insurance 3 of 3

SLOW COLLAPSE INSURANCE 3

My normal advice to everyone is that you should max out the amount of money Uncle Sugar gives you.  This isn’t taking away from your grandchildren-that argument assumes we never run out of energy or money and was moot from the Reagan administration on anyway.  The FedGov needs to borrow money to pay interest on the old amount it borrowed and I don’t know where you learned your economics but in my learnin’ book that means you are already bankrupt.  Taking gov money now is merely increasing the odds of your survival later since that is more preps now.  The Titanic is sinking, so why worry about the ownership of the gold trim in the purser’s office?  Just take the bitch and jump in a lifeboat.  What, it’s better to leave it to sink to the bottom?  Think rationally rather than emotionally.  Having said that, I of course excuse myself from my own advice and am not collecting Food Stamps.  Instead of eating on $50-$100 a month I could get almost $200 and that extra money could go to preps.

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Well, it is kind of a challenge living without bennies, I’ll admit.  But I enjoy it, kind of a superiority feeling “anything you can do I can do better!” as the song says.  And while I’m not lazy, I am adamant about living the rest of my life while minimizing my stress.  I had enough of that the last two and a half decades.  Plus, I really just don’t care.  How many more prep supplies do I need?  Sure, I could get MORE of the same, but why?  To what purpose?  I think I have way more than everything I need to live out the rest of my natural life, let alone my untimely death come the apocalypse ( remember, preps aren’t to assure your survival, they are for IF you survive ).  It is probably just as important to know when to stop prepping as it is to know when to begin or how much to get.  And you can have TOO much, believe it or not.  If I had ten or twenty years of food, and/or more than the bare minimum, how motivated would I be to get off my ass and go get me some more elsewhere?  The limit is what lights the fire under your ass motivationally.  And, yes, I know we keep tiptoeing around the sensitive issue of stealing or killing in relation to food.  Sorry, but YOUR morality and good intentions don’t stop others from acting poorly.  And morality and good intentions are only applicable to your own tribe.  If you love and honor and protect the old, pregnant and young from another tribe, for instance by refusing to take their food and hence killing them, you are in the long run endangering the infirm, breeders and children of your own tribe.  Yeh, not living in surplus is a bitch.

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Another aspect of not bothering with Food Stamps is that I eliminate their eventual demise as a factor in my planning.  Since I know it will just be a temporary fix, I’m not bothered with their absence ( not to say for some bizarre reason I won’t be forced on to them, nor that you shouldn’t get on them post haste if your preps are short ).  Sure, I’m still “planning” on Social Security, in that if they are still around I’ll go ahead and collect them ( not that I really think the system will last ten more years as that takes us too closely to the Olduvai Theory date of 2030 as the year our oil supply matches a century ago which is obviously unsustainable ).  Why, I’m not sure.  I still plan on writing up to the day the Internet goes tits up and cold.  Perhaps all of you will be broke by then and I’ll need money from another source.  Remember, not burning any bridges.  I just can’t see it being around.  There are simply too many issues with our energy supply and our way of life that precludes assuming a soft landing. 

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Great Britain might have been able to hang on after empire by virtue of its small size, North Sea oil, coal and public transportation, but the US has none of these virtues.  Plus Britain is our obsequious butt buddy in the Global War On Terror and other central bank shenanigans for the very reason that their energy supply has contracted so far they need our scraps to survive.  They are not a good post-imperial role model.  Japan might be a better one as they are limping along after their economic collapse and nuclear disaster.  Not that we can emulate them due to their close knit tribal nature and our not so very homogenous population.  But they sure do know how to survive with a lot less energy.  Well, we could talk about the reasons business as usual and can kicking are unlikely but I think we all assume as such anyway.  How does one get Slow Collapse Insurance?  Sure, I’ve strung you along for nearly four thousand words now, but it is actually quite simple and easy.  Well, in theory if not practice.  Can you survive on your own without money for six to twelve months ( surely far longer than the system will last without food distribution on par with today’s norm )?

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And I’m not talking about having extra savings.  I’m talking about having the supplies to live off of for that time, above and beyond your post-apocalypse storage items.  If you’ve been following the discussion on canned or frozen meat, you know where I’m going with this.  Can you eat off of your perishables for the time it takes between infrastructure break-down to the final infrastructure collapse?  Housing is of course an issue, but not necessarily an insurmountable one ( we assume here you keep working during this time, or at least want the option to-this isn’t batten down the hatches just yet, unless you live near the ghetto, although it could be if you want a real early start on bugging out.  Obviously there is little way to assume a time frame for this event ).  Medical of course is off the table completely unless you can survive now by fudging your pill popping regime and squirrel away some meds slowly but surely.  Medical care is already past the point of incompetence as the new normal, so it won’t take much to get to “even bad care now isn’t available”.  You don’t need a solar storm knocking out the electric to reach the point where hospitals aren’t getting high tech machine parts replaced or disposable items restocked.  Hell, a few Chinese hacker attacks can play havoc on ANY of our systems.  Put yourself in their shoes, look at the unprovoked attacks on Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as our proxy Saudi Arabia’s wars in Yemen and Qatar, and tell me you wouldn’t try to take down the psycho bitch that is the US?  PetroDollar collapse, economic collapse and hacker attacks simultaneously, anyone?

