personal problems

PERSONAL PROBLEMS

Today we take one of those rare breaks from covering only life shattering concepts and high class topics and top of the line subject matter and award winning survivalist journalism and high paying observations and belly flop into the fetid pool of my personal life.  Hey, you get what you pay for and always remember and never forget, the more dysfunctional the author the more interesting the reading.  First off, let’s just get the most embarrassing out of the way first.  I’m calling my premature declaration of Divorce #4.  Alas, I held out for over four months- quite an achievement considering the past poor choices I’ve made of potential procreating partners after just a few weeks without a bed warmer.  I was all jiggy with the roommate deal, live and let live and what not and then the evil vixen under summer heat pretext let her lady parts all flop out one night and my further resolve lasted a mere few hours.  As we’ve been together fifteen years and as we’ve broken up and gotten back together almost as many times, I’m sure this is not the last you’ll be hearing of this. 

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Getting old blows rabid monkey balls.  I’m in terrific shape for my age and probably doing better than a lot of folks ten years younger than I.  My heart is invigorated by plenty of bike riding.  My whole wheat bread consumption should keep any digestion/elimination issues away.  I’ve got great muscle tone from daily lifting multiple tons at work.  Rigorous hydration has offset middle age urinary issues.  And my hair looks nice.  But some crap is beyond your control.  In the last few months my eyes have become an issue.  I’ve worn glasses for far sightedness for decades but recently I’ve had to do the “hold back and forth to bring print into focus”.  And now not only do I need reading glasses ( I refuse to get bi-focals ) for books but when writing as well.  So when we went grocery shopping I invested in a tri-pack of glasses, a hard storage case and a string/holder.  I’m now fashionably nerdy with the granny glasses neck string on my regular glasses.  Drop the regular pair around my neck, don the reading glasses to write/read, place those back in their case when done and put the regular glasses on again.  The reason I bring this up is that reading glasses have gone from glass to plastic- and the plastic are NOT anywhere near as good, even at three times the price.  Stock up on the glass types if you can.

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I want to thank my kindly minion for the last donation, again.  You said do something fun with it so I bought three paper survival/self-reliance magazines ( I’ll review one in an upcoming post ).  Normally they are too rich for my blood.  $8 an issue?  I should be able to buy a paperback for that.  So, you allowed me to indulge this once.  But to more important topics- coffee.  Wal-Mart brand “Master Chef” coffee was $5.28 for years.  Last month it went to $5.68 or thereabouts.  This month- $6.48.  No Friggin Way!!!  Kroger generic brand “Psst” had debuted at $5.30 and was still low at $5.50.  I bought them out, getting eight cans.  Stockpile like mad, my minions. 

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6 months escape/prep 4 part 2

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Note: this is a vacation day for me, so only one post and no comments answered.  Don't worry, the next one won't be for another month and a half and I only have another two the rest of the year.
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SIX MONTHS ESCAPE/PREP 4 part 2

( Six Months To Escaping The Rat Race And Preparing For The Apocalypse Cash On The Barrelhead )

 

Bare Ass Savage Living continued

For raw meat ( because, again, canned meat cost a first child and tastes like afterbirth- not quite as bad as low quality hot dogs which used to taste like floor sweepings but are so bad now I don’t even want to know what is in them, but certainly worse than real meat ) you can buy a fresh package every night on the way home.  This is no longer cheap nor can you always find a market that sells them.  If both of you are too busy for additional food preps this is a good way to start your non-fridge living.  The better way is to can your meat in a pressure canner which allows you to buy big cuts at a discount.  This isn’t really as frightening as you would be led to believe.  Remember that, one, it is the wife who will take the blunt of the blast, not you, and two, everyone over exaggerates the danger to stay away from the ravenous pig-dog lawyers when, after one and a half million canners are sold, one blows up due to those shifty Oriental ChiComs trying to defeat the American Empire by filling the entire place wall to wall with defective manufactured goods and when we go to warn the armed citizenry of their imminent attack the air raid sirens only fart out a feeble bleet and our ammunition in our AK’s which made its way to us from China through an eastern European nation hangfires. 

