trump kills prepping

TRUMP KILLS PREPPING

Remember how Obammy single-handedly made all the ammunition disappear ( yes, even as the weapons to shoot them came down in price about twenty-five percent )?   Well, now Trump has canceled survivalism.  You know, since he is such a believable politician and not out to make himself richer, and only accidentally packed his administration with the same old players in the central bank and military industrial complex, why, sure, he’s all about the Little People.  All problems solved, ’Murica is great again, Fracking Forever, fill in the jingoistic blank.  It greatly pains me to see nice guys hurt their brains trying to think in a such a convoluted manner.  I’m not even being bombastic.  I truly am confused how this sort of conclusion could ever be reached.  First, you have to actually believe individual players can so easily overturn the imperial court.  Then you have to believe only Democrats can ruin the economy.  Then, you have to believe building a wall after our population doubled, and WHILE current immigration laws on the books are not being enforced, will actually make a damn bit of difference.

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Unnamed prepper gurus over in Tennessee are having delusions about the economy and about the importance of their industry.  Okay, so no survival gear company is putting up prizes so there are no more writing contests.  Which means the editor of said site has to do all his own writing, which is about three times a week-please don’t hurt yourself, just as the unnamed Idaho fellow didn‘t either-and based on this output folks will want to pay $99 for a year of newsletters?  I’m sorry, I really am.  But you stopped writing books long ago, and a genius in economics with a doctorate ( back when they meant something ) is charging $180 a year-in easy to stomach $15 a month increments-for a real daily publication and you are worth almost as much?  The sad truth is that no one NEEDS survivalist writers anymore.  We contribute little to the canon, the Soviet threat and the end of the petroleum industrial economy providing much better material in decades past.  The eighties were the last original survivalist publications based on the end of civilization.  From the Nineties we had, basically, just militia porn and Yuppie Scum luxurious lifeboat prepping for minor disruptions in the consumer paradigm.

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Back in the day, the US went from being the worlds leading economy to derailed in glorious fashion as we gave up gold backing to the dollar, oil quadrupled, all our factories shut down and we lost our first colonial war.  Folks were rightly alarmed and a real movement of manly men ( where sheep were nervous ) stepped up with advice that is good enough to be in print forty years later.  Today, girly men cherry pick the old data to see what fits the debt laden purchase paradigm and timidly present advice which won’t offend anyone, and help pretty much no one in the process.  PC Preppers.  Not to discount all that was wrong about the old advice, nor to paint a broad brush to completely discount everything said today, but in general close enough.  The simple fact is that you can’t find much advice that is worth all that much today, so you give it away for free and make money on ads ( you all understand most of this applies to myself, also? ).  And the economy as a whole can’t rely on advertising anymore.

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I’m not sure why this is hard to understand. Only PC Pretty Pony Preppers would preach that the End Is Nigh, and then act all shocked and butt hurt when the economy actually, you know, starts collapsing.  For many a year now, certainly not too far after the ‘09 collapse ( you do remember that, I presume? ), corporations are only making money by buying back their own stock, goosing the markets in a illusion of activity, so that earnings go up in the remaining shares.  They aren’t increasing from increased sales ( earning increases are how the big boys get paid ).  Sales are in the toilet, because no one has a job, or if they do have a job it has less hours and less take home pay, OR extra income is going to medical care ( which, at 20% of GDP is nothing but froth and fury, incompetence, death panels and banker owned insurance industry bail-outs ).  No jobs or no income, no buy-ee crap-ee.  No sales, companies start to cannibalize to survive.  And this is global, with overproduction issues!  Now, are you seriously thinking when a corporation is desperate they won’t decrease advertising?  Of course they will, and they have.  NOTHING is off the table to make money.  A company that trashes its quality and reputation has no interest in increasing its advertising.  At most, you hope, they cut it less.

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The Prepper Industry is having the same issues as everyone else with decreased sales due to decreasing disposable income.  Trump being elected had nothing to do with it.  Do you not recall the lack of Hilary panic gun buying ( on a large enough basis to make a difference )?  Folks COULDN’T afford to panic buy semi’s ( again, relatively speaking ).  Why do you think ammo prices came down?  Less sales.  Blaming Trump for the industry woes is merely transferring the cause, as most folks wallow in the bottomless stinkhole of denial.  The fact that the economy could actually be imploding rather than being a subject to increase their sales, that is not something survivalist gurus are willing to admit.  You know how I feel about this subject.  Guru’s are asswhores, just another carnie lining up to fleece the rubes.  I’m PROUD that I’m still publishing an amateur newsletter, a hobbyist publication ( albeit in electronic form ), rather than a “professional” publication.  At least I’m not following the rats and perhaps not going down with them on the ship.

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What is the future for the prepper industry?  Can you say “buggy whip manufacture”?  There will always be some demand for their products.  Those companies that can survive on niche sales will be fine and those companies that are in debt and need increased customers to service the debt will go bankrupt.  There are still leather companies out there selling custom holsters or what not, even if they only sell a few buggy whips a year.  The variety will shrink and prices will remain at cottage industry levels, but it can be done.  A good example is with “The Backwoodsman” magazine, mostly supported by mom and pop manufacturers of fur trapper/frontiersman equipment.  And even mostly filled with articles written by the fans of such equipment.  The only reason the publication survived was that those running it based their expenses and income on the ability of their home grown advertisers to pay far below industry standards.  You should check them out-if I think they are affordable, a tightwad skinflint, you should be amazed.

