Saturday, July 8, 2017

popular prepping


POPULAR PREPPING
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note: I love to question the victors version of history.  Why Russia was a threat and attacked by the Germans click here
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Is prepping popular?  You see headlines such as “really rich dudes are building bunkers” and you see all the cheerleading by the home team, prepper publications looking for any main stream media headline to latch on to for validation and you just might get some sense that prepping is getting much more acceptable and respectable.  Well, don’t believe that bullspit.  Number one, anything the bulk of prepper sites are doing is going to automatically be wrong.  If Las Vegas bookies allowed betting on prepper predictions I’d gamble a good chunk on doing the opposite of whatever that gang of mouth breathers stipulated was in store for the future.  Ones like The Economic Collapse guy, I can understand his brain damage.  He was a lawyer in DC, after all.  You know he ain’t wired right.  Throw in some weird bible prophecy and you’ve got yourself offal for brains.  Your popular demigod living up in Idaho, he was an officer in military intelligence.  An officer?  They inhabit a world all of own, where unicorns frolic on rainbows.  And Intelligence?  CIA rejects without the budget.  And these are the “leaders” of that gang?

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And number two, any industry you run across, any small  following, they are all the exact same.  Their worldview is the correct one, their niche group the center of the universe, their gang the one that is the coolest.  If that is a bunch of Goths or Punks or electrical engineers employed in Dubai.  If it is a neighborhood of immigrant Montenegrin steel workers.  Like attracts like, in business or in love, in hobbies or in news.  And because we are all adrift in a sea of crap, past the point of the twilight of the nation state, fifty years into an economic collapse that shed its cultural cohesion almost at the very beginning, we are desperate and clingy and will join any tribe no matter how small or insignificant and make them our universe, probably devoting more mental energy trying to belong than we give to our dear spouse.  In terms of complex organization the nation is pretty high up there, but instinctively we crave a tribal group and always have.  The nation was readily acceptable as a substitute as long as there was a two way agreement as far as responsibilities and rewards, but the nation state long ago ceased being a partner and instead became parasitism.  All this disfunctionality you are seeing is just the messy divorce.  People sense if they don’t actually know that the relationship has soured and they seek substitutes.

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At this point, the nation has stopped being a protector or provider and is now just a parasite, as its replacement is no where strong enough to replace it.  But people don’t need to be intellectual giants to re-invent the wheel of social organization.  They grasp instinctually at what has always worked before, the family or the tribe.  They might be stuck with the nation until its demise but they turn to family or tribe for order in their lives, a feeling of security ( it is not acceptable to accept welfare, if you are an older generation who accepted the nations WASP work ethic, but younger generations who see the nation as nothing more than a Taker see nothing wrong with taking from the Taker.  Since the nation never offered them security they feel they owe it nothing, especially not loyalty or hard work or effort at most anything ).  The family as a security device usually only works in a primitive resource scarce setting, where group cooperation isn’t conducive to resource procurement, the tribe or band becoming dominate when the opposite is the case.  We aren’t primitive enough in our food procurement that the family is dominant.  For that we need our tribe.  It isn’t a surprise that family unity has suffered in this collapse.  As one social cultural dynamic is declining, another is slowly attempting to take its place, and since decentralizing down to the family doesn’t make economic sense the tribe or band is dominant. 

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The Great Basin Indians, the Shoshone ( as a loose group, there are sub group tribes such as the Piute ), had to constantly move about for substance, their primitive shelters not the case of savagery or ignorance but of the need to stay nomadic.  Each person needed between fifty and a hundred square miles for foraging ( cattle in the same region needing about the same, but in acres ) and the surpluses were seasonal.  To take advantage of that the families formed loose bands for those seasonal gatherings, but the rest of the time the family was all that was needed or desired for food gathering ( family banding groups, interestingly, seems to be the primary focus as to the need to prohibit incest.  The need to marry out to other families was a bonding for security mechanism.  What I had thought to be an instinctual need to avoid inbreeding didn’t necessarily hold since the prohibition extended to non-blood relation step-children.  The instinctual part was covered in another study which showed that close living arrangements at a certain age range imprinted a mental block on amorous feelings, and there is a basis for observed inbreeding aversion, but taking the universal taboo as a whole with its variations, some groups embracing first cousin unions, others adverse to any but third or higher, and other details, it seems that incest prohibition was primarily to use unions as diverse group unifying mechanisms.  Peter Farb’s “Man’s Rise To Civilization” is a fascinating look into the cultural differences in the North American Indians dictated by their resource base  ).

