prep plan, nor did I need to live middle class. Right there is your first step in making your stress manageable. If you continue to live middle class, you can never, and I do mean NEVER, quit your soul crushing completely suck ass job. There is no end in sight and that would be just like joining the military forever. Prepper Pussies think they can live and prep middle class but they will never be anything other than a corporate drone stuck in the city scraping pennies to fund a dollars prep plan. You must downgrade your expectations, or you might as well never start to shed your crappy job or even prep past a months natural disaster. It is not my job to talk you into that choice, only to point out that choice is a first step you can’t evade. If you can embrace genteel poverty you can escape the corporate rat race and prep for survival. Because you can’t plan to escape or prep if 99% of your pay goes to the parasites leeching off the middle class. And you can’t escape because your pay level jobs are disappearing faster than minimum wage paying jobs-you are stuck in place. You want your cake and eat it too, but hard choices are required. There is only one escape from this level of suck and that is minimizing your fiscal needs. To me, the job was the worst, but the pay was the best, and I knew as soon as it was over I could go back to lower pay. I was living a half minimum wage life but getting paid middle class, so almost nothing went to anything other than preps ( at least half if not more of my take-home pay ). That was how I coped with the stress, with a clear deadline for quitting, with concrete means of doing so rather than as a vague dream, and with the knowledge every day was improving my situation.

This Series Finishes Next Article

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Tuesday, October 27, 2015

monkey balls 2 of 4

HAPPY MONKEY BALLS 2

I have a theory about the legions and hordes and ever expanding armies of Growth Uber Alles paradigm followers. Most of them are genuinely stupid, regardless of how many years of schooling they went through ( you can teach an ape to mimic any behavior, but that doesn’t mean they comprehend it or can expand upon it to improve it. You can teach anyone to short term memorize for a test, which doesn’t mean they learned the contents ), but even the mildly less retarded ones won’t change their thinking because that would be counter productive. It pays, in herd acceptance, money and job security to never ever never question the capitalism book of psalms. Just like the slave owners ( a minority of the population, the aristocrats. Dumbass Yankees who call all Southerners slave owners and racists are stereotyping and that would be akin to calling all Yankees bankers and factory owners ) who actually believed the Bible said it was okay to enslave Darkies because they were sub-human, Infinite Growth Paradigmers actually believe the laws of physics don’t apply to economics. You can’t fix that level of hard-wiring.

When you and your co-workers are chilling out around the water cooler, drinking coffee and sneaking looks at O’Leary’s ass because after your job went co-ed the scenery got a lot better, bitching about the boss who, once again not just on a daily but now on an hourly basis, defied your bet that they couldn’t possibly do something even MORE stupid, you are failing to look at things from the Suits point of view. They think you are stupid. You are not the boss, hence not as smart and good looking because you are not validated by a higher paycheck. You think, hey, if this idiot would just ask the workers who are doing the job how to improve that job, the company would improve, customer relations would improve, my job security would improve, the American economy would improve and my friggin attitude would improve. Your boss is thinking you are incapable of independent thought and won’t follow his directions. Since he is incapable of seeing the laws of physics can’t be violated ( Shindler’s List, with the soon to be shot Jew vastly speeding up assembling his doo-dad to appease a hovering boss, and his boss not understanding why that speed was not the norm all day, perfectly captures the owners representative and the worker in today’s economy. I’m sure sometimes we wish the boss could just shoot us and get it over with ) he can’t understand when you operate within those laws.

And you know, no matter how often you wish it wasn’t so, that things are just going to get worse as businesses continue suffering and sliding towards bankruptcy and boss’ get more and more desperate and hence more and more stupid. And you want to stick around for that kind of abuse? Sure you do. But not all is lost. Next article, my successful ride on the corporate beast with a timely escape with most of my sanity intact.

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Monday, October 26, 2015

happy monkey balls 1 of 4

HAPPY MONKEY BALLS 1

Here is another article suggestion from a minion. How do you stay positive and on target prepping when the job sucks, yet anymore jobs are precarious and scarce? How do you suck it up and keep working? If you continue working, you gain extreme benefits from the extra income ( this assumes you don’t do all the typical middle class traps ), plus the spouse isn’t really ready to pull the cord on moving out to the retreat. Today, it is harder than ever to quite your job, yet more tempting than ever before. I would be moaning and bitching about how employers now have us by the scrotum, the last century of progress of workers rights nearly completely nullified and voided, but I’m too busy laughing my ass off about all the pain and suffering they are going through at the same time. Almost nobody is safe from the carnage of the Greater Depression we have entered, icons such as McDonald’s and Wally World not exactly bankrupt but certainly looking like they will be the first to go tits up at the slightest whiff of additional trouble. Okay, they did it to themselves. McDonald’s has been moving towards faker and faker food, and insulting the Black community by ad targeting them as if they were too stupid to realize they were eating pink slime and sawdust and Wally was just too flippin stupid ( giving credence to the Arkansas pudpuller stereotype which just pissed off all the other rednecks and hillbillies in other states ) by thinking the Nineties would last forever and expanding with debt accordingly.