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Trump is certainly better than Alzheimer’s Annie, but he won’t be much of an improvement over Shrub.  If you aren’t doing anything different you are de facto accepting all previous administrations dictates and decisions and that means nothing will change.  I don’t believe the President has that kind of power, anyway ( being a mere meat puppet for the elite ), but if you subscribe to the theory that he does, still believing ‘Muricans rule the roost and will be number one forever, then you need to look at his actions rather than his lips flapping some lie you want to hear.  Trump has changed nothing, so it is business as usual.  And business as usual means the same economic policies and realities we’ve had already through the last administrations.  No wall, no draining the swamp, no leaving Afghanistan, no bringing jobs back.  Okay, granted, the reality is not the perception and the perception says no one is panicking because Trump was one big baby binky to placate the masses, so that killed prepping, right?  Well, then why, without the Soviet threat, did the prepper industry do so friggin well in past Republican administrations, eh?  Conventional wisdom says Trump killed prepping.  So, using conventional wisdom, in good times prepping does poorly.  So, why did all the guru’s do so well during the Bush administration?  Credit was flowing freely, as was the oil, people were cashing in at their home equity ATM, jobs were easy to get.  Times were, relatively speaking, economically gangbusters.  And the gurus were making serious cash.  Hell, I was doing much better, and if I of all people can get paid, especially back when my writing sucks more than it does now, you know the spending was stupendous.  My boat was lifted by the tide.  Follow the money, people, not the ideology.

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new boss

NEW BOSS

I know you all don’t appreciate me reviewing books or movies.  I try to minimize it.  I hope you won’t mind if I bring up the TV show “The Walking Dead”.  I promise I’ll merely use it to make my point, and I won’t, much, have review like blathering.  I’m not a FanBoy of the show.  I can’t watch the episodes more than once, so I harbor no trivia that someone who studies it exhaustively would.  I can barely remember one or two of their names.  I just enjoy the heck out of it as it is such a relatively good mirror of human nature ( relatively, since it has to fight the uphill battle against PC and BitchesLib and whatnot and such.  It just does it better than most other entertainment venues ).  Some seasons dragged too long, not doing much but treading water, but they were always good enough.  I experimented with season one, having no idea of its merits, and that was awesome enough to buy seasons two through four on DVD.  By season five I was getting Netflix, so there was no reason to buy anymore.  I just enjoy them when I can. 

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Well, season seven was a huge jump in quality.  Rather than the standard fight against other settlements, with all those road trips, suddenly we got ( spoiler alert.  None of you seemed too excited when I announced the new Netflix season so I’m just assuming you don’t care for it or already watched it on cable or got it on DVD.  Am I really surprising anyone here?  Okay, here goes ) a twist.  Rick’s group ran into a New Big Dog that they couldn’t handle.  Now, of course, to me this isn’t just a way to keep eyeballs watching ads, it is a turn towards a better reflected reality.  The old seasons?  They were wish fulfillment fantasies where all the billy bad ass preppers got to be King Of The Hill, no need to prepare, just scavenge and fight for your little space.  Which, truthfully, is really a bad form of fiction for post-apocalypse.  It chaps my ass something fierce.  Even accounting for zombies, so much of the premise is flawed.  Gasoline untreated, which is most gasoline and with ten percent ethanol the crap is the crappiest crap and stores for crap, doesn’t last for years.  With Just In Time Inventory, everything is built or grown as needed and shipped, several times around the globe if needed, and inventory is nearly non-existent and even with far fewer mouths to feed I’m sure it isn’t as easy as the show makes out.

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So, shelf stable food inventories?  I’m not feeling the surplus that is depicted.  Nor the ammunition.  These guys might take out zombies with melee weapons, but they sure buzz through the ammo fighting each other.  Which they do, a lot.  And when they grow food?  Gardens.  Fields, not so much.  If the writers didn’t do such a good job on sociology/anthropology, their weak grasp on survivalism would have turned me off long ago.  So, we can ignore all that is wrong with the plots.  What they got right was introducing warlordism into season seven.  Before, it was just little bitches fighting each other in defense.  Walter Mittey minds thinking they are Warrior Kings.  But they never were, were they?  Even Rick, who as a former cop had that prevalent attitude that he was Captain Enforcer, Morality Police ( few cops are Peace Officers-not necessarily their fault, with the System the way if is ), was never burdened with doubts as to his right to take what he needed, even he was just playing at the leadership game.

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And then he met his match.  The new warlord in town is nothing special.  No new weapons or tactics.  No extra men.  Just that attitude.  He isn’t burdened with the pre-collapse civilized behavior norms.  All these other little wanna-be tyrants were never truly ruthless enough to equal the new guy ( I’m going to say “Keegan”.  I might be off.  I have zero desire to look it up.  I’m going with it for now.  Hey, I’ve only watched three episodes so far.  Bite me, doughboy ).  The old bad guys, sure, they’d harvest you for meat or kill women and children, but they didn’t have the vision of Keegan, who isn’t just expanding, isn’t just defending against start-up dictators, he is starting a new Rome.  He is defeating his enemies not just in battle but mentally.  After he demoralizes them to the status of a dog shaking in utter pain, as if passing a peach pit, then he has a new subordinate that works for Keegan rather than himself.  He went from the norm of petty local thug to an expanding empire where the colonies send tribute, doing all the work. 

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What makes this guy so appealing ( I can’t remember if it was T-shirts or just social media graphics being passed around like a cheap whore, but there have been for a year or two the pro-Keegan propaganda accompanied by the drawing of the barbed wire bat )?  Granted, as I said I’ve only watched three episodes, and I have no idea what is going to happen between me writing this and you reading it, but so far it just seems that the appeal is, Keegan is one happy humper.  He doesn’t come across as a psychopath ( of course, if that is just my exclusive observation, that doesn’t say very good things about me, now does it? ), but rather simple a guy making lemonade out of lemons.  He knows what has to be done to make things work ( a widespread monopoly on violence encourages trade and a centralized military lowers the cost of defense ) and sees no reason to allow the carrying out of those necessary tasks a burden or a worry.  He is, in short, not only more effective at his job, he enjoys the apocalypse not because he is an asswhore but because he is just a person enjoying life.

