bison survival blog

r and r

2012-02-01T12:54:00.000-08:00

R AND R

Henceforth and forever more ( or until I change my mind ), the new daily blog will be here:

http://jamesmdakin.blogspot.com/

Starting February 2nd 2012, this will be your Monday through Friday blog. I’m doing this for several reasons. First, one of these days I’ll get off my dead ass and compile the entire five and a quarter years of the Bison Blog together and charge you for the privilege of reading it ( like I do the old newsletter ). Don’t worry, a mere $3 or so. If I actually cleaned it up and indexed it I would charge more, but I don’t know if I’m that motivated. Secondly, I need a clean break from the Best Survivalist Blog Of All Time. My new blog will of course be strongly leaning towards prepping and such, but I want the freedom of occasionally writing about whatever and I don’t need the troll brigade crying about that article having nothing to do with the apocalypse. I understand why they did that before. They were getting info on one subject and expected that. Okay. But as I said yesterday, I’ve saturated the topic and am just repeating myself. If I need to take a day off and write about something else, I want to do so. I know I did that before, but I always tried to tie it into survivalism. I want the freedom to do that more often ( and, sure, it is my blog and I can write what I want to, but when you have financial supporters, there are certain expectations that must be met ). Oh, and I’m going back to a 7 am posting. Tomorrow’s article will be one written previously and held in reserve. So, I’ll write on my lunch break and you get it the next morning.

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Today’s article is R&R. Not Rest And Relaxation but rice and rimfire. Well, wheat or any other grain and rimfire or any kind of ammunition. For the prepper that has most everything, I can’t think of two other items that make more sense for unlimited stockpiling. Either for personal use of barter. Not that I like the idea of trading ammunition. Once our empire collapses ( and, one assumes, the globe follows as the oil runs out ), that will be the last of the high quality ammunition ever manufactured again. But let’s say you have an infection that will kill you without an antibiotic. Then it doesn’t matter. Your life is worth it. So your extra ammo becomes a life and death stockpiled item. You can plan to try to never sell it, but just in case you have to it will be available. Let’s say you have your five years of food, your ten thousand rounds of Russian bolt ammo. Your solar panels. Whatever. You already have a reasonable amount of precious metals ( not enough to drain your savings, but enough as an insurance hedge ). Mostly, you have everything you need. If you buy anymore it will just be duplicating. Or covering disasters so outside mathematical probability it seems silly to worry about ( like the Mayan thing ). If you continue to buy R&R, you have an investment worthy of multi-generational savings of true wealth.
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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Once the oil runs out, we will NEVER again be able to grow grain at such an insanely low price ( the lowest paid worker being able to buy a day’s calories for under three minutes of work ). And ammunition will become utter crap compared to today’s modern machine automated items. It will be mid seventeenth century quality, not twenty-first century. Now, once everyone goes to black powder, and once the die-off is over and sustainable organics start feeding us again, your investment is still secure. Because it was so cheap to procure, you shouldn’t ever lose value on it on a purchasing power basis. Granted, there is a bit of an expiration issue. Some grains last longer than others, and no matter how well stored, eventually ammo will start to turn. But it should last enough to make it through several generations. And it is far more affordable than gold. For the price of one ounce of gold, you can buy almost a ton of wheat. In a famine, how much gold do you think you can get for five years worth of food? And once most folks have wasted all their rimfire on squirrels, how much silver do you think you can get for those rounds when folks are hungry?

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This is one of the best cost verses returns I can think of. Cigarettes are too expensive ( if your area will grow tobacco, I’d invest in seeds and training for that ). Booze can too easily be homemade ( although of course, not until there is a food surplus ), but still too expensive even if it is a good initial trade item. And not only are R&R great returns, they are great items for yourself, regardless of a potential market. If you never sell it, they can at least keep you alive. Matches are easily substituted. There might be some demand for needles or sewing stuff, but I’d wager there are enough already around that it will take years before a demand develops. And you can’t eat matches or needles. Or kill something with them to eat ( as an aside, you might think about having traps, then selling that food for yet more rimfire ).

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

our decline is better than yours

2012-01-31T12:54:00.001-08:00

OUR DECLINE IS BETTER THAN YOURS

Before I say anything else, please note that I will continue to post drivel until either the day I die or it becomes uneconomical to do so ( for instance, if a tax was levied on the Web ). But there will be big changes afoot here. I’ll continue to post here Monday through Friday. Even if I really went south I’d still post at least once a week ( don’t worry, I don’t think it will come to that ). I just think I don’t care all that much anymore. I’ve posted for five years, almost every waking hour thinking about the subject of our collapse. I think I’m bored. Not only am I bored, I think it is getting harder and harder coming up with fresh subjects. I’ve always had my down periods, and then rebounded. I’ve always repeated, but managed to make up for it with new insights. I just think all that is getting harder and harder. I’m not burned out as far as being able to write, but burned out as far as being so inspired and motivated. Most of you are faithful minions and I want to keep this together, but I can’t help but wonder if its gone from me bringing up new things to ponder to just us sitting around and rehashing the same crap. I’ll keep writing, but this won’t be my main purpose in life anymore. I’m going to stop spending so much money buying books for research, and I’m going to stop caring so much if the Amazon commissions drop. If I’m not spending $120 a month on books, it won’t matter if I don’t get double that amount in commissions and Google ads and book revenues. This is going from a consuming all encompassing passion to just a hobby. And really, how long is it going to hold together anyhow? The post office and the Internet are both on borrowed time. Netflix is a business model in trouble, and so are blogs relying on ads. Last weekend I sat for hours and just pondered the upcoming pit project. It was a nice change of pace from trying to pull an article out of my butt. I think it is time for more Jim time. And it is necessary that I pull myself off the extra money tit before I become addicted. And the “spoiling myself with expensive books” tit. That one will be harder, but the extra money is going to preps. Some part of this is naked fear we are almost at the edge. I’m going to get serious about reloading components and especially rimfire. I played “big heepum business tycoon” role long enough. Time to stop investing in a micro-business and just go for more supplies. I’ll of course blather more on this another time.
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
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NPR was interviewing some author who wrote a book on North Korea. You know, that relatively harmless country we love to have lined up as a back up Evil Regime Of The Ages just in case a few ragheads with rocket launchers kick our ass in Afghanistan and we have to declare it pacified and desert it ( I’m sure most Afghans are wondering what friggin country we think we are rebuilding when they are still living in tribes ). We have to have SOME country to hate. It gives the sheeple something else to worry about in between Super Bowl Wardrobe Malfunctions, lest they shift their gaze to Quantitative Easing #6. It was fiction, but based on his stay there. Diane Rheem and him were breathlessly droning on how comical that government is. For instance, the one tourist hotel open only had two floors available. Our brave intrepid writer snuck around the deserted floors and noticed how all the other rooms were being stripped of fixtures to keep up appearances in the two open areas. And this was supposed to make us all superior and feel good about our standard of living. Really? Who has bridges falling into rivers? Who has vacant houses being copper mined, and the copper shipped over to China? At least the North Koreans are keeping their raw materials in house. Then he went on about how everyone is brainwashed. Really? Who supposedly has a Constitution? Who’s nation is full of uneducated idiots that think indefinite detention without charges is Constitutional? We blindly go alone with the Kenyans declarations of a dictator and spew about how we are the freest country on earth, and THEY are the brainwashed ones? Then there was some other nonsense about incompetent spying. I’m not sure how competent the TSA is compared to any Third World group of wanna-be KGB goons. Perhaps they are more professional than those jack booted thugs in, say, the Congo, but I wouldn’t put the rent money on that wager.

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In short, we are as sad and pathetic as North Korea, but far more dangerous as we have more precise nuclear missiles. We have nothing to be gloating about. Yes, I love the idea of America. Too bad it’s a foreign land I’ll never find. And no, I wouldn’t

rather be living in Korea. But if we lie to ourselves and pretend nothing is amiss, nothing will ever change. You can’t fix a problem you don’t admit to having. But I think the thing that really chaps my ass is they insult our intelligence assuming we will buy into this crap. Of course, it could just be it underlines of apathy. Or it could be the Wet Spaghetti Theory Of Propaganda. Throw enough half baked notions against the wall and some is apt to be done enough that it will stick. Bombard us with enough manure and something is going to grow. Repeat a lie enough times and the most resistant will eventually just accept it so it stops bothering them. So why do I cry and you listen? Perhaps its just our brand of circus to entertain us through the collapse. Cheers.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

frugal move

2012-01-30T12:56:00.000-08:00

FRUGAL MOVE

Before we get into the meat of today’s article, and I’m sure there is no hurry because most of you who’ve stuck around a few years have heard it all before and all you new minions will swiftly desert away to a nice safe Yuppie blog where no one panics or gets upset that the middle class way of life is doomed ( and that includes pampered wives, bug out four wheel drives and a job that allows you to buy twenty three semi-automatic weapons ) as soon as I mention such forbidden words as Peak Oil or PODA ( post oil dark ages ) so I’m being a swell fellow and allowing you this heads up to do so, we’ll talk about today’s little news item with Freddie Mac or Fannie May or whichever Federal Reserve Bank bailout recipient it was that just had an “expose” about how they are actually out to hump you dry. I’m not the least bit surprised about this but apparently National Pravda Radio is all atwitter over said event. It seems FM is taking out derivatives betting against its customers being able to get their loans at a lower interest rate. Everyone is shouting “conflict of interest”. I’m wondering when these idiots are going to learn that “they” are indeed out to get you. I’m also wondering how hard it is to figure out that a bank loses money if you pay them less interest. Then I absentmindedly wonder how close to going belly up these folks at FM are if they are STILL playing with derivatives even after the real estate bubble, and how indicative they are of our whole financial system.
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
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Because that is our main worry, isn’t it? We have no idea when the entire system takes a big wet runny dump. The people in the World Bank or suchlike are crying on cue to sell the idea of more quantitative easing. The gold bugs are crying imminent crash to sell their wares. The freeze dried food guys the same, and I cry Apocalypse Now through good times and bad. But it is just common sense that kicking the can down the road eventually leads to the road running out. We know it is coming but nobody knows when or how bad. I think we should assume the worse just to play it safe. Which means getting the hell out of the big city. Granted, you could die just as easy in a small town, but the odds are better when you get out of an urban jungle. I still think you should bug out now, while there are no hostile crowds in your way, before the government can blockade you in ( the Warsaw Jews put up one hell of a commendable and courageous fight but in the end they were trapped ) and while you can still earn a living while you learn to live off grid ( it ain’t rocket science but it still requires practice and trial and error ). I’ve harped on this for years but I’m still getting that bad feeling like the cliff is near ( although to be fair I’m a bit of a nervous type and might be overreacting rather than picking up on a cosmic vibe only the reptilian part of the brain is tuned to ). Which might be why I’m so up in arms over “saving” the blog from imminent financial ruin. I might just be thinking it is doomed from grid crash and I’m picking up on the wrong worry. But who the hell knows. The nervous weasel makes a lot of wrong calls diving for safety. I’ve harped on junk land not because it is the perfect answer ( I don’t sell perfect, the Yuppie’s do ) but because it is the affordable answer. But I won’t try to resell you on the concept. You will either glom on to it or ignore it as is your wont. Here we just talk money, how to get to your land.

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Anybody can afford to move to a piece of junk land. What not everybody can afford is being able to move all their stuff to it. Your stuff is very expensive to move. A U-Haul is, let’s just ballpark it, about a buck a mile to rent the unit. And about fifty cents a mile for gasoline. This ain’t anything to worry about across the state, but it adds up quick across the country. You need to figure out if it is cheaper to do one of three things. Move it all, move some and replace some, or replace all. Of course, you can start over smaller and cheaper. You can use the excuse of needing to move to drastically par down your possessions if you so desire. Once you stop using your crap as an excuse, you will find that moving is as cheap as a Greyhound bus ticket or a discount plane ticket. Or, just as cheap as the price to fill your gas tank ( if you get thirty miles to the gallon, it will cost only three hundred bucks to move coast to coast, baring mechanical failure ). That U-haul will run you over four grand. Which is more than your land probably cost you. Now, I understand that we are all different. One of you has more tied up in ammunition than four grand, another has tens of thousands of dollars in books needed for reference as you write for a living. I can’t cover everyone’s situation because I don’t know them. I don’t know who has sick relatives, who has a nearby farm to go to, etc.

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I do know that in my own experience, paring my possessions down to a few duffle bags gave me the opportunity to move whenever and wherever I chose. I’ve lived most places other than Yankeeland. And when I hated it I just moved on with little lose. No investment, so no worries. That of course was before my children or most of my wives, but I’ve also just dumped all my prep gear and lit out half way across the country and started over again. Dumping all your possessions allows you to move freely about the country ( I think that was an old Southwest Airlines commercial ) and to start over smarter. I can’t tell you if that is as smart right now, collapse timeframe unknown, but it can’t be much worse than living in an almost guaranteed death trap. In short, moving to a safer place has nothing to do with financial ability and everything to do with your frame of mind. If you want it, it is as easy as can be. But for how much longer?

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

when you're in a collapse

2012-01-27T12:53:00.001-08:00

WHEN YOU’RE IN A COLLAPSE

Let’s just say, for the sake or argument, that I’m wrong. Let’s just say, acting on supreme ignorance in the face of facts, that Peak Oil never declines in our lifetime and we stay at Bumpy Plateau. In that case, I’d be wrong about collapse and the Druid Dude would be right about long decline. Hey, anything is possible. I’ve always thought a mortgage was a bad idea, but I was twenty years early in my paranoia. I’ve always hated cars, mainly because of the financial drain but also a lot of that is a fierce hatred against the whoring bastard insurance industry for jamming compulsory coverage down our throats. But by and large we still aren’t to the point where you can’t afford a car if you want one. So my timing really sucks on that one. I moved out to junk land only when a combination of economic collapse nationally met local sky high rents ( I knew I’d have to move eventually as rent went up 10% a year ) and then those two combined with the family planning on moving out of the area. In other words, I wasn’t a supreme strategic planner as much as I was just lucky. I’m usually right about the trend, but usually not for the reason I think, and never correct about the timing. I think the total collapse is just around the corner, but look at my track record before panicking.

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But here is my point. Even if I’m wrong, I could be right. As they say, when your neighbor loses a job it is a recession but when you lose your job it is a Depression. The same can be said of a collapse verses a decline. During a decline, you could very well end up dead or penniless and homeless. Let’s go back a short period in history. How about just the first half of the last century? You weren’t alive then, but it isn’t such oldie and moldy history that you might want to discard it. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, and Russia turned into the Soviet Union, Russia was never in a collapse. In general, food still got into the cities and you didn’t have mass casualties. Not die-off levels anyway. Society was never in danger of collapsing. But if you got caught in between warring factions, you ended up dead. Even if you didn’t starve, you probably had malnutrition and health issues. Did you get enough fuel? In short, you were in a collapse, personally. Looking back, in a macro sense, life in general went on. But even without a collapse, a large segment of the society suffered. Look at Germany at the end of WWII. Civilians were dying left and right. Starvation was rampant ( between the end of the fighting and the relief shipments from the US, there was plenty of time for plenty of folks to starve ). History shows a change of leadership, a continuity of governance. But people still died. Calling this a long decline rather than a collapse was technically true looking at the vast forest. Looking at the trees individually tells a different story.
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
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. Thank you.
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Now, people die everyday. Just because you are one of them doesn’t mean civilization is collapsing. I’m talking here instead of mass death and destruction that is hidden in the bigger trend. How can you call Rome a slow decline when invading barbarians sacked the city ( killing all males and violated the females and selling the children into slavery ), food shortages caused malnutrition which exasperated the effects of widespread plague, and hyperinflation wiped out your savings? That was a civilization collapse to the people that went through it. Because it took a few hundred years before the city was a deserted overgrown meadow doesn’t mean people didn’t die as if it were a collapse. Die-offs are messy. I’d state that the majority did NOT slowly adjust over several generations. The majority died violent deaths. How else do you have such a severe population drop? Remember that civilization collapse is resource depletion. To get the population back into equilibrium with the diminished productivity of the land, most must die. And most do not die peacefully in their sleep.

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Assuming that we do stay at the Bumpy Plateau ( the term describing the maxed out production of oil with blips up and down but staying within a certain range ), civilization per se has not yet collapsed. But far below that general trend, a lot of messy reconfigurations are going on. Tribes are fighting, natural disaster victims are receiving no help, infrastructure is not being replaced, quality of life declines and the unnatural death rates increase. Just like we’ve been seeing for the last five years or so. Do you honest injun really think New Orleans fifth ward, the island of Haiti ( okay, half the island comprising the country ), or Japans industrial city are ever going to be rebuilt? Do you think it will be safe to fish the Gulf within our lifetime? Do you think crime is going to decrease in Detroit? Who thinks stability will return to the middle east? The place is falling apart and slapping a fresh coat of paint in the front room doesn’t change things. We are already looking in the rear view mirror of the start of the decline, and there is no guarantee that a general collapse won’t happen. And a greater than even probability that your own personal collapse can occur any time. Sure, all the survival writers called for evacuation of urban areas in the seventies. And they were wrong. What did they lose? Future book sales. If you are wrong and stay where you are, what do you lose? Your life. Wake up about what you are betting.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

evolutionary biology

2012-01-26T12:58:00.000-08:00

EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Evolutionary biology is one of those simple concepts that should have been obvious but is hard to sell because of such things as political correct thinking ( an oxymoron to be sure ). Humans have evolved physically to solve problems. Now, if you argue with other educated religious scholars about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, this might not be the kind of theory you want to go embracing. Odds are, you will be burned at the stake for your troubles with independent thinking. Dogma can’t allow the most obviously innocent dissention into the conversation for fear of such mental activity. So, even though Darwin was a religious dude and simply said that God created the earth and evolution also, most folks tend to side with the idiot that did a few back of the envelope calculations and concluded that God created the earth whole clothe like three thousand years ago and that was that, end of argument. And just to light a fire under said religious folk, then you have equally baffling theories which worship at the scientific alter purporting that everything evolved from a primordial ooze. Which isn’t any more logical than the existence of God. But if I said that then said same scientists would have “proven” just fifty years ago that plate tectonics was wild quackery. Anyway, evolutionary biology might not be the end all and be all as a theory, but it certainly makes a bunch more sense than sociologists blathering on about “blank slates”. Which might have made sense at one time as there was little else to take its place but now compared to evolutionary biology it sounds pretty retarded. The blank slate theory blames ( or credits ) everything to environmental factors. These advocates are, say, purple haired fat lesbians that claim that if you raise a boy around ponies and tea sets he will be all in touch with his feminine side and be all loving and when he hits puberty he’ll grab the first male butt he sees and try to have carnal relations with it ( actually, the gay gene already gave way to the gay chemical imbalance, but that doesn’t sell in the PC crowd ). The evolutionary biologists on the other hand claim that male and female are born hard wired in their behavior because they evolved those characteristics to survive better.
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you
*
Anyone that has ever had a child knows this instinctively ( well, they start to know it after a few months- before that they are too sleep deprived to know much of anything ). Which is why lesbians are the chief guilty party for holding views to the contrary. The idiots are living in book theory instead of reality. Other characteristics have evolved to help us survive as a species. Culture, for one. We don’t conform to any old cultural trait. We wouldn’t learn how to be pony playing tea sipping butt pirates if our parents were plastic penile pumping carpet lickers. Culture has to reinforce what is already programmed into our brains. Boys are naturally aggressive. When you encourage that by letting them brain each other with rocks and tree branches, everyone is happy, even the boys with dented heads. When you penalize them in a sports team for being “mean” or “competitive” and give trophies for participation, everyone grows up maladjusted and confused ( and probably wanting to be gay even if they can’t pull it off ). And evolution is not a quick process ( except in catastrophic circumstances when all other traits are suddenly extinct ). You need a fairly stable long term situation ( which is why we still retain all our hunter gatherer traits- ten thousand years of farming is nothing compared to hundreds of thousands of years of killing bison and picking berries ).

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What does this have to do with survivalism? Easy. If you try to work against your programmed nature, you will lower your odds of survival. Right now, you are living as if the modern economy is how we are programmed to live and thrive. As if accumulating intangible wealth to acquire a mate is a viable strategy. Yes, right now that is what will attract a mate. But from a evolutionary biology standpoint, you are still a hunter gatherer. How good are you at hunting and gathering? I’m not saying that is a viable survival strategy after the collapse. There are way too many people, even after a 95% die off, and far too few animals. I’m saying that everything that has been culturally programmed into us is not a viable survival strategy. Women’s lib, the neutering of the males, all that sort of rot. Any female that sits there and cries to me about how oppressed women were a hundred years ago is as good as stewpot food. She has no idea how females have survived up until the modern era. They are the ones that lead males around by the gonads. The females are in charge, and the guys like it that way as long as they are able to act like they run things. And by the way, apropos to little, I’d like to throw in the fun filled fact as to why the female hourglass figure is so appealing. Fat on the breasts and thighs are signs of enough body fat for a healthy pregnancy, but show the right kinds of fat. Fat stomachs can easily point to health problems like diabetes and intestinal parasites. Males choose this body type as a preference, that body type is reproduced more, in time you get more of it. Evolutionary biology.

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I just got done reading three books on this subject ( although at the time I didn’t realize they all followed said theory ). The Red Queen, Why Wealthy Men Have More Daughters, and The Dark Side Of Man. Of the three, I’d recommend The Red Queen.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

perfect decline jobs

2012-01-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

PERFECT DECLINE JOBS

Okay, another one I wrote last weekend. I’m going to go over to my web site and add a page on the top 20 fiction books. I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile. Tomorrow I’ll be back on schedule. Here’s an extra tidbit for you- Shwan’s, the frozen food dudes that home deliver, is shutting down a bunch of distribution centers across the country. If you want their slop you’ll have to UPS it. My guess is that will be MORE expensive, and the company was never much of a bargain to begin with. To me, proof that the middle class and luxury spending is sharply contracting ( but don’t worry, North Dakota oil will allow green shoots to grow out of our ass any day now ). They said so, so it must be true. On to our regular article.

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Well, okay, no job is perfect. Because a job is work and work is a four letter word. But then again, the only thing worse than a job is no job ( kind of like the only thing worse than being married is being single ). What we will talk about here is jobs that actually have a future in a general decline and that have close to zero start up costs. But of course there is a catch. There is always a catch. Ain’t nothing free in life and what should be as obvious as my need to state the obvious. Entire generations thought they could get a free lunch ( Union wages, forced hiring quotas, Social Security benefits far exceeding what they paid into the system ) and now that the various levels of government are trying to modify the amount of free downwards the hue and cry from the public is deafening. So I guess most folks know there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch for the other idiots out there but they themselves are privileged and special. Anyways, back to the catch for a perfect job. You can’t expect to make too much money. In the past, rarified salaries were the expected norm. People sold their one hundred grand home for half a million, opened a granite top or a bead and trinket shop and expected to pull in big bucks. They were by gum special. Hey, Special Friggin Education. What moron can’t figure out salaries and home prices can’t grow upwards forever? The wave of the future is for wages to fall. They have stagnated for almost forty years. Through increased productivity, employee paid further education and computerization. Now add oil reduction and exponential debt growth to that and you get actual wage decline. For everyone except those that can steal it. If you can live on less, you will be welcomed in the future.

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Living on less is having no debt and little expenses. No mortgage, no rent, no car payments or its running expenses ( if you think auto insurance is high now, wait for consolidation and more government granted monopolies [ such as mandatory health insurance- Romney or Obammy, both whores to the financiers so be sure to vote carefully! ]. Don’t drive and free yourself ). Grow some of your food. Eat bulk for everything else ( that doesn’t mean a five gallon tub of Gummi Bears ). Now you can live on very little salary. If you can, read a copy of both Possum Living and How To Survive Without A Salary. If your needs are low, your salary can be also. And with a need to little salary, you can provide services poor people ( the only growing demographic ) will want to pay. If you need to pay a mortgage, pay off the truck, rent a retail office, etc., you have already priced yourself out of this market. The perfect, grow in contraction, almost no start up cost jobs are Alternate Energy, Bike Repair and Bike Hauling. Alternate energy is going to be such things as insulating and 12 volt power. Also solar cookers and water heaters. All the needed skills can be self taught online and through old issues of Mother Earth News ( you can buy the first ten years on CD for $20. I wouldn’t bother with much past that date as the corporate scumbags took over around then ). Bike repair is as easy as a book or two and practicing on your own bike. If you go to where folks need you, you eliminate most of your costs. Bike hauling fits in with almost zero operating costs and the growing segment of folks being priced out of the car ownership market ( and the growing old and feeble segment ).
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit

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*
You can’t sell your expertise at a high mark up with any of these jobs. If you do, the customer himself will perform the job. You want to price yourself under the threshold where it is worth the cost savings to do-it-yourself. For instance, if you charged $100 to install solar panels, most people would figure it out themselves ( perhaps buying $20 in beer to have a buddy come over and help ). If you just charged that $20, most people would conclude the cost savings weren’t worth them learning that new skill ( especially if it was a one time needed skill ). Usually, they could afford to insulate once ( say, using a years tax return ). They would gladly pay you $100 to get sweaty and itchy and finish it in one third the time. But they wouldn’t pay you hundreds ( my son works each summer on roofing. Him and a buddy charge double material cost as labor. Apparently that is much cheaper than from anyone else. And, he actually has high school carpentry training so it isn’t just two yahoos climbing around like monkeys. The community knows he is trained and experienced and works cheap ) or thousands like a contractor wants. Of course, there is always the problem of licenses and permits and required training. You are on your own figuring that out. The next, bicycle mechanics, is easy enough if you are klutz, and really simple if you are mechanically inclined. Which makes it easy to lose customers to do-it-yourself. You can’t expect to emulate retail bike shops and expect to be able to make all your money in tire repairs. Expect the crap jobs like bearing replacements. But by providing a come-to-you service ( their bike might be their only transportation at that date in the future ) free, and working cheap, you should always have some business.

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Bike hauling anyone can do. If they are in shape, own a bike and aren’t too old. If you are cheap enough and can undersell the guy who owns a jalopy truck, you will always have a market. Have a quality bike ( most folks will own a crappy Mart bike ) and a specialty trailer for serious weight ( they sell a trailer that can haul an electrical appliance- but it also handles four big 18 gallon totes or a piece of furniture ). As more folks go back to the city ( as they give up cars and commutes ), the easier your client growth gets. It doesn’t have to be a serious oil crunch. Higher inflation, higher unemployment, higher insurance- all point to decreasing car ownership. Most folks have eaten at the GM trough of death and having once valued their time more than their health ( the poor don’t eat the majority of fast food- office workers and the wealthier workers don’t have time to waste and mostly eat out ) they are only alive due to modern pharmaceuticals. By the time the oil crunch gets serious, they are your built in customers as their health reflects their past eating habits. Your ability to actually peddle enough to haul your own weight in freight without having a heart attack is job security. And as your sickly customers die off, the newly car-less take their place. Most probably didn’t even have the foresight to buy a bike at all but instead had two or three cars.

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You can start now, and with very little money. As time goes on you gain reputation and experience. When the serious decline starts, you are in like Flynn. As government teat juice dries up, the difference in earning a few hundred bucks or not a month will make all the difference ( and then, there is always barter for eggs and veggies, etc. Say, you take infirm grandma’s eggs around to her customers and she gives you a cut. Boom. Protein in your diet solved ).

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/

*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

newsstand magazine review

2012-01-24T12:20:00.000-08:00

NEWSSTAND MAGAZINE REVIEW

Okay, okay. I’ve finally pulled my head part way out of my butt. You’ll have to excuse me. I’m still fighting with this damn cold/flu/crud two weeks later. I’m blaming that for my more than usual amount of dumbassness. Since I mega-dose on vitamin C and have for many years, I can only think of three reasons the thing is hanging in so long ( when my co-workers, who are usually much sicklier, get over it in days ) One, since China produces almost all of the globes ascorbic acid, they are poisoning me. Two, Baby Jesus is infecting me with the worse strains in order to boost my immune system so I can fight the Super Deluxe Obammy Barnyard Flu soon to be unleashed on mankind. Or, three, I’m sucking in Japanese radiation and so my immune system sucks. I like number two, personally. My probably final word on the new magazine to be is this. Rather than more blog drivel, rather than a thrice yearly book, I’ll still put out a monthly mag but make it a booklet on one subject. That should be worth a buck. With m original idea, I was in essence begging you for charity. With the idea for a book, I’d soon run out of ideas for a thirty or forty thousand word book ( the reason I haven’t put one out in years ). With booklets, I thoroughly cover on topic. You should get perceived value added. And I shouldn’t run out of ideas. Month one will be junk land. The second will be firearms. Since I have to start over again next weekend, I’ll just post the articles I wrote last weekend. That way I’ll have time to do my tax return. Thanks for your patience while I thrashed around for a viable alternative to declining commissions.

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If you simply love your books on CD and you positively love your Kindle to the point of indecency, a paper magazine would undoubtedly fail to move you. But for those of us that prefer paper reading to electric reading, who associate a book with joy and learning, a paper magazine has the tactile reinforcement that a web page is never going to match. Granted, electric media is the only reason self publishing is now possible on such a scale. None of us has much choice in whether we can read much if anything on paper. But when we have a choice, it sure is nice to hold our reading material in hand without the aid of electrons. I like survivalist magazines not because of the content so much but because it is paper and it does provide a better advertising medium ( I don’t buy the Yuppie Vermin Bastard Scum products by and large, but it is nice knowing what is out there and available ). But the last paper survivalist magazine was ten years ago. Why they failed is beyond me. They had a monopoly and they had oodles and gobs of advertising from Y2K. Granted, the ads fell after that date, but look at Wired magazine. They had a much more drastic fall in advertising after the Tech Wreck and they stayed in business. Of course, you could look at Blockbuster and wonder how a business with a monopoly in retail video rental could fail. Sure, Redbox and Netzero were competition, but with retail you could search for a movie you didn’t know you wanted. And, their acquisition cost had been reduced to nearly zero. They paid a percentage of sales for each movie- they didn’t have to buy the movie up front. It could have been the real estate bubble that did them in ( rents went up drastically ), or they just could have been grossly incompetent. I suppose American Survival Guide had about the same story. Even though low paying hacks were churning out worthless drivel, so were obviously low paid ( reading their output at times it almost seemed a computer program was churning out the stories ), perhaps the magazine still couldn’t handle the drop in ad revenue.
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
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The other day I was at the bookstore. I wanted to buy something besides a discard table ten cent book ( you have to help them pay the rent so they keep that table ) and couldn’t find anything worthy in sci-fi ( all the Apocalypse books had been wiped out just before Christmas ) or in my favorite authors in the used section so I went over to the magazines. I had resigned myself to having to buy the newest Backwoodsmen ( a fine magazine, but I hadn’t found many articles that interested me in the last year or so ) but there was a message from Baby Jesus himself ( I easily translated the message, “I love you like the red headed stepchild I never had, and I admire your hair, so unlike my mangy hippie freak show of a mop” ). A newsstand magazine of survivalism. How the heck had I missed this for the last year? There it was, issue number five of the bi-monthly “”Survivalist”. Which, by the by, has the obvious web address of Survivalist dot com. I was so excited that the retail price of five bucks bothered me not in the least, and that was just for 48 pages which included both covers.

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Let me tell you, compared to the old American Survival Guide ( they changed the name just before they went out of business but I never remembered what it was ) this thing is the pinnacle of professional prose. ASG was pretty predictable in its contents. Every issue had an article on a gun none of us could afford, and the required ( by law it seemed ) article on cold weather survival. The rest was pretty much all ads. They could have won a contest with Shotgun News ( which, speaking of competent business practices, has weathered the death of the amateur gun dealer and the huge surge in gun prices ) to see who had less writing and more advertising ( for the few out there that never saw a copy of Shotgun News, it is nothing BUT advertising from gun jobbers to gun retail dealers ). But ASG was great in that it was the connection each of us needed to the survivalist community. Nothing since has really filled that void, be it chat rooms or even Rawles ( he comes close, but it is hard to feel the connection through the computer screen. Hey, I’m not a total Luddite. I love books, but I also love the fact I can publish a lot more of my writing when I don’t have paper costs or postage cost to factor in. Before, I sent out a monthly eight page newsletter. Publishing electronically, I do that two or three times a week ).

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I don’t know if “Survivalist” will fill that void left by ASG, but it should. The movement needs its paper mag rag again. Okay, the writing is inoffensive, non-alarmist and pretty basic. But at least it is by talented writers that care about the subject. This magazine has Doug Bell ( who used to be my gun go-to guy before we lost touch ), Jerry Ahern ( still a hack writer, but OUR hack writer ) and guys I’ve kinda heard of like Robert Scott Bell and C Green, Jim Richter, Mat Stein and Ed Corcoran. The subject matter in issue five covered Martial Law, communications, gold and silver, collapse investing, CDC propaganda, suturing, Is The Family On Board?, emergency lighting and grid down, EMP, the interview with Rawles hawking his new book ( I guess this issue has been on the newsstand since October ), lasting survival shelters, essential oils, Did Civilization Peak In The 70’s?, frugal fire lighting ( by some fool pretending to be the Frugal Survivalist ) and a few unexciting classified ads. The regular page ads were NOT overwhelming. A Goldilocks amount of advertisements, in my opinion. Nothing you can’t pick up on the web as far as the articles, granted. So, honestly, this is just a luxury item. But I love it. I’m already decided, I’ll pay the under $20 subscription price.