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For lights, I would stay away from almost all camping units.  Some are okay, but by and large they are crappy illumination.  Just get a thirty watt monocrystalline panel ( $88 with free shipping from Amazon ) and a $65 marine battery and use that to run 12v car LED bulbs.  Buy an auto store bulb base, and run two wires ( + and - ) from battery to base and there is your very bright, five watt draw light for the night.  You can also then use that for other 12v appliances-perhaps even a small TV ( with additional panels, of course ).  Actually, nowadays, electronics is the one place you don’t have to live primitively as long as you keep track of the usage.  Showering is easy enough with a solar camping shower ( if the sun isn’t out, pour in water heated with propane ).  Or just Whore Bath with a nice big thick washcloth.  Bathe one night, wash your hair the next.  Use a two liter pop bottle with holes drilled in the cap ( you can drill with a screw and a screwdriver ) for rinsing off dishes ( washed in a plastic tote ).  Believe me, once you haul water from town, you’ll learn to use very little very quickly.  Coffee tastes great using a campfire percolator- I totally call Useless As Teets On A Bull with the 12v coffee maker.  Wash your cloths in a Laundromat in town.  Camping out ain’t too bad this way, as long as you keep dry from the rain and warm at night and rig a “porch” of some kind screened in to keep bugs away.

END

 

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6 months escape/prep 4

SIX MONTHS ESCAPE/PREP 4

( Six Months To Escaping The Rat Race And Preparing For The Apocalypse Cash On The Barrelhead )

 

Living Like A Bare Assed Savage

I know that we would all prefer to have the Apocalypse Fairy wave her ( yes, her-as is Shiva Destroyer Of Worlds ) magic wand over our sad and pathetic heads and sprinkle sparkling unicorn dust on us and then pull a Leprechaun with a magically delicious bag of gold out of her ass and POOF before you know it we  are sitting atop a mountain in a concrete Fortress O’ Doom with an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons and enough MRE’s to stop all our colon functions, but in Reality Land ( also known as “Life Is Like A Crap Sandwich- The More Bread You Got The Less Crap You Got To Eat” ) there is no such thing as a free lunch and to get There from Here we must sacrifice and work hard.  This is altogether a foreign concept for most of us, having cast the dice and thrown in our lot with Oil Age decadent living.  And the few of us that don’t either have older age against us ( by the time you achieve wisdom, your body decides it is wise to start breaking down- this isn’t a response to the indignities of youth you have visited upon it but just simple chemistry.  Once you procreate, your body abandons you and treats you vilely, as badly as a corporation treats its workforce ) or are still young enough to think they know better than I.

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For two or three months, you are going to be living out of a tent.  Or, if your car was already paid for and you brought it along, living out of a tent and your car ( a car without tags or insurance.  I don’t care if your car “only” takes $100 to run.  You are supposed to be saving EVERYTHING not food related.  Exception:  you can’t find a job close enough to bike AND in addition you already have a good chunk of change in preps which you can subtract from the total such as the two or three rifles ).  You are going to be cooking over a propane camp stove ( do NOT buy a Wal-Mart unit.  They used to last five years.  Now they last five months.  I tried two new ones to be sure, and yes, the second one also only lasted about half a year under daily use.  You are SO friggin welcome I spend more money on you than I get from my writing, to save you money.  I am as a saint ).  If you are lucky, you can bring ice home from town in a cooler in your bike basket ( use a larger cooler on site.  Put the block of ice at an elevated spot, then your food just off the floor of the chest so as not to stand in water.  The cold air falls to refrigerate your food.  It won’t keep raw meat, but it will keep daily and deli which is a far sight better than just eating out of cans ).

This part continued next post.

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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon ad graphics at the top of the page. You can purchase anything, not just the linked item. Enter Amazon through my item link and then go to whatever other item you desire. As long as you don’t leave Amazon until after the order is placed, I get credit for your purchase.  For those that can’t get the ads because they are blocked by your software, just PayPal me occasionally or buy me something from my Amazon Wish List once a year.