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Okay, all well and good analyzing an entertainment fictionalized account.  Now, how is this related to your soon to occur reality?  Well, think about this.  You will be, 999 times out of a thousand, just a petty local thug.  You won’t be a warlord.  I don’t care if you are a religious nut job, where Jesus speaks at you every night ( “smite the wicked heathen, as they are unworthy of inhabiting this earthly paradise.  You have my blessing, and I shall guide your sword hand” ), or a farmer trying to mind your own business but the neighbor keeps being unreasonable ( “bastard won’t help us defend against raids” quickly turns into “I’ll tell the raiders his weak points, the bastard” ), if you survive any length of time it will partially be because you emulated thug behavior ( regardless of the justifications you used ).  I’m not trying to get into another argument justifying banditry.  That is just reality, whereas Love Thy Neighbor Co-Operative Hippie Dippy Bull is not.  Everyone turns into bandits fighting bandits until the strongest and smartest one wins and forms a large enough government that he can reduce his amount of plunder to taxation levels and the violence is greatly reduced.  That is just “nature abhors a vacuum”.  What I am saying is that only those ruthless enough survive.  Libertarians and Religious types and Love Children might preach love and happiness but Realpolitik will kick their glazed eyed asses.

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But being realistic enough to perform badly at times STILL isn’t enough.  That is what Rick thought, that he was providing adequate leadership services.  He had the cop outlook, that if you carried a big stick no one would mess with you.  His was, in effect, a defensive attitude.  Keegan, he was more a student of human nature.  He understood true leadership requires your people to fear you to the point of carrying out your wishes willingly.  Not just fearing your wraith if they messed with you, but performing exemplary service to avoid that occurrence, ever.  It was a “above and beyond” level of subservience.  Hell, the season makes no effort to be subtle about all this.  They spell it all out so even those of less attention spans understand it.  I’m not doing any extra work here.  If you read the bare minimum about the Mongols, you get the gist of this already.  What excites me about this part of the show is that it highlights how most folks going into the collapse have no clue to be anything other than Rick.  There are far fewer Keegan’s out there.  How do I know?  Because the default attitude is we are all destined for leadership after the collapse.

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We all think because we were smart enough to prep that we both deserve to lead and have the ability to do so ( I think one minion has always said, look to be the man behind the thrown, not the ruler.  Be an advisor only.  He gets it ).  We are dumb asses.  I’m just as guilty.  I know what needs to be done but I have no ability to force others into doing it.  I have no will.  Like most of you, I’m only wanting to be left alone and base my planning around that.  Defensive.  If I survive that, a doubtful proposition, AND if I can transition to offensive, I MIGHT have a chance of long term survival.  All the ammunition and semi-auto’s in the world do you little good if you stay defensive.  You have to be smart enough to realize the limitations of your lifetime conditioning as a serf.  And, if you do, you then have to be smart enough to plan and think and execute on a centralized scale rather than a decentralized one.  Granted, there are resource constraints ( something the show Walking Dead never considers ), which place a ceiling on how centralized you can go.  But you still need to be able to think within that maximum structure.  Leaders aren’t necessarily warlords.  If you don’t like history enough to study the Mongols, look at today’s African warlords.

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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon ad graphics at the top of the page. ***You can make donations or book purchases through PayPal ( www.paypal.me/jimd303 )

*** Unless you are in extreme poverty, spend a buck a month here, by the above donation methods or buy a book. If you don't do Kindle, send me a buck and I'll e-mail it to you in a PDF file.  If you donated, you may request books no charge.   My e-mail is: jimd303@reagan.com  My address is: James M Dakin, 181 W Bullion Rd #12, Elko NV 89801-4184

*** Pay your author-no one works for free.  I’m nice enough to publish for barely above Mere Book Money, so do your part.***   Land In Elko*  Lord Bison* my bio & biblio*   my web site is www.bisonprepper.com *** Wal-Mart wheat***Amazon Author Page
* By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there

 

imitating art

IMITATING ART

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note: around Oct. 3rd ( don't quote me ) on Netflix streaming is the movie "The Survivalist".  Here is a YouTube preview click here
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Another case of life imitating art.  Or at least rhyming ( Mark Twain? ).  Eight senior citizens die from being off grid in a Florida nursing home.  The Sheriff immediately launched an investigation to make sure there was no foul play ( one assumes the rest of the county is safe at night without power and that other seniors elsewhere are in no danger, so as to allow this political ass covering maneuver with the needed extra manpower ).  Dude!  This is Florida.  Home of auto insurance three times most other places as granny tries in vain to peer over the dashboard, stubbornly clinging to her new women’s lib right to drive a vehicle, started back when she was already seventy years old.  Florida is the geriatric elephant graveyard.  People go there to die.  Did they just hire him from Chicago because he was Black ( sure, the Sheriff in principle might be elected.  On electronic voting machines.  With no accountability )?  Sure, the oldsters MIGHT have been smothered so there were more seats on the bus, or it was past lunch time for the orderlies, but don’t prisoners die in your care in the jail?  If not immediately, years later from AIDS.

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Anyway, does that sound slightly familiar?  I mean, besides being a New Orleans repeat?  “One Second After”, one of more popular post-apocalypse novels out there ( do NOT under any circumstances read the sequels.  Not even if it is a library book.  Tragically racing to give James Patterson a run for his money ), had the nursing home deaths from lack of power.  Duh, right?  Living in Florida without refrigeration and air conditioning is certainly not impossible.  Just look at southeast Asia for swamp living primitive style.  But that is akin to moving up to Alaska to live in the Bush.  It takes talent and education.  Marshmallow soft Yuppie Scum middle class retired pukes?  They have no business living in the tropics if they rely on the spacecraft life support system of petroleum to keep them alive down there.  That is what I can’t understand about creaky old humpers flocking to Florida or Arizona.  You hate the winters up north?  How often did you live in the northern climate, except back when you were driving a mule to the one room schoolhouse barefoot and milking the cow?  You were inside all the time since.  Why move?