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I guess the best comparison right now is Venezuela.  I HATE, with a purple friggin passion, the pretty pony preppers  glomming on to that countries collapse as a “life lesson”, as they inevitably go full retard and blame it all on socialism rather than its more obvious petroleum issue ( but, but, how could that possibly be?  Why, if ‘Murica is two hundred years energy independent on fracking oil, how come Venezuela isn’t the same after a century of oil production?  I’m so confused!  I better go buy a FLIR scope so the world makes sense again! ).  But as far as an illustration of how social services break down and food delivery is problematic yet the government is still slaughtering its way to dominance, it does serve as a very good example.  Think of them and think what it is like surviving on intermittent power supplies, grocery deliveries and etcetera.  I can’t imagine our society will survive as long as theirs has in that state, as there it is the 1% against the 99%, whereas here we are much more fragmented and hostile and spoiled, but I suppose it is possible.

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You need a food insurance hedge to get you from Everyday Wal-Mart Shopping to the true apocalypse, and what better way to do that than by buying daily current food ahead of time?  Food you are going to eat anyway.  It is money up front, but it isn’t extra money.  In fact, as already discussed, it might be LESS money, as you save on sales and bulk.  You need motivation to do so, don’t worry your pretty little heads about all my personal complete collapse fears, just picture Venezuela.  Even short term, less than complete collapse, issues and events can get us to that point.  You can’t eat beef and butter after the apocalypse but you sure can take your cupboard and freezer ( yes, freezing might be an issue with regular brown-outs, so proceed with caution obviously ) from a months supply to six or twelve months supply and enjoy those very luxuries in the pre-collapse phase.  And you should.

END ( article related link http://amzn.to/2gY6eC6 )

 

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.  Or, send an extra buck and I'll send you a CD ( the file is in PDF.  I’ll waive this fee if you order three or more books at one time ).  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

 

insurance 2 of 3

SLOW COLLAPSE INSURANCE 2

We all pretty much agree that expecting Business As Usual to prevail until suddenly an overnight collapse sees you on your way four wheeling to your retreat which was under an insane amount of debt but which is now free since the bankers magically just disappeared along with the White House as Jerry Jihad nuked DC’s ass, well, that might not be the smartest prepping plan under your purview.  We have been in a slow collapse for almost fifty years, or about fifty because obviously Peak Oil and the gold window closing and the PetroDollar institution shouldn’t be considered an overnight cause of economic collapse but rather symptoms and so it is hard to pinpoint exactly when in the ‘60’s things started falling apart but I’d wager the end of the Baby Boomer era at the  beginning of 1965 might have been the first indicator since tens of millions of couples independently decided that their  personal circumstances dictated against spawning and there had to be a reason for that but it did take a few years after that for the general economic signs to manifest themselves.  It could have been something as simple as US Peak Iron Ore which occurred in the late Fifties, which might have been an early alert as the commodity copper is now.  Alas, it is all academic at this point and I think calling the beginning at 1967 might not technically be correct but it is ball park and a nice round number.

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Even if you agree with me that collapses are not Stair Step, nor are they inverted L’s but rather Waterfall in shape ( slow smooth decline until a sudden drop off the cliff ), it is still prudent to know that the best model never matches to reality completely.  We all depend on the welfare state, or the Public Safety Net if that title makes you feel better, for our emergency back-up in the economic collapse because it is difficult if not impossible to plan for both a long term of lack of welfare AND a long term after the collapse, mostly food wise.  It is hard enough to plan for five years of bare bones food, let alone five without Food Stamps and then five without oil ( twenty years food in wheat is affordable enough-the storage containers and the storage buildings for the containers are the main insurmountable costs for us po’ boys ).  We know with lack of food comes social unrest which is the last straw on the camels back once added to oil EROI collapse, economic collapse and centralization collapse.  No doubt the bitch goes up in flames once food doesn’t show up on the shelves.  But what if SOME food kept trickling in?  Enough supply disruptions occur that chaos ensues, but not enough to tip us over into anarchy.  It only takes long enough eliminating our current surplus that you’ll perhaps face the uncomfortable prospect of digging into your storage food.

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Well, of COURSE you should NEVER do this, as discussed previously, but allow me to propose a possible scenario.  I’ve previously complained that our private for profit corporations would starve us all as they sold our food to China for real wealth.  I probably based that on the doubling and tripling of food prices due to the ethanol fiasco ( prices are lowering now for basics-not processed-most likely simply due to lower demand.  You would think Mom getting unemployed the family does more home cooking rather than less, cooking from scratch, but evidently home cooking is now processed crap put in the microwave.  I could be wrong, but convenience and fast foods are going up in price and raw ingredients are going down, so there you go ).  Now I’m not so sure as it seems Chinas economy is much less sound than assumed.  But there is still huge profits to be assumed by selling to Uncle Sam.  As the recipients of Food Stamps increases, so does the sales of the major corporate conglomerates, both retail and food.  Food Stamps are welfare for the RICH, as the food growers and processors make millions, alongside big banks processing the EBT cards the bennies are stored on. 

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Wal-Mart saved a metric butt ton of money with ObamaCare, transferring employee bennies from the Walton fortune to DC.  The giant wheat growers/owners get paid handsomely through farmers aid and the corn growers make more through ethanol than sweetener ( you think the soda being sold as Retro, real sugar, is a return to concern for our health?  The cost of sugar can closely match that of corn syrup at times AND they charge you 30% more! ).  16% of ALL meals are served at McDonalds ( 40% of all meals are fast food, 40% of all fast food is Mickies ).  Corporations might, mostly, strive to sell you a cheap meal, but they make mega-bucks one nickel at a time.  The corporations investing in robots to process food cheaper need loans and the federal government needs loans to pay for Food Stamps and the central bank needs to make loans to somebody ( the public is tapped out, their credit revoked.  Gov loans or gov backed loans are where the action is now ).  It is all a cozy arrangement.