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PODA weapons devolution 3 part 2

PODA WEAPONS DEVOLUTION 3 part 2

Logistics

Since you can only fight with what you have, nomads have a hard time fashioning armor and weapons from sheep ( they make a mean insulated tent however ).  Without agriculture to produce excess food to feed soldiers they both can’t engage in manufacturing nor hold land.  Without land there is no crops nor factories.  The whole thing feeds on itself.  A symbiosis.  Farmers can produce a surplus which allows manufacturing and an army which was needed in the first place to allow a food surplus to be grown.  By definition, agricultural empires have to start small, feed its rise on the corpses of other groups, and continue to grow to survive least they be eclipsed by a group growing quicker.  This is why empires always without exception are agricultural based and expand til death.  And don’t give me examples from the last 500 years when empires declined slowly and in relative peace.  They were occupied by another empire until the new one imploded, or they were rich enough that a new one kept taking over, or they just faded into a backwater.  A collapse isn’t always as messy as the Romans or Mayans- sometimes migration is greater than famine ( and less deadly as long as the migrants are needed elsewhere, even as slaves ).  A civilization collapse is a die off when the surrounding area is denuded.  If it is just a political/military transfer with resources remaining it isn’t as bad.  And the European global colonization was both a one off event and unique in other ways.  When the future mirrors the past, it isn’t going to be from this time period.

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Because growth determines empires, mass production always plays a part ( he wins “who gets there firstest with the mostest” ).  From the first Mesopotamian armies to today, warfare is the best example of environmental degrading consumption.  Mining your assets to the point of exhaustion is part and parcel with empire building and position holding.  That is how you win.  The trick is to be the last to run out-which pretty much nicely sums up human survival as a species.  There is a reason we stay tribal and hostile.  Scarcity is normal, outside the Oil Age.  So it doesn’t matter how quickly you use up resources to defeat all your rivals, it matters more that he runs out first.  And if you aren’t able to extract and build and consume faster, you will be defeated and overrun.  Nomads can survive because no one wants their land.  A remote hidden agricultural area surrounded by a defensive moat of hostile to their enemies nomads is the only way farmers can be peaceful and unwarlike.  Otherwise, they had better be bigger and badder than everyone else. 

END 

Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon ad graphics at the top of the page. You can purchase anything, not just the linked item. Enter Amazon through my item link and then go to whatever other item you desire. As long as you don’t leave Amazon until after the order is placed, I get credit for your purchase.  For those that can’t get the ads because they are blocked by your software, just PayPal me occasionally or buy me something from my Amazon Wish List once a year.

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Spud emergency fund

SPUD EMERGENCY FUND
I'd like to start a Bison Minion Relief Fund for reader Spud hit in an accident.   I'm in for $50. Anyone else like to help? I trust Spud is who he's always claimed to be, and this is a genuine emergency. Come Tuesday ( when I get back ), let's see what everyone says. Yes, I know he isn't asking anyone for anything. I'm offering. If anyone else can help, maybe we can make a slight difference.   Leave comments or e-mail me jimd303@reagan.com

PODA weapons devolution 3

PODA WEAPONS DEVOLUTION 3

Logistics

The old saw on amateurs studying strategy and professionals studying logistics is one of those that everyone has heard of yet nobody can be bothered with because it just ain’t very cool.  The guy that figures out how to trap the enemy into a corner and then proceeds to blast each and every body into subatomic particles using several tons of explosives per pound of flesh is oohed and awed  by his compatriots and bought drinks at the officers club and given bright shiny metals like some of those weird Soviet dudes who were so bejeweled with awards they seriously listed to the left and yet the guy that figured out how to get all those bombs past the Hippie protesters and on to a ship past striking longshoreman and through a storm and then unloaded under enemy mortar fire and through the jungle on trucks past ambushes and then probably on to helicopters was just some Poindexter with thick framed glasses who was thin and weak chinned  and got no respect and was only the towel boy in High School football and the jocks threw spitballs at the back of his oily head.  And yet, even THAT ain’t logistics.  That is a transportation problem that most brilliant military commanders have solved-and there are few enough of them out there that history has got a record on most of them.  They call that logistics, and it is.  But TRUE logistics is at a whole other level, that of not transportation but of production.