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Is it worth even the reduced $3 an issue? Like I said, a luxury item. But come on! $3 every other month? Who can’t afford that? I have a pretty high standard for content and I was satisfied with the items offered. Most of that could just be nostalgia, sure. The articles were really too basic and too short and too timid, by and large. But for the cost, if you pick up just one or two pertinent pieces of information it will be worth it. Frankly, we are all way too spoiled by the Internet. We pay $30 or $50 a month for access, and then assume everything on the web should be free. Hey, writers don’t get a share of that $50. Greedy bloodsucking corporations do ( I’m not anti-free market, but corporations can be, and usually are, pretty damn evil. My Payless boots just got their hole big enough to show socks. After a mere four months, less than a thousand hours of use. Piss off you whores! ). And while the magazine writers don’t get paid much more, they get exposure and pay in other ways, hopefully, eventually. So do your part and part with a buck fifty a month to put some profit motive into the movement ( better to pay that, and a few bucks a year on any new survival books, than buying a $500 wheat grinder to keep a Yuppie Survivalist equipment seller in business ).

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

EMP ourselves

2012-01-23T12:51:00.001-08:00

EMP OURSELVES

Before we begin today on why our good buddies in DC are probably going to kill us all quickly and avoid a lot of headaches, yet more on my just announced schedule change. You know, not publishing the blog on the weekends anymore. I’ve only published seven days a week for a year. This blog has been going for more than five years. So less than 20% of the time I’ve been posting both weekend days. Nobody should be that darn upset. Granted, perhaps the monthly magazine to take its place was stupid. But something WILL take its place. Your choice of doing this the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is, everybody chime in at the comments section. Monthly magazine ( which, granted, will be no more exciting than regular articles, just a smidge longer ) or a book every four to six months. The hard way is, I publish my first magazine issue and if nobody buys it, I know to go to books. Look, I’m not trying to get extra money from any readers. I’m trying to anticipate falling Amazon commissions and put something else easier in its place so you all keep supporting my writing. If you feel you will get higher value from a couple of e-books every year, great. We’ll do that. As I said, it takes twenty grand in Amazon sales for me to get $300 in commission. If my mere thousand readers don’t have that much to spend, my commission goes down even as you still buy through my links ( albeit smaller amounts ). You all were great supporting me in the past, I’m just mixing it up on how you can continue that. Remember four years ago when I started the Amazon links? It was because my Google ads and book sales had drastically declined. Same difference this time around.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
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. Thank you.
*
By paying so much attention as to how the federal jack booted ninjas are going to be trying to control us come the collapse, I wonder if we are missing the real danger. Should we be worrying about detention centers, or man made viruses? Should we worry about Muslim terrorist attacks or false flag attacks? Are UN troops a worry, or is mass genocide? If we don’t have the resources to pacify the population, isn’t it likely that the logical preemptive action would be to eliminate most of that population before they started to rebel? If I was the President ( and be thankful I’m not ) I’d look around me and see nothing but problems. The oil supply was flat with periods of slight decline in between periods it goes back slightly to that years new normal. You can’t replace that decline of domestic supply with ethanol anymore because the grain supply is contracting faster than that of oil. You’ve pulled out of Iraq because you can’t afford to garrison it at full strength anymore, even with borrowing half of the budget. All of your quantitative easing is being sucked up by Europe and they still keep getting worse. As soon as they go, your banks go. You know any day that the Straights of Hormuz are going to be a war zone. You know that as soon as that spark ignites the next world war ( nuclear only as no one has the resources to repeat WWII ), your citizens start rioting from lack of heating oil and grid power. You can wait for that event to unfold, and react blindly, or you can control the situation and be proactive. Keep in mind that the Constitution to you is a living document and it is as flexible as need be. Lincoln and FDR showed the way.

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A man made virus is problematic. It isn’t always effective ( look at AIDS- it was targeted at Africa and butt pirates thirty years ago and both groups have yet to be eliminated. Very disappointing results ). And it can always backfire on you ( you know enough not to trust the pharmaceutical companies claims on the effectiveness of an antidote ). You don’t want to false flag ( Kristalnact, Gulf Of Tonkin ) attack. Anything you do will be only marginal in swaying the public, baring a nuclear strike. And you don’t want to make anything radioactive ). The best course is to EMP the Homeland. You have plenty of nukes to spare, you can blame it on anyone you want to, and you can mostly prepare for it with prior warning. We have enough missiles to defend the government, even if most of our conventional forces were missing or retired. We can spare a dozen to cover the entire lower 48 and really fry the civilians nicely. Since most military vehicles were stationary or warehoused, you retain your mobility. Even if you fry most of your own high tech equipment, do you really need it? Once the US economy is destroyed, the global economy is toast. And since they can’t buy parts now, the high tech arms race isn’t an issue. Plus, by immediately nuking the “guilty” party, everyone gets the message you can still defend yourself. They stay in their own back yard.

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You have just duplicated a cold warriors dream. Killing off the civilians while leaving the infrastructure intact ( wasn’t that the hydrogen bomb? ). Oh, sure, there will be damage as the starving freezing civilians fight to the last full stewpot, but there isn’t the heavy damage of an industrialized war. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that Social Security is broke, or the fuel and food supply is shrinking. European economic meltdown isn’t an issue. And it doesn’t matter about the bankers. Those pricks might have controlled every President since 1914 ( Kennedy was an example to the rest not to get uppity ), including you, but you’ve just destroyed their money machine. Now you can become dictator for life ( one has a hard time believing Obammy wants the job, but Hilary sure will ). Things are a bit tough in the adjustment, but far easier than if you had let events unfold at their natural pace.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

guest article

2012-01-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

GUEST ARTICLE
My article will post at 1 pm ( see article below explaining ).
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survival/food storage

We are a couple in our late 40's

each of us has 2 part time jobs

we don't have much disposable income

no kids

last few years we have been trying to build our food supply and become more self sufficient.

some of our food is now past "best before" dates

we decided to try to consume it to see if it was still ok to eat.

(we did the "sniff & taste a wee bit" to "check" it - this is not advice to eat food past the "best before" date. If you are unsure of any food - chuck it! It is better to be safe than sorry!)

some long term storage experiences

Pace salsa 5 years old-still good

Tea and coffee-over 3 years old-still good

Shelf milk aka UHT milk-over 2 years past best before date-ok as long as you shake it before you use it-fat settles - bottom of tetra pack turned to "yogurt"

canned goods from store (meat, fruit, vegetables, soups etc)-2 years past best before-still good Had a couple cans of tomato paste swell up-didn't open them-threw them in garbage.

Miracle whip salad dressing-2 years past best before-still good

Kraft bottled (italian, french, ranch, etc) salad dressing. Over 2 years old-ok.

honey-crystallized-but still good-soak jar in to water for a while to re-liquefy.

dry goods-sugar, powdered milk, flour, baking soda, baking powder, yeast, cake mix, pasta, etc. Over 2 years old-no difference. Stored in area that never gets past 70 deg. F

Breakfast cereal (corn flakes, rice crispies type)-over 1 year old-very slightly stale-but still good.

Health and beauty aids and over the counter meds-all health and beauty aids were ok (except for expired birth control-didn't want to take a chance on that!). The pain killers still killed the pain, the soap still washed as well, the cold and flu medicine worked just as good. Band aids don't stick quite as well and certain vitamin tablets changed color.

Crackers (triscuit, ritz) Just over 1 year old Very stale - eatable but not pleasant.

Pet food-dry food that was older than about 6 months-pets would turn up their noses at. They would eat it if nothing else was given. We felt sorry for them and gave the old stuff to the animal shelter.

Has it changed us or the way we look at or do things? Yes! We now regularly buy products that are discounted because they are close to the expiry date. We have not had to do very much grocery shopping in January because we have been consuming this expired food.

We have noticed that many of the new packages are quite often a few ounces less than the old ones, but still charging the same price as 2 years ago. I would say we have saved money by purchasing food 2 years ago that was on sale-every week a few extra items.

We were thinking of trying "the Bison diet" (buying sacks of wheat, beans, corn, etc at the feed store), but were not sure if we would like it or be able to figure out how to use it. With the "buy extra normal food every week" plan we knew we would not mind eating what we had stored. I found it very easy to have both the male and female food urges satisfied. He buys what he likes and she buys what she likes. Sometimes we have to keep track of each others inventory (and remind the other person to "ease up") because we tend to stock up too much on our favourite foods.

Submitted by: a nameless couple

article at 1 pm

2012-01-23T06:34:00.000-08:00

ARTICLE AT 1 PM
I'll now be posting right around 1 pm ( baring server malfunction ). Since the weekend articles will now be pay-per-view I don't have to post weekday articles three days ahead of time anymore. I'll vomit up my daily drivel and serve it fresh, warm and smelly. Sorry to spring this on you last second, I forgot to include it is Sunday's article. See you in about six hours.

hoisted with your own petard

2012-01-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

HOISTED WITH YOUR OWN PETARD

You know, it is just my luck that while I strive mightily to present fact and fun filled sermons and beseech and implore all my minions to change their evil ways by vomiting article after essay on any particular subject, in the end the only one convinced appears to be myself. Not that I’ve convinced myself I’m right. I knew that all along. But rather motivated myself to change. As of late ( I don’t know, the last year or two perhaps ) I’ve been forced to consider arsenals beyond that of war surplus bolt actions. The times they are’a changing and what used to make perfect sense is now sometimes a flawed theory. Of course you can still buy surplus and cheap ammo if you are on a strict $500 prepping budget. That part hasn’t changed in the last five years since I published the best survivalist book to ever grace the masses. It is just that now you only have one choice and that is the Russian bolt. Which I hate because of the lack of the gas safety but no one else considers an issue. If you want a better designed weapon you are now forced to pay the same as a new modern arm, so why pay for a used rifle? And the ammo saving are no longer there. I’ve been lamenting this insidious development, but didn’t give it too much concern since I already had laid back my own supplies cheaply prior to Y2K. Yet yesterday seemed to be the straw that broke the camels back. I investigated in depth one too many times another aspect of the negative aspects of war surplus.
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
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. Thank you.
*
A minions comment on the poor shot placement at 300 yards got me mulling things over ( again ). I should have gone with 200 yards ( going up against the AK ) rather than 300. At 200, I’m not too God awful of a shot although I won’t claim a one shot one kill. But at $1 a round, even that cut in range is too much of a compromise. When I first bought the Enfields I also had a couple of SKS’s. At 100 yards they both sucked for accuracy but the rifle, if for no other reason the barrel length, was not as bad. But that was also the old WWI Enfields with those crappy leaf and post sights. When I went to the No. 4’s there was a great improvement in shot placement. But I also was living in Oklahoma and then Florida. You wanted a bit more than a pistol round but the terrain still didn’t call for much range. My 100 yard shots were usually all I needed and I felt comfy out to 200 ( and since I was buying thirty cent surplus rounds I didn’t mind the fact I couldn’t always connect the first shot ). Even when I first moved to Nevada it was at the base of the Sierra mountains and I didn’t worry about open range. Now however, I have to worry about 200 yards all day long ( 300 yards is about max because of the rolling hills ) rather than 100. I can’t easily practice enough to be proficient at those longer ranges ( even if I started reloading, with the shortened life span-so I’ve been told- of the 303 case I won’t be able to spend less than fifty cents or so a round taking into account the 65 cent case cost ). I could afford the cost but to me it seems this smacks on the case of shopping around trying to find VW Bug parts- it might be cheaper to replace the car itself. When you can buy a new factory case of a carbine round for half the cost as reloading your antique thirty caliber, it might be time to replace the arsenal.

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It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve replaced a pistol only arsenal, an SKS arsenal, my first Enfield arsenal and a rimfire arsenal. It might be time to replace this one. I have time, because if things go to hell tomorrow, I’ll still feel comfortable with what I have. I’ll just have to pay real close attention to ranges. But it is something I should place a few more rungs higher on my Master To Do List. First of course is building a more habitable pit. And designing better solar heaters. Paying off the land, perhaps rain catchment. It’s still up in the air, but I think I’m running out of excuses. I could still keep the Enfields ( security blanket, possible investment, bartable items ) and it would only cost me about two grand. Three bolts ( or single shots, I’m not sure ) and three thousand rounds. When you are on a totally frugal budget, bolts make sense. When you are looking for ways to waste extra, not so much.

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Okay, this weekend is the last weekend of free articles. I’m going back to five days a week on the blog. Just like we did in 2010. But I’m still writing seven days a week. To read the extra, you will now have to pay. I’ll take my weekend writing and use it to put out a new e-magazine. It will be published monthly and I only am asking a buck for it. For you all wanting to read free, you still have the blog. For those of you wanting to support my writing, you can buy the magazine if you wish. You are all wonderful at supporting the blog, don’t get me wrong. But it takes thousands of dollars in Amazon sales for me to see a hundred bucks in commission. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter how much you love me. You can’t pay what you don’t have ( I’m down half of last January’s commissions- I’m thinking you all just don’t have the money you did a year ago ) to pull out of your butt. So instead of relying on you spending hundreds at Amazon, I only need you to pony up a dollar ( I’ll see 80% of that ). I think this makes better sense in a contracting economy. There will still be the option of Amazon, I’m just diversifying is all. The first issue should be out mid to late February. I’ll try to lard it up, but don’t expect much more than about eight articles and around ten thousand words. In the future, who knows? I might go bi-weekly or whatever. Let’s see. Of course, the best part of the magazine will be its name. The Cockroach Chronicles. Get it? Cockroaches will be the only species to survive global nuclear war.

END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

divorced from preps

2012-01-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

DIVORCED FROM PREPS

From SHTF Blog, we have an article on divorce and how to deal with it. Now, of course the first thing I did was thank said publisher for being kind enough to trash his life so I could get an article idea. Most of my loyal minions are no where near as dedicated as that. I liked the part about having to medicate to sleep. My first “real” divorce ( wife number two, Handmaiden Of Satan. Wife #1 was more of a marriage of convenience and in our divorce she only got me for me for two months net income ) produced the worst bout of illness I’ve had in my entire life. Now, I’m warning you up front, you might not like this article. I don’t bemoan my situation ( and we all know it is all about me ). I won’t be too hating on females. No rants or pleas for divine intervention to smite my enemies. In fact, I might even be able to squeeze out an optimistic tone. You might wish to proceed with caution.

*

If you and the spousal unit are always at odds over life in general, you are not meant to be together. If you can’t agree on fundamentals such as what is considered a safe place to live or how to budget money ( or how often you can bump uglies ) or whatever, you might not want to admit it but sooner or later you will split up. When times get tougher economically, those problems will be much worse. Every worsening of your situation will cause both parties to blame the other for past bad decisions. If he hadn’t stayed in that crappy job until the company went bankrupt we could have already been living in a much more affordable location and not lost the car, etc. I’m not saying that healthy couples won’t have the same issue ( selective memories on both sides when it comes time to blame ), just that a dysfunctional couple will NOT survive times of trouble but a healthy couple should be able to. If you know your marriage is in trouble, don’t postpone the inevitable. If you wait too long you end up homeless, unemployed and legally liable to make those support payments every month ( I’m going to assume 99% of my readers are male and will be on the hook for child support ). If you act soon enough, you can guide your destiny rather than be tossed about by it.
*
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*
Okay, financially you are going to be screwed. This is a given. You will usually be paying about 60-70% of your gross income to federal taxes and support combined. Take it from experience, if you try to stay living a conventional lifestyle, you live just sink deeper and deeper into poverty. And as a father, I understand that your kids are about the only decent thing about your miserable existence. But if you stay in the same location as them and that place has too high a cost of living, you will be dooming yourself ( and odds are, the ex will move them away anyway AFTER that event ). The ex-wife and the courts give not a care about how little money you have left ( there will be ZERO justice for you. I tried getting Food Stamps as I was paying 75% of my gross, and was denied ). You WILL make your payments or you can go to jail, get butt humped and die from AIDS. I kid you not. But as bad as this is, it can be liberating. You can now start over again living a sane and sustainable ( financially speaking ) life. You can start over again with another marriage to a spouse that isn’t allowed to act as your ex did. You can have your life back, and while doing so on 33% of your former income doesn’t seem possible, it isn’t hard. Give up your car, get out of debt, live in an unconventional dwelling and never waste a cent on luxuries. You will have plenty of prep money very quickly. But only if you give up any hope of a middle class lifestyle and middle class mate. Hey, trust me, middle class mates suck anyway. The lower rungs of the economic ladder might not hold the prettiest prospective wives ( I’m talking about the perceived beauty desired such as you see on TV or in the mall at the high end stores ) , they might be pretty bruised up being used up by life, but they have a far more sensible attitude. They’ve been through the squeezer like you are now experiencing and they accept that life will hand them a crap sandwich long before they get a gold lottery ticket. And did I mention the preps?

*

You can prep like a mother humper once the consumerist shoe shopping, central air wasting two car payments bitch of an ex is gone. You usually can come out ahead financially if you can learn to live below your means. How do you think I ended up on my own land, out of debt, running my own micro-business with preps coming out my ass? I make minimum wage and support a wife on that, as well as an ex-wife. One, I live below income. It took me awhile to learn how to do that. And mainly it boils down to just getting rid of the car and/or living in the cheapest area you can find. Two, you remarry a wife that is diametrically opposite of the ex. You can find cheap to keep wives. They all have their own issues, but then, we are talking about wives. We aren’t talking about just leaving a wife who won’t prep ( not that I’m opposed to that ). We are cutting off a limb once it becomes gangrenous. If you wait until the bitter end, you end up screwing yourself. If you are going through a tough time anyway, make the best of the pain and stress. Restart your life. Take your financial screwing, but don’t let it hurt you as much as the bitches want it to. If you cling to the middle class lifestyle, not only are you doomed to fail, if you aren’t careful you might attract another middle class wife!!!!! The Horrors. The Horrors.

END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

99 big wheels

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

99 BIG WHEELS

I’m sure as soon as you all read the comment by the troll saying that I should write about Big Wheels ( I think he was pissed he had to read another few words on bug out bicycles ) you instinctively understood that there was a fifty/fifty chance that I would take him up on his offer, no matter how steeped in sarcasm it happened to be. But you said to yourself, self, how in the world could even such a talented and wonderful creature blessed by Baby Jesus himself come up with an article on Big Wheels for survivalism? People, this stuff might look easy, but I think here is proof positive that it takes supreme talent to do all I do. Today’s article is on two topics, one being the three wheel bicycle as a survival conveyance. Okay, it technically isn’t a Big Wheel, that wonderful plastic tricycle that was for most the first vehicle any of us ever had unless we were just poor white trash living in an Appalachian coal mining town shack wearing flour sack shirts, watching whitewash dry ( too poor for actual paint ) and seeing how closely your cousin could be related to you before your offspring was stunted and looking like some freak from Hiroshima ( ohhhh! The humanity! How could he possibly have such a marked lack of compassion? ). But it is a Big Boy Big Wheel, so I call it close enough. Now, even I’ll admit that this article lacks much importance, so I’ll throw in some familiar ranting on the Republican Party Idiot O D Day. That might not be enough to keep you off my back, but I’ll deal with it.
*
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*
Oh, and one other thing. Speaking of “99”, remember that German band in the early Eighties singing about “99 Red Balloons”? I think that was the title of the song. If you listen to the English version ( the German version of course sounds better in a Teutonic Wench Pleading To Dominate You With Bondage Gear kind of way ) you might enjoy the reference to nuclear war worries ( the Balloon Going Up ). Okay, let’s get back on track. We all agree that bugging out by bike makes perfect sense because the bitch can’t break. Well, anything can break, but the odds are so far against it because you have as close to zero moving parts as is possible in a vehicle. A car on the other hand has close to a gabizillion parts ( actually 987 thousand kazillion ) to fail and with your luck one of them will on the worst possible day. Bikes are, at no additional charge, both on and off road. And the cost difference is insane ( about one to twenty at best ). Also, with a motor vehicle, once your fuel runs out you have a worthless tool. With a bike and just a handful of parts that thing should be good for years after the collapse. I think the reason so many Yuppie Puke Bastard Scum Survivalists insist on everything petroleum powered is because they refuse to believe it will ever disappear ( Little Johnny, where does meat come from? A white tray from the store ). Their argument is, It’s The Best For The Job ( giving an example of a chainsaw verses hand saws, for instance ). They don’t want to ask the more pertinent question of What Is The Best Tool For PODA ( Post Oil Dark Ages )?

*

Now, while I won’t ever switch to this kind of bike, it does have advantages. A three wheeler is great for cargo hauling and remaining upright. A regular bike, two wheeled, is of course easily turned into a cargo hauler, but if you are suddenly attacked you have to let the bitch fall over. You might damage precious cargo. And you usually have to get untangled from a regular bike if you want to run or return fire. With a three wheeler you are far less encumbered at defense. Plus, if you are old, you almost have no choice but to have this type of bike ( okay, perhaps one day I’ll be forced to go three wheeled if I live long enough and the collapse hasn’t happened ). I don’t pretend that I have any more information than you on this bike. I don’t know prices other than you are paying a premium due to its low volume in demand. If the idea appeals to you the research should be easy enough ( guest article, anyone? ). It certainly is an option for a tool for a certain problem.

*

Next up we have friggin Newt Gingrich and his stupid comment on how 99 week unemployed are slacking whores. Okay, he actually only hinted at that. He did say something to the effect that “99 weeks is an associates degree”. As in, why are these slacking ho bitches wasting my tax dollars lounging about in the sun drinking beer when they could be earning a college degree. Newt, I usually love ya big fellow. You are a politician but at least you know history which makes you a less than total idiot of a politician. But here you are either showing your ass or showing us what a sell out you are. ANY government pay out has its share of hucksters and cheats. The unemployed are no different, that doesn’t make all of them so ( you have as many cheating the Social Security system or the military disability system or whatever ). And, workers pay into the system. To me it is just another tax I’ll never see a return on, but to those using that argument about SS, here is the same rationale. You can’t say everyone is entitled to SS but not unemployment. Third, you stupid twat, more college degrees do not create new jobs. They just create more debt for people who can’t afford it. It’s a good thing I have no plan on voting ( your vote is not for a candidate, your vote is your consent to being screwed by the establishment- if voting actually changed anything it would be illegal. Castro had 100% voter turnout at each “election” ).

END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

five year plan

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

FIVE YEAR PLAN

I liked the article Monday at Rawles on Japan with its debt at 300% of GDP. Of course, if we would just listen to the West Podunk Community College School Of Business all that would be necessary for the Japanese to do to increase their productivity and hence lower their debt, even in the radioactive ruins of their industrial parks, is to stop giving those whiney lazy bitches handouts like free shelter and meals. And to stop taxing the rich, since we all know all rich guys spend all their money on consumer items so it is all magically trickle down. They never send their money overseas for safekeeping or increased returns. But since we don’t listen to WPCCSOB, we are all doomed to economic ruin. The article mentioned the end of this decade as Really, Really Bad Times To Come. So, you have at most eight years to prepare by buying fortified zucchini farms atop mountains in any northern drought stricken state of your choice ( behold! Yeoman Farmer Paradise Of The Future! ), arming your troops with really cool looking short range high firepower carbines made by God Fearing Americans For God Fearing Americans To Smite The Unbelievers, and of course lots of complicated digital radio communications devices relying on odd sized batteries, wearing ballistic helmets sporting cameras and infrared detectors and night vision devices and bullet proof vests and at least five hundred clips of ammo and even if you can’t move under your own power with all that crap because of the weight you don’t have to worry because you are bullet resistant and can just remain immobile and lay down an uninterrupted spray of lead like that really cool gun in “Predator” that somehow didn’t need electrical power to rotate its barrels as it mowed down whole jungle ecosystems.
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*
Obviously this is a lot of stuff to buy, but if you are one of God’s chosen you make a lot of money, usually as a government contractor. You love the “free enterprise system” and Baby Jesus loves you ( I’m being sarcastic, Baby Jesus says you suck ). If God loved you, he made you rich and you can afford to buy your way to safety through the Apocalypse. Now, the article didn’t say a thing as to why we only have six to eight years. I’d imagine since it was talking about inflation through government quantitative easing, it is felt that is all the time we will have before the whole silly circus melts down. Hey, why not? It is as good a guess as my four years to zero oil imports. I’m glad to see the article as it is a much better heads up in the time line to collapse than you usually see over there. I think it is overly optimistic, but then I’m usually way too pessimistic. Keeping in mind my general rule that you should have your bare bones, better than nothing stockpile yesterday, would there be any harm in assuming a five year plan? If we assume that my overly paranoid date of death should be stretched out a bit ( but also keep in mind my last child support payment is now only nine paychecks away!!!!! ) and their overly Pollyanna assumption is too much to hope for, let’s just compromise, meet in the middle and say about five years to go until the twin oil import death and the hyperinflated economic contraction meet. I’m not saying this is a set in concrete date we should all fear, just that it is a possibility.

*

And why not go with it? If you already have some food and protection, you can now gamble with the date of deliverance. The nice thing about an arbitrary date in the future is that no matter how small the probability of it being correct, you benefit from accepting it in that you get much more down. We all didn’t have to really truly believe all the computers would crash at the beginning of the millennia, we just used it as a motivator. A cattle prod to our lazy asses. For me it worked as both a timeline and as a way to visualize how I could prep better. If you work better under some kind of pressure ( I get so much written because I have a deadline. I don’t wait for inspiration or motivation. Those are too fickle and can be used by your brain as excuses ), the five year plan should do you a world of good. And it will work much better for you than it did for the Soviets because you are actually motivated. Fear and greed can be great motivators, but they work much better together than separately. You fear for your life, and are working to make your future lot in life more comfortable. If you have done nothing, go with my $500 plan. It is strictly bare bones, but with it and a cynical paranoid attitude you should survive a black swan event that happens anytime. Then, as serves you, make improvements.

*

We all want more food than just wheat. More accurate weapons shooting modern ammunition. We would all like a place to live that is debt free and runs on alternate energy. Being out of debt. A retirement plan. All this is included in your five year plan. Just balance everything. Being completely out of debt is nice, but if that is all you do in five years, you have no where to live, no food storage, etc. Plan in order of importance. You won’t get everything done, but much more than if you “just prepped as I felt the budget allowed” ( which usually means never ). And plan your activities in order of freeing up cash. Like paying off one credit card quickly, then doubling up on the next. You free up a car payment, say, then that money plus the original amount that went to the first item goes to the next. Like I’ve outlined on moving to your junk land. You live in your car, or rent a room, putting your former mortgage money or higher rent into saving up moving money or paying off the land quickly. Everything gets easier and moves quicker this way. You might find the structure and the immediate feedback really work wonders for you.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

mighty thunder sticks

2012-01-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

MIGHTY THUNDER STICKS

A minion wanted to know my thoughts on apocalypse orphans. This will be a wonderful topic but must wait for another day after it ferments in my brain awhile more. But it did get me to thinking on the subject of firearm caliber. And all our favorite surplus war bolt action rifles. If the mighty he-man warrior of the clan sucks in an airborne virus, gets sick, soils his drawers in a bloody manner and dies ingloriously, will the more frail members of his family be able to pick up one of those ten pound clubs and then actually fire one? All along my less than perfect plan had been for the wife to act as back-up with the rimfire rifle, and if needed she could use the revolvers in rimfire or even the 357 if she went with 38’s. This is all fine and dandy with me using the Enfield to reach out to longish ( I’m no sniper, but even three hundred yards is a good distance to start taking out AK users ) distances but if anything happens to me her survival chances diminish with such an arsenal. There is nothing wrong with a rimfire as the sole long arm, but it must be used in very skilled hands ( stalking, ambush ). The average survivalist is an overweight office worker, not a practiced bushwacker. And the spouse is usually going to be less skilled in the martial arts. While a good firearm in untrained hands is a marginal tool, to a certain extent the tool will substitute for that lack. In a knife fight, you are just as disadvantaged with a stainless steel $5 knife from China as with a $100 knife custom made if you are untrained. In firearms, the training level is much lower than a knife to achieve a tolerable level of skill. If you are half-assed in using a gun, the difference in the tool starts to matter ( unlike the knife ).

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A guest article was posted earlier. Scroll down after my article.
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Spending a grand on an AR-15 makes some sense as the carbine did have an original selling point that our little Vietnamese brothers in arms could shoot the thing far easier than the current 308 in service. They couldn’t shoot it for long as it jammed up easily, but don’t get me started on that. A African pygmy with arthritis could fire the AR for as long as it took to jam, with no discomfort. The AR is THE best design for a firearm that any urban boy could pick up and hose down the enemy. The recoil is zero. You do not flinch and can easily follow up shots. In all other aspects, this is the worst firearm every made. The parts are so over engineered that it would make a German cuss, the site is stupid, one can’t imagine why such a light weight carbine needs a carrying handle, you need a stick and a rock to extract a case jammed in the extractor, and the thing is dangerous to the user in a protracted firefight when the enemy won’t honor your request for a time out so you can clean your piece of crap. You might be tempted to arm your 100 pound five foot tall wife and your teenage children with this weapon because of the weight and recoil. As long as you hate them and want to see them die ( okay, I’m only sorta kidding ).
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*
For a loner survivalist, no other warm and fuzzy feeling will equal that of a scope mounted thirty caliber bolt action that will easily smite our enemies at eight hundred yards ( I ain’t that skilled, you might be- the gun certainly allows for it ). But if you have a wife and or kids, and are on a budget that precludes the purchase of four or five AR’s ( which are only three quarters of the price of the cheapest thirty caliber ), I’d recommend adopting a mid level arsenal. I’m talking about your average poor prepper here. I understand thee are plenty of Warrior Princesses out there that can pick up a M1 or whatnot and kick some serious long range ass. But that is not normal, is it? It is exceptional. Even though I applaud that skill, I won’t pretend it is normal. For the family defense unit of limited means and normal skill levels, think about carbine rounds. Yes, the 223 and 762x39. But not the semi auto rifles that are traditionally associated with those rounds. Semi-auto is retarded for a long term collapse into a dark age. You must conserve ammo from day one. And the cost of acquiring them is double. I’m suggesting civilian hunting bolt action rifles ( gasp! What of the bayonet? ).

*

It is true that a surplus rifle is a far superior military arm than its lighter constructed civilian counterpart. You can shoot them longer, butt stock your enemies in the trenches, mount a bayonet and charge if you run out of ammo. You can abuse them and they still function. A deer rifle is not so accommodating. But the difference in the ammunition and weight is critical in arming females and children. Even a slender short pasty Englishman weighing one hundred twenty pounds soaking wet has the upper body strength to carry his Enfield all day long and shoot at bloody Krauts at the end of it. His wife, even if taller and matching his weight, does not. Despite what FemiNazi bitches tells you, the genders have physical differences. Males, even the weak ones, have superior strength. That is just the way it is. That also kills them quicker, so stop your whining. You fems also have the ability to store much more body fat ( and stay healthy ). If you aren’t busy at the gym trying to turn your body into one matching a pre-teen boy, you can put some fat on your ass and carry that portable apocalypse pantry around with you. Just don’t try to carry around a heavy rifle. You will only set yourself up for failure.

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A mid-caliber bolt action should be used for mid range sniping. Not close in urban assault. And it is an offensive weapon, not defensive. Don’t hunker down and wait to be attacked. The best defense is a good offense. So, while the rifle itself is not perfect or the best, it is affordable at around three hundred bucks. It should be light enough for the females and children to tote. Perhaps not easily, but easier. And the recoil, with a rifle mounted pad, should be manageable. Not as nice as a AR, but a heck of a lot nicer than a Mossin Nagant. And the benefits of scaling down your caliber are reflected in price and resources. The rounds cost half thirty caliber ( applicable to all but the 762x54r ), which means the same cost for arming two family members as one using his mighty macho thunder stick. And, while I’m not overly skilled on reloading so I can’t give exact figures, you are using less gunpowder to propel your lead down range. Yes, less stopping power and range, but more ammunition in the long run. As long as you are sniping instead of spraying and praying, the mid level calibers should only be marginally less effective ( 80/20 rule ). Now you are armed as a family with less than perfect but acceptable weapons rather than just having one member armed with the perfect rifle.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

guest article

2012-01-18T06:31:00.000-08:00

GUEST ARTICLE

As more people are seeing that those damn survivalists were perhaps not wrong about everything, more attention is devoted to them in the general media. While most of that fiction is not great at all, some works really try to have something to say. For instance, "Take Shelter". ( http://www.imdb.fr/title/tt1675192/ )

This is a movie that is clearly stemming from someone's personal experience, as it accurately describes the first stages of survivalism as experienced by newcomers.

It is a movie with premonitions and twist endings/moments, so it cannot be talked upon without referring to that. Just like it's nearly impossible to talk about "The Sixth Sense", once you've seen it, without spoiling it.

That being said, there is only suspence for those who aren't in survivalism. For survivalists, the fact of the hero being right or delusional is irrelevant.

OK, SO there are ONLY SPOILERS from now on.

We follow a character named Curtis LaFourche, played by Michael Shannon, who is reminiscent of Christopher Walken in his performance. Curtis is not a big talker, he has a wife and a young girl (approx. 5-6 years old). They belong to the working class in a small town in Ohio.