But in a growth paradigm economy, such stupidity could be forgiven. Not anymore. No room for stupidity and 99% of corporates are retarded arseholes who can’t change ( as the saying goes, I might be ugly which is skin deep but you are stupid to the bone ) to literally save their lives. You can’t expect to have an MBA study ecology and actually encounter the concept of finite resources, but then, you and I, regular types, figured it out so ignorance is no excuse. The average corporate clone thinks the laws of physics do not apply, and with that kind of attitude is it any wonder they are clueless? That is just some of the crap you have to put up with, some fudge packing toad laying off half the workforce and doubling the remaining employees work load, thinking it was a swell idea and trying to do it again. They simply could not pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the bottom. They are the simpletons who screw up a wet dream by waking up and jerking off. So, being so dumb, every time there is a problem, they try the same old solutions that worked before, not realizing they were “one off’s”. The new economic reality for them is too much to compute. Which would be an unending source of mirth for those of us with the cranial capacity higher than a chimpanzee, if it weren’t for all the headaches we get from the blowback.

More Next Article

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Saturday, October 24, 2015

urban patrol

URBAN PATROL

A couple or few weeks ago, it shouldn’t be too hard to find it with one article a week published or two if we get Prom Date Lucky ( end of September I believe ), Club Orlov talked about how the American military was so focused on urban combat and patrolling ( the example was given of trained indig troops being issued a sledgehammer many miles from any towns or buildings ) that they excluded most other aspects of combat. You really should read the article as a critique of limited military tactical considerations. Not being overly focused on battlefield techniques myself, I can’t say if the article made a valid argument or not, but if it did it is worth noting as one would do well to know the enemies weaknesses ( and no, I don’t necessarily believe that this time, one out of many, that Obammy’s empty headed bloviating will gain any traction and actual gun confiscation will be attempted. I’m not certain the FedGov is smart enough to avoid that conflict, but I also don’t get overly excited every time a politician mouths platitudes ). For all of you three percenters or oath keepers or other jingoistic types, who know a conflict is coming but somehow think most civil servants are honorable and will attempt to be helpful ( I still have a hard time accepting the duality of expected FedGov persecution with military/police worshiping ), I would suggest a more than cursory look at the Civil War. Do a Google search along the lines of Civil War Northern Atrocities.

What troubles me about the article is the seeming blindness to less modern history, as the author blames the doctrinal blindness to the history of counterinsurgency in Iraq. I can’t speak for World War Two or Korea, but I have read quite a bit on Vietnam and can state confidently that we were practicing ground war nearly fifty years ago just as we are today. The infantry, whether mounted or afoot, urban or rural, patrols for enemy contact and when engaged calls in the heavy weapons to inflict the casualties while the human tripwires try to hold their own long enough for the job to get done. Any lessons, if any, we learned in Vietnam about fighting guerrillas would of course be applied today against the same kind of enemy. Just because it takes place in an urban setting doesn’t change the fundamentals. So here is my point. If a commentator is questioning the wisdom of our tactics, wouldn’t a sounder grasp on our military history be a good idea? Again, I’m not saying hooraw or calling BS as I’m not qualified to judge. I’m just saying it seems a curious oversight. Obviously, from a logistics standpoint, our military won’t be effective much longer given resource contraction. But other means are still heavily Industrial Age centric also. I’d like to hear from others more skilled in this area.

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Friday, October 23, 2015

horde hype 4

HORDE HYPE 4

NOTE: I have a Saturday article this week, but again, beware. I was going to delete it after I wrote it as I wasn't happy with it at all. But I figure, well, I spent the time on it and perhaps someone might improbably like it.