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I’m not trying to redefine that which is more than adequately labeled but merely trying to get you to see a difference between the means of production and the means of moving that production.  Without one you can’t have another and both are essential.  For instance, Germany has a wonderful system of rivers which are a real advantage in low cost and low energy logistics.  Then they militarized their rail production early on to compliment the previous water system.  But because they have always been a resource poor nation ( they have ore and coal but not in the quantities needed to compete with a lot of other nations jockeying for power and certainly no where near their neighbor Russia- of course, NOBODY uses their limited resources as smartly as the Germans do, probably not even the Japanese ), and because they have no natural defenses they must always be offensively minded  ( which is not the greatest mix of problems to have ), they are always going to be at a disadvantage.  Resources must be there, they must be well managed, and they must be transported intelligently and timely.  That is logistics.  First, you must have the needed materials.  Second, you need to extract/form them ( and those two must have an infrastructure installed to do so, part of the cost of logistics ).  Third, what is traditionally thought of logistics, the getting stuff over yonder. 

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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon ad graphics at the top of the page. You can purchase anything, not just the linked item. Enter Amazon through my item link and then go to whatever other item you desire. As long as you don’t leave Amazon until after the order is placed, I get credit for your purchase.  For those that can’t get the ads because they are blocked by your software, just PayPal me occasionally or buy me something from my Amazon Wish List once a year.

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6 months escape/prep 3

SIX MONTHS ESCAPE/PREP 3

( Six Months To Escaping The Rat Race And Preparing For The Apocalypse Cash On The Barrelhead )

 

Six Months Wages

If you can’t provide for yourself, your wife and your spawn after the apocalypse with a mere eight or nine thousand dollars- half the price of a starter car before finance charges- you are simply not worthy.  And if you act now before the dollar is reduced to toilet paper I’ll even throw in paid for land just in case the collapse doesn’t go forward on schedule and you need to survive a mere society functioning Super Duper Deluxe Economic Collapse ( as opposed to our current Blasé Economic Collapse ).  In fact, I’d pay the land off first.  You are going to lose your job before the ass falls out of civilization.  Okay, I promised a no-to-little money down cash on the barrelhead apoc prep and here it is.  I’m sticking with six months regardless of personal circumstances because in my humble estimation anyone and everyone has the necessary assets they can liquidate to cover six months of undischargeable expenses.  If a student loan is $100 a month, you just need that amount to get through this.  Once you are paid off on your far more important investment, Rat Race Bail And Apocalypse Stash Investment, you can go back paying the student loan out of wages.  If you have a mortgage to pay, I imagine you can skip on those six months payment, if not be absolved from a total amount of the home equity.  I’m therefor going to assume full wage savings except for bare necessities such as food and propane and medications.  The car is repo’ed, the credit cards on hold as you file for bankruptcy.  Between yourself and the spouse, both earning minimum wage, you bring home $2,000.

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Put aside $400 a month for bare basics and in six months you’ve saved almost ten grand.  I understand it isn’t going to be quite so sim-le.  You’ve got to find junk land, move there,  then both find work.  But if you’ve liquidated everything, there is very little to move except some cloths and personal items.  They have a thing called U-Haul.  Use a small truck and move to your land.  Pitch a tent and start your camping.  It shouldn’t last but a few months.  You don’t need to live that way the whole six months.  The first month, pay off the land.  You might think a food stockpile or guns are more important, but you are playing the odds an economic collapse of severe magnitude happens prior to a complete dollar collapse or trade disruption.  The second month buys the lumber and supplies needed to build a Unibomber Shack.  The next four months are Apocalypse stockpile months ( we’ll cover them in their individual sections ).  After six months, you go down to one family worker, pay off your old life financial obligations and still have money left over to enjoy.

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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon ad graphics at the top of the page. You can purchase anything, not just the linked item. Enter Amazon through my item link and then go to whatever other item you desire. As long as you don’t leave Amazon until after the order is placed, I get credit for your purchase.  For those that can’t get the ads because they are blocked by your software, just PayPal me occasionally or buy me something from my Amazon Wish List once a year.

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All My Contact Info, Books For Sale, Links:

http://bisonprepper.blogspot.com/2014/05/my-information.html