Wednesday, April 11, 2018

who's on first? 2 of 2


WHO’S ON FIRST? 2

Food First, because housing gets easier with salvage and conquest.  Protection gets easier as everyone else uses up their ammunition while you hid and conserved yours.  But food gets harder as we go along.  Every day some selfish pig pops out another screaming starving spawn in another craphole already a failed state ( Africa, middle east, California ).  And every day some greedy pig paves over more farmland or turns it into ethanol, and there is less land to feed the new people.  The marginal farmland in arid regions ( some parts of India, Arizona and California, alternating years with Texas or Pakistan ) begin failing as the once constant water supply does.

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This is not to say that as time goes on you won’t see any issues with ammunition or construction supplies.  You will.  Failing systems see failing trade.  Just as the end of both the Greeks and the Romans started with soil degradation, moved on to currency debasement and finished off with the shutdown of imports, so will the American empire fail as she cannot get the oil needed to grow her own food ( the soil is already crap ), irrigate or transport the centralized food system ( grain belt to the two coasts ).  The end of other commodities being traded goes along with that.

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But while you should be already self-sufficient in defense, if for no other reason than it almost looks like the supreme moronic retards of the universe might actually try for gun control, and shelter is easy enough as long as you lower your expectations, our food production system gets worse every year.  You can stock up on ammo and build shelter now, and in theory that is a One Off event that will last you forever, food is a daily concern.  All other human endeavors throughout history, to include the need to reproduce, takes a back seat to eating everyday.  Even nature agrees.  You can hump until your rib showing protruding belly yellowed eyed famine ravaged body no long has the energy for it, but long before that the female will abort a fetus if she is malnourished.

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Every day that draws us closer to the die-off degrades the soil that much more.  Erodes the soil that much more.  Saturates the soil with more poisons from Bayer ( I think it was the German pharma giant that bought Monsanto ).  Sprinkles magic unicorn dust from Fukishima.  Every day the soil we need to grow crops locally in the near future is paved over and turned into McMansions for the very same humpers that are generating mere pennies of profit per ecological disaster, but need every penny they can get to send their offspring to college to learn the plundering trade.

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And, has everyone forgotten how important weather used to be?  None of us farm, and all of us luxuriate on the couch in our Hello Kitty underwear staring at 500 channels of commercials, in the middle of winter, eating Yak Testicle flavored Dorito’s.  We start our SUV remotely in the morning and by the time we get from the door to the car our bare legs between flip-flops and shorts barely register the real temperature.  Weather, whether caused by Al Gore or by Sol, or by the Alien Overlord Green Lizard Gods, is changing to a routine of extreme events.  Drought followed by flood, polar vortexes randomly thrown in.  Does that bode well for your food supply to come on the farm?

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Once you get an ammo supply, the odds never change.  You’ll either live to use it or you won’t.  Probably, “won’t”.  Preppers seem to have a rather casual hankering of odds and probabilities ( I know my own personal odds are bad.  But knowing is only half the battle, Joe ).  If your shelter is adequate for your climate ( as opposed to adequate for On Grid ), in theory you are insulated enough to not exhaust your nearby wood supply.  To which, I might add, you would be well served to do the historical opposite and gather the fuel from furthest away FIRST, rather than last.  You’ll have metal tools and mechanical conveyances ( bicycle, wheel barrow with synthetic rubber inflated tire ) and extra calories to do so.  Then, as you lose body fat, and food storage, and transportation, you’ll have the nearer supply.  Just saying.

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But your food supply situation just grows worse.  The soil starts out worse than now.  The weather has gotten worse.  And you keep depleting the soil further since you didn’t store enough grain.  Nobody starves as they improve the soil condition.  They keep drawing down its fertility so as to keep eating.  Even if you are religious about adding back to the soil, you are still starting out at a deficit, and you need the extra inputs to be available to begin with.  Nightsoil isn’t a great solution, nor is it enough in most cases.  Almost without exception, farming is a long term negative energy supply.