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Answer: you can’t play golf in December, up north.  That is the only feasible answer I’m coming up with.  So, now, how is that “paradise” working out for you now that the power is down?  With flooding and no power, sewage tends to mix with that pool in your living room.  Your sputtering ticker is going to seize up without air conditioning.  Your medications, just in time delivery married to Drug War idiocy like not allowing 60 or 90 or even thirty day prescription fills spawns the demon baby of geriatric triage deaths.  Sounds like the Obama Death Panels all over again.  Of COURSE the FedGov wants to kill you off, you are suckling at Social Security and using funds that should be going to propping up overseas colony garrisons, starting new wars and enriching Hilary’s favored donors.  This stuff ain’t rocket science.  Now, yes, media pukes are the biggest queens outside a New York City gay nightclub, it is true.  They drama’ed it all up with Sandy.  Dear Baby Jesus!  Two Foot Surge-TWO FOOT SURGE!!!!  Okay, granted, it was cold water, but come on!  So, we can expect them to drama up the hurricane arrival with hyperbole and plain grade bullspit.  But we still have to ask ourselves, was this the litmus test for killing off the biggest welfare class?

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Yes, I know, I’m being dramatic myself.  No one is safe from the elite and the elderly won’t get a pass or even really be targeted.  Everyone is equally in danger.  Not hard to forecast that, with all jobs overseas and most folks dependent on the FedGov and the MegaCorp’s to eat and stay out of the weather.  The overcrowded cities where no one can evacuate from and the under funded maintenance of the power grid was the profit model for the elites taking back the last few generations of shared wealth ( you think the Leave It To Beaver Union wages dad generation was going to be allowed to keep their sliver of the pie?  Jane, you ignorant slut!  How did their saving account in real estate work out for them? ).  Growth was good for our masters and now, planned or not, they are abandoning their mess once it went from profitable to needing an upgrade investment.  Just like a CEO works his peons to mental and physical exhaustion, after hiring from a town completely dependent just on himself, makes a fortune off real estate speculation as the only factory in a hundred miles jacks up housing costs, so too goes the economy.  The peons think they are sharing in imperial wealth, until the factory/colonies shut down.

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Did you follow where Venezuela just dropped the PetroDollar?  Sure, I can hear you now, yucky, Jim is talking about Peak Oil again.  Gross!  I’m going over to Rawles site and read about Idaho politics and investing in gold!  Fine, dudes, whatever.  You realize that once enough countries divorce from the PetroDollar that we can’t buy overseas oil or service our debt, right?  That is the sound of our colonies being granted de facto independence.  You know why China isn’t buying our debt anymore?  They have Russia, with all its oil-more oil than Saudi Arabia-and buying our debt was just to buy oil.  Why do you think the propaganda machine is dialed past 10, in the red zone, blathering about Russia?  It isn’t because of Trump ( Trump has Wall street suits and military brass in his administration.  It is quite the Business As Usual there ).  It is because Russia and China don’t need us anymore, and we are getting desperate. 

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Once the dollar, and hence our borrowing without inflation, is dethroned, all the nasty little problems we’ve been warned about suddenly get pushed to the front burner.  And one of those is going to be the inability to fund Seniors.  They will of course get their money, but inflation will be so bad, and those numbers fudged, that Cost Of Living Allowances will be a sick morbid joke.  A heck of a lot more than eight oldsters are going to die then.  Then, the system simply crashes.  We are already at the point that our dysfunctional medical system is flying apart.  Seniors are being killed, but slowly ( not too fast!  Money to be made ).  Nursing homes will get so expensive, and their staff of illegals and incompetents so dangerous, the body count is going to really skyrocket.  Right now, WITH the petrodollar still limping along, we had to slash the interest rate to fund our borrowing.  It is at 2%.  Okay, go down to 1% and we can borrow another 20 trillion.  But unfortunately, it won’t take ten years to double.  Without fuzzy foreigners buying our debt we must do it all ourselves.  We will double our debt rather quickly.  Then, what?  A half percent, then a quarter?  How much longer do we really have before it doesn’t work?

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Simple crap, like minor fires and minor flooding, once easily cleaned up and funded and compensated, are left as is.  If you think the insurance industry is going to be forced to pay for your house, you haven’t been paying attention to who pushed ObamaCare through.  Now, and not tomorrow or the next day, Alibi Abe, is the time to work on adapting to your environment of choice without the grid, and being able to limp along without the financial class sharing anything with you.  You can’t seriously still be in denial, can you ( they had better sell us OUR oil.  The banks better give me MY money.  Trump better give me my EARNED Social Security )?  All these problems that the shrill drama queens have been filling their doomer porn sites with?  You know, the Gore Warming flooding and super hurricanes and the West being ablaze with thousands of fires and the depleted reservoirs.  How do you think we’ve been solving those, even if half assed and poorly, all these issues that would have slapped the dingus of any Third World nation into the dirt?  Don’t you say it!  Don’t you dare!  Don’t mention Peak Oil!  No, bitches, I’m talking about the PetroDollar, the Free Oil Currency we have been coasting on.  Still plenty of oil left, but not for us without the petro-bucks. 

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Do you think I just talk here to listen to the musical wind chine sweet sound of my own voice?  All these indicators we safely ignored ( Gore Warming is fake!  Fracking Oil Forever.  Dollar is the worlds reserve currency ) WILL come home to roost. It is all interconnected.  Irma wasn’t JUST another hurricane we will easily recover from ( although we will ), it was also a warning.  Are you listening?  Remember that “two years early rather than two minutes too late”.  I’ve been panicking early all my prepping career, and it still is paying off.  I might panic about the wrong thing, but the preps for that worked elsewhere.  Civilization collapse might be too hard to prep for but you’d better be squared away for economic collapse because it is already here.  On this waterfall collapse, the current is already too strong to turn back.  Plan for no grid, period, not no grid for two weeks.