Curtis has very vivid dreams about a tornado threatening his home and his family, and this leads him to get prepared for it. This is one of several points where the movie does not want to confront itself with the more disturbing aspects of survivalism. Curtis' actions are not motivated by politics or economy, but by a dream, and a general sense of doom (and impressive sleeping disorders as well...). Now this is somewhat fortunate, because the storm becomes a metaphor for anything "SHTF", and we don't get caught by the technicalities. The movie focuses on Curtis' situation and choices.

His own mother having had schizophrenia, and being treated for it, Curtis is as cautious about a potential mental disorder as he is about his preps. A lot of people who have barely passed the door to survivalism may also ask themselves if they're not overreacting, or not having some condition (depression, paranoia...), when they're witnessing all the nonsensical stuff that revolves around survivalism, which is full of apocalyptical visions and general wackiness.

As more dreams occur, for instance his daughter and him being attacked while being in a car, or Curtis being bitten by his own dog, Curtis takes precautions (buys some extra food, for instance), and reorders some of his world slightly. No big fuss, but this starts to startle his wife, to whom he also becomes more directive. My view : Curtis is not kidding about his security, and will not let it jeopardize by discussions , compromise and other home economics/politics.

Then Curtis falls into the Big Trap of starters, which is overdoing things. He already has an old, small storm shelter in his backyard (from previous owners, probably), but decides to dig up a hole next to it, to put a ship container (!) and thus expand the living space. This costs him north of 6800 dollars, and he borrows company equimpent without telling his boss to do so. He takes his best buddy, also his work buddy, to help him.

Then he dreams about this buddy hurting him, and overreacts. He wants the buddy to be reassigned to another team, the buddy tells everything to the boss, who then fires Curtis. The buddy gets fired too (which is also good bonus lesson).

At first, Curtis' choice of doing things the way he did is not optimal. Of course, there's an easy explanation : he did rush things, didn't have the money to rent the equipment etc.

But there is another clue, and it's the center of the movie. Curtis is all alone on this. Nobody, not one single person is going to be of any help to him whatsoever. His wife is dreaming of a holiday by the sea, his father-in-law is a domineering idiot, his brother is patronizing him, his buddy turns against him and tells the whole social club (100+ people) about what he's doing (& provokes him in front of everybody), shrinks are clueless etc.

During the movie, Curtis becomes increasingly paranoid, but the introverted way. He's not aggressive, but he takes it upon himself, and continues stubbornly. Buys horribly expansive gas masks. Anybody in the survivalist world knows he's been horribly ripped off, but this could be a good metaphor of the whole profiteering business that grows around freaked out survivalists, with certain bloggers more than happy to oblige - after all, there's money to be made here.

As the movie draws to an end, as with every "omen" movie there has to be a confirmation of the omen. Here, the alarm sirens roars, a bad storm is approaching. Curtis can bring his family into the shelter, though. At this point the survivalist viewer can say "See ? It made sense to do everything he did." The setting of the shelter is extremely bare, there aren't spare clothes for instance (they're all in their pyjamas). The place looks cold and unfamiliar, like a cave.

At that stage, Curtis is stricken by terror of what is outside. His wife makes the whole Oprah stance "you have to open the doors of the shelter by yourself, this is something that you'll have to do", as if it was a first step towards recovery. My take on this : recovery from what ? His condition just saved your life and your child's life as well, just how is that a bad thing ? Is it because the danger is gone now ? it is because the shelter is finished, and you can take it for granted ? I guess it's all that "feminine selective memory" thing (or the "always be on top" thing).

And as the shelter's doors are opened , men in the audience and survivalists even more so hope to see utter devastation. But no, just a few branches that the storm took away from trees, the rest is undamaged.

Thus, Curtis accepts to go to a shrink, who convinces him to take a treatment AND to be hospitalized for a while.

In the final scene, which is the key scene that can be interpreted in several ways, the family is at Myrtle Beach (SC), and then the storm Curtis was dreaming about (with oily rain drops) is coming towards them, with two tornado hoses visible. Curtis looks to his wife, who nods in approval.

Now that scene can be interpreted in several ways.

First interpretation : it is one of Curtis' dreams. The way it is filmed is like the other dream sequences, but then again those started quite realistically as well. This interpreation means he's trapped in his madness forever. Another clue for this version is that they would not have been able to afford the vacation in the first place.

Second interpretation : this is what he prepared against, but he's away from home now. It might kill them all (who knows - you can't tell from the scene) and thus it was all Inescapabale Fate.

Third interpretation (it is a bit less solid) : By having gone so extreme, he's in this situation now where he had to go to the beach instead of having stayed at home. He missed the Test givent to him by the Almighty because he overreacted.

My interpretation : Shit does happen, and who cares if it happened to you or to somebody else. His premonitions did come true and he was right to worry and to act, even imperfectly.

End of the movie.

This kind of movie is focusing on the individual instead of the underlying technical / statistical aspects. But this is acceptable because most people don't care about economics, politics or fallout but do get interested by relations between people. (It's the old LEGO vs PLAYMOBIL divide).

Many survivalists have seen the Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter" where friendly neighbours try to break in one' shelter as the sirens roar. Here, I would have expected the Curtis' social environment to be somewhat jealous of his preps, or sneaky, but instead they never seem to understand what he's doing. One critic I read on the internet says it's a "Noah's Ark" kind of story. Indeed it's incredible that nobody in the movie questions the whole reason behind Curtis' actions. To everybody, he's just losing it. And, because he's isolated, that's how he thinks about himself, too. After all, he is using the same reasoning patterns as his environment does.

I believe that for the majority of serious survivalists (NOT yuppie survivalists), there is a tremendous internal force that drives them to act. They just know. And they also happened to have lived through serious shit at least once in their lifetime. (Here, it's the mother's schizophrenia that represents this kind of trauma). So the movie would be about the mysteriousness of this internal force in the eyes of those who cannot understand it, and the interaction between the two points of view.

From a survivalist perspective, I identified easily with Curtis. I had the same sense of overblown expenses, that stems from a lack of practical knowledge (well shown at one point in the movie). Curtis doesn't use the internet , but goes to the public library and looks for books on mental illness. His research strategy is not adapted either, as are his sources of knowledge (small rural library).

This movie had to leave practical aspects out, for the sake of the message. There is never any mention of firearms (although two moments in the picture could have led to it - the abduction dream and the entrance in the surplus shop), and there is no survivalist subculture, from internet or otherwise. Also, "SHTF" is a powerful storm, but nothing political, societal, economic or technological. It's a "clean" SHTF scenario (not "DEAD ZONE" with Christopher Walken, which is an evident reference for this movie).

From the perspective of the frugal survivalist, the movie pinpoints the trappings of uncontrolled spending (consumer culture) and lack of factual research. Actually, he could have made it just fine with what he already had and the few things he did in the beggining (more food, remove the dog's unpredictability issue etc.), if his only concern was a tornado.

The message of the movie is that you'll be completely on you own, even and especially within your own people. You will have to do the right thing while everybody will oppose you. They will oppose you because they want what they believe is best for you, and they will not listen to you.

Â

clan crackie

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

CLAN CRACKIE

I don’t know why but my Supreme Hefe ( Hefe is a wonderful moniker for a female boss. Hefe being Spanish for boss, but they always are worried you are calling them heifer ) loves to institute huge changes into my work life during the mad Christmas rush. I think this is nothing more than sweet revenge disguised as sad but necessary business changes. The first season I had to sledge hammer the old walk in freezer apart ( that part was pretty fun ) as it had finally given up the ghost, but to top that off it was decided that since the place was trashed anyway we might as well just reorganize the shelves for a better flow pattern ( industrial warehouse shelves full of canned goods ). This last Christmas it was decided that since we had gotten so busy with the increased amount of businesses donating to us ( we went from donation pick ups lasting an hour and a half or at most two hours a morning to all morning and sometimes even after lunch ), I would be delegated towards the scut work and a new boss would be placed over me to do paperwork, interact more with clients, etc. No problem, in the long run less stress for me and I love monkey work as it frees my mind towards this writing. The problem, temporary but started at the worst time, was going from running the food bank completely alone for three years to having someone micro-manage everything I was doing. And another female boss ( affectionately known as The Straw Boss )? I have three friggin female bosses, not counting the wife! The friggin humanity!

*

Anyway, all that was just a lead up to setting up this article. I’m driving the long route to the next burg and so two times a week I have a long time to listen to Glen Beck on the radio. For the most part he is more entertaining than annoying. But every once in awhile he really makes my teeth itch. He starts out ( okay, it was one of his co-wankers, Glen was out at the hospital or something ) about how he is sooooo tired of everyone bad mouthing America. Why, we are the most diverse, tolerant people on Earth. He then went on to something else, happy that he made his point that we as a country have done such a wonderful job assimilating so many different cultures together and we have not been killing each other like they do in such yuckie places like Yugoslavia or West Pestilent African places. Later, as I pulled up back to work, I was greeted to the always sad but amusing sight of a group from the Clan Crackie grabbing ass and cavorting in the winter sun ( it of course gladdens ones heart that the bright sunshine warms the poor skinny dears meth weakened bones ). I’m not overly fond of that clan. I dealt with those idiots working in the casino as they tried to stay indoors and mooch alcohol without spending money. It’s one thing to want to stay out of the freezing temperatures, quite another to do so while being disruptive and cheap ( frugal is saving money, cheap is getting others to pay ). Luckily they don’t stay around long. But the thing that grabbed my attention was how unified a tribe they were. Crack users have their own tribe. What more could so well underline the persistence of such a drive that the most pathetic and vile idiots instinctively ( there is little intelligence behind it as I’m sure the collective IQ is room temperature ) flocked to it?
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Sorry Glen dudes, on this point the drug users are smarter than you. The natural human tendency is to go to tribal affiliations. Different cultures do not mix. If you throw enough surplus wealth their way, they will temporarily play nice and get along for the free handout. But underneath it all they still hate each other. Tribes are natural, nation states, if they do not share a common culture, are not. Tribes have been around as long as man. Nation states are artificial and basically the spoils of war on an industrial scale. If you would look just a bit closer than the glossy high school text book version, here in the US we are not very tolerant amongst our diversified peoples. I don’t think it would be out of line to say that only the last twenty years have been the exception ( and that might just be a statistical blip in our 400 year history ). We have always hated each other. The Indians were the target of genocide, the Blacks of enslavement, the Mexicans of land fraud, the Asians of citizenship denial, any White of lower class of indentured servitude ( there was always a good change of death before your term was up ) and any non Anglo-Saxon of discrimination. Then, when we felt like it, they were allowed to begrudgingly assimilated AFTER discrimination, harassment and death so that the next group could be a target. We never were tolerant so much as our intolerance was a moving target. So I don’t see what we have to be so proud of. But even putting all that aside, regurgitating such mindless patriotic pabulum is dangerous. If we condition Joe and Jane Sheeple to think all our little black and brown brothers love them, the simple pukes never see them as a threat. And no, I’m not just talking about race. Yes, race is a huge problem in this country, and mostly because we try to force a façade of love over our hate. But ANY tribal differences are the same.

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When the surplus wealth disappears, the fake tolerance and cultural diversity acceptance will be wiped away in an orgy of blood and violence. Look at how hard the federal government has been trying to hide the fact we are a tribal species and has been pretending “Americans” is a natural grouping. In effect, they are trying to replace your tribe with their tribe. But their tribe isn’t one. A tribe shares a culture. Americans are 101 different cultures that were held together with the promise of free wealth ( almost all of it stolen of course. First from other nations and now from each other ). Look at their century and a half war against the South. It isn’t just about punishing States from thinking they are superior to the federal union ( Constitution? We don’t need no stinkin Constitution! ). It is also a war against another culture or tribe. The Yankee bastards hate the South. Slavery had nothing to do with it ( the North was guilty as well in all but tolerating it longer ). States Rights were not any less important in the North, it was just that when it came to the tribe, it didn’t matter what the political unit was. The North was its own culture and the different states had no problem surrendering some independence to the feds. Because they were their own tribe ( and of course things were the messiest when one state had a blend of the two cultures ). The problem was that the northern tribe wanted the southern tribe to surrender economic independence and the south was in no mood to let that fly. They might have enjoyed slavery, but so did the north in other disguises. That was not their sin alone. But slave owners or not, those in positions of power weren’t going to become enslaved themselves. And ever since then, the North has kept up its subjugation to the southern colonies. I’d even say that the civil rights movement was encouraged or subsidized, but that might be too paranoid. At most, a subject for another day. But the success led the north controlled federal government to assume it could colonize all the other cultures and tribes on the continent. And beyond. Certainly it is no surprise when the North got a taste of empire controlling another culture it felt comfortable then going global.

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But clashing cultures never stay together long. Our yearning for tribes at present leads us to affiliate along harmless lines such as hobbies, sports or drug use ( harmless to those in power ). In the future, as the tribes are no longer bribed to tolerate, and as they then sense weakness in their controller, the fake tribe fails. Entropy of the diverse nation state.

END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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not all problems

2012-01-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

NOT ALL PROBLEMS

As per the remarks of a loyal minion in the comments section with the article “Ethanol Horde”, serious preppers must admit that not all problems can have a solution. Great observation. This is of course as true as can be but your rank and file doesn’t want to admit it. And any idiot with a keyboard that writes on survivalism certainly doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t have all the answers. Your average survivalists puts a lot of effort into research and a lot of money into supplies. Naturally you don’t want to see any of that go to waste so you might tend to place unwarranted faith into what you have done, and apply that unwisely. Thinking a stockpile of ammunition is sufficient as you go around spraying and praying in an approved military manner ( if I just sacrifice enough manna to the Semi-Auto god, he shall bless me and protect me ). When the very simple fact is that there is absolutely no good answer to the problem of keeping our modern arms operational. With improvised ammo, if any is available ( and if you tell me strike anywhere matches I shall scream until blood spurts out of my nose- the new formula matches are less combustible than when the military manual was written ), you corrode your rifle or your cases and soon enough you are back to the same problem but worse.

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We can talk about it until the cows come home, but really almost under any serious scenario most of us no matter how prepared will not survive the initial die-off. We are well prepared to survive a serious economic contraction, and we could survive nicely once things shake themselves out, but none of us have the resources to actual survive the process of devolving political control in a populated area. When you start with a centralized government run on oil and end up with a localized agrarian society, in between is all the fighting between groups for who is to become the new king. If you have anything worth stealing, you die. If you are part of the fighting you roll the dice and fifty fifty you die. You could have the New World Orders most valuable skill and you will die at the hands of indifferent hungry mobs. You could die in a famine stricken city or die in a isolated spot cut off from resupply. Hell, you could die from nuclear attacks as the worlds armies run out of conventional arms and must resort to the missiles to starve off one more attack ( or try to steal the last of resources ).
*
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Not that everything is hopeless. You still go driving your car every day even knowing that this might be the leading cause of death. You take extra precautions and trust in the luck of the Wee People that some asswhore doesn’t T-bone you as they are distracted texting. In the case of survivalism, you will most likely die, but you fight the good fight until the end. You try your hardest, but don’t bemoan your fate as you lie dying in a ditch. Hopefully you did all you could. The cards were always stacked against you. Just make sure you play a mean game while you can. I think that most people place way too much faith in the fact that they will live close to forever. Damn, after a certain point, who wants to? I’m content to just let fate strike me down as the fickle bitch sees fit. If I’m going to have a heart attack peddling my bike, fine. Irony is funny, after all. What better way to go than the exercise that is supposed to keep you fit?

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Let’s say you are battening down the hatches, arming yourself for the zombie assault, wearing a mask in case of government induced contagion ( I’m pretty sure that AIDS had a bit of help getting here and spreading so quickly in specific areas, so I would hold no surprise if a barnyard flu outbreak is in our future ), you’ve bugged out to the concrete bunker, etc., etc. Then a left field Murphy’s Law happens. Say, the spouse, who has been hiding her affair with the UPS man ( and here you thought she was helping with the finances with all those E-Bay sales ), decides the time is right to unlatch the backdoor one night and lets in her new and improved husband. They both live happily ever after on your supplies. The point being, there is no way you can solve that potential problem. And I’m sure you could think of 100 different scenarios like that. You could drive yourself crazy doing that ( literally, like becoming a paranoid schizophrenic ). Do your best, and don’t worry about the inevitable.

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Christ on a rocket propelled cracker, I’m feeling like double warmed over crap today. I’ve been sick for a few days, sore throat morphing into fever and work has been a challenge. This morning I barely biked into work I was so weak ( looking on the bright side, even though it was 3 degrees out I was quite comfortable with a long warm flash ). So, today being Friday as I write this, my article might be mediocre and a bit on the short side. I’m hoping I kick this by the end of the weekend.

END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

entropy

2012-01-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

ENTROPY

When you lead off most of your articles, “I’m not sure if I covered this before, but…”, that is bad enough. At best it points to a lack of any organization ( I’m the cluttered desk kind of guy ). But when you are writing about entropy and make the same statement, that sadly transcends irony. Entropy is simplified ( you can sound all knowledgeable and go to great lengths describing it, as the Druid Dude does very well, but we all know I go to great lengths to simplify things mostly for my own understanding rather than yours ) as Things Fall Apart. Okay, things fall apart without effort being put into arresting that process, but you get the point. Entropy is about states of energy degrading or some such, but I like my definition better ( its probably not mine but I’ll use it like that ). Everyone both instinctively knows/learns about entropy but at the same time takes great pains to either sidestep the consequences, hide it or bribe off the process. When you buy a house, there is a constant state of repair that must take place or the state of the house reaches a lesser quality than what you started at. A car, having a limited number of miles to go before it takes more energy to keep it running than it is worth, is the first lesson in entropy most of us experience. It starts to decay/get worn from day one. Inflation is a great example of entropy. Without adding real tangible goods to back each printed batch, each dollar becomes worth less. Every new batch of bills added makes every other bill in existence worth less.
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My blog is an example of entropy. As time goes on, the relatively fixed number of ideas in my head is worth less and less. If that goes on long enough you really start sounding retarded as many ideas are topical and have a limited shelf life ( a simple example would be expecting the federal government to still stock public shelter with food. There are few if any shelters left, and they aren’t stockpiled ). I feel I must continually consume more and more information to stay ahead of this obsolescence ( I know most of you think I’ve failed ). Just as most people today know they must learn upgraded skills for their job ( each additional skill of course returns less and less in the way of compensation. You are learning to keep your employment ). Our countries infrastructure is a poster boy to the consequences of allowing entropy to run its course. Gum, glue, baling wire and duct tape are not suitable repair materials. Because our entire industrial infrastructure was built to such high quality using the best material and world class engineering, all this crumbling around us is still working, after a fashion, with said half assed repairs, but since we don’t have replacements for the original materials it won’t last forever. Our empire ( well, anyone’s empire throughout time ) is victim to entropy. We built it up with a world class military ( it might still be world class, but it simply ain’t big enough now to do the job ), the worlds leader in oil production, the worlds king of steel, etc. None of this is available to us now, so we aren’t inputting enough material to freeze entropy. We are just band-aiding the giant as it slowly dissolves.

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See? Entropy is familiar to all of us. Obvious examples. Yet because we used the last century denying entropy ( more oil was found and used as a way to put wrapping paper and a bow over entropy ), it isn’t the lens we choose to view our world anymore. I’d even like to guess that our throw away society was a prop we used to deny entropy. It takes continued effort to maintain a marriage. Too much work. Throw the bitch away and start over with a new one ( that’s right, on marriage number four and unhappy as ever. I’ve just stopped thinking the next one will be much of an improvement so I keep this one around ). Rather than sharpen and oil a razor, we just use disposable ones ( not the greatest example, since safety blades are a heck of a lot safer than the straight edge of death, but you get my point ). Rather than clean or fill or sharpen a writing pen, use disposables. Who wants to clean dookie? Use disposable diapers. God knows our bloated corpses are too precious to journey down to a recycling center, so throw away that beverage bottle. There is nothing much to maintain and take care of and mix your labor with if everything is easily replaceable ( I’m just as guilty and have only started turning over a new leaf as the old types of disposables have dipped past the point they make economic sense. The new frugal is quality for more and more items ).

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The thing to take away here is that if you start asking a simple question, you can get a much clearer view of the future of our organizations and institutions. Is the level of energy or material needed to maintain its original configuration being applied? If not, entropy already has or soon will start to cripple it. And you plan accordingly.

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Okay, on to a short subject. The make-your-own water filters using the Berky replacement ceramic elements. I had been worried that the squishy washer used to obtain a water tight barrier would grow brittle with age. I opened up my five year old element ( I have a second one that’s newer ) and the washer is just like new. And that is with it wrapped in the original bubble wrap surrounded by newspaper and in a cardboard box and subjected to weather fluctuations. While I was in there, I measured the washer. It is the same size as your standard outdoor garden hose rubber washers ( the Berky washer is much thicker and looks to be of higher quality though ). I had bought a pack for my five gallon water dispenser ( spout at the bottom edge ) and so they were handy for comparison. I threw the package into the filter box thinking it might make a decent cheap patch if something happened to the original washer. Use that as you see fit.

END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

bug out blather

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

BUG OUT BLATHER

A kindly minion made the suggestion that I elaborate in depth on junk land, either as a series of articles or another book ( with a huge list of possible subjects ). Which of course I might just have to do if for no other reason that you are all crying poor and not doing much in the way of Amazon ordering ( bad minion! No biscuit!- thanks to a minion for giving me that one to rip off ). I do think another book would be nice, perhaps an updated companion piece frugal preps/cheap homesteading. But time she is not kind. Lacking financial motivation ( my books are the second least profitable aspect of my begging ), I tend to begrudge anymore time writing. Anyway, I bring up the above suggestion for a reason. I was thinking about an article on “why buy junk land” ( relax, I won’t subject you to that, yet ) and of course you get around to the argument as using it as a retreat rather than a homestead. Most folks are rightfully hesitant to move out to the semi-wilds when the job market sucks. It is bad enough to face the prospects of finding another job where you are, even with references and networks. At this point in the economic collapse, to move is to assure unemployment baring a miracle by Baby Jesus himself ( we were having a beer together the other day and he told me to pass on that your hair looks awful and hence he won’t be intervening ). Now, moving isn’t necessarily a bad strategy. You could use the unemployment as an excuse to declare bankruptcy, dump the house, perhaps the wife, go on Food Stamps and live off those as you learn to garden and raise chickens ( for under two grand you could buy a lot in east Texas and spend most of your time fishing ). Use the twilight of the Welfare Oil State to your advantage ( Wos, kind of a play on words with Oz, or Australia. Get it? ). Alas, if you like your wife, most likely she won’t go along with this primitive strategy ( hell, even my wife would most likely take off if I didn’t provide her regular booze and cigarettes, and she is a much better Prepper Bitch than your wife ). So understandably that leaves you with no other option than a retreat.
*
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*
As you should all know by now, I hate the bugging out strategy. You should live at the retreat, and since I’ve pointed out how to do so very cheaply, this should be an option open to all. But see the above. Even if economically feasible, it is a route almost no one wants to take. Most of us, and I include myself, would rather stay married and live in a less than perfect location. I could be living in an even more remote location, and live on almost nothing, but I doubt the wife would stay ( or if she stayed, I wouldn’t want to put up with her attitude she developed ). So a bug out option isn’t as retarded as I make it out to be, looking at it realistically. Oh, it is still a very bad choice, the variables almost assure your death. But realistically it is probably what most folks will do. We’ll cover a frugal approach, but as my final word on its advisability, I’ll just say it should, in a perfect world, be a fail safe back up plan rather than a primary strategy. Your basic plan is CCC. Creep out, cached camping. You bike out off road and go to a innocuous camping spot. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your own land, but I would highly recommend it. We can talk until we are blue in the face about possible future calamities, and many might indeed happen, but the one happening now, and for the last three years, is the economic collapse. It is already here and if you ignore it hoping for a sudden collapse that eliminates the bankers and the property tax collectors, you are setting yourself up for failure. The bankers and the politicians have been kicking the can down the road for a very long time. They are doing a splendid job of it. But eventually the road ends. If you try to time that, you will most likely fail. Plan on economic collapse, which means eventually you will be homeless long before the government collapses. Junk land is your ultimate insurance against homelessness.

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Get yourself a piece of land. Cache your food supply. And other vital equipment. The olde timey French trapper dudes were the ones, I believe, who introduced the cache concept. Hundreds to thousands of miles from town, hostile Injuns about, caching was life or death. Sound like your future? Caching eliminates expensive buildings and the prospect of theft ( obviously, bury in secret ). Construct a shelter, but one that won’t be broken into. Such as a lean-to or a outdoor roof on poles ( I’ll feel stupid when I hear the name but I’m having a brain fart on it. Most likely because these damn people around here don’t respect Jim Time and I got some fool yammering in my ear as they watch me hunched over the keyboard typing. Hello? This is your friggin clue calling ). Bury the tarps or bug screening or canvas you will use later to finish the shelter. The point is to disguise your intentions. For all the world to see, a weekend camping spot. Nothing to steal here ( just in case, I’d bury a hatchet or whatnot if they do destroy the shelter and you need another one ). As to bugging out, get a bike. A single speed, and not from a China Mart. A single speed ( coaster brake, like you had as a kid ) because nothing breaks on it except the chain and eventually the ball bearings. The spokes can break, which on a geared bike cause wheel wobble against brake pads. If a single speed gets wheel wobble, you don’t have to loosen up the brakes to peddle. Carry a spare fitted chain, and you are almost guaranteed to make it there mechanically. Your tires of course should be the solid tires.

*

Around roadblocks and not running out of gas, the bike is what you need as a BOV. Have a front and rear basket. You will need to carry some water, a route by water to replenish ( have a filter ), and a pack full of peanut butter and beef jerky. Calorie dense foods. Remember, it is fifty calories a mile to peddle. Strap on a pistol for protection with a decent amount of ammunition. Bare bones anything else such as sleeping gear or what not. Weight takes calories to haul, and you can only travel as far as your food supply. You might never arrive, but if leaving is better than staying, it is better odds. Good luck.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

ethanol horde

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

ETHANOL HORDE

A minion was wondering if the Golden Horde threat was all that real, and there is a new article out at Energy Bulletin on the end of the ethanol subsidy and import ban. Let’s take the ethanol news first as I have very little new to say on it. When TPTB do something incredibly stupid it is both because they are indeed incompetent short sighted asswhores and because some group is benefiting from the action. When they finally reverse themselves it is not out of logic or common sense but because they have no other choice. When Bush The Younger got us involved in Iraq, it was most likely because his handler Cheney ( supreme douchebag of this century, but also a pretty cool guy that had no problem busting a cap into, literally, the ass of a lawyer. Hell, if Hitler and Stalin killed a bunch of lawyers they can’t be all bad even considering the other 40 million combined body count ) wanted to make a few bucks, because the country needed a nice war spending booster to counter a sagging Tech Wreck economy and to control future flows of oil from the middle east. Obammy The Kenyan promised to end that war but he is a lying sack of crap ( read my big floppy lips, no new taxes. New cigarette taxes two months after swearing in may his evil soul combust in the putrid flames of a bubbling bowel in hell alongside wife #2 ). After three years, he finally placed a piece of eye candy on the sore to make it look like we were out. Why? Not to win reelection because elections are rigged nowadays. Not to fulfill his promises ( read my fecal stained lips that continually suckle the anus of central bankers, no new taxes. What the crap is that new universal health care bill, bitch? ) because he lies so much he can’t remember what he promised. He pulled out of one war because we are hemorrhaging money much worse than is admitted and that was the only choice we had. So when Bush Junior starts the ethanol subsidy it is because it benefits one special interest group plus it denies food to the Third World. Those darn darkies must be ethnically cleansed ( as a bonus, it makes the Saudi’s regime less stable and they are more beholden to us for military support ). And most importantly, at the time we didn’t have the frac fuels we do now. We were desperately trying to stem the decline from import drops. Of course I can’t be sure, but I’d wager the food situation here is much more dire than admitted. We needed to put a heck of a lot more grain on the market for human consumption. As far as gasoline prices, expect them to soar. Ethanol was ten percent of our liquid fuels.
*
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*
A minion was wondering why The Horde was such a fearsome foe if most people are going to assume the government will come to the rescue. And given folks reluctance to leave their “castle”, their only form of savings. And their only form of retirement most likely ( I don’t think there will be ANY market for reverse mortgages anymore, but idiots who lived the middle class won’t acknowledge that truth as it is their only life preserver ). These are good points. Most folks will remain stationary. Most won’t have enough gasoline in their vehicles. Most will wait until the roads are a huge stationary traffic jam before they try to bug out. All this is true. But the problem isn’t in the percentages, it is in the raw numbers. Because we are so overpopulated, even small numbers pose an extreme risk. And the places folks live nowadays is far worse than it used to be. Back in the last Great Depression, the bulk of the population lived on farms. Or, they lived in cities near farms. Today, almost everyone is far away from food production and it is totally centralized. To cope with the overpopulation of once fertile food production areas, people moved into all the marginal land. They didn’t see a problem. Here was a piece of land, dirt cheap because it was junk land. They imported federal money to live on and used federally constructed grid power to survive. None of these areas, from the swamps of Florida to the deserts of the southwest, can support more than a few miserable indigenous tribes. When the grid fails or the government checks stop, there is no living off the land. The land is incapable of supporting more than a handful. So, even though a lot of people will eventually move some time or another, even after most are dead there is such a huge number of them ( 15 million in Florida, 7 million in L.A., etc. ) that the survivors, warm from burning McMansions for fireplace heat and still picking the rotting flesh of the first dead out of their dentures, will make up a formidable horde. It is just like the small percentages that toppled the banks. When you are leveraged 100 to 1, a two percent loss bankrupts you. When just a percent or two of every town survives, there were so many there that a huge mob is left. Most can’t hoard enough ammunition.

*

This is true almost everywhere you look. Small percentages are now huge threats because the system has been overleveraged. To the number of retirees that will bankrupt Social Security, to the amount of money an insurer can pay out before all claims are denied, to the low number of crop failures that will start widespread famine. This ain’t your pappy’s survivalism anymore, as I’ve said before. Surviving the sixties nuke attack was as easy as picking a desolate area not downwind. Today, what desolate areas? I might live in one of the more remote spots, but that doesn’t mean most cars can’t make that 200 miles. It also means that once sleepy town itself is overpopulated so its location is little consolation. Fear the horde.

END

The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

bweebs

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

BWEEBS

Always hunkering for another acronym, today we refer to the earlier post on killing the wife. BWEEBS. Bitches With Brats. Do I have much new here to report? Of course not. It’s Monday, and not only is it Monday, it’s the first Monday in over two years I have to start working a full eight hour day again. Even less time to meander through other blogs and dream up something new, or more usually dream up a new way of saying the same old thing, so the only thing I pulled out of my butt was the above title. Let’s see if we can actually come close to the regular allotment. Just to kill a few more words, I’ve tried in the past to write half length articles and I just don’t seem to be able to enjoy them. I don’t feel like I’ve harped on a subject long enough. I’m sure many disagree but if I wanted your opinion I’d slap it out of you. Okay, I’m kidding. I’m rather non-violent. Not because I want to be but because that has been my coping mechanism my entire life ( non-threatening and the class clown ). I’m wondering if all the repression will lead to Going Postal. It certainly can’t hurt after the Apocalypse when I can let loose.
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*
One of my few female minions who has stuck around despite my continued abuse ( and to be fair, I’m an equal opportunity abuser and try to get seniors and commies in a lather also ), Lamb, commented that it would be just as easy and desirable to kill the husband. Hey, no argument there. I’m a big fan of Farrah Fawcett. Mostly for the nice scenery rather than the acting. All females who cry and whine that they are abused need only think “Burning Bed”. And if you are too timid to risk the electric chair, think “Bobbet”. I’m also very aware that females are really, really humping evil and mean if you cross them. They fight back in different ways, not having the strength to risk a male fighting back, but they can be meaner than a cornered junkyard rat. Now, I’m aware that I sometimes write from a male-centric viewpoint. Most of my readers are of the courser sex and it is also a way for me to vent against political correctness and the modern liberated female ( both of which I like about as much as the Handmaiden Of Lucifer ). Occasionally I’ll try things from the other view, although it will probably always make me look stupider than usual. Plus, I’m usually just pulling stuff out of my butt here. But what the heck. Not knowing what I’m talking about never stopped me before.

*

Don’t think of the title BWEEB as derogatory. Just descriptive. And fun. Remember DINKS? Dual Income No Kids. Already an endangered species of course. And Bweebs does rhyme with dweebs. If you are a bweeb, I would think you would have all the incentive you need to prep like crazy. I mean. you don’t really enjoy lying under a fat sweating guy twice your age, do you? But what do I know? I’m a guy. My little brain does all my thinking for me. Now, if you do play the poverty card and weep and moan that you can’t afford to prep, then I guess you really do desire the above mentioned sort of gentleman. More power to you. Certainly, it is a viable survival strategy. Today you see this sort of thing all the time. Stepfathers probably come close to the same percentage as the biological ones. My stepdad was a pretty cool fellow. I mean, he was a super nerd engineer and a pretty straight laced religious guy, but he put up with all the abuse of my sister and me with a song in his heart and a smile on his face. It didn’t seem like it was ever faked. My stepdaughter was an extreme pain in the ass, constantly pushing and testing ( and hating ), but I always thought of her as another daughter, as family. I think adopting another family comes naturally. With death rates the way they used to be, I’d image it is engrained in us. The point is, bweebs are no different from today’s second marriages. With one very important difference.