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Except.  Nothing works anymore and that is because, well, duh, we are in an accelerated collapse phase.  And, yes, I’m going to say it!  ENERGY.  That’s right bitches, energy, net energy.  I won’t say more right now.  You are so welcome.  Governments can’t even balance the budget.  Now, how hard is that?  They do a great job collecting money, yet can’t stop spending too much.  What a bunch of retards, they can’t even do one simple thing we pay them for, aligning two accounting columns.  Corporations can’t perform a simple function of selling a product at a profit.  They spend more effort cheating the customers and stock holders than offering a product.  And banks, even with FREE money they create out of thin air, can’t stop from going bankrupt.  Every level of society is incompetent and failing and it is NOT fixable ( the “e” word I can’t mention ).  So why should we assume that corporations are going to keep us fed, even as they make good money doing it?  If McDonalds can’t keep from feeding us pink slime sawdust, even with a 16% market share of the TOTAL frigging feed trough, the very epitome of the quantity manufacturing we’ve lived under for centuries, what hope that the entire industry can keep a simple logistics system functional and operating the moment the current system breaks down further?  The government can dump as many digits onto our Food Stamp cards as they desire, keeping up with hyperinflation, but we’ll still see huge disruptions in our food distribution system anyway.  We have all the gazillions we need to buy all the groceries we desire, but the food isn’t being delivered.

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When the last prop under the PetroDollar collapses, and there are so many different ways that could happen from Saudi refinery terror attack to Saudi shifting alliances to China to just one too many countries dropping the dollar as an oil purchase arrangement to Canada tar sands production disruption ( just one flood and one of their uranium mines took a big chunk out of global availability for quite a time ), we will see, instantly, inflation being exported as now to the inflation chickens coming home to roost.  It might not be hyper, but it will be at least higher, inflation.  And suddenly our entire economy sees another 2008 systematic failure.  Suddenly, the state issuing your food stamps screws up ( “borrows”, meaning “steals” ) federal funds and there is a delay getting you your bennies.  All at once, truckers go out of business, as soon as the inflation rate exceeds the companies razor thin profit margin.  Granted, their profit margins are crap because the dumb asses over borrowed to expand, but since they ALL did that they all operate under the same handicap. 

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The big combine manufacturers don’t get spare parts, and since they hold you hostage over proprietary software, you can’t fix it yourself.  Fuel shipments are late, delayed, or extra expensive, not because oil is but because the transport sector is, and food isn’t wantonly tossed about from warehouse to warehouse as it once was.  Delays of everything, price increases of everything, sudden toll road hikes or trucker safety inspection increases to jack up revenue for local governments starved for funds.  The system isn’t functioning now because it is so efficient, but because it is running on extra oil.  It is efficient only in money terms, and screwing with the money system screws with the efficiency.  Since profits are being squeezed everywhere, all proceeds of a shrinking pie being funneled into the failing banker sector, the only reason companies stay in business is by shrinking costs.  It doesn’t matter how, even if it is at the cost of staying in business in the future, it simply MUST be done.  And it has been, but it is a cannibalization.  Reverse the saving costs part, make ANYTHING more expensive, and nothing works in the private sector ( nothing is working, but there remains some functionality.  Increased cost kill that ).

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That concludes today’s discussion.  Continued and concluded tomorrow.

END ( related article link http://amzn.to/2gXsjkx )

 

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.  Or, send an extra buck and I'll send you a CD ( the file is in PDF.  I’ll waive this fee if you order three or more books at one time ).  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

 

insurance 1 of 3

SLOW COLLAPSE INSURANCE

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note: JS in ID, got your donation.  Generous to a fault, thanks!
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Well, I’m sure you are all pretty squared away for the collapse of civilization, or if you aren’t you possess a reasonable facsimile.  Sure, you might need five years of wheat at a minimum, but six months is far better than nothing especially since most of us prepping overstock our day to day cupboards anyway and between the two you might just have a years supply of food.  The extra fat almost all of us carry, an actual historical survival mechanism rather than something you need worry about ( unless you can’t see your dingus, in which case the fat went from beneficial mobile food reserve to health impediment.  For you gals, if your belly holds up your rack better than your bra does, you might be a bit overweight also ) will get us through the first month or two with extra calories so that prior to sitting on a rocker all day moaning about the second half of that Netflix series you’ll now never see you can accomplish those needed tasks such as bugging out or setting up camp security or cutting firewood or whatever.  Then you can go back to being as lazy as you were before, just with less calories doing it.

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The trick when you don’t have enough food is, hello Captain Obvious, getting more.  If your storage food amount is inadequate then you need to plan ahead better as to how you are going to get it.  My plan is to assume five years of food is equal to one or two at the most, two to three years in reserve because you need food storage even AFTER the apocalypse and up to one and a half serving as a double ration, with six months sedentary die-off rations.  So five years planned rations is six months die-off and six months double rations and the rest in reserve.  This is going to be flexible because it depends when the collapse happens and when the next crop is going to come in.  I could, for instance, await the die-off and arrive in time for productive potato fields, or not.  I might have to wait for the wheat crop and go fight for that instead.  That is what the double rations are for, the energy to actually transport to the fight.  Sorry if this is an uncomfortable subject, but killing for food is how things are initially, despite the sanitized versions you have dancing in your heads.  You are stealing food or killing those who might steal your food later, and that is it simply boiled down to basics.