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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon ad graphics at the top of the page. ***You can make donations or book purchases through PayPal ( www.paypal.me/jimd303 )

*** Unless you are in extreme poverty, spend a buck a month here, by the above donation methods or buy a book. If you don't do Kindle, send me a buck and I'll e-mail it to you in PDF. My e-mail is: jimd303@reagan.com  My address is: James M Dakin, 181 W Bullion Rd #12, Elko NV 89801-4184

*** Pay your author-no one works for free.  I’m nice enough to publish for barely above Mere Book Money, so do your part.***   Land In Elko*  Lord Bison* my bio & biblio*   my web site is www.bisonprepper.com *** Wal-Mart wheat***Amazon Author Page
* By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there

 

freeze dried dingus

FREEZE DRIED DINGUS

Have you all heard the phrase “a bag of dinguses”?  Okay, it’s the other “D” word, but I don’t wish to offend those of the gentler constitutions and more refined sensibilities who wouldn’t say “crap” if they had a mouthful of it.  Probably the same types that slavishly lather antibacterial gel on their hands, then take an antibacterial wipe and clean the shopping cart handle, then go walking around the store touching everything else other, dirtier, more unrefined and of the lower classes people already touched as they picked up a product, looked at the ingredients, disliked what they saw or noticed the price and then placed it back.  If you touch anything in a store, you’ve just negated the whole antibacterial wipe process!  Hell, the cart was just out in the sun or freezing cold, which did more to kill germs than you did with your stinking wipe, and all the germs are lurking inside.  Or, on the bottom of your shoe.  Do you take your shoes off with an antibacterial wipe?  No?  Why are you even reading this?  You are going to DIE!  Germs will KILL you!  Run!  Run away!

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Anyway, a bag of dinguses is most emphatically NOT a good thing.  When you are told to eat a bag of them, or when you exclaim, hey, what just happened now is a big old bag of dinguses, you are expressing a very undesirable state of affairs ( or wishing it upon another ).  And yet, people go buy several cases of #10 cans of freeze dried dinguses, and think it is a good thing.  A #10 can is FAR, far worse than a bag of dinguses.  It is more expensive and lasts longer!  Now, I’m not here to shrill an all wheat diet like I normally do.  I want to talk about what is in a years supply of freeze dried food and offer a much better menu, consisting of more calories, and far more meat, for the same price.  Freeze dried foods are not the worst survival supply you can buy.  That horror would be a $5,000 fifty caliber sniper rifle or a FLIR scope.  They have a niche purpose ( the freeze dried foods, not the rifle or scope ).  If you are older than the hill Jesus was buried in, they weigh  almost nothing.  So if you are crippled you can carry around the cans easily.  Me?  If I was all crippled?  An AR-15 with a butt ton of loaded magazine ( or better yet, an AK-47.  You can’t see very far, so you might as well get the one that won’t jam ), a nice supply of beef jerky ( not that weird turkey or pork jerky, that they now sell because beef is getting scarce-thanks a lot, Texas!, but perhaps a few cases of that shelf stable bacon too ), and a few bottles of whiskey.  Come the time, kill as many as you can and go out with no pain.

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Freeze dried does last thirty years so at the end of that three decades you have actually saved money, usually ( from buying the food at lower prices due to inflation, and lack of replacement cost of other methods ).  But, oy, the up front costs.  For $300, I could have a year supply of butter.  Granted, it is half the amount as fresh, but considering how much longer the grid is going to last, still not a bad trade-off.  So, yes, despite all my spoofing, freeze dried isn’t worthless.  But it is a very expensive convenience food.  Convenience being the operative word.  By mixing a bit of labor to replace cost, you get much more for your dollar.  Because you know what you are getting for convenience?  A near vegetarian diet.  If I wanted no meat in my diet, I’d rather spend $300 than $1500.  Which is what the cheapest yearly supply is for freeze dried ( with one case of #10 cans of wheat kernels ).  But there is no real meat and no fat.  So I’d be better off with $300 worth of wheat and shortening.  The only thing you sacrifice is a bigger range of food.

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The freeze dried food isn’t even healthy!  Oh, sure, there are plenty of fruits and vegetables.  And then they give you TVP!  Textured vegetable protein is the worst thing to eat!  It is soy, and soy, if not fermented, is terrible for you.  Remember my acorn analogy?  Eating soy without proper preparation is like eating acorns without removing the poisons first ( tannin? ).  I don’t even think the soy is cooked long enough, which is a minimum with all beans or they pass through your digestive system without releasing their nutrients.  So, you take the worst bean and prepare it the worst way, and you call that sufficient protein.  Hippies had a lot of good ideas going for them philosophically, but nutritionally they were morons.  Soy is poison.  If that isn’t bad enough, the menu includes margarine, fake cheese, and white foods such as instant potatoes, pasta and cream of wheat.  But they throw in oatmeal and soup, for variety!  Wow, why that is certainly worth the extra money!  I’m not saying freeze dried foods are bad, but I am saying commercially packaged survival one year foods are full of crap and a lot doesn’t need to be at freeze dried prices.