*

Today, we are still wealthy enough that feeding two or three times what we are used to usually won’t put too much strain on the budget. Tomorrow, it will be a matter of grave importance. Can we take in multiple mouths? Another mouth, a starving female, would be hard enough. Multiple that by a kid or three. If you are a bweeb, you had better have a strategy figured out beforehand as how to determine a potential husbands larder. You do not want to be taken in and become someone’s sex slave and see your kids kicked out of the house. Now, part of me says, dude, these are bitches here. They know more about being sneaky that you’ll ever know. Another part of me wonders. Bitches can act pretty stupid, at least American bitches. When it comes to attracting their flies, they seem to think vinegar works better than honey. Has women’s lib bred out the females natural ability to exploit men? Are they now only aware of how to take under the laws we now have punishing males for being born? Regardless, it is good advice. Trust has to be earned, not promised. And guys, you might think how you are going to be able to put her mind at ease. She actually might be stupid enough and can’t figure out how to figure it out on her own ( the bigger the boobs, the smaller the brains ). And you all are aware that six months of freeze dried foods isn’t a great investment for acquiring a new family, right? You need multiple years per person. The great thing about being able to afford a new wife ( even if the price is feeding small mouths ) is that she has less of the American bitches bad attitude. Sometimes when the threat is real and obvious, people act a lot nicer.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

turd eating ants

2012-01-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

TURD EATING ANTS

The Oil Age can be simply described as turd eating ants. Our future is going to be that of leaf eaters. I’ll explain shortly. I’m sure the authors of “Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle And Our Energy Dilemma” didn’t intend this to be the main lesson their book conveyed, but the message they tried to impart, namely that the deep water drilling in the GOM is typical of the energy we have left ( hard to reach and expensive to extract ), is old hat to me ( as opposed to the targeted general audience ) so I focused on other things. That, and the observation of cultural conditioning which hinders most folks acceptance of Peak Oil. I do highly recommend this book, but be aware that it is hard to process. It might be meant for a wide audience, but it is so dense with information that it must be slowly consumed. I loved it, but it is rather the nerds/geeks guide to the oil age and the vulnerability to society through its acquired complexity ( almost all societies are complex, some are far more complex than others ) manual. It is a much easier read than Tainter’s earlier work ( which reads like the worlds most boring college text book ) and covers the same ground but updated and focusing on our energy dilemma. Also, it is no where near a doom and gloom book ( the authors- the other one is the petroleum engineer T. Patzek- seriously think pleas of logic will lead to change even after they make the case that complexity must increase, as the amount of energy needed to keep the old levels of complexity stays the same and new levels demand more- which I read to refute The Druid Dudes arguments against devolving peacefully although I’m sure this books authors would politely deny that ).

*

There are different species of farmer ants ( ants that bring in fertilizer and grow fungus on it and then harvest that food ). Which is funny as hell to me because we think as humans we are so smart and special because we thought up farming like it was something special when all along these dumb as dirt ants were living off mushroom farms long before we even started eating carrion out of the savanna dirt. But I digress. There are dung farmer ants and there are leaf farmer ants. The dung dudes go a short distance from their hole, gather up animal feces, bring it back and start farming that treasure ball of nitrogen. The leaf ants on the other hand, must travel long distances to get leaves, a marginal source of fertilizer. The ants eating crap don’t need much energy, or specialization, or organization to eat because they have access to a highly concentrated form of fertilizer very close to their home. The ants having no other source of fertilizer other than leaves have to work a lot harder at feeding themselves. They have evolved into specialized workers to perform all the extra tasks, they must employ far more workers to haul a lot more leaves from farther distances ( because the yield in nitrogen is so small, there needs to be a lot more of it and over time the harvest takes place farther and farther away ). In short, they must use a lot more effort to get a lot less energy.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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*
Just as we are pretty blind to the fact that farming isn’t a trophy to our wonderful brains, we also overlook what kind of ants we are forced to become. Before, we were happily wallowing in a backyard full of crap balls. Just Texas alone used to provide most of our petroleum needs and a good portion of the globes. We even won half the globe off the richness of Texas oil. We strolled a short distance, gathered up a dung piece and started farming. Almost no effort, few workers, and all the other ants sat around enjoying the surplus. Well, we have, by necessity, now become leaf eating ants. We have been forced to specialize in order to harvest leaves far away ( turned to taking overseas oil as our primary energy ). And we are getting a heck of a lot less energy out of each barrel of oil ( we used to get by on 20 million barrels a day globally, now it takes 85 [ a lot of that is oil energy equivalent such as tar sands, ethanol, liquid gas, etc. ] and we have gone from using one barrel of oil to extract 100 to today’s one barrel to extract a mere 15. Total energy in BTU’s is way down ). One of the lessons is we have been forced to increase complexity in order to deal with this decrease in energy.

*

Complexity is nothing more than a way to solve a problem. The cost to reward ratio is usually positive. Until the cumulative effects crash the whole system. When Rome ran out of territory to steal, it could no longer steal the accumulated wealth, both agriculture and precious metals. It turned into a much more complex system to start to tax and control its land owners. Of course, that wasn’t enough in the long run to substitute for the wealth that building the empire brought. Peter was robbed to pay Paul and eventually the whole imploded. As America today has no surplus wealth or energy, she has turned to complexity to start taxing and robbing the old wealth owners. It was overseas colonies, increasingly now our own middle class. Just the complexity of the financial sector alone ( not to even begin to dissect the military-industrial complex or others ) is far and away more than what used to be needed to manage our whole system back when oil and ore flowed freely.

*

Another great insight I took from this book was the observation that most folks are indeed blind to our energy dilemma through simple cultural conditioning. A little bit of our training as children came from direct teaching from our parents. Perhaps a smidge came from formal schooling ( it almost has to happen by accident as schools are just regimentation programming ). But the huge bulk is just simple observation. What we are surrounded by is what trains us. The culture imprints its Xerox copy on our spongy brain, most of it not even conscious on the part of the imprinters. And what did we all grow up on? Energy abundance. Actions speak louder than words, right? We might holler about oil scarcity, but our actions, driving everywhere, eating fruit flown in from South America, throwing away tons of plastic, speak differently. Children are programmed to think oil is available their whole lives. Most of them bring it into adulthood. Okay, it hurts to say this, but people aren’t idiots about Peak Oil, that is just the way they were taught.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there

energy trends

2012-01-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

ENERGY TRENDS

When you are a paranoid little weasel, hiding in a blind panic at every perceived threat, more like a paranoid schizophrenic Chihuahua, you tend to look at things like preparing for a future of less and trying to save money as natural and good. When you are a typical corporate clone trained in a manner that suggests perpetual growth ( as if not everyone is familiar with the grains of rice and the chessboard story ) is a natural law that replaces the second law of thermodynamics ( which was actually thought to be inviolate by actual trained scientists until disproved by graduates of the West Podunk Community College business school ) you naturally scoff at such doom and gloom. It is offensive to their sense of wish fulfillment and blind optimism. So, here I am saving the company ten percent a year on my paycheck, thinking I’m providing a service equal to ending world huger or communicating with other sentient beings, and the company is looking at me as if I’m the sole roadblock to doubling productivity, bringing in huge management bonuses and creating a bonze bust of the current boss to be placed at the front entrance by a board of directors so grateful that they instantly go from hostile and surely to fawning and sickeningly sweet. Always looking towards a future of possible contraction, I voluntarily kept my work hours at 36 hours a week for the last two and a half years. The company saved a minimum of five grand, and I was happy to have a smidge more Jim Time every day.

*

Well, the company never asks what you did for them yesterday. Institutional memory excludes anything positive. They want to know what you have done for them today. Okay, understood. You must always increase productivity to stay employed, crap rolls downhill, life is like a crap sandwich ( the more bread you have the less crap you have to eat-bread being a 70’s slang for money for you young pups already deaf from gangsta rappers screaming about killing whitey, pants hanging down past your ass cheeks like you want Tyrone to have easier access to your bung, ball cap on backwards like you want to have no protection from the sun because your cool ass hipsta self is unconcerned with that pitiful ball of energy keeping you alive, stupid ignorant bastards ). All that is understood. And a normal person would inquire as to why I dislike a ten percent pay raise. First, it is just worthless paper. My time is irreplaceable. Money is printed at will. Second, I don’t need it. Now I have two new problems. How to not screw up my writing productivity by replacing that time with more work time, and how to get rid of the extra money without wasting it. But as you all know, eventually I always come up with the perfect answer to any problem.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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*
For now I’m going to go ahead and start regularly buying more solar panels. I may not have the extra time every night to write ( twelve hours a day I’m out of the trailer. Two hours commute, eight hours work, and hour lunch/write and an hour Internet research/blog maintenance. Throw in an hour or two showering, cooking, dishes. Seven hours sleeping. An hour spouse interaction. Two max watching TV. That’s my weekday. TV is my only down time. If I replace that with writing I get zero Jim Time ) so the extra electricity is worthless right now, but it is an exercise turning worthless paper into tangible assets. It provides juice for the future pit home, or acts as back-ups to the panels I already have, or doubles my current generating power ( or a combination thereof ). Solar panels are an excellent personal investment. They can translate into very cheap energy independence. Not by buying enough panels to power up a refrigerator, obviously, but by providing lighting and other essentials only. Alas, they are worthless in providing national energy independence.

*

In a year, we use 200 days worth of coal for all our electrical generation. 79 days of natural gas. 72 days of nuclear energy. Hydropower is down to 23 days, mainly as a result of silting and long term drought. 4 days of fuel oil, five days of biomass, five days of wind and only one day of geothermal. Solar collectors and PV panels deliver a whopping ONE HOUR of electrical power to the country. Even as we double the rate of solar power every year, we are at such a small start rate that it will take decades to make any meaningful change.

*

But let’s move on to a much more important point than solar will never save us. Transportation and electrical generation use 70% of all our energy use ( 20% goes to food, although there will be some bleed over as some transportation is food ). As total BTU return on energy decreases, total energy available goes down in two sectors almost exclusively ( food and military will suffer last ). Transportation and power. Transportation can be easily cut without too much initial harm, mainly by increasing the cost of gasoline and diesel. But grid power is a bit more problematic. The Internet alone uses 1/8th our electric power. This is everything from your PC to the server farms and extra power lines. Besides metro areas switching off street lights and adding taxes to kilowatt prices to reduce waste, where do you think the target for reduction will lie? The Internet. The low lying fruit is always picked first. Sure, there is a lot of backlash against the government fiddling with the Internet. Indefinite detention got a total free pass from the public, but the start of site shutdowns has everyone in an uproar.

*

I expect that the Internet control will move into a less public phase. Expect less overt control. It seems a good number of folks are just hanging on with a small Internet income. Otherwise, there would have been no cry if no money was being lost. Look at the way that the number of gun dealers was wiped out overnight. Instead of $30 a year in fed gov fees, suddenly dealers had to pay a hundred ( I’m rusty on the numbers but I think there was a tripling on fees ). There was no ban on dealers, just an economic penalty. This killed the market. Expect the same with gun control ( just quadruple the ammo tax ). Internet taxes will gut the usage of bandwidth hogs like movie downloads ( poor Netflix, first the post office goes broke then the Internet is no longer a freely exploitable resource ). The government doesn’t have to forbid Internet use, it just has to take it from subsidized to free market. Applying sales tax to the Internet will cut way back on commerce. The Internet is a zombie, walking around unaware it is dead. It isn’t about thought control, it is about energy decline and triage.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there

kill the wife

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

KILL THE WIFE

January fifth Rawles Survival Blog had an article on the potential evil of man. I applaud his efforts at edginess. It seemed to dwell on a subject most Yuppie’s would run screaming from. Thank goodness it was a difference from bug out spaceships, how to improve the performance of the AR by 10% by doubling the money spent on it, where you should buy your two million dollar mountain top concrete bunker with your own satellite for communicating with your tactically superior ninja hit squads or other such standards of duplicating the efforts of FEMA to keep our elected representatives in power and comfort after a nuclear war. Actually, come to think of it these kinds of articles might be just the thing the typical survivalist grooves on. Fulfilling his secret fantasy that he could replace his fat sexless shrill of a wife with a better model. After all, the bitch is probably going to divorce him and take the survival retreat as part of the property settlement before the actual apocalypse occurs and this scenario is just the thing to settle his blood pressure. When you are powerless, fantasies of revenge are sweet indeed ( trust me, I’ve gruesomely tortured my ex-wife in many and varied ways in my mind in times of hunger or cold and it settled me down slightly. Of course, it was problematic in that I don’t want to use regular techniques because of the blood and gore, but any torture of a sexual nature would probably just excite her. I can’t even catch a break in my Happy Place ). In the article, the end scenario had a few choices for when a young thing with kids shows up hungry. Take her in, send her on her way, kill her in kindness, boot the wife out of bed and use the new wife shamelessly or kill the current wife. These are all fine choices, and sure, a few are more evil than others, but I’d like to point out some problems with these choices and offer another one.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
*
Now, I’ve said before that I was once a clueless bastard when it came to women. I only learned the hard way. I used to be the testicleless idiot that would come to the bed every night, hat in hand, begging for the good stuff. I was a good little Modern Male, never imagining that the female wouldn’t be in control of our sex life. I had been properly indoctrinated in full on women’s lib ( the best indoctrination is when you never know its happening ). If you love masturbation, this is the kind of relationship you want ( in my view, sexual release is a lot like grades of protein. Masturbation is a can of pork and beans. Intercourse is sirloin steak. Anything in between can be hamburger or even sausage. Certain protein satisfies your craving much better than others. If you are satisfied eating beans instead of animals, fine. I’m a carnivore ). It is now my contention that in a relationship each gender has a role expected of them. A male must provide and protect, a female must satisfy her man if she wants to keep him. Everything else is gravy. If you only have love, you will eventually have a divorce. So I am heavily leaning towards killing off the wife. But that is just my thirst for revenge against all the promiscuous whores that slammed their legs shut after their wedding night. The logical thing to do is to eliminate the possibility of blowback.

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Paul, thank you for the generous donation. It will go towards the 30 watt solar panel I'm buying today.
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Let’s say you are a middle age ugly bastard that prepared for the collapse. Your wife is suboptimal, but you keep her for whatever reason. If a young pretty thing shows up at your door with a hungry kid, you know what is going through your mind. I want a new wife that is compliant out of necessity. You can talk all the crap you want to look good for the modern women, but I’d wager most of us long for the good old days. Look, stop putting pins in your voodoo dolls, gals. You have certain expectations in a relationship and so should we. Anyway, putting aside right or morality, if you decide to trade up in wives, do it the smart way. If you take the new one in and cheat on your wife with her, the new wife will henceforth expect you to cheat on her. Right? You are showing your true colors. If you kill the old wife, then the new wife knows you might kill her someday once she becomes old and ugly and a new one comes along. No, the smart thing to do is lie like a rug right off the bat. A potential wife shows up. Give her a few supplies, not inviting her in. Hint around you are lonely and she should think about it and come back in a day or two if she want a permanent place at your table. Okay, she doesn’t know you are married. You then have 24 to 48 hours to kill off the old wife. The new one shows up, you are a long time suffering widower that lost his spouse long ago. You kept the ring on and her things in the house because of your undying love. Bing! Sympathy and you’ve played the romance card chicks dig.

*

But let’s say she saw the wife. She knows. So, you have to get a bit more creative. When she shows up next, you have terrible news! Your wife got insanely jealous and started attacking you, thinking you were going to leave her. You might have to hit yourself on the head with a cast iron pan or cut yourself on the arm ( make it look serious enough she believes you ). You had to defend yourself! You unfortunately hit the bitch too hard and she is dead. You of course grieve, but things were never going great for years, the marriage was a sham, etc. Kind of the same lies stupid bitches buy from married guys wanting a mistress ( I’ll leave her, promise! ) ( note on terms like “loyal minions” and “bitches”- if you can’t laugh at jokes at your expense, you take life too seriously. I like to weed out those kinds of readers. Survivalism might be serious business but life itself should be enjoyed. Learn to laugh a little. It will lower your stress and that of others around you ). There is a reason we all wear polite lies to sanction our evil. It makes everyone feel good, and reduces their anxiety. As they say, white lies are social lubricant. Disguise your evil, idiot.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

sense of entitlement

2012-01-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT

Before we start today, a general word or two on the loyal minions comments ( and no, sorry, you don’t get to pick you term of endearment, I do. If it offends you, you are directed to the other two long standing prepper blogs that take great care to offend nobody ) that I “am full of myself”. Now, I do believe that I take some pains to humble myself. I try to fess up when I do something stupid. And I try to retain a sense of the absurd. But let’s just say that I am an egomaniac. I grant you it is possible ( sometimes its hard to analyze yourself ). Now ask yourself this. Who else, other than someone quite pleased with their powers of observation, is going to consistently, year after year, fight against the consensus of his field of study? I have to present the case against 99% of the logic out there. Most of it isn’t even logic but a bad job of parroting regurgitated premises. Let’s take Greer, the Druid Dude. That boy can spin the prettiest argument ( and that is meant as a compliment ). In fact, he does such a good job that I use him to question a lot of my own conclusions. In this weeks article he made the case for long term decline rather than collapse. And it would be easy to buy into except for one or two minor details. Such as The Bigger Straw Fallacy. Greer seems to understand that we are running out of oil. Granted. But how does running out of oil mean slow decline? We have roughly six billion too many people on this mudball, and they are all mostly fed off of petroleum. Does he envision the oil will decline at the same rate as the population in a decline rather than collapse pace? But more importantly, you must factor in the Bigger Straw. An oil field has X amount of dinosaur juice. If new technology such as fracking comes along to get oil out that was left behind by conventional methods, you certainly have bought yourself a lot more time. But you are using exponentially more oil now than when that field was originally pumped. You pump it out as quick as possible because the demand has grown for more oil. I might be off a bit, but if I’m not mistaken fifty years ago we were using under twenty million barrels of oil a day globally. Today it is four times as much. We have a lot less to draw from and much more demand. And only some of that is optional use. A lot just keeps folks alive.

*

Let’s try to psychoanalyze the mass of idiots living in the US. I’m sure a foreigner could do a much better job, but you are stuck with me. In the beginning, here was a huge continent that a few pesky injuns were squatting on. A damn shame, they weren’t utilizing the land to its full potential. Damn heathens were just living sustainably rather than stripping the surface and underground resources to become filthy rich. The same problem they had down in central and southern parts of the same area. But Spain was run by a bunch of greedy royalty who didn’t want to share the wealth. They limited their official work force to Spaniards and enslaved all the indigs. Well, of course once those poor bastards were all dead productivity went to crap. The French never entered that area but eventually got a good director for colonization and started treating the tribes decently and had a great time thereafter. But really, they didn’t do much better than skimming rather than mining the riches. The British screwed up down south but actually got it right in the future US. Send your desperate and discontents over and give them a percentage to exploit the place. Rather than being directed centrally, this had great growth potential for being organic and free flowing. More and more malcontents moved over there, they and those already there had more kids, the numbers exploded and exploitation was successful ( Russian used the same strategy going east of Moscow but in the end never allowed the peasants to retain much of the wealth ). Of course, the strategy backfired as the Colonists realized the prize was worth trying to steal from the Crown. And that prize was great enough BEFORE all that petroleum was found.
*
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*
Now, I grant you that killing Indians is risky work ( and you can’t deny they did deserve it. Tribe A killed off tribe B, and B was killed by the white boys. Live by the sword, die by it ). And tilling fields and whatnot while trying to not be killed by Indians ain’t no picnic. Our forefathers worked their asses off for their wealth. It wasn’t gold nuggets on the roads ready to be picked up. For the longest time, we were very hard workers. And doubtless most of us still are. I make fun of the lazy and luxury grabbers, but most often the conveniences are there because we spend all our time working. But while working hard, we started to get expectations that our pay was to grow and grow. Our standards of reward increased. We still worked hard, but expected more and more for it. And I think that is where our Achilles Heel is. A few folks are just trailer trash, ghetto dwelling welfare trash, but the vast majority are hard workers with a really screwed up sense of what their compensation should be. When our oil wealth started to flow throughout society, that sense of entitlement just exploded. And our government saw little reason to do anything other than exploit that to the fullest. While fulfilling one groups expectations of their just reward for hard work, they made sure another group perceived that as a unjustifiable entitlement. In fact, I’d wager that the conservative and liberal hatred is nothing more than one group of folks thinking they are harder workers than the other. Used by full advantage by our banker elite controlled federal government.

*

Now, add in a few hundred million firearms. A dash of economic decline and a dollop of wealth loss to the majority. I don’t know if we will actually have class warfare, but the ingredients are surely there. Everyone thinks they are the only ones working hard and the other group is stealing it with help from the government. And why not believe? It certainly seems so. No one blames the man behind the curtain, there are so many scapegoats handy.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there

killing sadly

2012-01-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

KILLING SADLY

Last night I finished up “Homo Luminous” by Mike Frost, purportedly a post-apocalypse novel. I will say, the author seems talented. I had no problem wanting to pick the story back up and reading on. One’s interest was kept. However, it was rather the steaming pile of dog puke as far as its genre. I was ready to forgive the early introduction of the mystical aliens inducing pole reversal and the bitch with the glowing hands healing dudes, but when the guy attacking the Very Bad And Evil People ( who were a bit cardboard cutout like ) started reading their minds to gain a tactical advantage in his attack, I had to call bullcrap. As I said, well written ( perhaps not perfect, but certainly no where near atrocious ) but NOT post-apocalypse. I would not recommend the paper version, high priced at $15 for under 300 pages. I don’t think the Kindle version is too bad of a bargain if you are still interested in it. One thing that stuck in my mind about the story was one part when one character admonished another for taking pleasure in killing. Bad Spot! Bad! No biscuit! You can kill, just don’t enjoy it and then it is a-okally dockily. Yes, a bit gay. Next we might flash backwards to a Native American cradling a slain buffalo to his bosom, dear fellow creature, thank you for nursing my spirit. You have died so I shall live. Praise Earth Mother. Or some such crap. I feel like we are back in “Dies The Fire” with its tree hugging Super Warrior Princess’. And speaking of princess’, here’s a joke for you. If you can hear the wife in the living room when the TV is on, her chain from the kitchen is too long.
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*
Anyway, I might not agree with the “kill with a heavy heart, grasshopper” ideology, but the basic point is valid. Set your boundaries beforehand on your Rules Of Engagement ( translated from Politically Correct Militarese, when its okay to kill ). If you figure out ahead of time, you won’t have moral quandaries over who you can cap. Mother in laws almost always qualify, but make sure to think several moves ahead. Is your father in law in possession of a primitive living skill? Will it make your wife difficult to live with? Most importantly, is she a MILF? But you get my point. You can kill kids if they are part of a descending hoard, or if one of the little bastards looks like he might be carrying a grenade, etc. This group is worthless, this one isn’t. Everyone is going to be different. But you will have a long list. There are over 300 million idiots out there wanting to be fed and post petroleum there is only enough farmland for about ten percent. As distasteful as it might be to play god and eliminate the competition for short supplies of food, if you don’t than you move from surviving to being culled by someone else that is in better touch of his reptilian brain. Kill or be killed is not a “yeh, but…” proposition. You either eliminate all the surplus or you become one of the surplus. Sorry if that includes babies, old bastards, cripples, etc. You want farm hands, not piehole stuffers. We have had such a surplus of energy and food in this country for four hundred years that we have lost all touch with reality. Reality is scarcity and hard choices. If you can’t make up your mind about killing others, not because you are more worthy but just because you want to survive instead of them, you are already dead.

*

To my main point, it isn’t just making an enemies list, you must also create a culture your tribe will adopt to justify and institutionalize the killing. It is obvious you have no other choice, but there needs to be rules and boundaries. You must have the blueprints in place beforehand. Any moron can follow the basics- our tribe good, their tribe kill. But you also need activities to reinforce reward and punishment for following the standards. Let me give you an obvious, modern example. In our military, there are severe punishments for falling asleep on guard duty, or for failing to attack under order ( such as desertion in battle ). These are codified. Then there is the less formal peer pressure. Your squad mates are not to be disappointed. You can’t fail to hold your own under fire. All these reinforce the mandate to kill, even if you are scared crapless or are having qualms. They serve the purpose of removing any ambiguity. A soldier who hesitates, who stops to think, is dead. As are his fellows. I’m not talking about an unthinking killing robot. I’m talking about not having to think during combat ( you don’t have time ) because everything is already spelled out for you in black and white. So, the refrain from “taking pleasure in killing” is one way of not only justifying killing the enemy, you also prohibit unnecessary deaths ( killing armed combatants is cool, going on a rampage through the village, you drooling and grinning like an idiot as you sport wood, is not ).

*

You definitely don’t want the classic 70’s refrain “kill them all, let god sort them out”. But you also don’t want today’s mamby pamby bullcrap about us all getting along eating tofu and singing kumbiya and how everyone is our buddy and we should all swap spit and how its okay to butt hump your pal Earl or any of that other nonsense. Christ on a cracker, reality is indeed a bitch. If you try to fight it. Embrace reality and it will treat you okay. And to veer off slightly to finish up my required word count, really? Eight votes! You have got to be crapping me if that doesn’t scream voter fraud. The bitch that is on record for implementing state run mandatory health insurance wins the Republican vote in Iowa. And they not only fix the vote, they insult us by claiming it was such a close count. It’s all fixed people. The main election is already decided. We just have to wait for it to be made official.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

diane rehm-let them eat cake

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

DIANE REHM-LET THEM EAT CAKE

To long time minions, it is no surprise I despise Diane Rehm over at PBS. Well, I hate PBS also. If the witch hunt for communist infiltrators began by McCarthy ever was meant to be a serious cleansing rather than a pathetic sham, PBS should have had all their directors placed in front of a firing squad. Its funding should have been reduced to zero and anyone ever sending in a contribution should have been sent to a reeducation camp ( hey, the commie pukes love socialism so much, they would welcome reeducation camps, Killing Fields style ). But Diane has also been in the top five things that make Pravda Broadcasting Station so bad. At first, it was just that scratchy nasty sounding voice, like she was 120 years old and hooked up to a machine to keep her alive. Then there was…the…damn…way…she…paused…between…each…word. For Christ’s sake woman, spit it the crap out. My shift will be over before you finish a sentence. I mean, sure, Rush Limbah does almost the same thing, a pause between each rapid fire thought. But he just does it to fill up the three hours of geriatric and Yuppie product commercials. Diane can’t talk any faster because her mind has been wiped out by decades of smoking dope in a commune with the hippies, and the late nights swilling hard liquor as she provides sex acts considered illegal in most Southern states to any Democrat in DC. But now I have a new reason to hate the vile whore. She has proven to be another hypocrite in the War Against Po Bitches.
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*
You know the folks waging war against the poor. They spew out propaganda like we were back in the Reagan era. The poor are just lazy. If they wanted to work they could ( especially in those areas with 25% unemployment, evidently ). They should all be denied welfare. Only the rich deserve their money, the poor should just assume a hundred grand in college debt to retrain themselves when their industry is shipped overseas to China. Perhaps I better spell out The Bitches sins. I’m flipping between channels on the radio as I’m driving around at work ( working at the Food Bank I got to by riding my bike to work from my recycled home- for all you sanctimonious pukes advocating to save the spotted owl by working for a law firm driving a Saab and buying foods shipped overseas to Whole Foods ) and The Bitch is acting all smug talking to a guy that is talking about being unable to afford Obammy Health Care. Why, she intones, you surely don’t expect The Rest Of Us to pay for your health care, do you? Now, on the face of it, this is a valid question. As things stand now, if you have a limb cut off while unemployed, you can go down to the ER and they will save your life. They will employ Satan himself to hound you to pay them back, and if you ever are silly enough to work again ( should you stop being a lazy bastard and move to China and work for $3 an hour after you learn Mandarin ) they will garnish your wages to get paid back. But at first, it was free medical care. Which, by the way, was probably from all those Liberal Bleeding Hearts insisting laws were passed making it illegal for the hospital to deny you services. But evidently, if you are rich, even if you are socialist or communist ( by which they mean they are free market with their own money and socialist with everyone else’s wages ), you can’t abide funding any kind of welfare system. Diane is appalled that the unemployed should suck off her dime. Hey, here I am, working minimum wage, and I get humped straight up the wazoo paying for all those old bitches out there to suck off the Social Security system and the Medicare program, neither of which I’ll ever benefit from, but that is okay with Diane. It ain’t her money, and as far as she is concerned, if I wasn’t such a lazy bastard I could magically pull a better paying job out of my ass and make enough to have my own radio show so I could agitate for less taxes for the rich.

*

You know that cheap gasoline you are burning in your SUV? That crap costs more than $3 a gallon. It costs that, which is mostly taxes by the way, plus the un-levied cost of the military to control the world to our advantage so that they can sell us their oil cheaply. This is a hidden cost that you are expected to pay unknowingly. Well, Diane, there is a hidden cost that all you rich pukes must pay. That of social cohesion. Your kind are still worshiping the Robber Barons that underpaid workers, treating them as interchangeable commodities, whipping them to work harder and faster under threat of unemployment, and under dangerous conditions. Ever since the first Unions persevered against Nation Guardsmen firing into their protest lines and actually got a decent wage, the rich have moaned and cried and pined for the good old days when those uppity bitches would get back into their shackles. But the rich seem to forget that that over paying the masses, there was relative stability amongst the classes. The rich didn’t go along because they were forced to by the government ( the government had offered armed troops to be used by the companies as strike breakers, remember? ), they went along after enough money was lost. It was the price you paid to stay profitable, bribing the workers to stay peaceful. Well guess what, Diane? You still need to bribe the underclass to not lynch you or destroy your machinery. I don’t necessarily condone that, but I can understand what few choices workers had. Left to their own devices, the owners would continue to exploit. So the workers used force to level the playing field.

*

But now the wealthy are crying, feeling their profits getting pinched. They are still wealthy as hell, but they aren’t making enough to keep them in the style they are accustomed. The poor must pay more. Welfare must be abolished. Means testing must be applied. Sorry, rich pukes. You can hump the poor by not paying the Social Stability Tax, but in the end when your mansion is burned down by mobs, you’ll find it would have been cheaper to do so. It sucks to have people on the dole, it sucks not everyone pays their fair share. Life sucks. You want less crime and a peaceful environment to conduct business? You bribe the poor to stay home and kill themselves with booze and drugs.
END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

enemy of the state

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

ENEMY OF THE STATE

Back in the 70’s or 80’s there was a book by this title by F. Paul Wilson. It appears to have been reprinted, so it isn’t rare. I must have read it close to a half dozen times, and along with L. Neil Smith “The Probability Broach” two of the classic libertarian sci-fi novels. Back in the 70’s activists, patriots and revolutionaries might have used science fiction to hide their sedation, but all but the idiots could read between the lines and figure out the protagonist was the repressive US federal government ( in “Probability” there was an out of control jack-booted thug fed agency national police which I believe the TSA is modeling itself after. Hey, the Federal Reserve Bank chairman was a Randian before he went to the Dark Side. What’s to say that the head guy of the Airport Molesters didn’t get inspiration from science fiction? ). In today’s climate I wonder if these two books would have been written. Forty years ago, if you put your protest into fiction form you were left alone. By allowing all the “noise” to cancel itself out any dissent was just ignored or trivialized. Killing or jailing you ( other than for IRS problems ) would have generated publicity for you and your cause. By ignoring you your voice was lost. Well, today dissent should not be undertaken so lightly. Even making it into fiction, or disguising it as a history lesson ( Rawles guest article on never surrendering would appear to me, as a fed Thought Police Patrolman, to be an attempt to incite defensive measures in the event of an arrest attempt ), will no longer save you from yourself. Now, while I hesitate to scream and panic and say “this time is different”, I can’t help but wonder why the current carte blanc legalization of Disappearings is going forward. Crap on a cracker, at least our original fascist President Lincoln waited for war before suspending civil rights. Nor do I believe we have the resources to concentration camp all that many folks. At first I’m worried that we would be starved to death to save money and food and cot space, now I’m wondering if any arrestees will just get a bullet to the head and a shallow grave. After all, if you are held without charges indefinitely, no one has to prove you are still alive.

