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GRANDPAPPY’S PREPPING

I don’t think I’ve done a gun article for some time here on the blog.  I did include them in every issue of Malthusian Survivalist Newsletter, but less than 17% of you bought those.  Which really hurt my feelings since if you had all enthusiastically embraced that periodical I could have a vast publishing empire established by now.  It was little solace that I withheld firearms articles from the blog.  Well, March 12^th or thereabouts Survival Blog had an inevitably overpriced “survival battery” series of articles which got my blood pressure elevated to unsafe levels and I thought I’d crank out this puppy ( even as I know most of you will shriek like little school girls on crack, throw your laptops against the wall in horror, then go start a campaign to blacklist the very mention of myself or my writing in all other survivalist related works in retaliation for daring to come anywhere near your sacred cows with a sharp pointy instrument and a bottle of ketchup ).  Those of you not too interested in my trashing semi-auto’s once again can relax, as I try to focus on the economic aspects of acquiring a battery rather than the pure logistics of it ( you all know my spiel by now-brain chemicals will thwart your control on the trigger so you need a mechanism to conserve never to be replaced ammunition.  Bolts and revolvers rather than semi’s ).

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The sad truth is that this ain’t your grand pappy’s prepping, yet everyone writing about survivalism thinks it is.  That is one problem with letting your readers write your blog for you.  Yes, they are vastly more knowledgeable than yourself in engineering, medicine, military structures, firearms mechanics and all the rest.  But not many of them are very well read outside of their specialty ( if there is any one advantage I consider I poses over most others it is not only my dedication to research but the fact that it is eclectic rather than specialized ).  I might miss a few details on individual trees-which, granted, can be important-but at least I can see the forest.  One of the biggest issues I see is that everyone acts like we are preparing for the collapse which is in the future.  The collapse already happened, which few acknowledge, and when they do they think it is a long slow collapse.  Which it WAS, back almost fifty years ago.  1971 was Peak Energy Production for the US and 1979 was the same globally.  The net available energy per capita has shrunk since then.  Every new swinging cheese dingus birthed every day takes away another little bit of the share of energy from everyone else. 

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Here is the reality.  Your grandfather had Union wages to spend preparing.  Your father had abundant credit to draw on for preps ( hell, I remember getting an American Express card on a gross $12k salary in the late ‘80’s, which should tell anybody everything they want to know about how anyone fogging a mirror got credit if desired ).  They both had jobs, outside a few areas.  If their area went into a Depression, there was always the ability to drive away and to the next big opportunity.  Where you could find a place to live and a good enough job.  Perhaps not the job you wanted or were trained for, but still a job.  If your college education was wasted, even that wasn’t a big deal as the financial hit was manageable ( SOOO unlike today ).  My father came within something like two credits of a masters degree in sociology.  He had been hired by the state while in college to oversee juvenile delinquents but then switched to law enforcement.  While the college was not wasted, it also really didn’t get him a job as much as going to the police academy did.  He didn’t have tuition debt pulling him down, either ( at the time departments were not Unionized and pay was paltry, retirement the big incentive ).

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The reason everything sucks so much more today than yesterday-far less pay for the few jobs left, the far exponentially higher cost for everything, the complete lack of coherent strategy or intelligent response to problems-is NOT lack of morality or leadership or vision.  Those are symptoms rather than causes.  The cause is dwindling resources for increasing populations.  It is as simple as that.  Rush Limbaugh’s or Glen Beck’s wet dream FedGov position roster would change nothing.  All levels of government taken over by the Libertarian Party would change nothing.  The resources are running out, and so is all of our luck.  1970’s advice on guns assumes 1970 levels of income and resource availability and population levels.  STOP.  For humps sake, think about it.  Take a bigger slug of whiskey or coffee, whichever helps you think more coherently, and ponder a world of less.  The world we are in NOW.  Not in thirty or ten or two years from now, but NOW.  Think about it for 24 hours, when I’ll continue this article.

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