babylon

BABYLON

After much baited breath waiting, customer complaint department inundation and threats of subscription cancellation, here finally is an article of little import but containing my trademark excess ranting.  Why, yes, you are welcome.  We all know the end is nigh.  And I don’t mean the hurricane is coming, literally not figuratively, and so you must run out and buy a generator and a case of MRE’s and more AR ammo.  The end of western civilization with the accompanying die-off.  The soil is dead and oil is food and the EROI of energy is plummeting exponentially.  You know the end is near.  The most obvious indicator being that DC went from incompetent but functioning to some-equation-beyond-completely-incompetent and utterly dysfunctional.  When your Color Revolutions turn around and bite you on the ass, your global hegemony is overcooked and done with a fork stuck in it.  Which translates to energy import collapse.  Bank on it.

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And we all know the simple solution to this immanent waterfall collapse.  Lots of wheat, more ammo and moving out of the city.  And that last part is almost kinda sorta what we will discuss today.  Hey, a tenuous link is better than none at all.  Deal with it.  Okay, we all know about Rawles.  Despite all his faults, mainly amongst them having been an officer in the military, having been Military Intelligence, and being an Alpha Male with outdated views of everything, you still can’t really be too harsh on the guy.  He did the heavy lifting of walking the walk and relocating and living his life as if the collapse was on the way, more than a lot of us can do or will do as we live in our electronic dream world ( my minions less so than most other publications followers it would seem ).  Despite his being a One Hit Wonder as an author, and his illogical views, he really after all that is said and done no worse than most flawed human beings ( as hard as it is to believe, even I, Baby Jesus’ favorite, have a few minor flaws such as too perfect hair.  I’ll admit it, I stir the loins of females and create envy in all males, leading to hate and discontent which causes my message to suffer in dissemination ).

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I love my new life, self-employment so obviously superior I almost rue every day since summer 2012 when two decades of child support ended I didn’t immediately embrace the concept ( almost, because after that was the last of my widespread stockpiling and savings accumulation and because I thought I was doing the right thing trying to stay working at the Food Bank.  My replacement is bringing in a third of the food while clocking in more hours, so I know I was kicking ass, helping out and making a difference ).  And I love my mission of reaching out and trying to help in my own small way, preaching frugality and common sense prepping.  Most of it MIGHT be simple and obvious, except it really isn’t because so many reject any of it.  Let’s not kid ourselves, my entertaining draws more than my preaching.  I like to hope they stay for the fun and accidentally learn something, but, whatever.  You do what you can.  But, to get to the point, this is still a job I “arrive” at every day.  A job bestowed upon me by adoring deities, but still a job ( and before you get jealous, not just of the hair but my employment position, recall I earned my wings after twenty five years of writing-granted, some years with less than perfected craft-and working two jobs, living like a barbarian and supping on mega-doses of stress ).

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After five or six hours of daily writing and research, my poor little brain is as wiped as my body used to be at the end of the day.  I’ll freely admit, after I add in House Bitch work and exercise, I then plant my ass in the recliner and turn off both body and mind and vegetate on YouTube video’s for at least an hour.  That bad habit didn’t take too long to germinate.  I could never just watch regular television.  I don’t have long on this Earth and I shan’t waste it any more than I do now ( evening viewing, an hour and a half to two hours ) on TV.  But YouTube?  Come on, you can lie to yourself all day long that you are being educated!  The latest channel I was actually impressed with was How To Get Out Of Babylon.  Nothing more than a screen shot of a web page with the guy droning on incessantly, but I find myself intrigued.  Probably because he started out unmercifully harping on Rawles.

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Yes, I was entertained.  I try to actually mitigate Rawles faults by remembering his accomplishments, but this guy pretty much went to town spewing angst and discontent on the fact that the man was ever born.  It was like a slow train wreck when the cars are full of kittens and orphans, a shame but impossible to look away from.  Believe me, these video’s are NOT what you would call short or direct.  I think it was like three 20 minute videos later he finally got back on point about the viability of the Ozark Plateau as a retreat location, in the mean time talking about Rawles’ flawed religion, politics, encyclopedic knowledge and choice of location.  His contention is that the mid west slope of the Rockies contain multiple magma pools which while creating idyllic growing conditions due to their heat effect mitigating the cold weather at times,  also will blow when Yellowstone does.  Now, I’m not sure about that, as it was my understanding you have to ignore plate tectonics for that to be true since the older geological locations of volcanic activity are stable ( although don’t quote me on that as science is a VERY weak understanding of mine-a pity since I can’t be a chemist and blow stuff up ).