*

Remember the Interstate Commerce Clause being the darling of the legal eagles during FDR’s reign of socialism ( fully supported by the populace, thanks a lot you old bastards-who was the guy that tried to kill the crippled puke? We need a national remembrance day for the assassination attempt )? It was used to justify any and all Stalinist doings of the feds. If you grew your own wheat on your own land using your own cows to fertilize it and using your own seed, it was deemed permissible for the feds to regulate your crop because by NOT buying supplies from someone else you were affecting interstate commerce. Huh? Yet this was the convoluted logic used. Anything and everything came under the control of the federal government because it was “forced” by the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce. Remember the rash of asset forfeitures twenty years ago? If you had “too much” cash, you were obviously a drug dealer because honest citizens didn’t have to fear a paper trail of checks or credit cards. If you were parked in a “suspected area” you got your car seized. It was obviously being used for drug dealing. Anything and everything could be tied in to drugs. If you used convoluted logic.
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*
So, once again using convoluted logic, who is a terrorist? Well, clearly I am, because even though I keep saying not to fight the feds, just let them destroy themselves and try to survive the process, obviously that means I don’t support the continuation of the government. Why, I must want them to be destroyed. I must be anti-government. Just because I didn’t come out and say “attack”, I must be implying it by not opposing it. Clearly I oppose the rebellion against the government, but since I hate the government and wouldn’t mind seeing them die, I must be a terrorist. Anybody who is against the bank bail outs must be a terrorist. If they oppose the bail outs that means they want to see the banks fail. If the banks fail, the economy implodes. If the economy implodes, taxes can’t be collected and the government can’t afford to fight the terrorists. So clearly you wanting to see an end to the fighting against the terrorists make you a terrorist sympathizer if not a terrorist yourself. If you are a Constitutionalist, you are a terrorist. By failing to support the federal government acting beyond its limits set by the Constitution, you are saying you don’t want terrorists arrested. You don’t want the American people safe. For their safety, you must be arrested if you refer to the Constitutionality of their actions. Should I go on, or do you get the idea? Hey, perhaps one of you trolls should call Homeland Security on me. Didn’t I just admit I’m a terrorist?

*

It isn’t hard to put yourself in the shoes of a anti-terrorist All American Hero Of The Peoples State. No matter why the war on terrorism is being fought, clearly it is in the best interests of this nation. Why, it’s non-partisan! Both Bush The Younger and His Most Excellent Kenyan ( oooohhhh! He is dissing on the commander in chief! Off with his head! ) support it. If you don’t support it, if you do anything at all to weaken the empire or regime, you must support terrorists. This is oh so much better than the war on drugs or against commies. Now there is no long chain of evidence that needs to be followed. Anyone that isn’t 100% behind the Forces Of Goodness is obviously a terrorist. Now, all that is needed is the thought that you are unpatriotic and you are a terrorist. Who needs a wiretap? That is so “evidence required”. Now, rumor and innuendo and heresy are good enough. And it’s a bullet to the back of your head. If you are targeted. Hard to say who will be until we know to what purpose this whole charade is unfolding for. Of course, I can’t imagine this will backfire. I mean, why would anyone resort to deadly force just because they might be arrested? Most folks still think we live in a free society, under the rule of law that still applies to law enforcement. Sure we do. That is why it is now the law of the land that you can be disappeared. Now, the police will comply with fed dictates and fellow citizens will not interfere or complain. It is all legal. Just like Hitler’s dictates. Good thing history isn’t taught in school anymore now that we are teaching so much math and science so all our kids can get into debt going to college.
END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

apocalypse practice

2012-01-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

APOCALYPSE PRACTICE

I’m sure I talked about this before, but we’re going to do it again. First, the last time a minion gave me an article suggestion was back when I talked about the economics of a generator verses more solar panels ( right now 120 watts is $250 after shipping. If that lasts twenty years it is one buck a month. Battery replacement for that on one hand and gasoline for the generator on the other hand just wash each other out cost wise. The generator and 120 watts of panels generate the same amount of juice for batteries per hour. The generator will last a far shorter time [ solar 3,000 hours a year, generator about one thousand hours total lifespan ] ). So if you ain’t suggesting something different you really must enjoy my topic picks. Secondly, I’m writing this as quickly as I can so I can get to building my floor while it is still light out. No time to drink coffee and leisurely contemplate another idea. Things to do! I am writing this on the first day of the new year, Sunday. I know I was off on last years new years prophesy. I said oil would double, and although I can’t remember exactly where it started I’d say at most it just went up a third. No matter. The Powers That Be ( Quick! Don your triple layer tin foil cranial protective devices! ) surely had something to do with fudging those prices. Either the wars or unrest within oil producers, or screwing with the futures markets somehow ( did you see the Rawles link to the gold markets manipulations end of last week? ), or killing overseas demand by flooding the markets with ObammyBucks and killing everyone’s economies. Heck, I have no idea. I do know that you get the same prediction this year as the last two. One of these times I’ll be right. Start at an even $100 a barrel of oil. It will double this year.

*

Here’s another prediction. Thailand will experience large scale rice failures from ocean flooding. So here we are, the end of the day last day of last year, eating out at our regular restaurant in the casino ( Denny’s prices- not great, not too bad comparatively ) since we had been running around town all day. The wife bought dinner since she won a bit gambling on the penny machines. I had my regular $7.77 prime rib and she had her platter of shrimp. Here is a women that merely nibbles through life, her dinner portions not even equaling a snack for me ( bitch be cheap to keep ). But put sea food in front of her and she acts like she owns a tapeworm several feet in length. She can out eat me then. And there was so much shrimp she didn’t make much of a dent ( we finished it up several hours later ). Which brought to mind a recent news piece on where all this shrimp comes from. Primarily Thailand, which has cut away most of its mangrove forests to install shrimp farms. Mangroves act as a break to ocean flooding. Beyond those you have a lot of rice fields. Go order up a batch of shrimp. You will be enriching an Asian peasant fisherman. And helping to kill off all the little bastards when tidal surges flood their grain fields with salt water.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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*
The standard answer from Yuppie Survivalists when asked why they don’t move away from the city, go gridless for their utilities, give up a car and ride a bike, eat more wheat or anything else smacking of giving up their petroleum luxuries is that there is no reason to live like a Third World peasant until they have to. Behind this answers lies three very frightening reasons, all of which assure our intrepid survivor he is going to die a horrible lingering death. One, their wife wears the testicles in the family and all they can do is fantasize about prepping. Two, they themselves are just as addicted to luxury as the wife and use her needs and desires as an excuse. And three, they don’t actually want to survive if they have to give up their luxuries. You will die, lazy bitch. Now, this does not concern me overly much. If you keep buying from my Amazon commission links, I still love you. Oh, sure, you might muddle through okay if things go your way. If you moved to, say, New Zealand and had a bit of food and some gold, most likely you would be okay baring a Chinese invasion. They grow their own food, have less problems with relying on petroleum, a mellow culture. If you live here in America though, you have millions of guns and welfare bitches with a sense of entitlement ( and such an overdependence on oil that we can’t even have a discussion about minimizing its consumption without you all getting butt hurt ). You really must assume the worse, die-off and collapse wise. Because we have completely and totally given up any old fashion way of feeding ourselves ( even the organic farms are too far away from metro centers full of tens of millions ). Think of it as the Y2K problem ( with thanks to the minion for clarifying the issue ). The US was the most advanced technologically and hence had the most to break since all its systems were the most vulnerable. We are the most dependent on oil, hence have the farthest to fall with shortages.

*

You can’t wallow in petroleum today and expect to instantly adapt come grid down. The same survivalists that advocate practice, practice, practice when it comes to firearms or first aid or tactics are the ones ignoring the need to practice for the lack of petroleum. You must learn now, and learn what needs to be done. Even ignoring Peak Oil, a terrorist attack down by Louisiana/East Texas monster refinery area would wipe out a good portion of our refined petroleum products ( gasoline, propane, motor oil, heating oil, etc. ). A giant solar flare equaling that of the 19th century would EMP us back to that time technologically. If we continue to devolve economically, the grid shuts down a little at a time due to bankruptcies and infrastructure collapse. Regardless of what disaster befalls us, you need to learn to wean yourself from the petroleum tit. You might think you are smarter than me, and most likely you are correct, but it took me more than a few dead ends and bonehead decisions to learn about living off grid. It is not an instant learning curve. And if you wait, there will be no stores to supply your transition.

END
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*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

richly frugal

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

RICHLY FRUGAL

Well, today you certainly are a bunch of lucky bastards. I just went shopping, you get to hear all about it, and I’m disguising it as survival advice. And what? You complained about those Peak Oil articles and this is what you get. Are you happy? Is this what you really wanted? I’ll allow you to stew in the toxic cocktail of your own misery now and proceed. You have all pretty much guessed by now that I’m such a tight ass with my pennies that I’ve yet to have one fall out of my orifice, and that is with the ravages that middle age start playing on the bodies, oh, how to put this delicately?, digestive parts. As relaxed as my sphincter gets, it is so packed with copper coins that nothing is dislodged. Yes, I was unwillingly pulled to this sad state of affairs by the financial shenanigans of the ex-wife, but now that I’m here I can not only claim credit for the willpower it took, I can enjoy the end result. When you have pared down life’s basic necessities to a minimum, you have plenty of extra cash to play with at the end of each payday.

*

I can’t take credit for feeding myself ( if the collapse never happens, I‘d like to ferro-cement a large ground covering for rain catchment for gardening and perhaps chickens ), or living rent free ( I have a few grand left on the lot but don’t worry overly much as the paid for lots are available if needed ). But for a working stiff I spend comparatively little of my income on groceries and rent. By reducing my needs to the cheapest basics ( like almost free electricity-amortized the panels are under a buck a month at current prices ) I have so much extra that at the end of the year I can go hog wild. Last year I got the generator and this year I got a newer bed, construction supplies for a warmer floor in the living room and a lot more wheat. And as you are all aware, seething in jealousy, I spend over a hundred a month on Amazon books. These books are not only tax deductible, they fill me with information I can pretend is knowledge that is my façade of wisdom. All because I refuse to allow a motor vehicle to own me, I eat whole wheat two meals a day ( although I do consume sweet, tasty, majestic nectar of the gods butter with my lunch bread ) and I live in a tin box on junk land. I’m not claiming to be a super stud back to the lander macho redneck he-man. I bitch with the best of them as I’m hauling water home in the cold of winter. My nipples grow hard, but with no pleasure at all, as I shower in 55 degrees fifteen feet from the heater. That is not the finest part of roughing it. No, I’m not hard core. I just enjoy the lack of stress from not living at a maxed out paycheck. Nothing is free, it is just if the cost is agreeable to you. For me to go out and buy an additional nine months worth of apocalypse food for the two of us, and not be bothered at all about the cost, to me the freezing showers and slow hard rides home makes it all worth it.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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*
Which brings me up to the part I must give Lucifer his due. Thanks to all my Amazon commission paying minions. Sure, writing is work, the research is work ( both are fun, but still a job ). My minions only pay if they are gaining perceived value. But I still appreciate the support. It keeps me from having to work a real second job. I’m also going to give a shout out to Eugene, a fellow Silver Stater, for the Christmas gift just received. Your donation paid for a good portion of that wheat I just got. Which is up about ten percent this year over last. Still a bargain at $28 per hundred pounds at the local feed store, though. The Home Despot buckets went up ten percent also. They were close to $10 to store a hundred pounds, now a solid $12.

*

I noticed that wood prices are down 20%, but insulation prices are up 50%! But, hey, don’t you worry your pretty little heads over that! It certainly can’t mean energy prices are going up. Why, North Dakota is supposed to be our new savior, gushing forth cheap crude at such a pace that the Saudi’s are embarrassed ( please note inserted sarcasm here ). One thing you might want to look for if you go to the Big Orange store anytime soon is their marked down LED flashlights. Eighty friggin cents! I got a half dozen since they are plastic cases. Sometimes when it gets really cold here and the condensation starts forming I lose metal case flashlights to internal rust. You can never have enough flashlights if you don’t rely on grid power for lighting at the flick of the wrist.

*

Living frugal has its price. It also has its pleasures. It isn’t for everyone of course. Although I can’t understand how those purporting to be survivalists can’t wean themselves from luxury. Which will be tomorrows article. Practicing for the apocalypse full time. Another oft covered topic here. Yet, somehow I know you’ll enjoy it. Oh, you can turn off the gas and breaker box for the weekend. Or even all of a week on vacation. Know what you’ll learn? How quick your petroleum based petroleum substitutes run out and how expensive it was. You need to learn long term luxury deprivation. But more tomorrow. If I give it all away now you will get bored and go hook up with a Yuppie Survival site. And then I won’t be able to buy more Amazon books. We don’t want that.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

bothering with details

2012-01-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

BOTHERING WITH DETAILS

A comment the other day said, in effect, don’t keep panicking about every disaster de jour because you don’t need to preach to the choir and we are already prepping. And of course, a plea to stop covering such things and focus on prepping. Well, on the face of it that is good enough advice. But as usual the devil is in the details. I get yelled at if I just cover prepping ( all you ever talk about is wheat and bolts and junk land ). I get yelled at if I panic ( see above ). I get yelled at if I write too much ( just get to the point ). In short, no one seems happy. But that isn’t because of what I’m writing being irrelevant. It probably is just because that particular person doesn’t like that particular subject. If I was covering their pet project every day they wouldn’t complain ( if I wrote iluvARs blogspot I would be everyone’s friggin hero ). And, yes, a lot of covering different aspects of our collapse is nothing more than that days filler article since I had nothing else better going on. But the thing I get worked up over is that while perhaps once sound, perhaps back in the mid-90’s, is now bad advice. You can’t ignore current events and just plug along with prepping. You no longer have the luxury of time because any fool can see that events are becoming more chaotic, less structured, more unpredictable and disasters are being spaced closer together.

*

Back in the 1970’s, it was all coming apart and no one knew if the ass had fallen out of civilization ( actually, given all the facts it looked like a good bet ). Panic was good and it looked justified. Then nothing happened and things went back to normal. Suddenly, Yuppie Survivalists preaches you have thirty years to prep and Druid Dude thinks all civilizations take centuries to dissolve. It’s all good, dawg. Look at the 70’s and Y2K, nothing bad can happen to us. We’ve got history on our side! Well, yes, you have the elementary school version of history on your side. Now try applying a bit of thought as to why those civilizations took so long to contract. And when you’ve done that, ask yourself if it can be duplicated. Then, apply a 20% plus or minus to your math. History is written by the victors, and so all history is both subjective and arbitrary. Now, I take history and try to apply lessons myself. I think that is just human nature. We value our own thoughts so much we can’t help but wallow in their glow. But really, in the end, we are probably just full of crap. Not because we draw faulty conclusions but because the facts we started with are probably wrong. Survivalist writers and doctors should have one overriding principle of “first, do no harm”. Now, I know a lot of doctors think they follow that adage. If their training is correct and in fact radiation or chemotherapy is as benign as advertised. Personally I would rather skip them. But anyway, as I’ve blathered about before, advice that isn’t conservative is harmful. If you aren’t taking the worse case scenario as gospel, you are placing your readers in harms way. Not because you are wrong with your end conclusions, but because your initial “facts” could be erroneous.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
*
If you take threats as life threatening, and nothing happens, you are safe rather than sorry. If you relax and don’t panic and just plod along with slow preps, that one black swan coming along will kick your ass. Always assume the threat of the day is real. That is not to say you must act on every threat. You can’t be in three places at once ( hell, you can’t be in two places at once, although modern management wants to believe you can- and look at the mess they’ve made of things ). It is impossible to prepare for everything. But as each threat comes along, ask yourself if you are somewhat hedged on your bet prepping for that, or if you are totally vulnerable. The point is not to go crazy, the point is to refine your preps. It is just like going from a six month supply of food in your apartment to a three year supply in your cabin in your woods. You are covering more contingencies. In effect, yes, that is just plodding along and ignoring the details. All I’m saying to do different is to hasten the process just in case you don’t have all the time in the world. Don’t wait for another year to get a thousand watts in solar panels. Just buy 50 watts now and make do with that. If something bad happens, you’ve got yourself covered with Better Than Nothing. If nothing happens, sometime later add another 950 watts.

*

Worrying every day about a new threat isn’t meant to discourage anyone. It is meant to light a fire under your ass to have all your bare bones preps, and have them yesterday. Adding depth and breadth is what you can plod along with. Jesus on crack, the number of times I read about “budget survival” by a Yuppie! They have no concept of budget or survival. Budget doesn’t mean spending a thousand bucks for a years food supply instead of two grand ( just use coupons! ). It means spending a hundred bucks on grains and beans. They take luxury and do that cheaply when they should have been thinking bare bones. Kind of like today’s definition of poverty is owning a junker car and living in a centrally heated apartment rather than having a new car and living in a huge house. Sixty years ago poverty used to mean malnourishment and exposure to the elements. Now it is just a decrease in the amount of luxuries. I guess when you cry, “reality check”, most folks look around for a real bank check.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

they hump you in the drive thru

2012-01-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

THEY HUMP YOU IN THE DRIVE THRU

If you have been around the block a few times, you remember the movie series “Lethal Weapon”. Mel Gibson, before he got all fire and brimstone religious, and Danny Glover stared. And together they were a pretty darn funny action team. It was the epitome of the “buddy movie”. Of course, the movies were so far to the left in their blatant propaganda that the Soviets were probably pretty embarrassed for them ( yes, this was back when we had a few Ivan’s hovering over the red nuclear bomb buttons and our fearless leaders weren’t reduced to conjuring up a lame terrorist threat out of cave dwelling ragheads and Constitutionalists here in “das Homeland” ). In between cracking wise our intrepid duo were spewing against civilian gun ownership and what not. It was a guilty pleasure to watch the movies though. One couldn’t help ones self. Along about movie number three I believe, Joe Pecsi came along ( excuse me if I’m wrong, I have no way of looking it up right now. Both the movie number and the actors name ). He became the teams unofficial civilian mascot and the antics kicked up into high gear. More than likely, the Jewish producers realized that they were smearing on the Red Schlock too thick. The Jews, being worried about government concentration camps in their new country, were busy kissing ass, assuming that they could win a brownie point by helping to indoctrinate folks against guns and that pesky piece of paper that was supposed to be the law of the land. In theory, come round up time, the complicity would result in favorable treatment. Those schmucks never learn. You need to fight back, or preferably not be in an unfriendly country. Kissing ass never works against Jew haters. Weren’t you warned? Hello? Operation Paperclip? Your liberators just put the Nazis in charge of the technology for the military. You shouldn’t maybe have started to worry a bit ( did I insult the Jews enough? )? Anyway, they needed to keep the movie series going, what with the money and all. And the ass kissing. So the “funny-it-up” exponentially with the new character. And there was another 80’s catch phrase. Who could be mad then?

*

“They F--k You In The Drive Thru!”. Joe was pissed every time the two cops wanted to go through the fast food drive thru. Our buddy cops, being diligently seeking the forces of darkness ( different force every movie, rather Bond like ), had no time to stop and walk in the restaurant. Like everyone in LA, they worshiped the car and lived in the car. But Joe knew that people are in such a hurry, they don’t check the contents of their food bags. They just dive their hand in while driving and stuff their face. So the food people knew they could hump up your order ( probably out of spite for having to work there ). And they did. Don’t go in the drive thru, he shouts. They hump you in the drive thru. And they always did. I’ll tell you, I feel like that character a lot of times. Now, granted, I only have myself to blame here. It has been five years since I worked for a typical corporate job. There, if they didn’t hump you in the drive thru everyday you wondered if the pink slip wasn’t on the way. And its been three years since I was being humped in the drive thru by a slumlord. I hang my head in shame, I think I have been deluding myself into forgetting that They Mother Humping Hump You In The Drive Thru!
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
*
The casino I used to work for used to be a good paying job. I despised it, I loathed and hated it. I also sucked at it, but the boss liked me because I was the straw boss and kept the 90% female crew out of his hair. The girls liked me because I hated management even if I was their boss ( God, did I hate managing females. A friggin soap opera a minute. Great individuals, a merciless group ). I stayed until the second pink slip ( you know the drill, everyone gets canned, you reapply, a smaller group gets rehired and does the work for the missing positions ). And with that, I vowed to never again work a management job. Minimum wage still pays half to three quarters and you work less hours. And the stress level is really low. Comparatively speaking of course. Not that any job is perfect, but I still love this one even as they ratchet up my screw job every year. I’m just now being reminded how work can really suck your soul as the stress level here increases. And living under a landlord. You’ll excuse me if I once again generalize and unfairly demean a race. I swear my last landlord was a damn Jewish slumlord. If he wasn’t, he was one of those they based the stereotype on. A little sliver of gravel for your trailer, the neighbor literally within spitting distance, and every year a healthy rent increase. Why? No one in Yuppieville would rent to old travel trailers. They only wanted rich retired bastards, not po folk. So by being the only park in town that took slightly less new trailers, he charged a premium ( like half your take home pay if you flipped burgers ). Humping you in the drive thru.

*

If you go to Rawles site last Thursday ( 12-29-11 ), and looked in the links section under odds and ends or whatever it is, you notice a link on an article about the markets crashing/bank run. It is an expose on the latest investment folks that went bankrupt and took the billion and ran ( crap, I can’t think of the name. Sorry, I’m writing this at home at night because They Humped Me In The Drive Thru and I worked over half of my lunch hour with extra Christmas leftover crap pick-ups. I friggin hate Christmas ). The article is wonderful. I highly recommend it. Essentially, a group of lawyers, probably from Clintons old team, got together and figured out how to steal money from investors that should have had protection. They paid off JP Morgan, then went bankrupt. Getting humped in the drive thru is absolutely nothing new. Ask homeowners. Or retirees. Or pretty much any college graduate. But the important thing is that now, anyone with an investment in any US market has gotten word that the rule of law that used to protect them from fraud is null and void. When the a regulating agency steals money to make sure everyone is defrauded except a major bank, the trust is gone. You will only be rewarded if you are a member in the Central Bank cartel. All others will be swindled. Now, guess who has a lot of money in paper assets? Governments for their pension plans, and foreign governments. Do you think they will stay around now, to get humped in the drive thru? Be surprised if the stampede doesn’t start.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

viper and cobra

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000-08:00

VIPER AND COBRA

I’m wondering why more people aren’t worried about TSA. I mean, when you start out life as a federal law enforcement agency as a spliced recombined hair lipped banjo player and peeping Tom child molester, you’ve set the bar so low that your future performances are going to be something bewildering to behold. Let’s back up a few decades to the Janet “BBQ” Reno days and the infamous female agent from the ATF who stomped a kitten to death in front of the family kids held hostage. Forget for a moment the actual act and the fact it was allowed to happen. Forget that the agent was not held accountable by the courts or the press or the public. Just think about why it happened. Law enforcement abuse is as old as cops. You will always have abuse. Go back fifty years and if you were Black or homeless, you were likely to be arrested without cause, and get worked over with a lead filled rubber hose. I’m not trying to say that abuse is new. I’m saying that public support of abuse is new. And as I’ve said dozens of times, if not hundreds, when you place unsuitable folks in positions like law enforcement, abuse is more likely to happen and become normal. You need police matrons to safeguard the female prisons, but you are just asking for trouble when you make bitches street cops. Combat soldiers too. Females, by temperament, are not in general able to perform in these roles ( some males also, but that is far rarer ). When you put a female in this position, she is apt to overcompensate for her inferior strength. Hence, kitten stomping. I’m not saying males are any better, as witnessed by the NY city case where the victim was sodimized by nightsticks. I’m saying that you are courting extra instances such as this by placing incompetent asswhores in these positions. So, when you take morons who molest small children and feeble geriatrics, how much abuse do you think is going to occur?

*

If you said, more often than not, it will be “normal”, give yourself a gold star and a Brilliant Boy Bison Biscuit. Whenever you are silly enough to board a plane, you should expect either a full body radiation dose equally ten times that of the Japanese nuke plant, or a fat pissed off room temperature IQ TSA agent to conduct a full body cavity search upon your person. By giving you a “choice”, they are of course blameless. And don’t give me the argument that people protested against these intrusive measures. You can say anything you want, but actions speak much louder. If you bleat and wail about a five year old being felt up to the point of trauma, yet still bought a plane ticket, you changed nothing. If you whined about the radiation dose but still underwent the scanning because it was faster and less obtrusive, your protest is certainly NOT noted. Only by fleeing air travel en mass would have anything changed. The sheep still boarded the chute, so they voted with their feet, noises notwithstanding. And because no one offered any real protest, that which would have crippled the industry and put the TSA out of a job, they know that they can expand their mandate by covering ALL travel. Bus, train, and private vehicle. They already started. Random checkpoints, even at the END of a destination rather than during a trip. Welcome to the Homeland Security drama, brought to you courtesy of Soviet and Nazi training.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
*
Now, how many Yuppie Scum Survivalists add up these three news items? 1) preppers, for buying storage food and ammo, are on the suspect lists. 2) TSA is expanding their searches everywhere. 3) all suspected terrorists are to be detained indefinably without charges or cause. Let me spell this out for you because while your heart is in the right place for prepping, your choices in life lead me to suspect you are not the brightest Crayon in the box. When you bug out, you will be pulled over in a random rolling checkpoint by the TSA. Since you have food and ammo in your vehicle, you are on the Double Top Secret Potential Terrorist List. You will be detained and never be heard of again. Really, do you think the bug out plan is all that smart any more? Right now, the TSA has VIPER teams ( I can’t remember what it stands for, something incredibly stupid ). They are the same idiots you would find anywhere in an airport molesting children ( if the kids were a little older you would find them in a Catholic church or a football locker room ). But they have been given SWAT training and equipment so they think they are the newest Billy Badass. And they will act like it with bluster, savagery and overcompensation ( because deep down, they fear they are really still just the same old jerk-offs ). If I were you, I’d fear these pricks because of that ( well, obviously because of the indefinite detention also, but these clowns will make sure that nightmare becomes more of a potential for more folks ).

*

In light of the adage that if you don’t laugh you will cry, I’d like to suggest we rename the VIPER hit squads. Sure, VIPER sounds stupid enough, like a group of hormonal teenagers naming their gang Super Studmuffins. But let’s just be really stupid and go with COBRA, from the GI Joe cartoon. Crime Observers Bringing Relief to Americans. That might pass on the drugged public as more beneficial, and only a few will get the rip-off from the original terrorist fighters. Go Joe!

*

I’d like to give a shout out to the minion who sent me a gift card from Home Despot. Thank you very much ( and believe me, I’m now worried afresh on the cold sink ). The plan is still on for construction this spring/summer. This weekend I’ll be renting a U-Haul for a bit of lumber and insulation ( I’m saving the card for the underground Bison Bunker though ). I’m raising the trailer living room floor to keep our feet from freezing ( the skirting helped until this December when we had three weeks of single digit cold. Surely a record for here. After a time, we just stayed cold ). I’m also closing in the room with hanging wool blankets. If it gets that cold again hopefully that combo will keep us comfortable. Of course, I’ll also be dropping off the wife to gamble. I’ll stop at the feed store for more wheat. And I’m getting another mattress as our old one is as soft and mushy as can be. A three-fer for the money.

END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

lymph node menu

2011-12-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

LYMPH NODE MENU

Sometimes I wish I could just scream like a little prison bitch whose front teeth have been kicked out. Here we are in very short order going to either be in prison for not having a job and hence paying for Obammy Care, or we are going to be in a detention center just because a Fed said he suspected us of, whatever. And no, don’t think it is going to be like prison now. It is going to be quick starvation concentration camps. Your grand pappy got to die to free the Jews from those kinds of camps ( okay, it was to create an empire, but I’m in full patriotic mode here for illustrative purposes ). And you get to become one of the new Jews. The old Jews labored for the glorious Reich, and you get to labor for the glorious Homeland. Jesus weeps. And if you dare try to escape your banker controlled golden handcuff corporate cubical job, thinking you shall weasel out of their grasp by going self-sufficient in a rural area, they just close down your income generating web site. You are truly screwed ( we all are, baring an ability to disappear in the wilderness and escape drone detection ). I can’t believe how quickly the militia porn nightmare is actually unfolding. Well, don’t I feel like an idiot for thinking I was preparing. Alas, this new particular problem is going to have to wait. As I’ve said, I have no earthly idea how to try to alleviate it. If you go mobile because you don’t want to be a stationary target, the TSA checkpoints will get you. If you drop out of the Rat Race, they’ll get you for not working and paying the insurance company bail-out tax. So, while huge problems we need to worry about loom large, without answers all I can do is whistle while the lights go out. So today’s article, as inconsequential as it is, is what you get. Enjoy.

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I’ve always loved Chorizo sausage. My mom used to add it to hamburger ( which itself was usually soyburger ) for tacos. The taco shells were real corn tortillas fried up into a shell, not the crappy store bought brittle pasty pukes. To this day, I’ve yet to find as good of a taco ( and mom was as white bread as they come ). I got out of the habit of eating chorizo after awhile, but I’ve started again since it is a pretty cheap protein dish. A little goes a long way and you have a lot of fat to go with it. Kind of like pork fat ( the trimmings ), if you can find it at your butcher. If you close your eyes it almost taste like bacon. Between pork fat, eggs and Chorizo, you can make a lot of dinners with affordable animal flesh. The sausage is very spicy and very fatty, so you may not want to use the whole eight or ten once tube in one meal ( but of course, that depends on the number of folks eating ). Since I have to eat it all, not having a refrigerator, we try to use an absorbent starch to cut the grease. If you are twenty years old it might not bother you, but as my stomach can’t handle fat like it used to eating chorizo is like eating a lard stick. Flavored with habanera. This stuff will clear out the sinuses. Cook it for five or ten minutes on low to medium heat, and add it to whatever. Some folks like it in scrambled eggs. I think the best combo is putting it in couscous. Those little wheat balls soak up the fat real good. Rice, not so much. But not bad in rice and refried beans. It really tastes good on pasta of the more Italian persuasion ( I’m partial to mac and cheese with it ).
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
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. Thank you.
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Now, let’s talk about the making of this delicacy. Remember Vienna Sausage, those nasty little hot dogs in a can? Used to cost like two or three for a dollar before steel prices spiked from energy costs, ores declining in grade and the companies needing to pay back their loans. They had spleen in them. And tasted like it. If you had no teeth, these were great for gumming. Otherwise, they were foul and putrid butcher scrap in a tube. Well, chorizo is far worse. Here are the ingredients. Salivary glands. Lymph nodes. Cheek and tongue fat, flavorings and soy flour and nitrates. This stuff is the last piece of meat rejects sold to the last desperate idiot in line trying to pay with pennies and pocket lint. And yet, it does taste heavenly. Not at all do you get what you pay for in this case. Some genius back in time discovered how to make lemonade out of lemons. Or, in this case, delicious sausage out of butcher scraps fit only for rabid homeless dogs gathering out back in the alley.

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Since a minion was so nice to send me a book certificate from Amazon ( electronically, even ) I had to get a great gift with it. I think I got it. Drilling Down, The Gulf Oil Debacle And Our Energy Dilemma. When I had put this on my wish list, I paid no attention to the authors. One of which is Tainter, the guy that wrote on the complexity of civilization and their collapse. That book is old and dull. And very expensive. So, while the first book sounded good all on its own, it sounds even better knowing this could be a cheap update to his original tome. When I read it I’ll of course let you know how it turns out. I know only some of you care. Reading for pleasure isn’t a universal amusement. It used to be five percent of the population. Then the idiots consolidating the presses had to pay back all their loans through more growth so they started publishing putrid swill like vampire novels. So I’m sure that five percent has grown a smidge. But still a minority by any measure. I thought I’d just throw it out there for your consideration.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

selling santas crap

2011-12-29T07:00:00.000-08:00

SELLING SANTA’S CRAP

Well, thank all the gods that Christmas is over. Remember, before the empire crumbles it sees the most lavish human sacrifices of all time ( in other words, the excesses are never more excessive right before it all comes crashing down ). Christmas has reached the pinnacle of stupidity with its greed and naked desperation for gift giving to support the once great retail sector. Most people would love to react to the commercials like the brain dead zombie Pavlovian dogs that they are and rush down to every single sale out there, but their means of production are gone, the credit cards are maxed and the income stream is in decline. I couldn’t believe this morning, Monday, with the pathetic “news” reporters blathering on about how stores expect to see day after sales much better than expected due to gift cards and discounts. I don’t know where this alleged shopping is going to take place, but here in Elko there was about zero traffic on the road all morning. Two weeks before Christmas if you were foolish enough to drive into the shopping center containing J.C. Penney’s you were literally run over by crazy Yuppie bitches in their SUV’s and minivans. It was such a dangerous situation, akin to the exit of a bar parking lot at 2am after a two for one chicken wing sale, karaoke talent night and nude dancer event, I went the long way around even though it was dangerously close to my lunch time. Today, the lot was deserted even late morning, tumbleweeds and litter outnumbering the cars. It was the same everywhere in town, and if you’ll remember correctly, town is one of the few places left in Nevada that still has a functioning economy. The Yuppies here are not in as bad of shape as Vegas or other pestilent sinkholes. Things are pretty bad when you have the “news” fabricating events to stimulate sales after a holiday season that was supposedly not too bad ( most likely, it was just a giant loss leader ).
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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
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. Thank you.
*
And now that the unholy event is concluded, it is time to think about selling all the crap Santa gave you from this and every other Christmas. You know, I know, and Ross Perot’s twin brother that the North Koreans didn’t kill knows that any time now the economy is going to take such a huge squishy dump that all the previous bad economic news like failing banks, imploding European Unions, food riots in the middle east and car company bail-outs is going to look like a mildly infected splinter compared to Bubonic Plague. When that happens, not if but when, all your toys and expensive possessions are going to be worth not pennies on the dollar but something far, far worse. They are going to be as valuable as buggy whips sold at the Daytona 500. Your RV’s, your ski-doo’s, your ATV’s, your electronics of every type and size, all that crap and so much more will be worthless crap no one can afford to buy and with no available fuel or content worthless even if it was affordable. You might be a year or two early right now, but this is something you can’t time. So get the hell rid of it all before the general population tries to do the same in a blind panic. Right now, husbands everywhere are seething in resentment that they didn’t get anywhere near the crap they wanted for Christmas. They work their balls off and all they get is a stupid tie or sweater. No I-Pad or notebook computer or Super Deluxe Ab Pumper or whatever. And wives are pissed that their jewelry is as fake as their D cups, their shoes are Chinese sweatshop fake knock-offs and their tight ass friggin husbands didn’t buy them a BMW like the couple in the commercials. This might be a good time to come along with these worthless trinkets at rock bottom prices. Are they worth a lot more? Could you get more if you waited? Perhaps. But prep supplies are just going to go up in price whereas worthless consumer crap is a highly flexible market. Better to take a slight loss now than wait until you can’t give them away.