*

The pasta, cream of wheat, rice and oats, popcorn and instant potatoes, do they really gain all that much from being nitrogen packed in a #10 can?  Are you really worse off by placing the dry goods in a Mason glass jar and vacuum sealing it with that jar attachment doohickey on your bag sealer/vacuum packer that is around $50?  It is convenient to have all these in #10 cans, but is it necessary?  Do you even want all those foods in your one year food supply?  If so, why not go in bulk and Mylar bag them in buckets?  Why #10 cans?  Unless you are THAT old and weak, or crippled, and we already covered that plan.  Jerky, whiskey and semi-auto.  See, I’m not completely opposed to semi-auto.  And if you are planning on moving, and want the light weight of #10 cans, aren’t you worried about damaging them?  If you damage a can, there goes $15-$20.  If you damage a whole case of Mason jars, every single jar, it is the same loss, more or less.  Is a five gallon bucket of pasta all that heavy?  I suppose the spaghetti noodles might poke through the Mylar.  Are other noodles acceptable, instead?

*

All these questions should be highlighting how you have been hoodwinked into buying convenience alone, at the high price of dollars, the high price of nutrition-less foods and the high price of elimination of animal protein from your diet.  Sure, you can get higher priced plans with freeze dried meat.  But isn’t $1500 high enough as it is?  How many years of food can you buy at $2k each, or $2,500, or $3k?  I’m not discounting the $1500 a year.  I personally would not pay that much.  But if you are going to, don’t buy a crap menu.  Buy much better food.  For the same price.  The freeze dried menu is ONLY good for the fruits and vegetables.  All the other food is calorie only white foods, or worse, fake soy meat, with only a little fat, and that the worst fat of all-margarine.  You would be better off just buying shortening.  Both shortening and margarine are made with the same hydrogenated process, turning fat one step away from plastic.  You might as well buy the cheaper one so you get more of it.  Margarine is mostly flavoring, water, texturing and a smidge of fat.  Shortening is all fat.  Which you need, especially after the apocalypse.

*

The one thing the freeze dried menu doesn’t have is wheat.  If you are not gluten intolerant, it is a good thing to have.  Not to the extent I recommend, perhaps,  but enough to give you plenty of energy ( carbs alone, nor protein alone, doesn’t necessarily work for most people, but a combination is wonderful ).  One pound of wheat a day, plus a pound of meat, with fat, is going to get you through most days unless you are actually digging ditches ( my wheat only diet is a core calorie, emergency only, better than nothing diet.  It requires you to sprout some kernels, and forage and trap if possible, with a minimum amount of fat from shortening.  $20 in fat could make the difference in you surviving the winter.  Another $10 in vitamins would also make a huge difference.  In theory.  I’m not sure how many people have been forced to rely on mostly just vitamins to actually test their performance.  For all we know, they could be placebos ).  The freeze dried menu is 1500 calories a day ( actually, something like 1460, but I’m being extra generous ).  I’m suggesting a 2500 calorie diet.  For the same price.  Full of meat.

*

For $275 you can buy feed store wheat kernels and put them into buckets, for 400 pounds ( a pound a day with extra for sprouts ).  If you are forced to buy through Wal-Mart, the Aguson Farms buckets at $36 for 25 pounds, the cost goes way up to $575.  Some of you have no choice, given the lack of feed stores in your urban areas ( heck, even in Podunk Texas I had to drive thirty miles to find one, pre-Y2K.  But once there, damn!, $5 for a fifty pound sack.  The good old days ).  Now, for meat, as per previous discussions, you are going to need to Mason jar pressure can.  Sorry.  No convenience there.  But REAL meat.  Every night!  I’d rather have meat every night than soup and TVP nuggets.  Once you buy your jars, a one time purchase with just occasional replacements due to damage, then you merely need new lids every year.  What I would suggest is buying the years worth of jars and rotate.  Use a weeks worth of meat, can another batch every weekend.  You rotate and hence always have a years worth of meat.  No, it won’t last thirty years, but you aren’t paying the inflation tax since you are eating as you are buying.

*

I’m not sure if you can buy a pallet and get a discount, but most times you can get a case at the grocery store for $11.  Less than a buck a jar with lid and ring.  $365 for a years worth of jars.  It will take up a lot of room.  But you double duty here.  You don’t need a freezer of meat ( just enough to buy sales and can as needed ).  You don’t have to worry about a power outage ( saving on buying a generator ), nor power to cook your meat that night, nor stocking freeze dried meat.  Two bucks a pound the average price ( at least for now, buying family packs on sale ) gets you a years worth of meat for $550.  Now add your fat.  Twelve cans of shortening, one a month, is only $40.  Go hog wild canning butter with $160 ( three pounds a month, the extra jars included in the price ).  I would, personally, feel safe enough pressure canning my butter.  But that is a call you have to make as it is not recommended.  There is the issue of fat corroding the sealing ring, but other than that I think you’d kill all nasties.  Let me tell you a short story.  True story.  I was just at my B-POD and ran across a stick of salted butter.  At the end of summer, the temperature down there is around seventy degrees at most.  The stick has been down there a year and a half.  I wouldn’t try eating it, but it had no mold and no smell.  You tell me that isn’t some storage hardy food!  I thought I had to eat up room temperature butter in two or three weeks.  I guess I was pessimistic.  Now, if you are boiling that bitch under vacuum for a half hour or whatever, do you really think it won’t store long ( as long as the seal lasts )?

*

If you are really paranoid about canned butter ( to be clear, the old discounted for safety reasons method was a bath canning.  I’m saying, go with pressure canning ), you can buy that in freeze dried form.  $24 buys you four pounds of reconstituted butter, so $6 a pound.  Under this budget, you can get seven cans, a half pound every other week.  Not bad.  You can it yourself, three pounds a month.  Freeze dried, a pound a month.  Not great, but you have plenty of other fat either plan.  So, our totals are $575 for the expensive wheat.  $365 Mason jars.  $550 meat and $200 fat and butter.  That is $1700.  Sorry, slightly over the $1500 for the freeze dried, unless you live near a feed store, then your total is $1400 ( I would NOT recommend Tattler re-useable lids to save money, as it seems a 10-20% seal failure rate is common ).  If you average the two, the one Wal-Mart wheat the other home canned wheat, you average about what the freeze dried costs.  I call it close enough.  And remember, many more critical calories and the right kind of calories, no processed foods other than shortening.  Granted, very little variety.  No comfort foods like fruit out of season.  But the one thing preppers are supposed to be wonderful at is gardening.  And gardening, with spouting and drying getting you through the winter, should be how you get your produce.  Fresh, not out of a can.  You might claim you need the cans in case your garden fails, but ask yourself what you are eating.

