raising the bar on survival 1 of 3

RAISING THE BAR ON SURVIVAL

Wheat might be the staff of life in most places, but here in good ‘ol ‘Murica, land of exceptionalism and imperial hubris uber alles, we have taken the worlds worst crop, corn-depleting the soil faster for less nutrients-and turned it into our national cultural diet.  Now, I’m not arguing at the surface results of such a move.  At first glance it is hard to argue with practically free chicken and pork ( the only reason beef is so expensive is because those douche nozzles in Texas drained their aquifer good and dry-nice work, boys.  The flaming humptards in California will soon be consulting you on how to live without water ), gushing fountains of soda and anything else sweet.

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I’m not arguing with past results, but future ones.   Nothing in our food industrial system is sustainable.  It is all based on cheap carbon fuel inputs.  I won’t recap and bore you, as long as you can agree that nothing we need for farming is local or infinite.  Just like the auto industry that we had based our national economy on, yes?  Killing two birds with one stone after domestic Peak Iron Ore near seventy years ago, we exported a lot of steel making to our two Asian “allies“ ( war is peace, our colonial subjects are allies ), Japan and South Korea.  This stabilized weak economies and immunized the labor force against communism ( to whatever degree that was possible ). 

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It started the US on the road to economic ruin, at least insofar as the industrial economy was concerned.  Long before Peak Oil, Peak Ore had screwed our pooch for us.  I think we can safely say that peak sowed the seeds for the Flower Power Revolution of the Sixties.  There will always be Marxist idiots in any age.  Whether they gain traction has a lot to do with economics.  When there isn’t a future to work towards in a failing economy, naturally you are going to get the Free Riders seeking out a life preserver alternative.  The masses may follow after that.

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Not that I’m trying to find one culprit for all our ills, although it might seem like it at times.  But there are underlying themes and then trigger events.  I would argue that the death of our industrial economy was as life changing as its birth was ( at heart, beyond politics and more in line with economics, the Industrial Age being birthed at the expense of the ages old agrarian system was at the heart of the War Of Northern Aggression ).  All the disruption of the death of industrialism still to this day sees the issue of there being nothing to replace it with, other than a return to agriculture. As that hasn’t even started to happen, the majority of pain is still ahead.

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Financialization is running the show now, almost completely to the detriment of both industry and agriculture, but that is just a dying system attempting to save itself.  And I doubt that its death will be as easy as its birth.  Look at the Potato Famine in Ireland as just one symptom of the birth of the Industrial Revolution, still causing famine much later as Russia and China was forcibly industrialized.  The collapse won’t be two centuries long.  For those two centuries those who were not part of the new system got along just fine in their fields ( it got more and increasingly difficult to ignore the mechanization being forced upon them, but they were still able to feed themselves ). 

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( Mostly.  In the US, the Great Depression could be looked upon as a soft revolution as the central bank caused a panic for its own profit, then profited off of the beginning of the Big Ag system as it cleared out the peasants from the land and sent them begging for crap work in the cities, and soon begging to be allowed to become cannon fodder as the banks needed more colonial lands for free industrial commodities.  Then they closed down the factories the former farmers had been forced to go work in, shipping them overseas.  They were then forced into the Service Economy subsistence living or on the public teet ). 

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But who feeds us when the industrial inputs to farming start to run out?  Because the way the system is set up, ONLY industrialized farming is permitted.  No longer any peasant farming, or if allowed it is carefully walled off by excessive taxation, and only the middle class is permitted to hobby farm.  There is no wiggle room in the system to save itself from its own destruction.  Which is resource contraction.  Not running OUT, just no longer growing.  Just as an interruption to the growth of the steel supply killed our industrial economy, and an interruption of the growth of BTU’s in our energy supply is killing our finance industry, our food system which is a combination of those two will fall along with them.  And there is nothing to replace that system in an orderly manner.

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And already the industrial food system is failing.  Mostly, that failure has been exported to other nations, one of the benefits of an imperial currency monopoly.  We export starvation to Turd World Nations.  The triage system is firmly in place, as the poor simply eat less corn as we burn more of it in our automobiles ( part of the support of the financial system is paying auto loans.  We are allowed to Happy Motor in unlimited amounts because it benefit’s the banks.  Who ARE the economy now.  As suck ass as it is to be under their thumb, the alternative is far less pretty.  And as much as imperialism sucks for everyone else now, and shortly for us after the PetroDollar collapses and we cannot import half our oil-soon to be a deficit of far more than half as the fracking fields fail- without it we would have already been one of those starving Turd World Nations ).

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I could go into mind numbing detail on the food shortages and failures.  How Asian rice shortages saw almost complete failures of supply here.  How the Tortilla Revolution cut off our once third largest foreign source of oil, a fight over corn.  How a minor shortage of pasta wheat in Italy tripled prices here.  How the Arab Spring had zero to do with democracy and everything to do with US grain shortages there ( because of ethanol ).  For Christ’s sake, “democracy” was the buzz word killing over a hundred thousand GI’s over in WWI.  Whenever “democracy” is spouted, run.  The bankers want to profit off your corpse. 

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But the one takeaway here, in regards to this articles subject, is that the food system has ZERO slack.  It has been running a deficit, actually ( conveniently, I might add, starting right as global carbon fuel BTU-net energy-peaked about 2005.  All those weather related shortages would NOT have been as big of a deal if energy supplies had not been shrinking ).  No slack in the system means zero surplus for anyone anywhere.  There isn’t enough to feed everyone.  So how is there enough to stockpile any?  In onesies and twosies, of course.  On any significant scale?  Hell to the no.  And so tomorrow we continue with a look at the preparedness industry that has no surplus food for its own growth, let alone its long term survival ( get it?  The Survival of the Survivalist Industry ).

( .Y. )

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note: video on building a arrow slingshot with storage for other survival gear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv5OgsMn-Cs 
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note: free books.  Alien invasion https://amzn.to/2Cui9Cy .  A bit on the short side, PA https://amzn.to/2wQa7xQ .  
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