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The Sheeple still think the good times are coming back. They invest in super sweet bargains and you get the cash to invest in real valuables like wheat and ammo. When the end comes, their $50 computer is worthless. But you have six months of food. It didn’t matter that you spent $300 for that computer and sold it for $50. What matters is you secured six months of food before the panic. Remember when coffee went from $8 a can to $12? For once, Wal-Mart didn’t jack up the cost of their item ( one imagines they had a fixed price contract rather than they actually thought to not alienate their loyal customers some more ). Their can stayed at $5.30 the whole time ( well, their blue generic can. The Wal-Mart brand Great Value crap was $6.50, tasted worse and you needed to use one third more for the same flavor ). But you could find the can on the shelf only a quarter of the time. They were always out. The same is going to happen to prep supplies of all kinds, even bags of rice or beans or #10 cans of anything. If you can’t find it for sale, it doesn’t matter what the official price is ( like gasoline during a natural disaster ). You can’t wait until the last minute to shop, because stuff won’t be there. Last minute shoppers are idiots to the last. Sell your crap at a loss, buy now before the rush, and thank me later. Hell, by then the web will be down and you won’t be able to buy through Amazon, so you can save money and not pay me back for this wonderful advice which is just sweet garnish on the crap sandwich you wish you could serve up for my lunch. Damn ingrates.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

safecastle contest update

2011-12-28T12:56:00.000-08:00

SAFECASTLE CONTEST UPDATE
If you remember, Safecastle was having a contest. Submitted articles to survival sites were judged and now, end of the year, the winners are given to the company and from those a winner emerges and prizes are won and great fun is had by all. Here is how I picked the winner to submit. I went with the article with the most comments. I'm not saying it was necessarily the best article, but I felt it was a good indicatorof which article people paid the most attention to and were impacted by ( although it could have been good or bad ). Yes, a bit arbitrary. I don't mean to piss off folks or belittle anyone's efforts or talent. It was just my version of a readers vote. The minion that wrote the motorcycle article posted 8-29-11 was the winner. Please e-mail me with an e-mail or other contact info in case I need to pass it on to the company if you win ( don't count on it, but you never know ).
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My regular article posted earlier. Scroll down.

peak centurion

2011-12-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

PEAK CENTURION

The Last Centurion by John Ringo is quite a good book, but no way near a post-apocalypse story. Throughout the whole global climate cool down and plague, the government is quite functional or perhaps dysfunctional. Call it a dystopian novel. It is also a militia porn stroke book. It is also a nice Peak Oil Ignorer book ( it doesn’t qualify as a “denier” book since it deftly skates around the whole idea as if it doesn’t exist ). But despite the many and varied complaints I might have about the underlying philosophy ( which might be described as “soldiers as gods” ), the one thing you have to love about this book is the wonderful job it does pointing out problems that will arise from emergencies and then unwrapping the many layers of issues you have to solve, each one with many tentacles branching out in every direction that compound the problems. It is great in a few areas in this regard, mainly producing food. Of course, then you get into another philosophical problem, blaming all problems on “tofu-eaters” ( gotta love that one ) which obviously means the simple answer to all our problems is just “hiring smart dudes”. I could go on and on about that, and I will, but do keep in mind the basic point of my review of this book is, in a complex society every problem is multi-layered, and this is one of the better books illustrating that very well. Should you buy it or use it as a “prepper persuader”? I think so. The writing is quirky and fun ( it gets a bit “gamer fantasy” stupid in the last quarter, but before then it is quite good in peeling back the layers of the onion ). And the story will not frighten away potential converts because it allows them to still grasp the delusional straws of government control, energy supply flow, smarty saviors and other modern fantasies while at the same time perhaps getting them to think of potential problems and all that could go wrong because of all those multiple layers of complexity.

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I’m going to try yet another time to point out our energy issues. I know you are tired of hearing it, and that I harp on it a lot, but I’m also betting the grid will crash before this blog gets too damn lame and you stop reading ( hey, it’s probably on a downhill projection, quality content wise, but since this ain’t no “Seinfeld” I don’t have to worry about going out on the top [ remember the episode where George keeps trying to one up his own jokes and Jerry tells him to walk out after one good one, leaving them wanting more?] ). Until then, I’ll keep preaching to the deaf and blind. Okay, simplifying things can be both dangerous and illuminating. Dangerous because you might leave out something critical that later takes on life threatening importance. Illuminating because by putting it into a one sentence bumper sticker, they have a frame work to judge every other detail involved in the issue. For instance, economics can be distilled down into “supply and demand”. If all detail that follow fit into that framework, they are allowed to stay and help give depth to the idea. If they violate that, out they go. Anthropology can be distilled down into “it’s all about getting fed”. If an explanation into human behavior goes with that basic tenet, it makes sense. If it violates that, you can ignore it as the bleatings of a degreed moron.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
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. Thank you.
*
The supplies that keep humans alive can be described as “picking the fruit or chopping the tree down”. If you are picking fruit from a tree, you are leaving the tree there for next season to once again bear fruit ( we’ll ignore such things as locust attacks or lightning or tornado strikes and concentrate on the normal cycle of replenishment ). If you chop down the tree you get both fruit and wood, a huge increase in supplies, but clearly a “one off” action. Non-repeatable in a realistic time frame. Returning some plants to the soil ( directly in green manure and indirectly by grazing cattle and using their manure elsewhere ) keeps the soil productive for next season. Planting extra crops without returning enough nutrients delivers a lot of extra food, but then the yield drop off a cliff and you can’t get much more out of the soil in any meaningful time frame. Extracting ore from a mine, pure mining, is in no way, shape or form sustainable. It is a one time activity. You are chopping down the tree.

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Petroleum is mining the energy we use. Period. You always run out of what you are mining. Always. It has been proven that we are running down decades old super fields, and no others of comparable size has taken their place. All new fields are smaller by orders of magnitude. Today’s exciting finds wouldn’t have gotten the rigs installed forty years ago. As our population has doubled. Thank goodness for the North Dakota frac oil fields. Without them we might be in a collapse rather than a Depression. But they haven’t replaced lost imports, they just make the losses in total available energy a lot less. We are still in total energy decline, but it could be a lot worse. We have, a decade later, less energy to burn ( with more population ). All the effort in the last ten years to replace SOME of those losses has made for a decline rather than a collapse. But opening another mine, or ten mines, to replace the huge one played out, does not replace the ore you used to get. It only gives you some time to adjust to decline.

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Are any of us really getting ready for the global petroleum mine to start producing a trickle rather than a torrent? The torrent has already slowed, yet we continue to act as though the next wonderful find will keep the volume going at the old levels. It ain’t happened in ten years. So, you are betting your life it suddenly will, right? We are not picking fruit, we are chopping down the tree. If we kept discovering new wells to replace what we’ve used, that is one thing. But using two or three times what you are finding is quite another. How far does that can get kicked down the road?

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

selling on the collapse

2011-12-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

SELLING ON THE COLLAPSE

A great many people are under the illusion that any day now our great fearless leaders will jolt upright from their slumber, shout in glorious proclamation “hallelujah” and begin directing us towards a sustainable future in which we happily peddle our bicycles around our green village tending our organic asparagus and repair our windmills with locally grown wood. And perhaps that might happen if we could stop all current economic activity and redirect it centrally by an enlightened intellectual genius. Now, while you are contemplating the odds on that, please excuse me while I painfully extract that monkey out of my ass ( he could fly out but I’m such a tightass that there are some birthing pains ). You can’t direct folks against their own self interests. That includes the idiot that draws down the desert water table to keep his lawn green, the idiot that cuts down the last of the jungle hardwood trees using the last of the oil to transport it to China to make gee-gaws to sell to Yuppie Scum. You can’t force people to build green technology alternate energy if they will lose money on it ( if your solar panel cost $100 to make and the Chinese type is $90, you can’t sell enough of yours to pay back the bank loan interest rates. Even if the loan interest is only 1% ). People are going to promote their own future needs without regard to the “smart” way of doing things. If the economic advantage is to grow, you grow. Nobody cares if the oil is running out, the soil is depleted, the nearest farm to the mega-city is three hundred miles away and transportation costs are extreme. They only care about buying the wife shoes, the mistress diamonds, sending junior to Harvard and hopefully having enough left over to survive the implosion of Social Security so they can retire from this soul crushing piece of crap job that sees their arteries clogging, their hair falling out in clumps and their daily evacuations full of blood.

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This is what happens in a collapse ( both economic and energy draw-down ): economic interests stop becoming general enrichment and start becoming a fight for a dwindling share of the wealth. Before, there was enough for everyone. Now, not so much. You must understand this to understand why prices go up, why your pension is going to fail before you ( even with bloody stools ), why taxes go up as government shrinks, why your job won’t survive as long as the mortgage and why you will see a whole host of lifestyle crushing events very soon. Yes, it is nice to think we can muddle through until the end of our lives, but a contraction isn’t a straight line event but rather an exponential snowball into an avalanche process. You can’t worry about one or two things getting worse, but dozens if not scores. For instance, it isn’t just that the banks need bail-outs which cause government deficits to double ( banks are a suck ass parasite but have burrowed into every modern transaction economically so they are now essential to the current system surviving ), but also that the banks stop extending credit because of shrinking margins they now have which disallows investment and encourages sell-offs. Lack of credit slows down the economy as well as the higher inflation and taxes caused by the government deficits. Now every business facing lack of credit must cut quality, short change the future, raise prices and triage.

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Budweiser beer was sold to a Belgium firm. Old news, but a good example. Beer is a perfect gauge for our economy. Beer sacrifices food to become a luxury. Right there you are measuring surplus land and energy, irrigation, land prices, fertilizer costs, transportation issues, etc. And beer comes in disposable containers. The cost of smelting and transportation of a liquid over hundreds of miles, the real estate for bottlers and warehouses, to include the cost of loans for that equipment. Beer tells you in advance the direction of all these factors because it is a luxury rather than a necessity. The shrinking surplus for luxury is a barometer of the economy which is almost all demands for surplus. And the barometer clearly read “shrinking supplies, added cost”. The A-B folks said, screw this noise. Let’s sell this bitch off and make it someone else’s problem. Well, the Belgians have made it their problem. By making it your problem. Beer has doubled in cost. The profitability has decreased, what with all the rising inputs coupled with another layer of corporate debt, but everyone but the beer drinker is happy and glad for their income. And this is a non-critical industry. Next up, your favorite bridge to work.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
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. Thank you.
*
Your county government is in trouble. All the industry moved overseas, the housing bubble crash halved property tax income and at the same time every idiot making twenty grand a year thinks it is welfares problem to feed his family because he can’t make a budget to save his life ( not that the county is complaining too much about the extra Food Stamp money since each recipient is paying into the local economy through cell phone taxes, gasoline taxes, fast food joint taxes, cable TV taxes, etc. ). So revenue is down and spending is up. You’ve already laid off half the Sheriff Department so you don’t have to worry about an extra few million a year in pension costs in fifteen years. But you still need to cut expenses. So you sell your bridge to a corporation for $1 and half of all toll revenue. As a local, your taxes have increased but you still can’t drive for “free” anymore now that a toll bridge is between you and work. Okay, it is only $6 a day which is twenty minutes wages, and far less than the extra gas money it takes to get there. But that isn’t the only cost. To rub salt into the wound, you will one day end up in the river the hard way.

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Corporations are not known for long range planning. They maximize this quarters profits, make the CEO a nice bonus. When the inevitable blowback happens, they cash in their golden parachute and let the next idiot untangle their problem. Your toll bridge operator is inevitably going to play with the balance sheet to shrink declared profits by declaring costs for worker pensions and maintenance. But they will declare bankruptcy long before that money sees its way to either and the former CEO will have squandered that extra cash. Okay, the county would have done the exact same thing, but at only half the cost to the taxpayer. My point here is the increased cost for the same outcome.

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Look at GM or the airlines. Screw the retirees, and the taxpayer. Socialize the loses and privatize the profits. There is no money in transitioning to a sustainable future, but there is plenty in picking over the corpse of our current system. All the remaining money and credit is going into squeezing the last profits out. There is nothing left to invest in for the other end of the Oil Age.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

Christmas thanks

2011-12-26T07:11:00.000-08:00

CHRISTMAS THANKS
My regular article for today is posted below. Here, I'd like to thank all my minions for e-mailing me wishing me a happy holiday. Thank you to the two minions that each sent me an Amazon gift card. It will be used wisely. And Sam, thanks for the care package. I got the coffee last Friday, so it came just in time for the holiday. Both of my kids called me yesterday, so that alone made my day. But gifts are always appreciated. Now, back to the gloom!

bad attitudes

2011-12-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

BAD ATTITUDES

One of the good things about having published my drivel for five years is that since I’ve pretty much covered it all already I can safely take a detour now and then and take up on more important topics later and no one has missed anything. Okay, sure, the letter to Santa the other day was about nothing at all except perhaps a slight jab at Yuppie Survivalists. And today you might even say that this somewhat ties in with the economy, cultural mores, etc., but even I’ll admit this is a stretch. But don’t worry. This isn’t going to be an everyday affair. Despite this being a blog, this isn’t about my life other than how it exemplifies how to be frugal or how to avoid being a dumbass. The scary thing is, as much as I personally do dumbass things, I’m still smarter than the average bear ( okay, just wiser, not smarter ). Anyway, I was reading somebody online and they recommended an article by Smith at Of Two Minds blog on this being the last debt fueled Christmas. It really was one of his more exceptional articles, on par with the economy being The Titanic ( which I believe was from about two years ago but I’m not positive- time flies when the vultures are circling the stewpot ). It was the December 20th article ( I’m trying to cut back on links to postpone the inevitable Thought Crime Police shutdown as long as possible ). That article got me thinking on how you should really think about selling all your worthless crap now for junk land and prep money before it is all rendered worthless ( a good example that sticks in my mind was when I was a nineteen year old idiot and bought a used Mustang. You could literally see the gas gauge drop doing sixty on the freeway. Being as this was Hawaii still in a recession in the early 80’s, the demand for a V-8 was at zero. Dealers wouldn’t even consider them for a trade in. I had to drop it off at the bank for a repo ). It doesn’t matter what you paid for something but what you can sell it for. Before everyone else figures this out, you should beat the rush. High electric, expensive or non-existent gasoline, a spike in unemployment. A lot of different things can suddenly turn your crap in the garage worthless.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
http://bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
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. Thank you.
*
But I didn’t want to talk about that after I came across a sentence in his article which essentially wondered why today’s worker serfs were such poorly customer service orientated. Why, he wondered, would anyone have a bad attitude when they could so easily lose their job and never find another one? He sees this as a puzzling paradox ( the worse the job situation, the worse the attitude ). But never fear, Charlie, I’m here as the resident know it all. Okay, you scoff. But who is still living in California and who was smart enough to get the crap out of that petulant horrid toxic waste dump straight out of Dante’s illustration of Hell twenty years ago? Thank you. With that settled, let’s easily answer the question. I know it quite easily eludes managers. And if someone has been self-employed for awhile it might seem strange. Managers, after all, pay up to an easy hundred grand to go to college. They come out with proof which claims to represent a business education but what is in actuality a bill for a medical procedure called a lobotomy. I have had the displeasure of meeting a large number of stupid mother humpers in my day, and inevitably they are managers ( military officers included- the military seems to have an inferiority complex in relation to the private sector and tries to outdo them in idiocy in such things as managers, political correctness, waste of resources, etc. ). So, managers are basic clueless bitches. If it wasn’t an abstract theory that would never survive the sunlight of reality, they don’t acknowledge its existence. The self-employed are no stranger to hard work or pleasing their customers, but they whole heartedly drunk on the Kool-Aid of perpetual growth. They could never believe that we are in a collapse ( I think even most of the survivalist suppliers are not truly convinced anything truly earth shattering is going to happen- just your run of the mill natural disaster ).

*

Now, don’t you believe for a second that minimum wage peon serfs are too much smarter. In fact, I think if we go with the theory that a mega- catastrophe happened in pre-history which wiped out most of humanity and only left a few score breeding females surviving ( brought up by Ringo in “The Last Centurion” which I’ve only just started but which has really impressed me with its massive data dump of free association rambling which I’m enjoying immensely ) , we can safely conclude that mankind is a bunch of inbred retard banjo playing morons and that the occasional bright bulb is far more the exception rather than the rule and our worker bees aren’t any smarter than the average dumbass but at least has a bit of street smarts due to being subjected to the cruel mistress’ Reality barbs. The worker drones are still idiots, but at least they have a slight grasp of logic. And while I hate to give them any credit, I think we can say that these people know exactly what their future holds. Corporations, which nowadays means almost all jobs, are disloyal, lying, heartless and no smarter than consequences through the end of the present quarter. Workers know that they can be perfect workers, perfect ambassadors to customers, work harder than anyone else, and still get canned at will when the office idiots need to cut expenses. They know that corporate will hump their customers to save a dime and let the workers take the heat for it. They know that no matter what they do, they will be punished rather than be rewarded. So why try hard at customer service? The companies that treat their employees right get good customer service without demanding it. It is built in to the compensation. The companies ( 99% of them ) that hump their workers get what they pay for. Simple.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

merry humping christmas

2011-12-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

MERRY HUMPING CHRISTMAS

Dear Santa, Merry Humping Christmas you overweight tub of lard. You know I’m not too fond of Christmas, but I’m willing to reconsider my objections if you can fulfill my list. You haven’t gotten me diddly spit for the last few decades, so I think we can all agree that you owe me. Turn about is fair play. I’ve seen you give the ex wife a new Mustang a few years ago, on my dime. And you’ve given that big eared bastard in the White House ( doesn’t he kind of remind you of a Ross Perot with a tan? ) which is here without a Green Card all kinds of goodies like vacations to Stockholm to get a Nobel Prize for stealing my money and giving it to the central bank. I’m sure part of the cost of Bill Clintons cigar was from my paycheck. So, really, can you be cool and try to listen to my wish list this year?

*

First off, not to be too greedy or anything, but I’d like a buttload of Kugerrand gold coins. And yes, I’m doing you a favor here requesting the South African gold. Everyone is so butt hurt about being politically correct that they don’t want to buy any precious metal tainted by that White Boy country, so the mark up on those is less than the communist China Panda coins or most other branded gold. Which brings up the definition of “buttload” which you can take to mean “more than I’ll ever need for the rest of my life”. When you are procuring that much gold, the $20 or so per coin add up real fast. Next up, I’d like a mountain of my own in the middle of nowhere ( not in a really cold place like Alaska, or in a place that has a jungle at its base- I think in the Rockies probably ). Fortified concrete fortress, please. A real bitch to attack, even if you could get up the mountain to it. And a natural source of water. No shrinking glacier. And I don’t want the construction to have been done by a Mafia owned firm. No substandard building materials. In that fortress I’d like a decent arsenal. I really love my Brit bolts, but I wouldn’t mind switching over to German made HK-91’s. Plenty of mags and ammo would be nice.

*

Of course I’d need an army of minions, but I imagine that recruiting later wouldn’t be too much of a problem. So we can leave that for now. What I would like right now is a harem. Not that I ever really want “strange”, but in numbers I gain several advantages. First, if one gets uppity, I can kick her to the curb and bed another. Second, and much more importantly, if there is more than one hanging around, they can converse and socialize with one another and leave me the heck alone. I’m too darn busy to be acting as entertainment to the wife. And no plastic Barbies. I want all natural appendages. First off, the fake boobs aren’t the regular wonders of the universe but pale imitations. Secondly, I don’t want to have to worry about any leakage and silicone poisoning. Health problems will be bad enough after the collapse.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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*
Santa, I can think of a lot more that I’d like. But I’m not wanting to reach beyond your grasp. This is just the basics to prove you still love me. Please don’t disappoint me yet again. You know I’m tight with Baby Jesus ( no, I can’t ask him since that time I brought Olympia beer to our monthly board meeting ), so don’t make me narc on you for being a tightass bitch.

*

Now, you all know that I still love the Druid Dude, despite our polar opposite viewpoints on the collapse of civilization. I love him for the time he recommended one of the best non-fiction collapse books of all time, “Overshoot”. And I love his logical arguments ( except for the possibility of quick collapse, he has few blinders on ). This week he ragged on people and their irrational attachment to fantasy to bolster their privileged positions ( you think you got it bad since your house lost half its value? Try living in a Third World craphole with machinegunning bandits chasing you out of your mud hut ). I have to once again recommend his blog, The Arch Druid Report, for your required reading. Despite his flaws in reasoning ( he seems to confuse the inability of people to forecast collapse with the ability of Mother Nature to take away the marbles and go home ), he gets things right more often than wrong. He has quite a few valid points to make.

*

Okay, I am within thirty pages of completing Harry Turtledoves new book “Supervolcano: Eruption”. I really enjoyed the book, but I’m still confused if it is a post-apoc book or just a disaster book. This is another one of his multi-volume series, so he could go either way. The first book doesn’t let you know. He hints plenty at the potential of future shortages ( hard to have the Midwest grain or cattle delivered for consumption if they are under a few feet of ash ), but hasn’t taken it past that. The near end of the book is still just days past the eruption of Yellowstone. You can tell, so far, that the research is basic Wiki info on ancient eruptions and the experience of the Philippines with motor vehicles and the ash in the air. Whether he can draw a complete logistics argument remains to be seen ( for instance, it would be cheating, and unrealistic, to assume foreigners have enough food surplus to ship enough to both coasts ports to replace our output. I’m already a bit leery of his use of refugee camps with enough MRE’s to go around ). As I said, I enjoyed the book, regardless of how it turns out- if it is part of our genre or not. I’ll get the next in the series as soon as it comes out and let you know what I discover.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

middle class clueless

2011-12-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

MIDDLE CLASS CLUELESS

I had a minion write and express confusion on my term “Mormon Yuppie Scum”. He felt it was a bit harsh, and perhaps I should clarify that I have nothing against Mormons ( hopefully they aren’t too sensitive like those wishing to be addressed as “Sub-Saharan African-Americans Of Descent From Unwilling Oppressed Minorities Unfairly Subjected To The Honky Mo-Fo’s Incarceration” and won’t mind that I don’t call them LDSers or something ). I actually like them more than most other organized religions. Say, oh, just off the top of my head, someone like the Roman Catholics who have a really bad history of torturing Jews ( if I’m remembering right, I think it was the first Spanish Jews that had to wear a distinctive ID badge or armband by law, about 500 years before the Nazi’s reinvented the idea ), burning witches or sanctioning their priests that ran around sticking their junk up the asses of twelve year old choir boys. I mean, even if you are just a selfish prick and don’t care about the kids, if I were the Pope I’d be trying to save my organization from imploding by rounding up all the priests and burning them at the stake as punishment. Of course, some of the blame must be shouldered by the church itself, because in the history of really retarded ideas, banning priests from marrying, violating the cardinal rule of human existence which is little more than procreation, is among one of the most moronic ideas ever in all the history of mankind. I’d even be willing to bet that not even Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons or whoever it was that was just beginning to use their brain for something more than a pillow ever had such a stupid idea as they were taking their new brains out on a test drive. But of course, the church should not take TOO much of the blame because when someone decides to be a priest they are usually a teenager and their hormones are raging and if they decide at that time of all times to become celibate than they absolutely know what pain and suffering they have in store for them. Although, getting back to the church, can anyone think of a worse recruiting tool to grow your organization? Look, we are so stupid we ask people to go against their very nature, their very programming. Also, once we turn these freaks on you, they will be so unhappy that they really put a negative vibe on the whole thing. Wow! No wonder no one wants to be Catholic unless a missionary threatens to hold a flaming bush under their testicles.

*

Anyway, back to whatever the heck I was talking about at first. I have absolutely nothing against the Mormon dudes. It is a religion that preaches survivalism, so I can’t argue about that. And every Mormon I’ve met is a mellow, agreeable chap. But they all have THAT look. The look that shows how astounded they are to be amongst not so polite company. I described it as a look of time traveling Beaver family members, confused and dazed at modern times. And I called them Mormon Yuppie Scum not because I dislike Mormons but because I dislike Yuppie Scum. Mostly for their attitude that they are so special that they deserve the very best of everything, from houses to wives to SUV’s to coffee to jobs. But in this case, the Mormon comment, I was going back to THAT look. The look that says, I Am A Clueless Bastard. Clueless as their world crumbles around them. Clueless as to why it is happening and what they can possibly do about it.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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*
It isn’t only non-preppers. I’ve been subjected to survivalist writers for thirty years ( I fell in love with the concept in my teens during the 70’s ), going by one name or another, one profession or another, and without fail, other than Kurt Saxon, they all preach Yuppie Scum variants of prepping. Spend a buttload of money and duplicate your middle class lifestyle for after the Apocalypse. I respect them all for what they were/are trying to do, but they are still grossly misinformed. Prepper and non-prepper alike, the whole middle class concept is a reflection of a historic abnormality. Which is energy surplus in a hierarchal society since after the Agriculture Revolution. It only happened to a small percentage of folks during the last five hundred years, and only to most of the globe in the last decade or two ( and that might not even really count since most of the recent globalization is nothing more than colonialism and ever decreasing rewards to the new straw-bosses ). In effect, the ruling elite allow a small amount of a giant surplus to leak down to the middle managers or trader class to grease the machinery. The recent middle class made up of Unions, minorities and the uneducated was nothing more than a bribe to the masses to not harm the means/machinery of production. None of this had squat to do with American Greatness, our Constitution, freedom or anything else other than the above.

*

The whole middle class thing was wonderful, don’t get me wrong. I tried it for awhile myself but failed to impress anyone. I’ve always been content in any shelter or with any income, my only criteria being able to buy books. The whole middle class lifestyle requirement didn’t leave much room for a library ( as an example, take your monthly car payment, insurance and all added, and divide that by $15- the average price for a good book at Amazon-you would be surprised how many books that will buy ). But I can see how wonderful the opportunity was for those that chose it. But that is no longer a viable option. The welfare pukes are being squeezed, the middle class are being squeezed. The rich are getting richer, and those choosing “none of the above” go along unnoticed and unmolested. It is a much better survival strategy to step away from the middle class lifestyle trap than to delude yourself it will provide any better prep supplies. Middle class is an endangered species. You can’t save yourself, nor can you return to it. Don’t try to hold on until the bitter end. Just let go while you have some control.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

terrorist scum 2

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

TERRORIST SCUM 2

Yesterday, we talked about how easy it would be for you to be declared a terrorist. Not by proof but by accusation. Now let’s ask, why? It is one thing to see how easily it can be done, but we need to answer why someone would want to do it. Remember the 1990’s rash of asset forfeitures? The government wanted your crap, so they took it, accused the actual property-not you- of the crime, and it was up to you to prove the items were innocent? It was always cheaper to let them keep it ( a stack of cash was accused of coming from drug sales, a car was accused of being used to transport drugs, etc. ) than to try to get it back ( another dividend from allowing lawyers to add so much cost to the entire system ). The 1990’s were financial gravy for governments. The decade of cheap oil made the economy hum. So, the government didn’t actually need the money ( in fact, whatever extra money was made by stealing these items, the corresponding budget cuts were made- the LEO’s didn’t see a net gain from that alone ). But the feds were happy to militarize the police, and this was the way departments got extra funds prior to the War On Terror. After decades of a war on drugs, and two decades of extra financing to local departments to surrender independence to some degree, added to the recent terror by every local civil servant that his/her job is in danger, and you now have complete control of the new national police force ( but for all appearances acting independently ) by both carrot and stick.

*

Now move on over to the civilian side. Every citizen is in terror of losing their place at the federal trough. And if money isn’t enough, you allow this new terror. A process where there is no rhyme or reason, a total arbitrary selection process that does more to place fear than the actual number of arrests which must remain small ( any government that borrows 40% to pay its bills has a limited shelf life and despite appearances is struggling for operating expenses ). Because you can’t know if you are next, you live in terror and you try to make no waves. You are docile and easily controlled. This is just another tool to keep the civilians from rioting. Its passage, to me, points to a near certain near future problem. Money collapse, crop shortage, whatever. The point is you need a new and effective weapon to control your herd better than before. This just might be it. Could I be totally off base? Of course. I’m just spitballing here. But a little voice is screaming at me and I can’t help but be very friggin worried. Perhaps next summer isn’t the end of the world, just the end of MY world. Most likely I’ll be covering this more, because to be it seems a pivotal moment.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
*
Okay, that was short today. I was so damn busy on Monday, I couldn’t take a lunch. Since lunch is when I write this blog, this was a serious breach of protocol. I have worked like a rabid dog for three and a quarter years to be done with all required tasks so I could be off in time for lunch. A lot of the time, my writing income was all that kept me afloat, like when the truck ( when I used to have it ) and the bike both needed mechanical work, when I just got done renting a car to visit my dad right after I had sent my kids money and my savings were shot. So I take this writing time quite seriously. Yet Monday saw me screwed of that time. If I take home $600 a month, and writing can deliver up to an additional $300, a few times a year that is critical money. Most of the time writing income is just blow money, I have to keep that attitude because that income could always suddenly end, but I treat it like any other regular paycheck. Never put it off, always meet the deadline. I could have written Monday night, but Monday’s always kick my ass and I’m tired as hell ( hmmm. More heavy lifting at work tiring me out? Old age? Or, perhaps, Japanese radiation poisoning!?!? You bastards! Revenge for Hiroshima at last! ). So I am writing two articles Tuesday at lunch ( I’ve been taking half days off on Tuesday and Thursday to use up all my accrued vacation so I don’t lose it at the end of the year, so I can work a bit past the usual time ). Picking one subject cut in half makes it easier and faster than writing two articles on two different subjects. And I’m telling you all this to make an excuse for having part two of this article so short.

*

To continue to waste your time fleshing out this article, I shall now blather about a couple of books. I had just ordered The Last Centurion by John Ringo. A minion told me he had Most Excellent luck turning folks on to prepping with this book. In it, a mini-ice age and a global plague both happen together. The next book was Supervolcano: Eruption by Harry Turtledove. That was obviously on the Yellowstone volcano erupting. Now, normally, Harry writes in a style I can’t stand. I only like a few of his books, like the time traveling dudes arming the Confederacy with AK-47’s. But last night I read a quarter of this one and the style is pleasant and easy to read. It remains to be seen if this is a realistic TEOTWAWKI story or just a disaster and single hero saves the day story. I’ll let you know. As far as “Centurion”, I’ll read that next. Being as this guy writes military action, I have my doubts he can pull off a survivalist novel that is realistic. But I’ll be happy to be pleasantly surprised.

END

The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

terrorist scum

2011-12-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

TERRORIST SCUM

The Alien And Sedition Act passed by the prick Adams made a bit of a mockery of the whole “die to defend your country against oppression so you can be free”. Well, okay, granted, you don’t get a bunch of hayseed farmers to go to war by threatening to pay them in hyperinflated money and then admit the war agitators would be your new masters after they made a killing by buying up cheap frontier land that could only make a profit with the British out of the way. But without making a bunch of excuses or pulling some lawyer crap like asking what the definition of “is” is, the plain fact is that the federal government has ALWAYS, for hundreds of years, been able to dispose of you if they wanted to. They have never been any better than the English king, other than they were local tyrants instead of overseas ones. The American people until recently got a small benefit in the rape and pillage of the resources of an un-mined continent and as long as they are paid off they have no problem with minority exploitation. To this day this is true, even if we are now paid in paper and promises instead of gold and cheap energy. If you think death, bondage or incarceration of the unwanted is something new, you haven’t been paying attention. We had a nice little genocide against the Indians, then accused a Syrian president of killing off his opposition. We imprisoned Japanese Americans for years as we accused the Nazi’s of imprisoning Jews ( of course, the Jews didn’t survive the ordeal, so we have that propaganda coup going for us ). If you were accused of being a communist, you might not have been jailed, but your livelihood was destroyed.