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A band is ties to families that is loose or temporary, a tribe a continuous grouping of families.   In our current condition, the family does not secure resources as well as a tribe.  Nation states were most efficient when they attempted to mimic the 150 Rule, which is nothing more than the number of people the human brain is capable of dealing with on anything other than an abstract level.  There is no unity in tribes over 150 members.  Our brains aren’t big enough to sort our interlinking relationships past that number ( and 150 is the maximum ).  When nations attempt to interfere with the social customs invented to unify but separate groups into the ideal size, a lot of disfunction is generated ( in corporations that ignore this rule, no one coordinates or communicates.  In smaller than that number groups, cross department ties present a much more cohesive organization ).  Once centralization exceeded the natural maximum, big for bigness sake or more appropriately bigness for the survival of the organizations sake, the urge for alternate tribal ties became much stronger.  Long before the nation became a dysfunctional entity, tribal seeking was normal.  Reverting to tribal importance as the dominant sought organization was natural and easy.

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Now, as we know, with any tribe customs and traditions serve a purpose internally and yet to outsiders make no sense.  When outsiders attempt to make sense of them they invariably get the translation wrong.  And when tribal insiders try to take their world view and apply it to the outsiders, they also make little sense.  When a prepper ( Like the Shoshone being comprised of multiple sub-groups even as custom and need unify them into a whole, preppers and survivalists and homesteaders and etcetera are many different bands loosely affiliated even as they squabble amongst themselves incessantly ) looks outside of his tribe and attempts to apply his customs to others, he is bound to look through his world view prism and see, well, nothing more than a fantasy.  Other tribes see things the way you don’t.  A rich guy prepping for the apocalypse isn’t a prepper.  He is essentially building a fortification against proletariat mobs trying to steal his money, but under no circumstances does he view his future as an economic collapse or a systematic break down.  He is ONLY looking at wealth preservation, not collapse insurance. 

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You do understand that while he is using your same words, he isn’t speaking your language, don’t you?  It isn’t all that difficult to understand.  With insurance, you have incurred a cost.  With wealth preservation and growth, you expect an increase in your wealth or at the very least to avoid any lose.  One costs you money to provide a security and safety feature.  The other is about wealth, and wealth that is not allowed to shrink.  Unfortunately our modern sensibilities look at the loss of profits as a loss of wealth, highlighting how unrealistic our expectations are.  A guy looking around in fright that he will lose profits, does not a prepper make.  A guy spending money for future security, he does.  One is a lose and the other a growth.  As a prepper you can talk about “investing” but you aren’t buying future wealth, only security.  A person interested in wealth preservation and wealth increase does not seek the same things in life that you do.  So all these “gold investors”?  They are not preppers.  They are seeking to increase their wealth, even if they pretend they are only protecting it.  All their double top secret decoder ring language is geared towards profiting off of their gold holdings.  Gold is not personal security, food is.  Gold is wealth preservation with the expectation of a return on investment ( in modern thought-traditionally it was never more than wealth transfer and storage, never an investment ).  We continue tomorrow.

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17 comments:

  1. The liberal at my old job, back when I was still semi-gainfully employed, was talking trash about a show called “Doomsday Preppers”. My curiosity led me to check it out. The general impression that I got was that the producers were trying to taint the prepper crowd in a negative light. That being said, the people being featured in these episodes were absolutely rich yuppie preppers.

    One guy was clearly a multi-millionaire. He owned his own plane, and part of his strategy was to fly out to an even more remote distant bunker. He had some small outpost type shacks with some kind of special glass that repelled incoming gunfire, but allowed gunfire from within, to exit without any restriction. Such a strategy relies on your opponents depleting all ammunition before you return fire. Doesn’t seem like a very smart strategy to me, especially if you suck at basic math.