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Commercial produce is grown with artificial fertilizers in dead soil, heavily sprayed with chemicals.  Then, you don’t know how much of any marginal nutrients ( remember, USDA nutritional recordings were from decades ago when the soil was much better than now ) survived the freeze drying process.  Really, how much worse off are you just taking a vitamin pill?  Add sprouts to that for the unknown micro-nutrients and the needed enzymes, and you are no worse off nutritionally.  So you rely on fresh produce grown in your healthy soil and just use vitamins and sprouts as your emergency source and you are still better off.  And the price is much better-like close to free.  For fruit, just dry your own and consume it like the meat, replacing it as you go so shelf life isn’t an issue.  And all this isn’t even touching on the “store what you eat, eat what you store”.  My plan is your actually diet.  Their plan, being freeze dried, means you CAN’T eat it daily.  My plan is for a meat fueled worker, their plan is for a bunny food, processed food fueled couch potato.  Same price.  Your choice.

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hubris underwater

HUBRIS UNDERWATER

Two weeks into September and the Gore Warming Industry has gotten an economic bail-out.  They had to wait twelve years but the hurricanes finally returned to, ahem, validate human induced climate change.  Never mind that we had worse wind storms prior to burning too much oil ( whenever I need a rational reminder to ignore all this Global Warming hype, I remember two things.  There used to be a 99% scientific consensus that plate tectonics was impossible.  And in the 1890’s we had one of the worst deep freezes ever out here in the West [ Gore Warming isn’t just about warming but extreme colds and extreme heats ] ).  Let’s not even worry that even if Gore Warming is a thing, we’ve also passed the point of no return long ago, meaning all the cries of anguish to “do something” is lamenting the horse now long out of the barn, which just makes it distracting and embarrassing.  Let’s just keep rowing up the river De Nile.  Let’s just keep pushing for fake solutions and ignore resource contraction.

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On a blog I shan’t embarrass by naming ( hint: published out of Tennessee ), who tries valiantly to out-do his chief rival the unnamed blog from Idaho ( note to Idahoans-you poor miserable bastards, with “Snyder For Congress”.  I would make fun of you but we had Harry Reid forever ), there was the standard guest article on how a princess prepper braved the wrathful thirty mile an hour winds and-gasp!-several hour blackout and emerged victorious due to her preps!  Every single thing a survivalist would not do but a prepper certainly would was highlighted here.  First, I will admit that the only point I can agree with her was the preps for Coffee Continuation.  And she did have a non-propane back-up for cooking.  But that was about it.  Everything else was Petroleum Prepping ( ie, short term preps to ride out a storm in luxury and return to Business As Usual ).  Suburban conventional house ( we assume a mortgage ).  Relying on frozen foods.  MRE’s.  Propane. 

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Not that there is anything wrong with all this.  I have a good long supply of propane myself.  A small amount of MRE’s are great for a bug-out or a covert hunker down.  And while mortgages are stupid, because you lose your job in an economic collapse and we are in one, I also understand most folks have little choice being in that situation.  No, my issue is that preppers aren’t prepping for anything other than a short term power outage.  They aren’t prepping for an economic collapse, nor resource contraction with overpopulation.  They are barely more than well stocked campers.  They rely on Business As Usual, but just on a one to two week delay feature.  They aren’t really prepped for anything beyond repelling looting and waiting for the electric company to repair everything.  That is it.  If that were Phase One of their plans, I can see the appeal of luxury items like MRE’s and propane.  But when that is Plan A, and B, and C, they are prepped for squat.

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Living in Houston or Florida isn’t the problem.  We have Intrepid Minions with viable plans living near or in the swamps.  The problem is believing that you can keep returning to Grid Up as you live in Houston and Florida.  These are natural disaster areas for a simple reason.  The same reason you move there.  Rainfall.  You want heat and rain to grow your own food, so you pick an area abundant in those areas.  Well, whatever ‘norm” your area is, you get extremes of that norm.  The dry West NATURALLY burns and has droughts.  The South NATURALLY gets floods.  Gore Warming or not.  Houston was flooding way before we fired up our first internal combustion engine.  Rather than looking at Gore Warming and thinking a Prius will save Gaia, how about looking at our diminishing resources?  Every year more little brown people are born.  Fact.  And everyone from the Pope to every business owner from the FedGovs cronies to the corner mom & pop all want more births than even that.  We’ve been pushing birth control on Third World nations since the Pill was invented, and the ONLY thing that happened was that we had a slight decrease in the increase of population when China shared the commodity profit with exporters and a slight uptick in middle classes slightly slowed the population time bomb for a short period of time before the global depression hit the manufacturing overproduction in China. 

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So how serious are we, really?  I don’t mean as far as pushing Third World birth control measures because that is pushing a string culturally.  I mean, how serious are we about population control in general, everywhere?  Less people mean less profits.  Of course Muslim and Latino immigration is going to be a factor, when the local population stops reproducing adequately for the bottom line of the elite.  Now, when you add more people every year, which will happen as it is profitable in so many ways, from downward pressure on wages to more product consumers, to overpopulation causing famine which causes wars which cause munitions sales to spike, what happens with the supply of their products they need?  Answer, it must grow just to stay even with demand.  Wow, this stuff isn’t hard at all!  More people need more food and shoes and AK-47’s.  So, where does all these products come from?  If you are the average corporate CEO or US citizen, the answer is, unicorns farting glitter.