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If you only have six months wheat ration plus the cupboard items you need to follow the standard protocol of hiding out the six months which is the assumed maximum die-off event duration, which will take the minimum amount of calories.  But then you need to double up to go on the offensive, so you only have two or three months to go fight and secure your food.  With no reserve.  I would strongly suggest you consider the wheat at one year as a bare minimum, as well as stocking your retreat location with an abundance of regular non-perishables.  Six months is VERY uncomfortable of a cushion.  That seasonal food question can bugger up anyone’s plans.  But assuming you can make that two month window work on your less than recommended amount of storage foods, it is a far better plan than what everyone else has.  Which is basically fighting for the food on hand, immediately.  Since that is the default plan of the entire population you’ve wisely found a bug out location ( PRE-stocked, damnit!  I’m not a fan of most buggin in, or bugging out past a certain distance but however you do it make sure it is ready at a moments notice.  The collapse SHOULDN’T be overnight as that defies all hope and logic, but since it COULD be… ) to go to ground at to wait out that stupidity.

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Which brings up ammunition, which you probably don’t have enough of.  Despite the seemingly universality of the prepper stereotyped ammo case stacker, most of us realistically are probably as deficient in ammunition as we are in wheat.  Well, after the six month period it is probably a very safe bet that a lot of that irreplaceable ammunition that the semi-simians thought would be soon replaced by the victorious Christian Militia  re-opening the three hundred year fracking wells is in fact all used up and NOT magically replenished and the only survivors of the die-off period fighting actually learned to husband their ammunition through altering tactics.  Even those with semi’s will be sipping rather than slurping the last of the ammo, so your embarrassingly small stockpile will be on par with most others.  As long as you assume from day one that you are a guerrilla without resupply, you should do okay.  Not great, but okay.  Now do you see the attraction of a bayonet?  Great for administering a coup de grace, saving on ammo.  A battlefield back-up, saving on the ammo and weight of that hypothetical pistol.  And etcetera.

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So, even those not exactly ready or equipped for the complete collapse are somewhat prepared as long as their plans reflect their logistics.  So when I say we’ve pretty much got the collapse covered I’m sure that includes everyone ( go back and see my article on even the homeless being able to prep ).  Now, what if that waterfall collapse DOESN’T happen?  I’m completely convinced it will, or I wouldn’t have lived my life like I did and am.  But I’ve never said the collapse is  guaranteed to happen by my reckoning.  I said you should assume and prep as if it would, as insurance against Worst Case Scenario.  If I’m wrong, no harm and no foul because you didn’t burn any bridges.  So you bought too many preps, who cares?  It was a hobby, and hobbies are a consumption rather than an investment.  But, it must be acknowledged, not burning your bridges only solved one problem.  And there are more than one of those.  So, you will still retire, or get Food Stamps to feed yourself on your junk land.  Fine, immediate future planned for.  But that assumes you have the economic collapse covered.  Which is GREAT.  Don’t misunderstand me.  You should have a bare bones kit for the collapse and then cover yourself for the economic collapse which comes before the civilization collapse.  Hell, we have been in an economic collapse most of our lives.  The difference is in severity and has been for a decade. 

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But if you think on it, most of our economic collapse insurance is premised on a functioning government.  I submit to you the possibility of a time period prior to civilization collapse and prior to governmental collapse which sees a cessation of ALL effective state welfare benefits.  Yes, I know we all assume the moment Food Stamps and Section Eight housing fail the streets will erupt in riots and the whole edifice crumbles.  I’m talking more about purchasing power, a hyperinflation scenario, as well as infrastructure issues.  The government certainly can print all the money it needs in that narrow window between the start of the rhetorical printing press and the end of its powers through civil unrest.  It could in theory give Tyrone the ghetto dweller twice the money as you get since you are white and own land ( currently the junk land doesn’t count against your benefits-although that could change.  Try to get that bitch under someone else’s ownership ), but I don’t know how much credence I give that whole “lib-tards are out to kill us through reverse racism” scare.  More realistically everyone gets increased COLA-cost of living allowance-since it is just a few taps of the federal reserve bank keyboard.

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Alas, our food growing and distribution system is privately run and while most of our lives we’ve heard nothing but capitalistic jingoism spouting nonsense to the effect that private enterprise is god like and any government interference is communism, the truth is a slight bit different.  Yes, private business is VASTLY more efficient.  But it isn’t efficient for the customers sake, but for the sake of the company.  Normally there would be nothing wrong with that, were capitalism in its growth phase.  But it isn’t, it is in its Right Side Of The Bell Curve phase.  Capitalism, it might do you good to remember, is the most efficient system to consume surplus resources.  Baring said surplus, it loses all its strengths and is then nothing more than dysfunctional.  Which is what we are seeing now.  You don’t destroy your customer base, your brand name, your national security and your ability to pay back growth loans in a functioning capitalistic economy.  Welcome to the Oil Age in decline.  Capitalism is just another victim, along with the nation state, welfare, industrialism and every damn thing you are used to, even if what you counted on was working poorly.  But soon it won’t work at all.  Which is what we must think about preparing for.  Continued tomorrow.