*

The just passed hidden passage in a budget bill that now authorizes the military to indefinitely detain anyone without charges is nothing new. For sixty years the Prez could have declared a national emergency, any emergency he deemed fit not just a nuclear war, and the government overnight turned into a dictatorship. And we’ve been living under the Patriot Act for ten years which no one seemed too concerned with. No, the passage of this does not surprise me, nor does it concern me too much. Because we have been living under that threat for a very long time. But I will tell you what DOES concern me and that is the total disregard everyone is showing. Granted, this was passed right before Christmas, and was sandwiched in between the manufactured crisis of North Korea change of leadership, the curious large drop in retail gasoline prices and the horrifying threat of any slow down in televised football games if the any coaches were accused of anally probing ten year old boys. But that surely isn’t an excuse to ignore this, is it? You can’t say we don’t have enough news outlets anymore. Why is this not something everyone is very concerned about? They must think this is nothing more than a way to jail Al Queda bitches. Or, they simply don’t give a rats ass. They don’t think it will effect them because they voted for the Kenyan, and because they parrot whatever the PC Police inform them is the right thoughts to have.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
*
Now, I don’t necessarily think that we have the resources to imprison everyone that we think is thinking illegal thoughts. But that isn’t going to be much of a comforting thought to those that are “disappeared”. And just the slightest increase in terrorists, quote and unquote, incarcerated will have the effect of totally larding up the system. So, even if they aren’t actually evil, which of course they are, even if they originally intended to catch and release you, the mere fact that they can’t process the new arrivals means you sit and rot anyway ( look at the slow death by malnutrition the Indians faced on the first Reservations for a taste of what you are in for ) . You are screwed anyway you look at it if you get arrested. And no one will care. Because if they complain, they get accused of terrorism. Or, they lose their Social Security benefits or their pension or their Food Stamps or even their children. And perhaps that is why folks won’t even make a sound before the first arrest is made. They don’t want to be on a reprisal list. Me, I’m already humped. I’ve said enough more times than can be counted enough to see me rotting in a cell. That doesn’t mean I’ll continue to poke the tiger. I’m not that brave. It just means my fate is certainly already sealed. I actually don’t know as of now what my defense mechanism is going to be. I will tell you I’m scared spitless. The lack of an outcry means it is you against 300 million narcs. In fact, you might actually be targeted by your fellow citizens rather than the government.

*

Let me tell you, I can very well see my ex-wife, as soon as she sees her last child support check, contact DHS and feed them all my juicy seditious rantings in my blog. Why not? She has always hated me ( I’m not denying I might have deserved it, I’m just saying her response was way out of proportion to my crimes ) and sought revenge. She hasn’t needed my money for many years, not on her salary, but by taking most of my money she is punishing me. Revenge is the goal, not support financially. So I have little doubt she might ( call it about a 20% chance ) try to get me imprisoned. Or, how about this. Your business competitor wants to get your customers. Why not frame you, or even just bribe an official to take you away? I can’t imagine my blog competitors turning me in, I’m simply not a threat to their reader numbers ( and their publishing’s are so bland and inoffensive that they wouldn’t fear any blowback ). I hope. But anyone, even your next door neighbor who saw your cat crap in his flower bed, could make up crap about you to the feds. If the feds were interested in you, or if they needed to make that months quota ( remember the NYPD scandal recently with the drug plants? ), or if they had another cot open after the last “terrorist” died from AIDS, TB, or Japanese radiation poisoning, that would be enough to see you gone.

CONTINUED TOMORROW

The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

populism

2011-12-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

POPULISM

Today we talk about two books. I briefly review one and use another to point to the insidious effects of populism. I could have titled the article “Why you are a supreme dumbass and will wave your flag vigorously to the point of harming your joint as the parade of Homeland Security tanks rumbles into town as you greet them as liberators from the Constitution which didn’t pay jack spit” but that seemed like an unwieldy handle. The first book up is “Holding Your Ground” by Prepper Press. This was a complimentary review copy and when I first opened and skimmed it I groaned loudly and cursed the gods for my love of free books. Christ on a rocket propelled cracker, the damn thing was talking about a worksheet. I hate books, lectures or concepts that use worksheets. And the thing was chock full of graphs and illustrations. I’m used to a concept being talked about. If you need a graph you haven’t done a very good job describing the idea. But since the publisher sent me a free book and even paid the postage, I had to uphold my end of the bargain and trudge through the thing. It wasn’t a light read, but it actually ended up impressing the heck out of me. As one who focuses almost exclusively on logistics, this book on all the whys and how-to’s of defending your supplies was very informative to me. A lot of “no duh” information, it also covered a lot of stuff I’d never had thought of and most likely might even save my life. As someone who has trudged through hundreds of survivalist books, I learned a lot of new stuff from this book. It might not be for everyone. If you’ve had hands on with defensive tactics you already know this stuff. And I’ll admit it is on the pricey side ( although few books aren’t these days ). But even if it isn’t cheap, it is educational. I would say it is the “go-to” book on defensive tactics ( and that is quite the concession from me, as the author is another AR worshipper ).

*

I was in between post-apocalypse books so I decided to try “Republic” by Charles Sheehan-Miles. Before I say anything else, I did enjoy the heck out of the book just because it was so well written. But the subject matter is what really pisses me off. This isn’t your typical militia porn in that the good guys battle the evil federal guys on an individual basis. Rather, the stare secedes from the Union after the Homeland jackboots mow down unemployed factory workers staging a protest. What hacked me off no end was the weepy story about the main characters terminally ill son. If only the federal government hadn’t allowed the owner of the factory to move overseas, the guy would have kept his medical insurance and his son wouldn’t be dying. Also implied was that a drug user killed the guys wife in a robbery, and if he hadn’t been allowed to the mom would still be working and better medical care would be available. I don’t know if this was endorsing a harsher penalty against drug dealers, if he thought drugs should be legalized to lower the price so idiots could fry themselves cheaply without needing to steal, if the government was to blame for the economic conditions or if it was just a plot device to let you see how hard the dad had it.
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But you had absolutely no trouble knowing that the federal government was evil since they wouldn’t save the son with free medical care. That was spelled out pretty plain. Now this is where I have a problem with most peoples logic. They want a totally free economy, very low taxes, no federal government overstepping their bounds, and at the same time a big fat huge payday in the form of welfare. They want health care for the needy, retirement for the needy, jobs for the needy. We must be compassionate. But only for our favorite programs. The federals were accused of stealing money from the state, returning twenty cents on the dollar. So, it isn’t high taxes that piss people off. It is not getting more than they paid in! Our founding fathers had no problem with taxes. If it had remained in the colonies. They didn’t want the King to have their money. Ah, but if those calling for the blood of the peasants to be spilled could decide how to spend it, as long as it home grown tyranny, it was acceptable. For a populist, repression and taxes are okay, as long as their favorite programs are funded. A huge military industrial complex is okay, because soldiers are honorable and noble. Just no free college education ( unless it is West Point or ROTC ) because radical hippie scum abuse the system. No welfare, unless it is make work jobs with the military. Police abuse is okay, but no corporate abuse if it gets in the way of blue collar worker jobs. These idiots want all the rewards of big government with none of the drawbacks. They want government spending and compassion but only if they deem it acceptable.

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I have bad news for you. If you allow wish for big government, you get big government. And not just your favorite parts. You get the whole thing. You want a global control of energy production, but not the taxes that subsidize that? You want jobs for everyone, even if government created, but no IRS abuses that go with getting enough taxes to fund that? When you lie down with the devil, he doesn’t lovingly kiss your neck and cuddle you. He butt humps you, wipes himself off in your hair and pushes you out of bed when he is done. It isn’t that I think people are stupid. Most aren’t. But they sure act stupid with self deception and by applying convoluted logic to suit their pocketbooks. In the end, it catches up with them. You don’t like DHS detaining you without a trial? Well, you sure enjoyed that county civil service office worker position after getting free college through the GI Bill, didn’t you? Where in the Constitution does it allow the welfare state? Were does it say you can suspend that document if the cause is worthy? If “it’s for the children”? There ain’t no free lunch. But you think you got one, with your government job, your kids eating school lunches before they go to a free medical check-up. Because after all, we must be compassionate.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

generating idiocy

2011-12-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

GENERATING IDIOCY

Some things that I do are pure brilliance in their return on investment. After our first winter in the high desert ( for you easterners, all desert in Nevada is not the same. The southern tip is Mohave-think the Sahara- and the rest of the state is part of the Great Basin, five thousand feet elevation- think Mongolia ) which in retrospect was very mild, I was so traumatized by the cold that I spent three hundred bucks and added insulation to every interior wall ( mostly foam padding, some foil backed bubble wrap ). This doubled the amount of heat retained by solar exposure ( for instance, even if the day before was 30 degrees, if the sun is out it gets twenty five degrees warmer inside and usually keeps it about twenty degrees warmer inside overnight- 29 degrees waking up in the morning is bad, but great compared to the 10 degrees outside ). A year and a half ago I added insulated skirting to the trailer, and for a mere $80 or so that was a great investment. It helps keep your feet much warmer in winter. Although, again, it is all relative. Mildly cold feet rather than your feet feeling like they are frostbite. But then there are really crappy investments, like my gasoline generator.

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I’ve always hated generators, and I dislike writers who suggest them for survivalists. It is one thing to want them for off-grid living. That makes for electricity being a very expensive luxury. But for a survivalist to own one, you have to wonder what the crap they are thinking, if indeed that is actually what they are doing. A survivalist that thinks a generator will be a viable tool after the collapse must rate his calamities at the scale of one being an ice storm taking out the power line and ten, end of the world, being a rate increase from the power company and the frac gasoline from North Dakota selling for an unheard of five bucks a gallon. Oh, the travesty! Friggin idiots. I’m sorry, but planning on fossil fuels after the end of civilization is delusional and retarded, and I can’t think of a nicer way of saying it. Because of that attitude, I lived off only my solar panels for two and a half years ( granted, panels with battery storage is also short term, the batteries being good for only a few years. But that is why I have AA battery lights using rechargeables, to keep going years after the 12v battery dies. But even the not perfect 12v is far better than a generator. Years rather than days of power ). But because I love all my minions and feel bad for them and try to help them out by thoughtfully pointing out all their faults, I gave in to the incessant demands and went from a five day a week publishing schedule to a seven day a week one at the beginning of 2011. Well, I thought I needed a generator to recharge the batteries on the weekend after writing on a cloudy day ( using the computer for just an hour adds about 60% to the amount of juice I use each day- normally the lights use about 30 watts in the winter and we watch about two hours of TV a night for another twenty watts ). But looking back over the last year of records, the generator was only critical less than half a dozen times. I was a damn fool for buying it.

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Okay, I understand that everyone’s weather differs. Some folks get a lot more cloudy days ( although I bet that the clouds mean more rain which means actual trees grow there which means you can heat with wood ). My situation is contingent on that. But every area being different just means your means of generation are different. The Pacific northwest might be mostly cloudy, but that just means you can hook up a year round, round the clock, micro-hydro power generator. In my case, it is normal to get sun, so passive solar heat and solar panels work best for me. And using a generator for back-up was overestimating the amount of cloudy days I was going to get. Our first winter here, we had two weeks of solid clouds. My 15 watts of solar panels didn’t even cut it for keeping one light on that whole time ( this was before LED bulbs, using the old fashion incandescent 18 watt auto bulb- nowadays my 3 watt LED delivers more light than that old bastard ). The battery drained down and never recovered for a month, at which time we used candles and flashlights ( big time suck ). Well, I added another 15 watt panel and shortly thereafter Big Bear turned me on to LED’s, bless his pea-picking heart. Since then we’ve had only six days of cloudy days, max. So I can usually count on the last day of the week to charge the batteries all the way back up. If I have 70 watts of panels, and use 50 watts a night plus 60 watts on the weekend writing two days, I use about 600 watts a week. In eight hours, the panels deliver 560 watts give or take. I shouldn’t even have needed a generator in the first place, but that initial two weeks when I moved here kept scaring me.
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*
Looking back over the last year, I had one month, January, with a lot of clouds. I used the generator every weekend and three times during the week. Yet for all that I still only ran the generator three hours. And that was A QUARTER of the years generator use. January through May I used the thing ten hours. This December one hour, and the other six months I used it only two hours total, not for power but just to keep it maintained. Thirteen hours for the year, and only eleven were critical. I wrote for a hundred hours or slightly over in that year. You could say that I only needed the generator less than ten percent of the time. Now, that might still make a case for the generator. 10% use means 10% of the time you still got a weekend article. Articles equate to Amazon income. But once you compare that to the alternative of added solar panels, the generator loses.

*

The generator cost me $150. Add a gas can, filling the can, the two stroke oil and a plastic tub to keep the rain off, and it cost $200. Then add the $40 I spent on the AC battery charger I had to buy after the generators DC plug stopped working ( cheaper than getting it repaired ). For that same amount of money I could have bought 45 watts worth of solar panels. After two weeks of clouds, on the first sunny day the added panels would have given 360 watts. Those two weeks would have seen me use 180 watts for the computer, at most. And as an added bonus, year round that same added panels would have given me 60% more generated power every single day. And this all assumes the generator never breaks and gas is never factored into the equation. Simply, I was an idiot and wasted the money. The investment will never pay itself off like the panels would have. Of course, in my defense, the PVC pipe and earth pipe project wasted the same amount of money, so you could say I’m always an idiot.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

guest article two of two today

2011-12-19T07:14:00.000-08:00

GUEST ARTICLE
Scroll down for my daily article.
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Handy Hermit Hut

You can build this little shelter in one hour. No carpentry experience is needed, and, there is no measuring needed! Total cost is under 50 dollars, less if you use scrounged materials. The shelter sleeps one or possibly two people and will last for years with an occasional coat of paint. This tiny shelter is perfect as a hunting camp, low profile hideaway, doghouse, or backup shelter. It ainâ€™t fancy but beats sleeping in the rain. If I am ever down to my last 50 dollars I will build this shelter to live in. Here is a list of materials and tools you will need.

(5) Sheets of 7/16 inch OSB â€“ Some folks call this chipboard. Ask for OSB at the building supply, they will know what you need. It comes in 4 foot by 8 foot sheets

(4) 2 by 4 by 8-foot boards - Pick the straightest boards you can, it makes building way easier.

(1) pound of 1 5/8 inch or 2 inch coarse thread drywall screws

(1) tube of latex caulk â€“ The cheap stuff works fine

(1) Caulking gun â€“ the cheap ones work fine

(1) set of door hinges with screws

(1) Piece of scrap rubber, an old rubber car floor mat or inner tube works well.

Rechargeable drill with screwdriver bit or a good ratcheting screwdriver

Caulking gun

Staple gun

Cut one of the OSB sheets in half to make two 4 foot by 4 foot pieces. The building supply will do this for free in most places. They use a panel saw that can do a neater job than you can.

Start by building a long box, open on both ends. A full sheet of OSB forms each side of the box and a 2 by 4 goes into each corner. A rechargeable drill makes this quick and easy. Use one screw about every foot. Drywall screws are the best thing that ever happened to amateur carpenters. If you drive it in wrong, reverse the drill and back it out. Screws are way stronger than nails as well.

Screw one of the half sheets of OSB over one end. Drive screws into the ends of the 2 by 4. Work carefully to minimize gaps that rain water can leak through.

Attach the other half sheet with hinges ON TOP to make the door.

Caulk the top seams with latex caulk to keep rain and wind out. Pay special attention to the top edge of the end piece. A leak there will drip water on your head.

Cut strips of scrap rubber and staple them over the hinge to keep rain out.

The shelter works best when the closed end is uphill. This keeps rain from running in and makes the whole thing shed water. Never sleep with your head downhill, it will cause a headache. OSB is not rated for outdoor use, but, I have seen the stuff last for 10 years exposed to the weather. Two coats of exterior paint will help durability as will putting the shelter up on boards, concrete blocks or rocks. The one weak point of OSB is it cannot take contact with damp ground. If you can get the shelter off the ground about a foot it will last for years.

In colder areas, some one or two inch thick foam insulation can be fastened inside the hut with screws or a glue called Liquid Nails. Insulate the end and door as well. The insulation can be cut to shape with a pocketknife, razor knife, or a hacksaw blade.

For security, you can install 2 hook and eye fasteners on the door. That way you can lock it from the inside.

SAFETY WARNING! DO NOT use any fuel-burning appliance in this tiny space. Carbon monoxide will be produced and WILL kill you. Use an LED lantern if you need light. You can burn a candle lantern or small oil lamp ONLY if you leave the door open about an inch for air circulation.

There you have it. You have just built an insulated box to sleep in. In most climates, your body heat and a sleeping bag will keep you warm without an external heat source.

guest article one of two today

2011-12-19T07:05:00.000-08:00

GUEST ARTICLE
My regular article was just posted, scroll down. Here is a way for folks way out in the boonies to get some bulk food. I can't say it is the cheapest, it is up to you to comparrison shop. I can tell you that the coffee he sent was pretty tasty.
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My family is in the gourmet coffee business, you may remember me sending you some a few months back. My reading and discussions with “experts” have opened my eyes to the fact that you do not want to live long term on just wheat. I have formed the opinion that I would need to supplement anything I could grow for at least one year. Adding some dried beans and peas would make you much healthier and would be easier on the palette.

I have made connections in the dry good grocery industry and have developed the following price list. NONE of these items are packaged for long term storage. That is your job, but my preference is packing in smaller Mylar bags and then in 5 gal. buckets.

If I open a 5 gallon bucket the life span of that product just stated ticking.

I would like to add dried berries to this list but have not found them at an affordable price at this time.

I will accept a check, silver, gold or Paypal for payment.

 50 lbs. of the following products:

 NONE of these items are packaged for long term storage

Cracked corn ……………..$ 29.55

(try to hand grind corn and you will know why I found cracked for my preps)

White Rice ……….……..$ 34.75

Fine ground Corn Meal ……………..$ 29.55

Whole Green peas …………….$ 34.95

Lentils …………….$ 49.50

Lima Beans …………….$ 99.00

Black Eyed Peas ……………$ 79.95

Light Red Kidney Beans ……………$ 75.65

Pinto Beans ……………$ 69.55

Bulgar Wheat ……………$ 29.00

All purpose Flour ……………$ 28.75

Table Salt NOTICE this is 25 LBS. …………….$ 8.75

These items are all priced FOB Mia. Shipping will be expensive unless you get several items and they are shipped by truck on a pallet. I will charge for pallet unless I get it free, and incidental expenses related to the truck shipping. I will also be happy to ship UPS.

I am not in the prepper or shipping business, if you can find these items cheaper let us
( all minions of the Great Bison) know where to get them. Some items are cheaper because they are a staple in that geographic area but not used as much somewhere else.

alan.alanwatkins@gmail.com

too much

2011-12-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

TOO MUCH

Well, I’ve been setting this one aside for quite awhile, hoping I could keep postponing the inevitable day when there simply wasn’t a darn thing to write about. Oh, I guess I could read more news every morning and talk about current events, but that is just a vast putrid time sink, the kind you might find in aDMV or a garage full of Natural Geographic magazines from the 1940’s. Both the reading and writing part. Even the items I do cover of a topical nature are mainly wastes of time. Which is proof enough if you need it that the darn collapse is taking way too long if you’ve been reading this for five years. You could have shelled out $3 in 2006 for my Frugal Survivalist e-book, spent a few hours reading it, then completely ignored the drama of the road-rage/road wrecks towards Apocalypse and not missed too much. It might all be fascinating or mildly entertaining but ultimately the show serves very little purpose. So why not just throw more navel gazing your way, as you’ve already proven to be a ready audience, eyes bright in the advancing headlights, frozen in inaction. Today’s burning question is, what the heck do I do if the world doesn’t end in the first weeks of June, 2012 ( the first paycheck after child support ends, the world ends as I am not meant to enjoy the fruits of my labor )?

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I know most of you could easily blow through $400 a month. You would be buying more semi-auto weapons, more semi-auto magazines, more semi-auto ammunition and more semi-auto accessories like laser sites, tactical nuclear weapon tipped grenade launchers and radar imaging TV screens. You would throw more money down the 401(k) rathole, the mortgage craphole and the SUV black hole. You would be bribing your wife with diamonds so you could get some nasty more than once a month ( the next time the wife asks, “you got a hand don’t you?”, answer with “oh, you’re right. Get out” ). You would be buying the kids McSlop’s or getting them tennis shoes that didn’t have any holes in them. In short, you would totally waste the extra money, the whole time wondering why you are dead ass broke and destined to work until the day after you die ( tip to Wal-Mart on saving money so you don’t have to rip me off on my food items- prop up a dead greeter with a motion detector to play the digital recording “hi, welcome to Wal-Mart”. When he gets too ripe, replace with another cadaver. The live one’s move so slow no one can tell the difference and bribing the funeral director will be much cheaper. Old dudes- demand a cut of his action with a funeral discount ). I can’t waste money like that. I’ve trained myself to be so cheap that any consumer spending that doesn’t make me money ( books ) or keep me alive ( food ) goes against my nature. Why spend money on a car if insurance gets too expensive, gas becomes rationed or the mechanic sees most of your disposable income? Why eat out now that the crap is so much more expensive and tastes like cardboard dipped in grease? Why have a bigger domicile if the taxman is just going to screw you out of enjoying it?
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
*
And how many preps can you own? You can always refine and add and tweek, but at some point you have to stop getting too crazy on it. Oh, I’ll spend more on ammunition for the Enfield and get serious about the reloading components. I’ll always be buying more wheat ( I like the idea about the twenty year stash, hoping I’ll live that much longer ). Here is my basic criteria on what to do with my new found embarrassment of riches, should the world not end next summer. Anything spent is temporary only. Nothing budgeted I can’t change my mind and immediately stop paying ( for instance, I wouldn’t get broadband Internet access if it came with a two year commitment ). If I start renting a car once a month, I’ll not only make the wife much happier since she can get into town, I’ll be able to buy bags of wheat and other bulk items I can’t handle on my bike ( no, I won’t buy a trailer and haul them that way. I put enough mileage on just getting to work and I’m burning enough calories schlepping thousands of pounds a day there ). If I need that extra $80 a month, I can stop. But in the mean time it is a luxury I’ll be able to afford ( call it an even $100 after the wife gets slot machine playing money ). Another $100 in 250 pounds of wheat, or 125 pounds of pinto beans or 200 pounds of white flour or whatever. Come next summer, I should have even more storage space ( hallway to underground bunker ) although I still have plenty to spare now if I go down into the spider pit. $100 will go towards ammo and once in a great while a gun ( I’d like to replace my tube fed semi rimfire with a few single shots, plus one of these days I’ll supplement my Enfields with an arsenal of 223 singles with mil-dot scopes. Plus, if they are still available, Russian bolts and ammo, once I get full up on everything else gun-wise. And I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to invest in post-apoc bikes and parts which will be a back-up for my daily riding, plus the occasional cash savings ( I won’t get crazy there, as too much cash is just inflation-bait ). But for all of the above, I can’t see it lasting all that long.

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After so many tons of wheat, why go on? After twenty or thirty thousand rimfire, why continue? I think if I reach that point, and I have the land paid, I’m in trouble with over half my take home pay sitting around burning a hole in my pocket. I’ll build underground on the other pieces of land, hell, I’ll even pay for a backhoe instead of digging it myself. That can either be back-up residences or a home for my son if he ever moves out this way. I don’t know what the heck I’ll do after that point. I can’t increase my book budget past what I have now, I’ll just start buying crappier books. I’ll already be totally maxed on preps ( even doubling or tripling the solar panels will only take a month or two ). Perhaps I’ll just start a publishing company and sink all the cash into book inventory. Until then, I’ll have plenty of time to write a few of the books, and if it succeeds, I can will a business to the kids. That should take care of the next twenty years of surplus earnings. Damn, what a great problem to have.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

underemployed

2011-12-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

UNDEREMPLOYED

Despite my occasional disparaging word towards Glen Beck, by and large he is pretty entertaining once he gets up a head of steam about something ( unless he suddenly veers into Bible Thumping mode ). Last night he got going on the lies disguised as statistics on the unemployment rate. Which is where the entertainment part came in, as I always am tickled pink when someone just now learns that the government is dishonest and seeking ways to destroy you. Wow! Talk about slow learners. I mean, Rain Man learned the best place to buy underwear long before that and he ain’t the sharpest marble in the bag. An inbred dog dumped on his head at birth and fed crack cocaine can be taught toilet training quicker than that. The government is all about humping you, and not in a good way. They won’t buy you flowers and dinner, wine and dine you. No, they knock you over the head, tie you up, wait until you regain consciousness and then violate you anally without lubrication. How does someone reach middle age without learning that lesson? How sheltered do you have to be? Anyway, our little buddy Glen is flabbergasted that the roles of underemployed folks are not included in the statistics. As he breathlessly explained, if the numbers of Americans unemployed and underemployed combined are approaching that of the Great Depression, we are serious trouble. I didn’t catch why he thought this, I only listen when I have the long afternoon drive to the town next door ( well, Spring Creek THINKS it’s a town but I think the Yuppie humps suffer from delusions of grandeur, kind of like Oklahoma thinks it’s a real state compared to Texas [ no offense Okkies, you’re great people, but you do seem to have a misplaced identity crisis with your southern neighbor ] ), but I imagine that since the retail sector is most of the economy, with 25% unable to afford to buy anything than that must mean the economy is in more trouble than admitted. Me, I just see this as a natural downward progression and inevitable.

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Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.

*

Then, that evening The Arch Druid Dude is talking about almost the same thing. Druid Dude wouldn’t admit to a fast collapse if he was bubbling away in a stewpot, but he nonetheless does have valuable insights most of the time. Inevitable, in an economic contraction, your purchasing power declines. You are able to buy less and less. Hence, it makes more sense that one of you in a marriage or modern equivalent of shack-ups NOT work and become a homemaker. If fuel and food continue their inevitable climb it follows that the less food you need to buy and the less commuting you do, the better off. While right now the benefits from a one income household are more intangible ( less stress, better child raising, etc. ) than a clear cut economic advantage, but that is bound to flip-flop soon enough. I understand that you bitches think working for The Man makes you independent and all empowered, but you’ve just traded one master for the other. And with the decline in energy will come the decline of your power. Petroleum is the only thing keeping you from inequality, and that has a short time left indeed. Now, saying that doesn’t automatically disqualify you from being the household breadwinner. I wouldn’t want to be the guy surrendering my testicles and putting on an apron, but realistically speaking in today’s job market a lot of time the female is more likely to land and/or keep her job. Sad, but what are you going to do? If I were a guy and I couldn’t work but my wife could, I guess a giant amount of sucking up would be in order and I’d start pursuing the cookbooks for crockpot meals and reading up on raising chickens.

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I’m not disparaging housework. Like the Druid, I understand how vital it is once petroleum no longer does most of it. If you aren’t earning money, how else are you going to heat your hovel other than by gathering firewood? How are you going to have clothes other than have a spinner and weaver making them? Who will cook everything from scratch when there are longer any grocery stores? The main thing we should take away from this is that as the economy continues to contract, more and more of us are going to be unemployed. But let’s not focus on that because God forbid you might have to think about living beneath your exalted station in life that incorporates SUV’s and mortgages. But there is a very good possibility that your family unit is going to be underemployed by an uncomfortable margin. One of you might lose their job, or both of you might have their hours cut. Prepping for the collapse isn’t just about caching MRE’s in your concrete bunker next to your arsenal. It is also about recognizing when you must downgrade your expectations. And a very unreal expectation is that you can continue to earn a large salary. Between inflation, corporate downsizing, government employment being slashed or eliminated and other already established trends, odds are good you will be making far less than you expect very soon. So not only is it suicide to put off eliminating debt, or keeping the spouse employed, it is stupid to delay stockpiling. I know it seems impossible to simultaneously pay off the house and credit cards, go from two salaries to one, stockpile for the collapse and go from a moneyed household to a self-sustaining one, but it isn’t about lack of resources as much as it is about lack of will making the hard choices.

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You can walk away from the house and the car and the job in the city, declare bankruptcy and sell all your geegaws on E-Bay and Amazon, pay cash for junk land and earn a casual income which takes care of all your needs with surplus. You just need the will to make the change. But you won’t. You’ll wait for downsizing and pink slips, and be homeless. And divorced, with a alimony enforced by jack-booted thugs if you work or not. And all your geegaws were long ago sold to pay the last house payment or two so you have no resources. You’ll get to the same place one way or another. It is your choice if it is voluntary and under your control ( a little pain now or a lot later on ).

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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forever stash

2011-12-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

FOREVER STASH

Good Humping Gravy! You’all did it again. I write a brilliant inspired gold nugget dripping with wisdom, it turns into a church pew fart article. And the next days article which I thought was a tired rehash earns me a gold star. I’m telling you, my perceptions of what satisfies a minion ( or a women, according to all wives past and present ) is skewed. Which is a great reason to just keep ignoring what others want and concentrate of what I’d like to read if I were a Bison loyal minion. I’d be wrong half the time either way, but at least I enjoy the writing this way. So, who knows what you’ll think of today’s subject. It is nothing more than my normal frugal survivalist stockpile on crack, but I thought it made a good thought exercise. What you need to live forever off your stockpiled goods.

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Of course, the title itself and the idea are more than a bit misleading. Nothing is forever. No one but Bill Gates can afford fifty years of vittles and armaments stockpiled safely away. And even fifty years isn’t enough for a multi-generational stash. This is just a “better than nothing”. It sure as heck ain’t the half million dollar Rawles mountaintop bunker and farm that would actually support a whole line of descendents, nor is it the “teach your family to trap sustainably” strategy because that is a bit too geographically constraining even if it is a couple hundred thousand dollars cheaper. This is the totally frugal tightass method of surviving a collapse in isolation. For just a few thousand dollars. One third the cost of an Asian compact car, and less than the cost of one years rent. So anyone can afford it. While earning minimum wage, paying child support and supporting the current wife, my last residence before the current Bison Compound was renting a travel trailer lot. That put me back fifteen thousand over five years. My point being, although several thousand seems like a lot, most worker bees earning crap could have that set aside in a year if they lived as frugally as possible. And bear in mind, even if the civilization collapse never occurs, the economic collapse will, and the welfare state will die a horrible death, pulling down 95% of us ( almost every single person relies somewhat or totally on the government tit ). This might actually be your only viable retirement plan. So, whether last ditch survival stash, or just the only way to avoid homelessness and malnutrition, this is a dam fine idea if I do say so myself.

*
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*

The only way to cheaply stockpile enough ammunition to last you years or decades is to concentrate ,mostly on rimfire. Sure, have a thousand or two thousand rounds of real rifle ammunition and a surplus bolt rifle, but for long term hunting and defense you must get your rimfire. Twenty thousand rounds is still only about $600. Two single shot rifles ( rimfire semi-auto is still wasteful and most of those have cheap plastic parts in their gut. Plus the expense of mags or tube springs. Go single. Your pistol can be your close in rapid fire firearm- and that assumes you don’t already own a conventional size caliber pistol ) are $200, and another $200 or so gets you a rimfire revolver ( come on, its’ nine friggin shots. You shouldn’t need to get a semi rimfire pistol ). For one grand, you have a “forever” arsenal. Far from perfect, but better than using an empty AR-15 as a plastic club.

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I wouldn’t want to just eat wheat for twenty years, and I wonder if you would even last that long because of the protein deficiency. But just look at the Asians. White rice, which is a vitamin deficient, fiber poor grain, is still calories. The rice makes up the 90% of the diet delivering calories and then vegetables and fish or eggs are added to round out the vitamin and protein needs. The rice doesn’t keep you alive, it just provides the bulk of the diet. Use your wheat stash the same way, calories which you can, if necessary for short periods of time, survive on but in normal times the bulk of your diet which is supplemented by rodents and other protein and by wild plants and container grown veggies. It isn’t ALL you eat, just the critical 90% that delivers calories. I haven’t bought a bag of wheat kernels for a year so I’m not 100% sure of the price, but let’s just go with $15 a fifty pound bag. I know the Home Despot buckets might possibly be toxic but I’m using them as the low cost storage unit ( I doubt that that plastic is any worse than the crap we breath in or eat, and I’d rather have slightly toxic grain than no grain at all because I couldn’t afford buckets at twice the price, but it is your call. Any further questions on this matter, see my Friday Fundamental links page:
http://bisonpress.com/fundamentals.html
and look up “Storing Wheat” ). For $10 you get three buckets and lids which holds a hundred pounds. $40 for a 100 pounds of wheat in buckets, $160 a year, $3,200 for two decades of bare bones calories.

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It ain’t easy, but you can still find land under a thousand bucks. West Texas is still good for even sub-$500 lots, but make sure it is close enough to surface water like the Pecos River. As a reminder, remember that Utah land in the same range is most likely a rip-off. One minion had to go to court to get a refund for a lot that was illegally subdivided and there is word ( I can’t remember if it was a minion or something I read ) that anyone living off grid is being harassed to convert to the expensive septic and well route, clearly an assault on poor folk who dare live less than middle class Yuppie Mormon Scum. You might not want to live in the desert, and I’m sure there are other options, but cheap junk land somewhere is out there for you. E-Bay search your way out of the rent trap. And of course, we just talked about the $1k cube cabin. That or a trailer and you have shelter. Total cost for the absolute minimum basics to live most of your remaining life is just around $6,000. It seems like a lot at first but it is just a third of a years minimum wage. For a security blanket that could last two decades. No, you wouldn’t voluntarily live like that, but it sure is one hell of an insurance policy that only costs $500 a month for one year. Remember, I’m almost paying that much in child support, and I still support the wife and myself, plus buy a hundred bucks a month in books, on what is left from minimum wage work ( important note, only twelve more child support payments left until the end of the world ).

*

For the frugal prepper that has everything, a two decade insurance policy.