*

Ever hear of Fracking?  Green Revolutions?  Fusion and space colonization?  Resource substitution?  Free market?  Those are all unicorn farts.  They are a mythical occurrence.  They are wet farts of misinformed minds attempting to ignore reality.  How hard, really, is the concept of “infinite grown on a finite planet”?  I mean, really?  How can you be skeptical of that?  I’m going to assume you are all with me on that.  We may not be able to agree on much, such as SUV driving, FLIR scopes, AR-15’s, trophy wives or city living, but surely we can agree on that one thing?  Eventually the mine plays out and you get a ghost town.  Eventually you draw down the soil and crop decline ensues.  Eventually you allow enough towel heads to immigrate and soon they are ravishing your white women, imposing their own laws and burning down your cities if welfare payments are interrupted.  More of one behavior to its logical conclusion always violently eradicates that behavior.  Even a place as big as an ocean eventually fills up with trash if you dump enough of the stuff for long enough ( fill it up enough and the waves just deposit back on to land the last load ).

*

Resources always run out, and accepting that and assuming it won’t happen until it screws over your grandkids is all very well and good a winning strategy.  Until it isn’t.  You can pretend that the target keeps moving further away each generation but that is just more unicorn flatulence.  Fifty years ago we knew diminishing resources were meeting overpopulation.  And so we used more energy to pretend we weren’t running out ( without the widespread adoption of pouring petroleum into the soil, mostly by extending farmland into areas needing irrigation, the global famines foretold by Ehrlich and other Cassandra’s would have unfolded ) of energy and other critical resources our entire infrastructure is predicated upon.  Well, now we are definitely running out of oil, on a net energy delivered basis.  Have been for awhile and we can see that by our economy, which was built on fossil fuels, in decline.  Other resources are in decline, as seem by buildings built with such subpar materials in China that they simply fall over.  In New Orleans when neighborhoods, hell, housing for at least a hundred thousand people, are not replaced.  Detroit where not only houses but all buildings and all infrastructure is allowed to entropy into junk.  The simple fact of the matter is that there is LESS resources.  Added to MORE people.  The resources are already running out.  Okay, technically they start running out from day one.  Rather, resources are in such a decline that triage has started long ago as to who is denied any, or at least most. 

*

The Arab Spring was not political.  It was food.  The conflict was oil and now more about feeding the increased population there.  The immigration to Europe isn’t just about ignorant slut Politically Correct morons in charge ( as aforementioned, it is allowed on purpose for profits, but it is also about the following… ) but about in part former colonies striking back in resource decline.  The French and British ( and now their neighbors, thanks to the senseless centralization which was thought to counter economic decline, forming the EU ) get to be economically exploited by the very groups they colonized for economic exploitation.  Poetic justice to a degree.  The US gets to see demographic conquest by the people they exploited by taking their land.  But make no mistake. That isn’t religious, political or even economic.  It is resource contraction.  Overpopulated areas unable to feed itself will conquer neighboring lands.  It just so happens this didn’t have to be violent due to the corporate and elite Quislings in the lands under discussion. 

*

If you can wrap your mind around resource contraction, if you aren’t making excuses to minimize potential pain ( like the pain that will arrive from no longer being an imperial citizen wallowing in the luxury of colonial treasure ), you can easily see the future.  New Orleans, full of poor Blacks, was abandoned as it promised no return on investment.  Economically it was just a money pit.  Since resources, economic or energy or ore, are shrinking in supply, the triage of our own nation was applied there.  In Detroit, that was even easier to see coming.  Globilization demands that a town of factories is abandoned.  No return on further investment there.  In Houston, many areas will be allowed to rot.  If every area is full of affluent folks, the rebuilding will be largely privatized ( homeowner only, mostly not the insurance industry ).  Any disaster aid from the government, beyond a token amount that won’t solve any substantial issue, will be in the form of loans rather than grants.  Some resources, not all that are needed, will be given to Houston only because it plays such a prominent role in our petroleum economy.  Florida?

*

Florida will be a combination of New Orleans and Houston.  The poor neighborhoods will see little if any resources.  Those areas that can afford higher taxes will be rebuilt, but only because the damage was limited and the Social Security money ( or tourist money ) will pay for the effort of rescue.  That is triage, folks.  When resources are limited, the price goes up ( if the contest isn’t decided militarily, such as in the Congo ).  If you can afford to pay, you kick the can down the road.  But if I was still living in Florida, I’d be asking myself this question.  When do I go from being Houston to New Orleans?  What if Social Security isn’t going to be paid indefinitely ( duh, right? )?  Eventually, my area sees less resources.  So eventually a hurricane hits and…nothing.  The relief effort silence will be deafening.  Why is any of this surprising?  The Rust Belt was around for decades reminding us of all this, the hurricanes are just the latest evidence of throwing poor folks under the bus.  Nothing new to see here, move along.

*

You know what helps me visualize the future better?  I just think that soon, we actually get Y2K.  That’s it.  Just see the future as being grid down.  Everything else follows.  All I’m doing here is attempting to explain the issues that will cause the event to actually happen this time.  Remember, to its logical conclusion.

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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon ad graphics at the top of the page. ***You can make donations or book purchases through PayPal ( www.paypal.me/jimd303 )

*** Unless you are in extreme poverty, spend a buck a month here, by the above donation methods or buy a book. If you don't do Kindle, send me a buck and I'll e-mail it to you in PDF. My e-mail is: jimd303@reagan.com  My address is: James M Dakin, 181 W Bullion Rd #12, Elko NV 89801-4184

*** Pay your author-no one works for free.  I’m nice enough to publish for barely above Mere Book Money, so do your part.***   Land In Elko*  Lord Bison* my bio & biblio*   my web site is www.bisonprepper.com *** Wal-Mart wheat***Amazon Author Page
* By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there