END ( article related link http://amzn.to/2eIU6EB )

 

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.  Or, send an extra buck and I'll send you a CD ( the file is in PDF.  I’ll waive this fee if you order three or more books at one time ).  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

 

forever shotgun

FOREVER SHOTGUN

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note: BP from NBH ( North BumHump, since I don't know where you hang your hat ), many thanks for a generous donation, and the kind words.
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note: a wonderful minion just sent these to me.  I don't know how they work but it looks like a nifty product to use with a wetstone for a great knife edge http://amzn.to/2uh9Kcv
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note: SH, double awesome donation!  Thanks a million!
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I offered one of the worlds best books, “Forever Gun”, last year.  If you for some bizarre reason missed it, it is available for the outrageously expensive cost of a whole friggin dollar, with a bonus book added, in Bison Book Batch #9.  I understand that some of you can’t fathom why they would cough up fifty cents to support an author, and to you I say, crap, never mind dude!  I guess you at least serve the purpose of inflating my reader numbers so I think I’m more important.  To quickly recap, although I of course think the whole book is well worth the read, if you reload your rimfire you can still get an entire arsenal for $300 if you can find a hundred dollar rifle.  The Forever Gun concept is that of being armed with smokeless powder long after all your enemies are using bows and crossbows and spears with the odd black powder musket thrown in.  Smokeless, even at rimfire and pistol cartridge strengths, or more properly, weaknesses, is far superior to other missile weapons, so you try to keep one going for, ideally, forever.  Hence the title.  I use an arbitrary number of rounds of ten thousand.

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Ten thousand rounds, used as a guerrilla warrior rather than a semi simian wildly hosing down the battlefield with lead hoping to hit something while frightening your enemies with the noise, should last a very long time indeed.  I’d strongly advise trying to get a rimfire revolver ( the semi is both a semi and won’t cycle with substandard rounds ) for another $200.  Normally I hate battlefield pistols, but with some weapons they are almost required.  Like when your rifle is an anemic rimfire.  If you want to step up your rounds wounding capacity you’ll need to go to the 9mm.  The reloads are much more reliable, and only twice the price ( 3 cent reloading supplies rimfire, six cents the 9 ), although the guns are $500 rather than $300 for a carbine/pistol combo, plus you’ll need magazines as an extra cost.  I covered other ways to achieve a Forever Gun, from extra reloading components for your battle rifle, to betting on being able to battlefield retrieve ammunition ( not that I think that will be viable unless we stay in a militia porn collapse rather than move to PODA ) and so owning the three main calibers in bolt rifles, to thirty cal inserts and I’m sure one or two others such as black powder.  What I didn’t cover in detail was the Forever Shotgun, only giving it a one sentence treatise on the last page of the book.  Let’s cover that a bit more.

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I suck at shooting a shotgun, pure and simple.  I’m about as accurate with a scatter gun as I am with a Chinese SKS without its sites adjusted ( in case you haven’t had the pleasure, try feet rather than inches at less than a hundred yards-I should have known there was a reason the thrift store always had them available for $100 ).  So I no longer own any just for that reason.  My relatively open local terrain is merely another reason to forego ownership.  Perhaps I have some weird bodily proportioning and can’t use a bead site.  I have no idea.  I won’t spend the money getting regular leaf and post sites on one of the guns to find out.  So a lot of this is academic.  Some of it you are going to have to experiment with.  The big one is primers.  You can go the smart and easy route and buy shotgun primers, and you may, but as usual I’m assuming complete and total money contraction issues and am going completely frugal.  Hell, the Forever Gun concept is purely optional as it is.  Why add to the cost?

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You need to focus on the feeding of your primary rifle first, as it is.  That is priority.  The Forever Gun is AFTER your main battle rifle has all the ammo you think necessary.  The Forever Gun is for when the better gun runs dry.  If you don’t care for the rimfire or a pistol carbine and if your terrain is appropriate, and if you really just love the shotgun, but are poor ( which would kind of be self evident as poor boys own shotguns rather than AR’s ), this might just be the Forever Gun you favor.  All it is is paper shotgun hulls and separate primer material and planning on using black powder as propellant.  Whereas a 9mm or a black powder rifle costs you $1200 on up for ten thousand rounds plus weapon, a reloaded rimfire or a shotgun both stay at the $300 mark, which is what it cost prior to about 2006 for buying 10k of factory rimfire plus the rifle.  A lot more preppers can afford $300 compared to $1300, and the whole point of the frugal forever gun is to be affordable so you can actually own it rather than dream of it.

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Now, this is by far no lazy mans arsenal.  You’ll need to make your own powder, covered below, and reload primers.  Here is the first issue you might encounter.  I don’t know if the amount of primer material used in a rimfire is sufficient to ignite a load of black powder in a shotgun shell.  I’m assuming if it is, you get the one cent cost. 

22LRreloader.com

That is the company that sells the rimfire reloader kit, along with the priming liquid that is $20 and is supposed to reload two thousand rimfire shells.  Obviously you’ll want to test this yourself rather than assume it will work, or then you might end up without as many rounds as you think.  My advice would be to ONLY use the reloading primer chemical if it is only one cent.  If it is two drops, double the cost, why bother?  Just spend three cents and get a factory made ready made more reliable shotgun primer. 

*

I’ve read many folks boasting they made black powder as kids, and an equal amount crying that its manufacture is more difficult than you imagine.  Granted, those kids probably just bought the ingredients rather than made them from the dirt in the chicken coup, or maybe they actually did have a copy of the Army Improvised Explosives.  I don’t know.  I do know that given the need, you’ll eventually get it right and if louse ridden near medieval dudes can make the stuff, you can too.  Just have paper instructions on a couple of different ways to do it.  I have several, but I tend to recommend this: Backwoodsman magazine, July/August 2007, the article “black powder just like grandma’s”.  It is nitrates from dirt, just like the Army instruction manual, and scraped off rust.  Now, that article used to be reprinted somewhere online, but a Google search reveals nothing, nor does searching this or my last blog.  I know I posted the link, but I can’t find it.  You might be stuck spending the $6 for the magazine issue.  I can’t vouch for the articles accuracy, but it seems to have become quite popular.