Now, let’s back up slightly from the masses arriving at your location ( not masses as in thousands, but it only takes masses in the scores if you are a small enough community-but more on that later ). I can see sudden catastrophes like an EMP happening. A limited nuclear war just hitting New York and DC would have the complete country fleeing for the hills. But the situation we find ourselves in right now is a waterfall collapse. All those suburbanites who fled the city core some time ago are mostly screwed, stuck in place with underwater mortgages. But right now there are enough people with resources that are continually making the decision to flee NOW, while they have a peaceful environment with the money and credit to make it happen. You are worried about city slickers invading after the collapse, when in fact they are doing so now. Every small town is going to see telecommuter workers arriving, and every community with still affordable real estate, damn skippy few anymore so if you are in one beware, plenty of working poor arriving as their options have dwindled to junk land as jobs evaporate while city rents double or triple. And right now, with gasoline prices cheap, there is the danger of such moves as desperate folks convince themselves they can commute to a job cheap enough if their rent disappears or drops to a land payment ( people are idiots with gas prices and commuting, making lifetime decisions based on this years costs ).

Now, just in case you are remembering Mrs. Lewis’ article and commenting on how she is well removed from any of these concerns which you are probably correct, I will note that I am addressing 99% of survivalists out there that are NOT ideally situated in the wilds of Idaho ( and not just any wilds but in a select few areas )( and I’ll remind those envious that moving to that perfect spot in grossly overpriced north Idaho is difficult due to lack of jobs-jobs paying enough for a mortgage payment, anyway ). Most of us must make compromises because we were not insightful enough to relocate decades ago. I’ve been here in Elko for going on nearly ten years and I know I arrived ten to fifteen years too late at my country abode. If I had pulled my head out of my butt sooner I would have picked another location better suited for post-economic collapse ( I still like the idea of isolated high desert, but I don’t like the high local population ). This series of articles is for the rest of us. The trend is towards urban rather than rural, but all those small rural outposts are becoming more urban due to the simplicity of population growth. The overflowing glass spreads its contents outward. So, every small burg around you is filling up, every big city near you is stretching its suburbs out closer to you. The horde, peaceful as it might be, is getting closer and closer PRIOR to the collapse. The core city population, where the criminals hold power today, is of no concern. They don’t have the numbers to spread out and control the suburbs immediately. It is people already nearby and those arriving en masse in the weeks after any downwards lurch in the occurring slow collapse that will pose the issues for your community.

More Next Week.

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Thursday, October 22, 2015

horde hype 3

HORDE HYPE 3

It is not just urban cores that are jam packed butt hole to elbow with teeming asshattery. All of suburbia is, wherein every single swinging dingus with two extra dollars to rub together has fled above said asshattery. The suburbs can stretch quite the ways. Here in Nevada almost every road anywhere in the vicinity of a city is packed with two acre ranchettes from that city to every small town within an hours drive, and sometimes much further. Because of almost complete lack of ground water, or all that many decent reservoirs, any drop of surface water is completely shaded by hovering masses perched within driving distance of it. Even discounting Las Vegas, the whole state is dangerously overpopulated for its meager water resources. I imagine Arizona is far worse. But here is my point. If most of the roads are the suburbs, and suburbs stretch everywhere, the city cores are certainly not the issue you need to worry yourself about. It is all the areas surrounding the cities, and because these drivers are by nature commuters they will all have cars and their tanks with some fuel. And the natural inclination is to flee to the mountains. And who will stop all these from fleeing? The criminal groups are back in the core ( where there is no need for cars ). And the horde fleeing towards you don’t even need to be armed. Just their numbers alone are going to be trouble.

Here you are, a survivalist on land in the country, with neighbors you’ve befriended and formed partnerships with to join together after a collapse ( for anyone ever living in the country recently, I think we can all agree that there are plenty of salt of the earth types around you, but also plenty of petty angry dick bags as neighbors who aren’t worth the piss they can’t figure how to pour out of a boot. Any neighbor is 50/50 just as liable to be worthless as worth a hoot. Also, I have my doubts that any of your neighbors are true survivalists. They will have gardens, and guns, but won’t be truly ready to survive past about the thirty days that the next grocery store trip was set to be. And their ammunition supply most likely is in the few boxes rather than by the case. I also see very little help from relations and friends “the next valley over”. You might not get shot while temporarily fleeing there as marauding hordes attack, if that were an issue, but there won’t be the resources or accommodations for you there ), and you think you are safe. And you were. No armed groups of notes bother you. Not in the post-apocalypse fiction sense of the word where scum of the earth roam the wastelands with the last of the gas searching for nubile females and caches of carbine ammo. Instead what you get is a constant flood of flatlanders fleeing the suburbs. Plus relatives of all your neighbors. Plus visitors from every small town or suburb near you that had well water rather than ground water. Plus every location near you that has no agriculture, or a wood source for winter fuel. It may not be all that much percentage wise of those that could have left, but since the population has increased so much, and every location but a few exceptions such as the artic Nebraska plains has more people settling along most commuter arteries, there are still enough people arriving peacefully that they present an issue.

More Next Article

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