    But the point is that your overall point makes more sense to me now. These people are preserving a way of life, as opposed to preparing for an entirely different way of life.

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    1. Finally, my voice in the wilderness was heard!:)

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    2. "Collapse now, avoid the rush."
      The #1 BEST quote I ever heard about the change of lifestyle that being prepared really requires.
      We can NOT live as we are living now and hope to have enough to live this way for the rest of our lives.
      The gold-bugs and Yuppie and WW3 survivalists/preppers remind me much of the elite class referenced in this article: http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2017/07/maya-theater-states.html
      Sure these prepers who have their night vision and generators and freezers full of steaks and a closet shelf of MREs will pull through a single solitary little disaster like a hurricane or earthquake just fine - to the point they will be well off even. But given a number of disasters that are inherent in the total breakdown of our current civilization they will find themselves barely more cushioned than anyone else.
      But the guys who are living without grid electricity, growing most of their own food - or eating off a multi decade deep store of food - will have a chance of pulling through with much less disruption.
      A new organization WILL spring up to replace what we have now. It will probably be smaller, more local, slower, etc.
      Live poor now at a level below where you could be, and it will be easier to adapt when everyone is forced to live poorer.

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    3. Thanks for the link reminder-I haven't followed him for a time.

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  2. Probably a good thing you moved to town,I can see a black suburban running your bike into the ditch.

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    Replies
    1. It could still happen. I bike early to avoid the heat, going out by the airport, no one around to see an accident.

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  3. Good stuff. I likes stuff that makes me think, stuff I'd never heard anything about before. The feasible size of tribes, instinctual/incest limitations, etc. Things like this, things that make us think, is what the teachers should have been exposing us to rather than 12 years of the same shit year after year after year. 40 years later I still hate public scho...er, imprisonment.

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    1. Apparently there is now up to 71 different gender distinctions depending on where you live. Didn’t realize that there were 71 different ways in which to be fucked in the head, but there you go. The PRK is discussing adding a 3rd gender to the state drivers license and ID. When I was a kid, a popular insult to another kid was:

      “Hey [insert name of your choice]. I met your parents the other night. Couple a real swell guys.”

      Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever pictured this as a reality.

      You have to wonder how this sort of thing is tolerated long enough to actually stick. It’s funny how our nemesis Russia would never tolerate this nonsense. Anything that harms the social fabric of their society is opposed, even by the politicians, so there’s something to be said about that. I recall the video in which those Pussy Riot shit disturbers tried to set up one of their gigs over there. The Russian police came along and gave those bitches the smack down, and hauled them off :D

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    2. I'm watching the TV show "Shameless (US)" on Netflix. Funniest dysfunctional family as the comedy is in the reality. The last season they were highlighting different gender combo's. It was like listening to Yuppies order different coffee combo's. I'm almost sure that was the intention.

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  4. Well.....you were doing great for the first two sections (certainly can't say paragraphs)

    I like it when you trash talk about those other phony survival experts.

    YKW
    MM

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    Replies
    1. Hey, at least you liked some of it. I knew I was improving.

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  5. LOL.. you nailed it! I have said for years now that so many "preppers" think they are going to have the same lifestyle after as before

    Its not going to happen but its without a doubt something that those with more wealth are willing to spend a pretty penny on trying to make it so.

    I guess there is a slim chance that those in the fancy buy in Millions for the silo's will keep up a lifestyle as long as everything keeps working and nothing breaks down

    But for the average joe

    Nope

    Its like me talking to someone that was "off-grid" finally got to the nuts and bolts.. what they meant was we have solar power.

    shakes head.. goes back to work.. those broad beans will not pick or process themselves

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    1. You have to wonder about the "prepper" who buys a missile silo. Forget the age, just focus on the builders mentality of assumed cheap maintanence.

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    2. I am sure you have seen this before but for those that have not. Here is the link

      Just WOW and huh..

      http://survivalcondo.com/

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    3. JUST $3 million? If I set up my blog publishing from that location, is it a business expense?

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    4. Jim, you have to incorporate first, THEN it is a business expense.

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    5. I hear Nevada incorporation is good if you are playing on the level of the bankers. I guess Deleware will do :)

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