*

The longevity of the plastic hulls is not important.  They seem to be made from real crap, but since they are being used in a break open shotgun, paper or cardboard can easily be used instead.  Your gun can be as low as $100 this way, plus the twelve gauge has the cheapest ammo and it is the easiest to load with improvised material.  The bigger question is the life of the base.  They seem to usually be made of crap easily rusted steel rather than brass ( although I can’t vouch for this-I’m just going by appearances at the shooting range ).  You can buy a full length brass case for a buck each, but then you are negating your low price dictate.  I would just buy the loaded shells on sale for a quarter apiece and store them airtight, then when reloading keep the shells protected from moisture.  You’ll need to do that anyway once the paper hulls are being used.  I’m not sure about the longevity of all plastic shells.  If they can be re-used many times, if the base stays intact, you could always replace the upper part that is splitting with paper.  But, again, as you own the type of firearm this is something you’ll  need to experiment with.  If ALL shell types break, split, rust or disintegrate too quickly, this won’t even be a viable project.  The whole point to saving money is being able to reuse shells, besides skimping on the primer and having free powder.

*

I’d just assume that the Wal-Mart $100 single shot break open shotgun is a real piece of offal and try not to buy it.  But if you can’t find a used one for that price, and have no choice but to not spend any more than possible, it is an option.  The primer material is $100 for, in theory, your ten thousand rounds in reloads, so that leaves you $100 for the ammunition.  Primed empty cases are as low as about thirteen cents, or you can just buy a loaded shell for twice that price.  Four hundred rounds of factory ammo, or 800 for shells that need your powder added.  Your choice, if you are on this limited budget.  I wouldn’t worry overly much about the projectiles as you can pretty much shoot anything loose from a shotgun.  Pebbles, pieces of nails, rusty staples pulled out of cheaply constructed trailers.  Don’t do something stupid like a steel slug ( okay, I don‘t even know if that will be possible.  Perhaps you‘ll try to improvise something equally too rigid such as aluminum ), but otherwise the pellets can be as improvised as the hull.  Glue to attach the paper to the base is as easily improvised as pitch for fletching was. 

*

There might be a better way to do this, as I recall minion printed YouTube links previously.  You might instead opt for turning your war surplus bolt into a black powder rifle, hence only needing the three cent primer replacement, although I don’t know how many rounds you could shoot before fouling negated ejecting the case or how many times you could reload or how accurate it will be.  There are many factors.  But if nothing else, perhaps this got you thinking a bit outside the box.

END ( article related link http://amzn.to/2utXGX4 )

 

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lunch eaters-post 2 of 2 today

LUNCH EATERS-post 2 of 2 today

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note: HT in OZ, got your generous PayPal. First donation for this month.  Cheers!
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*

Way back when Orlov was just a guy writing a blog rather than a Global Publishing Empire too important to communicate with the proletariat for mere pennies in compensation, he came up with the term “lunch eaters” to describe American business leaders.  Perhaps the Russians had a similar term for front line management, like “vodka swillers”, denoting the singular activity they seem to be engaging in rather than what their job titles suggested.  American managers seemed to only ever be busy with business lunches.  The second boss I ever had as a manager ( the military doesn’t count as junior NCO was a position fraught with inactivity, more a pay grade than position, at least in practice ) was pretty gay over business lunches.  He had them almost every day, and if a fellow small business owner wasn’t available I would get drug along.  After a time it became pretty obvious it was more about slurping coffee, chugging cigarettes and shoving mediocre food than it was about conducting business.

*

And that wasn’t even a corporate lunch meeting but the Main Street version.  I can’t image the indigestion caused by the overuse of the Suits lingo mixed with the food.  Back when air fair was cheap, safe ( it might still be safer than highway travel, but it isn’t as safe compared to historic air travel, due to the differed maintenance and lesser quality parts and other cost cutting measures.  We are most assuredly back in the Rail Baron days of yore when workers were a disposable commodity and customer deaths were the cost of doing business with corporates ) and trouble free as terrorism was directed at the front line in the communists war-Other Places-rather than at the Intelligence Communities fellow countrymen, I was hanging around LAX waiting for a flight and had the life altering, mind melting displeasure of seeing the spectacle of a gaggle of businessmen trading high speed corporate gibberish with each other, competing seemingly as to whom the Brown Lips Award would be bestowed upon for the best jingoistic presentation.  I would imagine that a Pentagon table full of lesser officers pretending to communicate, awash in acronyms and Politically Correct code words, would sound about the same.

*

Perhaps a convention of college professors used to sound like this ( prior to schools of lower learning turning into a contest to see which pasty white professor could kiss the most Black ass trying to save their jobs, no pride left as they know their subset specialty knowledge has no application in the real world except blog publishing with its much lesser pay.  Thank Sweet Baby Jesus for graciously allowing me to cultivate a poor attitude so as to curtail any college attendance so I didn’t follow my love of social sciences into that death trap ).  All junior positions blatantly jockeying for power positions by attempting to appear the most knowledgeable.  Certainly the military has to be like this.  When officers are as incompetent as ours were, the larger the unit the more obvious, how else do you curry favor if not for performance than the appearance of performance.  Busy placing fresh coats of paint on the false fronts of prop Potemkin villages. 