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If you are not in a river valley that deposits minerals from upstream ( or the equivalent with volcanic ash ), you don’t do net soil fertility ( even the biochar solution needs wood input ).  With enough food storage, you can wait while you build up your soil again, and have enough surplus land to continue to feed your farmland extra organics.  If you don’t, you rapidly deplete already hurt soil.  Most of the US rural South, the one place with extra water and vegetation, was depleted centuries ago from corn and tobacco, and if used today is dead soil saturated with artificial fertilizer and pesticides ( plus, might be dependent on Corps Of Engineers mega-projects for flood control ).

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With the future clear aspect of population growth and increasing idiocy going hand in hand, have plenty of ammunition.  With the lack of petroleum inputs and grid power, build appropriately.  And with the problematic food future clear as a bell, don’t skimp of food.  Then store more.  Then add some to that.  You might not consider wheat a suitable apocalypse food, but once that is all you have you’ll think, what a wonderful thing to have.  For the price of one case of soup with marginal calories, you can have over three months supply of calories.  Come famine and farm failure, you’ll wonder why you ever questioned it.

END ( today's related link https://amzn.to/2Jr8Wud )
 
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27 comments:

  1. In your estimation, would a 50% die-off worldwide be enough to start to turn the whole thing around, or am I looking at it from the wrong direction? (US population was about 152mil in 1950, less than half what it is today.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Population in the end is the source of all our problems, but that alone isn't enough. You need a suitable energy supply to go with less people. 1950 had only half the people BUT also quadruple or more energy available. We need 1/14th the population just to survive on a solar energy economy, but we need far less than that to allow the soil to recover.

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  2. Comment from Other ammo 2 post:

    “ghostsniper wrote:

    Speaking of archery. At Rural King the other day I saw a Bear brand take-down 3 piece recurve fiberglass bow for $99. The whole thing, broken down, was only about 2' long. Could possible be put in a large Alice bag. I may look into this a little deeper.”

    “James M Dakin wrote:

    That one guy who does the PVC pipe bows has a bunch of books ( I'll look up his name if needed ). He did a book on wooden dowels for arrows. Not sure if viable, perhaps an option?”


    @ghostsniper, consider getting a slingbow. They are cheap, will fit very nicely into a pack, and with the more powerful bands, will take game up to deer and boar size. For long term planning, vacuum pack several bands. The nicer models have the option so that the arrow rest flips down, and it converts to a standard slingshot for greater versatility.

    @Jim, Nicholas Tomihama.

    https://www.amazon.com/Backyard-Bowyer-Beginners-Guide-Building/dp/0983248109

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Damn, I keep forgetting about the slingshot bow! Mental block, sorry. This is why I need minion help.

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  3. Way to lay it down Jim! The only way to outlast the die off is as a total hidden away self secure hermit with a decade of food and ancilliary support suplies. If only those one street towns on lonely state roads that have cattle and privets of agriculture would pay attention to Jim. They can organize to diverify part of agriculture now to food plot crops, remote livestock pens etc. Set up For reserves, actual civil defense planning, school kids heavily programmed and involved in various community strenghening programs. If not interfered with by outside forces or proxy conflicts they would stand decent chances of staying alive. Hopefully town leaders/elders are exposed to Lord Bison's life and society saving wisdom.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nobody is exposed to my wonderfulness. 600 minions. Call it a bare few thousand who were ever exposed.

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    2. I point as many people in your direction as I can. Nobody is interested enough to humour me by buying a few buckets of wheat even when I offer to do the work

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    3. Extra minion brownie points for you! Hell, I BUY and store food for other people and they look at me like I'm stupid. Perhaps I am :)

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    4. Only stupid , if they know you have it.

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  4. There is no doubt, having been raised in a Morning family which firmly believe in having a two year supply. I've always had that and more. We have enough to likely feed us both right now for the rest of our lives lol.
    If...If it remains in our possession ! Which I have doubts.
    The importance of caches cannot be stressed adequately.
    As you've stated, farming will not be an immediate remedy. Way too many hungry souls for the first couple years. It takes an acre and a quarter in prime dirt to support one person. That much of a garden is a full time job for one person by hand. Who is going to guard the gardener while he's growing the guards food ? Doesn't work out so well eh ? Especially when just one guard is not adequate.
    Goes back to my thoughts on foraging skills.
    You need peace time conditions for farming !
    Hiding in a hole, will not save you. If when you finally come out of that hole...you don't have Hunter gatherer skills. Along with that deep larder of stockpiles.
    Book learning alone is no substitute either.