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But that is neither here nor there.  The allegation is the important thing.  Babylon doesn’t just mention valid issues with the Redoubt like its military vulnerability due to long distances between homesteads and the minimized food growing capability, he simply just assumes that Yellowstone WILL blow.  Now, I was willing to overlook the mention of George Washington’s “prophesies”, even though that fable calling for foreign invasion and an Ozarks Redoubt was used by some pretty wacko White Separatists in the ’80’s I used to follow.  But as he is carrying on and on about how Rawles was an idiot for calling for resettlement to a super volcano, I couldn’t help wonder if Babylon had any idea where he was living.  Does the name New Madrid Quake ring a bell?  You ridicule Rawles for his unapproved by you religious views, then hold your own, like Baby Jesus appeared to your cherry  tree chopping hero and whispered crystal ball visions in his head.  Let me clue you in to a little secret.  Baby Jesus told me that Washington was a giant gaping reeking twat.

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Are you supposed to be safe right alongside the New Madrid Quake Fault Line?  Really?  The last one rang church bells on the east coast, but you’ll be safe?  Now, I don’t wish to show my ass here, because I just told you that geology is one of my many Vast Ignorance subjects, so I might be wrong assuming the soft soil that will vibrate like a fat gals thighs as she’s getting some face time runs beyond the actual fault line.  The Ozark Plateau might be stable.  I have little idea.  But surely an event of this magnitude will be effecting all adjacent areas?  If not equally, than still significantly?  And why is the Yellowstone eruption assured, but the quake not?  Quakes are usually more active than super volcanoes, and even if not, won’t the quake be triggered by the volcano blowing anyway?  I’m not doing anything here but postulating, but I at least think questions need to be answered here.  I’m not even claiming the Rawles Redoubt is superior to the Ozark Plateau.  While I personally prefer the American Desert, it is not worthy of conventional survivalist consideration, merely an adequate alternate version of Bedouin nomadism, but even then I’d call it superior to the original Redoubt theory. 

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The Redoubt is half desert to begin with, but sold as a mountain top agricultural nirvana.  It’s ONLY selling point is lack of people but that is because of the water and employment issue anyway.  It is little more than a Rich Mans Converted Missile Silo strategy, and all the chumps who support the authors advertisers are buying into an updated fictionalized Tri-State fantasy which is more dangerous ( outside a few slivers inside the Redoubt reserved for Yuppie Scum Rich Humpers ) than not.  I’d gladly give the Ozarks better consideration before I considered the Rawles Redoubt.  Not to say I don’t approve of my location, because I do.  Now that I’m self-employed I could in theory move anywhere I could find affordable land.  There is a lot to be said for regions uninhabitable by most after the natural gas heat and gasoline pumps shuts down.  Since I’m not focused on agriculture I can consider other areas that are basically moats to protect me.  But there is always that Siren call trying to beckon me back to the lush mountain east.  I see the attraction.

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The southeast seems to be home to a lot of YouTube Preppers, the only local vocation seemingly being Internet sales ( he says on his monetized blog ).  I love the area.  I lived in Alabama and Texas briefly, five years in Oklahoma and five in Florida.  I love the culture.  But as the South long ago turned into the Mexican factory of the US, and is the default retirement spot for all the Yuppie Scum Yankees, plus is full of Blacks who were given a carte blanc Kill Whitey card from the self same Yankee Hoo-ers, AND has the big ass earthquake and hurricane AND overpopulation problems, not to mention it used to be home to such charming diseases as you’d normally see on the equator ( not to mention water snakes and killer bees, kudzu and invasive ants ), why is the place even all that that great of a potential retreat area anyway?  Actually, NO area has a great retreat potential anymore, the whole globe having turned into a giant version of Africa ( with some spots being less worse than others, just like on that continent ).  So, okay, one spot can be far worse than others but even the better ones are usually no worse than the other.  I just wish the cons as well as the pros were discussed rationally by an areas advocates.  Babylon spends huge bandwidth freely bashing one region and then can only sing hymns for his own.  If even those are correct.

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Much is made of the South’s great agriculture potential.  Almost as if Babylon is completely unaware how poor most tropical regions can be as far as topsoil.  Asia can convert human feces into rice paddy agricultural dynamos, but look at how poor the soil is in the Amazon, central America and yes, in the South.  If you don’t farm by placing charcoal in the soil, it is quickly depleted.  And most of the South’s agriculture took place by either indebted plantation owners in the lowlands or poor immigrants in the mountains long ago, farming way past the pull date.  At best, you are working 100 year old recovered soil ( it generally takes nature 500 years to renew soil on her own, if uninterrupted ).  With its rain, the South is great for Oil Age farming, which is what you see now.  And how does that translate into post-collapse living?  Again, this is not to say this is a bad area.  Agriculturally it would be far easier to renew depleted topsoil back east than most other places.  You could speed compost pretty easy and have plenty of biochar available, and most likely never need a motor vehicle to do so ( of course, also beware the trend in long commutes back South.  Despite Kunstler’s hatred of rednecks coloring his conclusions, Southerners don’t drive because they get a kick out of playing Dukes Of Hazards.  Jobs and shopping are generally far removed from homes ).  My point is, you aren’t warning potential immigrants of all this, now are you?

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 Enough for today.  Stay tuned for different wonderfulness tomorrow.

END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2f8OG69 )

 

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