*

What exactly do middle layers of management do?  They are supposed to manage information up and down the chain of command.  The old railroads formed according to this military system of command to organize more efficiency and increase profit making.  Each schedule and freight organization increased productivity.  This was a very good way of organizing a manufacturing economy, with its layers of parts and movement incomprehensible to a single mind.  Now, with computers, in theory, none of this manpower is necessary.  Yet you still have the layers of management.  Why?  Perhaps because leaders at all levels of the corporate structure are so idiotic that they are just playing the parts they learned in business school, themselves seventy five years out of date.  Perhaps the only role of leaders is to micromanage since few jobs are all that essential and all jobs must be molded to that business school façade of essentiality.  Form over function.  Perhaps because business is so inefficient and wasteful nowadays it doesn’t even matter what the Suits do as long as they look busy.

*

Noise passes for action.  Now, to travel back to yesteryear and borrow another phrase, if The Business Of America Is Business, and our business is poorly run, little more than asset stripping operations which by definition is a one-off event, can we extrapolate to conclude that the entire organization of empire is very poorly run indeed?  I mean, forget the multiple Trillions with a T in military spending unaccounted for ( I tend to believe those WERE accounted for but we are not entitled to know for what-such as, they were merely bribe monies for the declared enemy to not try too hard to defeat us militarily ), and just focus on your corner of the world where every organization on every level ( even our towns Food Bank, with three total levels of organization from worker bee to board of directors is hideously mismanaged.  Unless the whole point was to bilk the government and corporations of high un-entitled management salaries, then it might be considered a success ) simply does not work properly under any definition.

*

How do you take a small library and see it to financial insolvency?  The building is paid for.  You have a budget.  The budget includes salary, electric and books.  The budget is cut, you cut books and hours.  How is it always in financial mismanagement?  It isn’t even a retail business, which have to worry about lack of customers ( lack of library patrons is used as the excuse to cut budgets, granted, but that isn’t an immediate cause of closure ).  How do you screw that kind of stuff up?  An explanation would of course be that since everything surrounding you is dysfunctional, even when you bring common sense management to an organization to restore its solvency, you are not allowed to successfully implement it.  My point here today is that with your own eyes you are witnessing the Titanic crew all out on the deck watching the iceberg.  Nobody is at the controls.  It is as plain as the nose on your face.  If bad management is rewarded and good management is forbidden, it isn’t an absence of adequate leadership we are seeing but a systematic failure which is separate from that aspect.

*

You know what I’m going to say.  Energy.  You can try to ignore it, like a doctor looks at a bulimic and prescribes pills for the symptoms, completely ignoring the malnutrition and psychosis underlining causes, but that kind of ignorance is bliss only for the physician.  For the patient, not so much.  It isn’t because we are running out of energy, it is because we have already run out of enough conventional high yield energy.  That ship sailed in 2005, and all the fuss trying to fix a date for total energy peak-unconventional low energy being the main source of fuel now, even to some large degree in Saudi Arabia- is as productive as closing the barn door after the livestock got out.  Peak Oil is already baked into the cake because our entire global infrastructure ( to include banking and physical structure ) was built on cheap, abundant oil and we are only just slowing the decline with all of our efforts however misplaced and foolish they are.  You don’t expect a system built on one energy source to function on another, do you?  Try putting gasoline in your diesel and get back to me on that.

*

So we have a system of management built to manage a energy growth system, and the energy is not growing anymore ( even if the gross amount is increasing the net amount delivered is decreasing-follow the BTU’s.  Just like human organization is all about the food, systems organization is all about the surplus of resources or lack thereof.  No different, and even ultimately using the same fuel.  What started our modern banking system?  The flood of excess silver and gold into Europe, eventually making its way not to the Spanish government but to the Dutch who created an empire by banking.  Britain successfully picked up that organization and built their own empire with it-it wasn’t industrialism as much as central banking that fueled them although coal didn’t hurt.  But colonialism by industrial gunpowder armies, funded by the bank rather than the Crown, started it ) but contracting and is it any wonder we don’t know how to manage the opposite of what our system was?  Just as you can’t get a Soviet manager to take over a capitalism based firm, you can’t teach managers to manage growth and then have them take over shrinking economies.  And, to be fair, it wasn’t all that hard to manage growth.  Contraction without systematic support is a lot harder. 

*

How easy is it to manage your household budget if you get a raise every year?  Compared to how hard it is to manage as your hours are cut and the cost of living increases with no matching compensation?  That is our economy.  Decreasing energy to manage a high energy economy.  And, as I keep harping on but I don’t think most of you want to accept it, the PetroDollar arrangement is going off the rails and that is the only thing keeping this mess together right now.  Even the intentional money pit of financing fracking can’t continue if we can’t get free oil from overseas.  The dollar isn’t worth spit once we can’t print debt for others to buy oil with.  Our empire would have crashed with the defeat in Vietnam, as the Soviets did after Afghanistan, if it hadn’t been for Kissinger et all and the PetroDollar arrangement.  We just shifted from industrial army colonialism to oil economy colonialism.  That is endangered as oil supplies contract.  Mismanagement isn’t causing our economic problems, it is merely indicative. 

END ( article related link http://amzn.to/2eIClFq )

 

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.  Or, send an extra buck and I'll send you a CD ( the file is in PDF.  I’ll waive this fee if you order three or more books at one time ).  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

 

 

guest article post 1 of 2 today

GUEST ARTICLE-post 1 of 2 today

The Multitool Fallacy (but wait, there's more !)

 

First the positive : I carry a small quality multitool (Leatherman Juice CS4) with me and did so for the last 14 years. It has proven to be helpful now and then to do small, improvised repairs. I intend to carry it for another 14 years, since that little thing is durable.