    Other PREPARED tribe is the solution. Having multiple options of them gives a person much greater odds...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Hole is just for the immediate die-off. Which will be pretty darn short, considering the oil dependent centralized transportation dependent farming in depleted soil with well water most of us rely on. And, and let's not forget central bank credit globally.

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  5. Just read "One Second After" & realise the importance of food (Post apocalypse Porn)

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    Replies
    1. Just read Wiki length articles on famines. Digging up corpses for dinner was normal in advanced societies. You might grok it then.

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  6. Hey BFF. As much fun as it is to be singled out for special criticism....Highly flattering,...(somewhat creepy...but whatever. I got my big boy pants on)


    My ethnic an socially diverse relatives might be wondering where I am going with this, though. Just saying.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry, not sure how to respond to this.???

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    2. Planning to survive gives you options.
      Convincing the diverse relatives to stash a few buckets of wheat and a hand grinder gives them options. It's cheaper than taking the fam out to see football one time to buy them a year of eating while the world burns. Or, would they rather starve with everyone rioting in the street?

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    3. In the twenty years here in Florida, I've only changed the minds of one couple. From total optimistic almost pacifists, into knowing something is coming and storing food.

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    4. Experience tells us that if you are giving very specific and sound survivalist advice ,not only your relatives will not follow but there is a deadly combination of :
      -he's good at this
      - we are important to him

      This is why your advice here is counterproductive : they will not buy the wheat buckets exactly BECAUSE you told them to.
      They will happily spend their money on futilities, believeing (or knowing ?) that you will provide for them once things get dire.

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  7. I had planned on a cache but sold my BOL when I got cancer so I just have 1 year of basics left. I had planed on a 4x4x8 crate, buried cache. A 4x4x8 cache will hold 63, 5 gallon buckets plus items(guns solar panels ammo) that can be slide in the gaps. about 2000 lbs. will fit in it. A second one to hide in a different spot. Ideal for the die off days no, but its cheap and its size body heat/sleeping bag is all that is needed. 5 sheets wafer board 80$ 4 2x4 10$ plastic to wrap it 10 so 100$ bill each. oh the live in one would have room for 18 more buckets or other items =32 square feet not need for sleep. Me and the wife spent 3 summers camping in a tear drop that was 4x4x8 .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ideally is not in our budget. Affordable and practical is. I like this.

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  8. I know you have advised a 8x8x8 box shed. I advise 2, 4x4x8 caches because you can dig a 2x4x8 hole and use the extra dirt to mound over. harder to see/find and insulated with dirt.

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  9. How about the shelters in Nuclear War Survival Skills?

    Most of them could be built in 2 days, especially with the battery power tools nowadays, perhaps even faster. Digging is still the biggest time consumer.

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    Replies
    1. The 4x4x8 is the plywood shelter is from those pamphlet's . It was in the expedited shelter one and used a Kearny flap ventilator. They advocated mounding 2 to3 foot due to radiation with a blocking wall on the door side out of sandbags . I just adopted it to a survival cache for dual purpose and low cost.

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    2. I would be very interesting in some details on how you braced it from the dirt on top and how you connected the plywood sheets together...

      I'm imagining 4 full sheets with 2x 2x4 (to make a cheap 4x4 beam) connecting each corner. This creates a 4x4 square tube, 8 feet long. Then add a half sheet to one end? (12x 8' 2x4s needed so far. another 4x 8' 2x4s for the entrance end)

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  10. Wheat (or other grains) is definitely worthwhile store of calories. I am still storing other foods as well, but grains (wheat, corn, rice) and beans (including lentils)while forming the core of my food storage are supplemented by at least 20% of my food storage of other things - refined sugars, honey, spices, canned and dried and freeze dried are all, IMHO, essential to making the fresh grown/foraged/hunted foods you will be getting and bland storage foods palatable and more nutritious. Grains and beans first, but spices next.

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    Replies
    1. Nothing wrong with spices-no one needs to eat like a monk. I have a few hundred pounds of sugar. Also, lots of bullion.

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