 

Do I use it for something else than impromptu repairs ? Actually, I do use its perfect-sized screwdrivers to disassemble my cap & ball revolver, and on some other occasions on other firearms. So there's that. For anything else around the house, I have regular tools.

 

The Mutlitool Fallacy is the belief that all you need is a multitool. Actually, this way of reasoning goes beyond multitools, I will provide firearms and other examples below.

 

It used to be that useful mutlitools were relatively expensive, there have been improvements to that regard, and there are now good middle-range multitools available (and expensive ones are not necessarily good either).

 

A multitool is designed for small repairs and its main argument is that it is portable. That's it. In essence, they are foldable pliers with some Swiss knife stuff added wherever there is some space left.

 

In each functionality, any multitool will always be inferior to an entry-level tool (I'm excluding Chinese crap Tools In Name Only (TINO) here), and a good quality multitool is costing more than the sum of individual tools it encompasses.

 

This is why a multitool is a niche product. They exist since at least the Roman Empire (http://scoutmastercg.com/1800-year-old-roman-multi-tool/ ), so maybe they're also a sign of decadence :) Many people own one, but it should not be considered above its actual usefulness.

 

The definitive downside of a multitool is that you don't want to abuse them, although tools are made to be abused. If you break you 5 $ pliers you buy another pair, if you break the pliers on your Leatherman (or warp the handles) you can basically toss the thing away.

 

The “but wait there's more !” in the article's title refers to the kind of feature creep you find of inferior products in a desperate attempt to sex it up to the uninformed and the stupid (spoilers : it

works). Some examples : the tiny plastic magnifying glass or the infamous button compasses that doesn't work.

 

***

 

A firearms equivalent of a multitool is the M6 Aircrew Survival Weapon. It has its use, for instance if you're hiking or you're flying in a small aircraft (who knows ?). The Chiappa X-Caliber weapon sells for 688 $ but it includes eight 12ga adapters for following calibers : .380 ACP, 9mm Luger, .38 Special/.357 Magnum, .40 S&W, .44 Magnum, .45 ACP, .410/.45 Long Colt, .20 Gauge

 

https://www.cheaperthandirt.com/product/chiappa-m6-x-caliber-over-under-12-gauge-22-wmr-185-barrel-single-shot-fixed-fiber-optic-sight-picatinny-rails-caliber-conversion-set-polypropylene-foam-steel-matte-black-cf500-185-8053670716384.do

 

You can buy only the conversion kit for 268 $ ( https://www.cheaperthandirt.com/product/chiappa-x-caliber-12-gauge-break-action-shotgun-caliber-conversion-adpater-complete-set-steel-black-970387-8053670711495.do )

 

This means the weapon without the conversion kit costs 420 $. I don't say that the weapon is useless, even in a survivalist perspective, but that's a lot of money for a lowly combination hunting gun. For about half the price of the package I could buy a 99 $ Wal-Mart single shotgun and the conversion kit alone, or for under 15% of the price of the package only the single shotgun.

 

What inspired me to write this article is an afternoon spent at the shooting range with a guy who owns a crappy combination hunting gun that sometimes doesn't break open. It turns out he loses the zero of either his red-dot scope or his hunting scope whenever he switches them. This could be (only partially) mitigated by buying quite expensive scope bases instead of the half-assed entry-level crap he uses.

 

Side note : actually chinese crap is a blessing for some manufacturers who can afford to decrease the quality of their products because no matter what it'll be better than pot iron products from Confucius Central.

 

For what he spent one a single “multitool” firearm he could have purchased a scoped break-action rifle for 399 € ( https://www.chassemarket.com/pack-carabine-baikal-izh18-30-06-springfield.html ) and  a single-shot shot gun for 179 € (https://www.chassemarket.com/fusil-baikal-ij18.html ) , a total of 578 € (new !) rather than a second-hand combination gun for 700 € and a second-hand 150 € scope and endless frustration.

 

***

 

The final part of this article is about ourselves. As with everybody who lives in a dysfunctional society, Westerners are obsessed with being badasses, which make them automatically wusses in the first place (really it's like that kid who wants to have a toy gun so he can feel powerful).

 

So we have ludicrous macho stuff like the “Heinlein List” ( http://heinleinlist.com/ ) of stuff a single human being should be able to do, and ending with “specialization is for insects”.

 

On his list you'll find “program a computer” as well as “change diapers”. If only Billy Mays was still among us he could read that list with an Oxy Clean voice and then add : “but wait ! There's more !” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTpXh33Mbeg )

 

Yuppie survivalists think they have to do it all by themselves. You can do a lot of low-skill stuff by yourself, and already that is not so easy. Surviving the looming collapse is not about knowing how to butcher a hog or start a fire in the wilderness. At all.

 

The reality is, we all specialize, and because we specialize, we actually get better at other stuff than people who don't specialize. Having an experience of success in a complex endeavour (setting up a business for instance) teaches you efficiency and also how to subcontract the stuff that is critical to a specialist.

 

The contrary of that is Bubba, who'll lose his hand because he messed up with the gun and had no notion of what he was doing. In a functioning society, you have a lot of specialists, who do their job well, you depend upon them as they depend upon you. Yes, this sounds a lot like a beehive or anthill. Ask any Heinlein wanabee if he wants to receive surgery from a specialist or a non-specialist.

 

A society of multitools is going to suck and be frail, a society of dedicated tools is more resilient but less adaptative. It's all about the right mix.