END

The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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retirement for dumbasses

2011-12-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

RETIREMENT FOR DUMBASSES

I’m not sure where I saw it, most likely The Woodpile Report, but someone was talking about reader complaints about 401(k)’s being frozen and the wailing and gnashing of teeth and the corporate pooh-poohing and what not rose to quite the din. Now, even knowing that a recovery is impossible because the underlying paradigm of energy growth of the last five hundred years driving the economy is coming to an end ( granted, I thought Peak Oil was going to be more “straight dive downward” than what is currently taking place which is “same volume, less BTU, plus export decline due to home use plus the dwindling supply of grain into the fuel tank” ), it still takes me by surprise how passionately and fervently folks take for granted the old regime promises. I understand the end is nigh, but I should understand that no one wants to listen to that. As their reality twists and distorts about them, they have three choices. Accept hardship and sacrifices, accept ANY kind of change from the better, or ignore anything suggesting they are screwed. Everybody wants to just ignore the problem, and I’m sure that includes almost every survivalist who refuses to believe they need to do more than pack a BOB and buy an AR-15. They have had three years of increasing evidence that all that they hold dear from the past is coming to an end, yet they only hear “frac oil” and “green shoots”. How can anybody still believe they will be well taken care of in retirement? Cities are declaring bankruptcy, counties are raising taxes on the 25% of the population unemployed and states have all borrowed from the pensions to pay for last years budget deficits. Medicare is in worse shape than Social Security, medical care cost inflation relentlessly continues and without the financial players doubling the derivatives out there in the last three years, the whole world would already have been a smoldering squished pile of dog crap. We are kicking the can down the road as well as chugging from a gallon bottle of Hair-O-D-Dog.

*

Let me put this as simply as I possibly can. If you rely on any promise of future compensation from anybody to put food on the table, you are a complete and utter moron. Turn in your Bison Club Member badge at the door, and don’t let it hit you on the ass on the way out. Your pension, corporate or civil, is toast. You might get a bit, but not a lot. Ask the retirees from American Airlines how their pension is looking ( or GM for that matter ). Social Security has already seen two years of COLA freeze, and one year of a token increase. In that three years most things rose in price at least by a third. Your COLA was about 3%. 3% versus 33%. You do the math. In a very short time, the SS check you believe is your birth right will buy very little indeed. Every single swinging dingus out there is going to get screwed. There isn’t enough to go around, because only the population goes up, not the energy or other resources. The first stage in the collapse is shrinking resources for all but those in power at the very top. Cutbacks in all financial promises is the first step. It will not reverse. Things will just get worse. End of story and no exceptions, and sorry, but that includes you. Need has nothing to do with it, nor does fair, nor does the fact it is your money matter at all.

*
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*
Here is our future as old bastards. We work, then we die in middle age ( of course, work might be robbing people with actual jobs, begging on the street corner or selling your organs one by one- most folks can start with their brain. Just blow off the cobwebs first ). You won’t work into old age unless you are very lucky. Most will just die of something undiagnosed. Medical care is slowly going back to the old norm of “for rich bitches only”. As is any kind of advanced education. As is retirement. As is job security, or job safety. And that is if we don’t see a collapse. That is the best case scenario. This is nothing more than common sense in a economic/energy contraction scenario. Everything for the common people, benefit wise, was only allowed by a surplus in energy. Hey, I’m about as low on the economic totem pole as you get without being unemployed in the ghetto, and believe me I appreciated the benefits we got with oh so very little effort ( sure, you work hard for your minimum wage, and for most folks it is pitifully little cost-of-living wise, but it is still very generous in historical terms- thanks socialist welfare state! ). I understand the transient nature of those benefits, however. Ding dong, the witch is dead. Rush Limbaugh can now celebrate the demise of any worker compensation above bread and water level. Soon he will be able to rule his empire of worker-serfs. Too bad he will no longer have anyone listening to his show that can afford to buy his sponsors products. One seriously has to wonder if he ever heard of Henry Ford ( if he did, it was the Henry Ford that wiped out Brazilian Indians as the rubber rush took hold to equip his factory, not the Henry Ford that paid his workers enough to buy the product they assembled ).

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Stop acting so pitiful, trying to cheat death into your seventies and beyond. Have the good graces to die when your body decides. We are all going to get there soon enough as it is. You won’t be able to afford the medical, and retirement won’t be there anyway. For you young bucks still working, if you have more than one weeks wages in the bank as a checking/debit account cushion, say goodbye to it. All ones and zeros in the computer you call wealth are easily disappeared. Hey, why actually disappear people, right? Bloody expensive. Just disappear their paper wealth and they disappear soon after, starved to death in a cold dark apartment. How convenient for those in charge. Wouldn’t it be inconvenient for those doom and gloomers if instead of surviving the apocalypse we were forced to survive the end of our paper wealth in a still functioning economy? Don’t trust the bankers, or the government. They are just as dangerous as squads of semi toting brigands.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/

*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

lincoln, you slut

2011-12-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

LINCOLN, YOU SLUT

Well, here we are on another Monday ( remember, I write most articles three days ahead of time so you ingrates can have weekend articles- it’s much cheaper than paying for wireless Internet ) and Monday’s usually lick open-sore monkey testicles. Okay, yes, it’s job security and if it was the other way around I’d be bitching even more, but sometimes I wonder if I picked the only friggin Food Bank in the country that has donations far exceeding demand. The grocery stores are shoveling record amounts of crap my way, I think because the college educated idiots are bound and determined that they will see green shoots coming out of the economies ass any day now if they tap their heels together three times and wish for it really hard so the award winning plan is to overload the shelves at all times, the theory being that if it looks full you get more sales. Well, this always works with a hookers bosoms, but in a store it sure helps if the customers actually have that money in the first place ( even in a Depression, the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust or the middle of a Dark Age, there will always be customers for hookers. Luxury items in a grocery store is another matter entirely ). Good for me, sooner or later bad for the stores bottom line. Anyway, as is usually the case on Mondays, I’m almost always plenty busy cursing work and my fellow man’s generosity ( and/or stupidity ) and my article idea that day usually sucks. Well, it sucks about half the time anyway but we won’t talk about that. But you take it to the bank that on busy Monday’s I’ll both have a suck ass article AND tell you all about why it sucks so I can pad a really lame article. I would be disappointed that I wasn’t becoming predictable after five years of this blog. Today, lacking a better idea, we lamely venture into a worn out subject, collecting pennies ( yes, again- shut up and send me some unique article ideas I can use ).

*
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*

You know how I always bring up buying wheat? A drought in Texas? For the love of God, buy wheat! The feds inflate the money supply some more? Jumping Jesus, buy more wheat! Wheat blight moving from country to country at about a hundred miles a year? I’m imploring you, buy wheat? Well, I’ve got a one track mind about wheat as a store of wealth like some people have about buying nickels. Anything happens, economic or political or meteorological, you are told to buy nickels. I hate nickels. I’ll save what I get, which translates to about one quart Mason jar a year, but I put no stock in their presence. It is just there, just in case, but I don’t hold my breath. Nickels are currently worth about a 20% premium over face value, but pennies are usually anywhere between 50-100% over ( granted, this fluctuates a lot and isn’t always applicable ). Right now, if you wish to act before the Post Office goes broke, there are E-Bay sellers that have already bought the $500 machine to sort the pennies mechanically and are selling them as a service ( a small premium you pay for their machine investment and time ). This is the easiest way to acquire them. It is cheaper to do this yourself manually, but if you want to stock up while you can rather than wait for a run, go to E-Bay. As of this writing you were buying $50 face value worth of copper pennies for $100 after shipping. Since there are 145 pre-82 pennies to a pound of copper, and copper is currently selling at $3.50, your $2.90 per pound purchase is a sound investment ( assuming, naturally, that we don’t start mining the moon for copper and gold and the price doesn’t fall to a buck a pound or whatever ). Just keep in mind, you are not speculating on the copper value as currently determined but betting on the future of currency.

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As soon as it is obvious that the US is as broke as some crappy little European bunghole of a country, the dollar will be accepted with the same enthusiasm as a bloody hanky from a leper in the AIDS ward. If you are too poor to buy silver or gold, and most of us are ( I’d revoke your Super Deluxe Bison Club Card if you were buying an ounce of silver rather than a poly bucket full of wheat [ a months worth of emergency food ] if you didn’t already own a few years worth of food, but a few bucks here and there for copper pennies is allowable ), copper is there for the picking. Just picking through my retail transaction change, I consistently get a ten percent minimum return on my time squinting at the penny dates ( ie, one in ten pennies is a real penny rather than a putrid pale imitation of one ). I don’t know how good/bad that would be from buying boxes of the things from the bank ( if they even let you ). I don’t know if you remember the article I did way the heck back, but I gave you a list of food prices from 150 years ago, before oil queered the economy with false prosperity. Wheat was a few cents a pound, meat about ten cents a pound, etc. The point being, pennies, copper currency, was readily accepted as money and you didn’t need a lot to feed yourself. Even stocking just a few isn’t a bad idea. I would wager a bet that mixed alloy currency is NOT as enthusiastically or readily accepted, which is why I distrust nickels- there isn’t historical evidence that they are viewed as real money by ordinary folks buying things in a truly free market ( granted, I could be wrong, which is why it would be a wager ).

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

shrinking pie

2011-12-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

SHRINKING PIE

I think one of the important points to keep in mind about your future, even if we don’t see a serious crash or collapse in our life times, is that your piece of the pie is going to continue to shrink. This has already been going on for some time and you can’t escape it regardless of politics or economics for two very simple reasons. Population and resources. More and more greedy hungry mouths come into this world every day and every day more and more resources are used up. We know this, yet continue to live as though our personal lives can somehow escape this simple equation. We think we can get better jobs, live in better houses, find a better spouse, get a better education, drive a newer car, etc. We ignore the macro trend and assume our micro world can buck this trend, or be the exception or hold out a little longer than anybody else. Which is of course retarded because no matter how hard you work at two jobs, no matter how smart you are saving money and not wasting, no matter how many degrees you earn at college, you can’t control the basic trend lines. Since 1979 the world as a whole has been consuming less and less energy per person. Per capita available BTU’s has been declining. For a poor schmuck in Bangladesh, say, the drop has been severe. For a couple in the US, with both adults working rather than one, the available energy has declined only slightly. But a decline it has been.

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We are eating less healthy foods. There is more toxins, more genetically modified poisonous crap. The quality has decreased markedly. Our cars are lighter yet barely get better mileage. Or houses are made with far less quality materials. Our infrastructure is patched rather than repaired or replaced. This all translates to less energy used for each person. Rather than burning petroleum, we are burning ethanol and tar sands. Rather than using high energy coal we are using crap coal. The Chinese economic growth has largely been from coal. We are almost replacing all our lost imported petroleum with frac oil and ethanol, but the cost is a doubling of grain prices, and frac gas and oil are not long term solutions. The fields play out much quicker than conventional fuels ( if you doubt this, look at the rush to pump by the companies. One, their leases are set for renewal in a year or so. They are pumping the crap out of a well to avoid the increased cost of leases. Two, if the well was able to pump for twenty years, this wouldn’t be possible. And three, this is a mad rush at profits so I wouldn’t bet anything long term with this- in a very short time, the area will be polluted, the stockholders stuck with worthless paper, and the execs living large in the Bahamas ).

*

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*

At the end of the nineties, we started to run out of the last of the cheap and plentiful oil. We’ve never recovered from that. The end of cheap energy ushered in one financial bubble after another popping and the start towards substituting crap fuels. And it started the trend towards global grain drawdown and shortages. Without cheap oil, the end of cheap food began. Every year, because things don’t get better but continue to get worse, our standard of living decreases. This is the trend. It isn’t a recession that we can grow our way out of because there is no more cheap oil to push growth. Growth is resource use. Resources are running out. For now, there is plenty of fuel and we don’t notice any shortage. But we are using fuel that delivers less energy. I even wonder if the environmental changes is camouflage for that loss of BTU’s. I wouldn’t doubt it. The government and the profit centers don’t want a stampede, and consumers don’t want any reality check and gladly play the game. You can happily point to our fuel supply that continues to grow, but if you examine the total BTU being delivered in that fuel, and the growing cost in both money and energy to extract that fuel, it points to a shrinking fuel picture ( more and more coal being mined, but each ton takes more energy to extract and each ton delivers less heat since it is lower grade. Liquid fuels are the same ). Which is okay, to a certain point. It is a gradual decline in living standards which is far better than a crash or freezing in the dark. But the trend, which is long term, points to YOUR future also seeing a decline.

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You can be luckier, and smarter, and better than most other people, and that is great since you won’t suffer as much as quickly. Just don’t try to fight the trend. Eventually you will also see a decrease in the resources available to you. Don’t bet against the trend. Keep the old car going, don’t buy a new one. Insulate the house to decrease your energy needs. Get out of debt. Not into more. All the standard advise applies, from getting chickens to raise to growing a garden. Because you must act while there is a surplus to insure against future shortages. Even here in “the land of plenty” our standard of living has been in a decades long trend downwards. The cars look shinier, the houses bigger, the TV’s nicer, but it is all form over function. The cars are easily dented plastic, the houses are thin plastic shells and the TV’s are shorter lived. By voluntarily embracing a slightly lower standard of living now, by acknowledging that growth is gone and decline is permanent, in the long term your standard of living will be far better than your contemporaries. Word to the wise.

END
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

polluted empire

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

POLLUTED EMPIRE

Just the other week I was enjoying the book “The World Without Us”. There was a rather long treatise on the pollution of plastics. It seems that rather than degrade, plastics just get smaller and smaller. The layer of visible crap floating on top of the ocean is nothing compared to the microscopic layer several feet under the surface that is ingested by sea life, a lot of it clogging up the intestinal tract and killing the little suckers. One wonders what this does to the idiots eating the survivors ( the jag offs eating sea food because it is so much healthier than beef, as if mercury and plastic is better for you than growth hormones and genetically modified feed grain ). Today I was thumbing through the book “Metal Of Dishonor”, a look at depleted uranium exposed Gulf War soldiers, as well as the long history of indigenous peoples ( Marshall islanders [ Bikini atoll nuke tests ], Navaho Indians [ uranium mining dust and tailings leaching into ground water ] ) getting intentionally poisoned by nuclear weapons. At first I thought I’d talk about the history of death by government and how this should warn you what is in store for you, but then that got me interested in how we happily wallow in the poisonous stew of our civilization. I’ll call it even and talk about both aspects of this.

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*

Boiling it down to brass tack basics, it is as simple as can be. Human nature predisposes us towards indifference to our own health, which automatically translates into not giving a crap about others health. Females happily degrade their own bodies to give multiple births, sagging breasts a badge of honor to feeding, accumulated fat a sign of repeated pregnancies ( leaving aside the gravity later associated with old age and the other fat build up that goes with consuming poisonous foods ). Males happily shorten and endanger their own lives at work, a badge of honor that reflects their ability to provide for their families ( in previous eras, hunting or war wounds, not too long ago industrial accidents such as missing digits, today something like hair loss due to stress in the office ). We actually glory in our ill health, as it shows us and others that we are worthy members of the tribe, whether procreating or protecting/providing. We gladly accept the trade-off. So, if we don’t care about small prices that we pay for advancing the interests of our family and tribe, why would we give a crap about other people suffering for that same goal? Pacific islanders having birth defects from nuclear testing is a sacrifice we gladly make with their bodies to ensure our nuclear deterrent is capable of keeping us in power ( and the same goes for the Indians, who we dismiss automatically after we buy off any feelings of guilt with a Food Stamp payment and a free trailer ). Iraqi children dying of cancer? Not our tribe, we don’t care. Even if we cared, compared to our poisoned drinking water we get from fracking gas and oil deposits, or the cancer clusters we put up around nuke power plants ( the older the plant the higher the incidences, clearly showing the build up of waste emits more poisons ), how bad do those freaks really have it, right? It isn’t like we are so callus as to expect other people to die for us, we gladly share in the pain. Just like smokestack poison was once a sign of wealth and economic security, now the global poisoning reflects the same. We see a trade-off in the already low probability of getting cancer being slightly elevated for a much more secure future ( even if getting cancer is higher than “slightly”, we know we will usually die before we know about it, early detection and treatment being reserved for rich bitches ).

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Irradiating Iraqi’s has several positive benefits for Americans. It gets the nuclear waste out of our country. Once it vaporizes upon detonation most of the locals suck it in. By the time it gets back to us in the atmosphere it is several orders of magnitude diminished in lethality. Meanwhile, Iraqi’s population is being diminished which will make it a lot easier to occupy the place. Of course, our military over there is totally humped but few of us care, even most of the soldiers. It is both the cost of protecting and a badge of honor, generally speaking. If the federal government subjected its draftee’s to direct nuclear fallout, do you really think it will not do the same to those that foolishly volunteered to be in harms way? The military has always treated its members as cannon fodder and guinea pigs, and I think it would be fair to say most of its members both know this and don’t care. If you are lower class and the military is a way up, you roll the dice and usually win in the death lottery. Both parties know the score and both agree with the rules.

*

Anyone out there putting two and two together on Iran, with the test facilities and the downed drone? The frequency of “mysterious” explosions at Iranian government facilities has been increasing. Some idiot was blathering in the media about clandestine CIA or Special Forces bombing the facilities thought to be nuclear bomb related. First off, seriously? Why try to infiltrate teams, a difficult process with a slim chance of success. Just send in a stealth drone or two. Second, do you really think the Koreans and Iranians and Brazilians or whoever are really just “trying” to produce nuclear weapons? Russia is happy to supply ready made missiles to whoever is a counter to US power, just as we supplied South Korea and Japan with their own weapons ( no proof of course, but how else would Britain and France and Israel so quickly gotten their own nukes? It is a good bet that we also gave our other allies weapons to secure themselves against the Soviets and Soviet proxies ). I would bet one testicle that Iran has its own weapons, just as I’m sure that we are drone attacking bomb storage sites rather than enriching facilities. Which means we are exponentially increasing the radioactivity throughout the middle east. We are depopulating the entire oil producing area, slowly but surely. And the grunts and contractors going into the wasteland will gladly do so for the economics of it.

*

So, yes, Peak Oil is here, but we have a great plan to deal with it. We are killing the indigs to get to ALL the oil left, and we are poisoning ourselves gladly to scrape out the last of the domestic oil and natural gas. The government only governs with the happy consent of the population, and we gladly go along with it. I make fun of pampered and spoiled Yuppies living in McMansions and driving SUV’s, but that is just a side effect of our polluted empire. We are getting basic security out of our global conquest, because Oil Is Food. The wealth that goes along with stealing the oil is not the reason for the theft, it is just a happy layer of frosting on the cake we eat ( literally what we eat ). A win/win. Of course there will be losers in the process. Like civil servants deprived of a meaningful pension as we must triage some cities and counties ( obviously we can’t survive on the same level of wealth as when the oil supply was increasing ), or Senior Citizens getting screwed on their retirements. But what do we care? We are suffering right alongside them, but the empire carries on. And the continued empire benefits all of us, even as we must readjust to a lower standard of living.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

frac oil info

2011-12-12T07:29:00.000-08:00

FRAC OIL INFO
Posted previously today, both a guest article and my regular daily article. Here I'll just pass on a great source debunking the North Dakota frac oil hype. Bad news, it ain't no new Alaska. Good news, the decline isn't going as fast.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8697

$1k cabin

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

$1K CABIN

A guest article posted earlier.
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Sometimes I restate the obvious and everyone cheers, inheritances are offered, I must sadly decline females wishing to birth my offspring. Other times, everyone looks at me like I farted in the church pew. It’s usually hard to say which way it’s going to go. Today we talk of a cheap cabin. We do because very little is happening on the economic meltdown front and because we just talked about firearms and if I do that too often I’ll look like Mel Tappon and that my fine feathered friends, simply will not do. When I slink off into the corner to play with my gun ( this is my rifle, this is my gun… ) I try not to talk about it with others. Also, if I keep talking about how wonderful it is to live in a travel trailer you get all huffy and take your marbles and go play at another survival site. So here is the answer to all your problems other than that purported inability to perform sexually that we heard from the UPS guy that heard it from the wife, a cheap shelter. You can get really cheap shelter with a tent or with a beat to crap trailer or even by putting the kids out in a tent and renting their rooms, but here is a more conventional shelter. The Super Deluxe Wonderful Cube Cabin. Cheap to build and easy enough that mechanical morons such as myself can slop it together over a weekend.

*

The cube cabin eliminates everything fancy. Interior space, ascetics, you name it. It also eliminates high cost and the need for building skill. With a stick built cabin it is pretty hard to screw up. I know, you know, and Ross Perot knows that none of you will want to live in a space so small. Most of you have a mudroom/laundry room bigger than this. This is just an option for a “vacation” home on your “vacation” lot. If you ever need it for permanent occupancy it is ready for you. Cheaper than a trailer and not as easily towed away. You all won’t live on junk land, but consider it as a back-up. If you buy a piece of land for two grand, build this cabin for one grand, and have a grand in wheat and bolt guns, even someone on minimum wage can be prepared for a long meltdown. Yes, you could go cache some buckets and when the time comes just pick a nice spot to dig a pit and cover it with a debris roof and your total cost is in the hundreds rather than thousands. But here I’m trying to give you something the wife will loathe with all her being but at least it is NOT a tent or trailer. It is much better at keeping the critters out and the heat in. But it is still very affordable. Anyone can give you advice on how to throw your money away. I’m trying to offer the lowest cost, in case that is all you can afford.

*

Your cube is going to be an eight foot measurement. This eliminates almost all cutting so you don’t have to worry about the lack of power on your land. Believe me, cutting a piece of plywood with a hand saw sucks. Get yourself those cast cement blocks that have the middle hole that holds a four by four beam. They are roughly $5 each. Get a dozen for the corners, the middle of each side, and a center floor support going both ways. $60 total. You can get four by fours, but it will be cheaper to get two 2x4’s and nail it together ( four corners, and in between each corner on all sides ). Eight of these posts will cost $40. You are up to $100.

*

Nail horizontal 2x4’s to connect all the posts, top, middle and bottom. Lay a center beam ( you can reinforce the boards with more cement blocks if you wish, and you might as well since the basic block is $1.50. Add about $20 ) for the floor both ways, forming an +. The floor and roof can be a conventional one foot spaced stick wall. The walls can be also if you desire, to make rolls of insulation easier to install. I’d just loosely hang the insulation between posts since your interior walls will be more insulation. Call the walls $6 each before insulation, for a total of $25. The floor is $30, as is the roof 2x4’s. Total, $75.

*

You will need two sheets of plywood per side of the cube for twelve sheets totaling $120. Roll insulation is about $10 for thirty feet, or about $3 per strip per wall, or $25 a side for $150 total. Interior rigid board insulation is $120 ( place horizontally as the roll insulation was vertical. The two will criss-cross and eliminate most heat loss ). The floor rigid board insulation can go up underneath the floor boards rather than on top of the floor, but securing it would be problematic. Total cost here is about $400.

*
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*

You could jerry-rig a roof, but I’d just go with shingles to get a better lifespan. I have no idea how many you would need, as I plan on having a sunken pit and the roof a few layers of plastic with an inch of dirt covering it. But figure a good three packs for around $100. Throw in a window and door for at least the same Benjamin. Total, $200.

*

You are up to $775, give or take with whatever price fluctuations you find. Call it $800. Throw in a few solar panels, a small propane stove, etc. Within reason, a one grand cubed cabin. Obviously, this is just a “big picture” idea. Not a step by step instruction to be followed religiously. I’m just trying to illustrate how easy and cheap a basic, well insulated shelter can be. Yes, it is tiny. But yes, you can add to it as cash becomes available. You’ll need other odds and ends, but this is a great place to start. You could save even more and build a geo dome:

http://www.strombergschickens.com/starplate_building_system?gclid=CIO5-enu9awCFYYaQgodMQSDTg

*

This cube was just to give you a price guide to how affordable it is to live in something that won’t cost you the same amount of money EVERY SINGLE MONTH. Enjoy.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
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By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

guest article

2011-12-12T06:50:00.001-08:00

GUEST ARTICLE
One of the best ways I've heard it explained. My regular article posted at 7.
*

We do not advertize that we are preppers, or what or how much we store or if we store anything at all.

We do not even talk with anyone we know about prepping, TSHTF or TEOTWAWKI, Peak Oil or anything except the weather, and the new flowers we planted in the yard this year.

We feel safer keeping our preps to ourselves, as well as our thoughts on what is happening or may happen. No one listens, sheeple don't care, and worst of all some of them will remember. They will remember what you said, where you live, and that you have something they want, need, and are entitled to have.

We prep for our family. No one else; no neighbors, no co-workers, no friends or realtives. We are working on two years worth of supplies. We do this quietly, shopping weekly and taking advantage of sales for what we need or want. We do this a little at a time. Storing some things, using others, and always rotating the storage.

Right now, we tell no one of our thoughts or prepping We feel safer this way. But let's say we told one friend about our preps and tried to convince him to prep too. Let's call our friend Abe.

Abe is divorced and has his teen age son at his place every other week end.

He tries to get along with his ex wife because of his son. Mostly he doesn't. But that's another story.

Abe has said if something happened and he came to your house he would want to bring his son.

Abe's son has a girl friend. The girl friend has two parents and three siblings.

You know that Abe's son would want to bring his girl friend, she would want her parents and siblings to come with her. Those three siblings would want their best friends to come along with them.

Those best friends have parents, who have relatives and friends.

Abe's son also wants his mother to come with them too. She has a boyfriend with two kids, who has an

ex wife with a boyfriend with three kids. The ex's boyfriend has parents and two sisters.

Also there are the grandparents, favorite Auntie and Uncle and their relatives.

Oh yeah, someone wants their preacher there too, cause Baby Jesus would want him saved too.

And don't forget each one person will probably tell one more person, swearing them to secrecy. Or tell a group of people, all of them making fun of you and your preps. But one or more will be filing away your info, name, address, apartment, house, car. And don't think they won't show up.

Hopefully Abe will leave his house and get to yours before anyone else shows up at his. Of course Abe's son knows where you live, cause he has come with his father to visit at your house. Le's hope it is Abe's week to have his son with him. The son's girlfriend is out of town with her family, and Abe's ex wife is on vacation to DisneyWorld with her boyfriend and his family.

So how many people are you prepping for? And how long will it last? How many people know?

Will there be any for you? Or will you be around to enjoy and share your own preps???

flexibility

2011-12-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

FLEXIBILITY

Flexibility is the key to future bliss. No, not the flexibility like the wife used to demonstrate when she gave a crap about pretending that your junk didn’t offend her and so contorted into different positions like the Divine Monkey Self Gratification position. The flexibility just to live life. Now, I know I’ve brought this up before, or at least a minion did and I’m taking all the credit. A lot of my blathering just gets down to the basic need to be flexible when needed. Let’s say that you are working a high paying job, one of the three left in the country not involving screwing people over financially but rather making or designing something. With that high paying job you are buying a four wheel drive Hummer with roof mounted squad automatic machine gun which is one pimping ride for getting you to your mountaintop concrete doom bunker. Because your wife insists that little Junior go to the best school ( you have your doubts that the retard is retaining anything, and you notice a striking resemblance between Junior and the UPS guy that may or may not have had a heavy box dropped on his head but most likely was just born that way ), it has become necessary for her to also work at a professional job some distance away. Between the payments on the Hummer, the retreat mortgage, the house mortgage, the tuition and the two commuter cars, things are a bit tight. It didn’t help that you just stockpiled ten thousand dollars worth of freeze dried foods to keep the dog in post-apocalypse food, but you felt it was a necessary expense. How much flexibility does this couple have? Can they afford a drop in income if one gets laid off? Could they, oh, say, take a cut in income to become self employed so they can move to rural Montana to be with the other members of their cult? Could they handle a ten percent hike in taxes as they are classified as rich?

*

A survivalist strategy that is based on only one catastrophe occurring, and on your time frame, is a recipe for disaster. It isn’t prudent to ONLY bet on a long slow drawn out collapse ( really? You think the oil will last long enough to feed all our surplus people while we wait around for a natural population decrease? ), nor do you burn all your bridges betting on an imminent overnight collapse. Flexibility is stocking a core of basics and then, time permitting, adding to it. If time is not forthcoming, you still eat. The longer the collapse is in coming, the better you eat. But ONLY stocking the best food doesn’t give you that flexibility.

*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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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. Thank you.
*

If you insist on living in only one area, you are at the mercy of the housing market, the local taxes and the local job market. If you insist that only a house is the legitimate shelter option, you get to watch helplessly as year after year the ghetto gets closer until one day you spend all you food money on iron bars for the windows. At heart, isn’t all this dogmatic insistence on worshipping the old wealth paradigm a recipe for disaster? Wealth is intangibles. Love, good health, peace of mind. Success is a full belly, any kind of roof over your head and basic security. Doo-dads and gewgaws do nothing but make others rich as they provide your insecure bird-brain with status symbols and the illusion of wealth. If you are willing to live on the bottom, you only improve by going up. If you insist on only living the best, you only have down to look forward to. Think for yourself, and concentrate on making you flexible ( if the family doesn’t want to go along on the ride, you are a wallet, not a dad/husband. Think on that ).

*

God, is the above trite drivel, or what? Forgive me, today was a bear. It is still full blast Christmas at all the towns retailers, and I’m busier than a one fingered pimple popper trying to shove all the crap into the company truck and getting it back in the allotted time ( with fun activities like trying to clean a hundred dozen eggs and repackage them in between picking up more abused and worthless crap ). The job is basically that of a scavenger, and I know my place in this ecosystem. My complaint, which while a complaint is still a good problem to have, is the insane volume of material I must scavenge. At times it almost defies the laws of physics. Anyway, I worked way over into lunch and had to take this home with me and I’m not focusing my best out of my habitual time frame. Which is also the excuse you get for…Welcome, rock and roll fans, to December 8th, the birthday of Jim Morrison. Quite the few old fuddy duddies didn’t care for the man, dismissing him with labels such as Drug Addict or Hippie. Hey, Morrison might have been one screwed up individual, but if you look back a few hundred years, a lot of the now famous poets were bat crap crazy bastards. Jim always considered himself a poet, not a rock singer. Rock was just what sold and kept him in mind altering substances which he could use to write more poetry. A virtuous circle. Kind of like I love to read about the end of the world so I write about it to earn money to buy more books on the end of the world to get more ideas to write about so I can buy more books, etc. Not that I have crap for ideas today, but you get the idea. Everyone just loves REM for “it’s the end of the world”, but I prefer Jim’s “this is the end, my friend”. Can you imagine any other song opening up the movie “Apocalypse Now”?

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.

don't forget the sacrifice

2011-12-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

DON’T FORGET THE SACRIFICE

I’ve mentioned more than once that I don’t consider myself a veteran. A veteran risks his life for his country. Someone that served in the military, either rear echelon or peace time, is merely a civil servant. When you place too much importance on someone “serving their country”, it opens up a huge can of worms, which I’ll explain in a moment. First, a big disclaimer. I love my country. I love the country that adhered to a Constitutional Republic. But loving your government is not the same as loving your country. Russians loved their country, not the Communist government. I fear and hate my government, which is the farthest thing from the originally intended form as you can get. I’m not naïve and I understand that even back two hundred years the system was far from perfect and you had groups trying to form a centralized government even then. You could even argue that the Articles Of Confederation were far superior to the Constitution. But putting all that aside, back in the day we were far closer to the founders intent than we have been for the last century. The last century belonged to the Bankers. Lock, stock and barrel. Lincoln wiped his ass with the Constitution, but the bankers made us eat and swallow that fecal smeared document. I don’t love my Banker controlled government, but I still love my country.

*

I’m writing this December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day. And every swinging Blog writing dingus out there is screaming, Don’t Forget The Sacrifice!!! So, let me join in on this parade. Surely we can’t forget the sacrifice of all the brave men that became fish food on that day. But why did they sacrifice their lives? To defend their country? No, they sacrificed their lives in a chess game, a game of world domination. I’m not trying to belittle their deaths. I’m saddened that they were sacrificed because there was no need. They weren’t defending our country, because our country was in no danger. Our colonial possessions, our imperial outposts might have been in danger. But our country itself was in no danger. I don’t feel pride in their deaths, merely outrage. The US was in no danger of war, and we were in no danger of starving or dying from the cold ( offensive attacks to survive are just a fact of life. That is justifiable war ). We might have been in a Depression, but it was made by the Bankers devaluing gold and creating credit. They profited from it, and I’ll wager a donut that we didn’t need a war to get out of a Depression, we needed to hang all the central bankers. At worse, we could have just turned to armament production and sold to both sides to get full employment without the need to go to war. The government and the bankers profited by both pushing us over an economic cliff and pushing us into a war. There was no need other than what they manufactured.

*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon graphics above and to the right of each article. Or, visit
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*

If we are going to celebrate the fact that thousands of military personnel were led to the sacrificial alter by the bankers, let’s not stop at Pearl Harbor. There are a lot more fallen heroes we dare not forget. Let’s remember the Revolutionary War soldiers who died so the war bond holders could profit off the vast tracts of land they could sell once the British were no longer in power. And you have to appreciate the civilian holders of paper currency “Continentals” ( we’ve already had hyperinflation here, thank you very much ). They had all their wealth confiscated. I won’t mention all the victims of the Indian Wars, since that was a fair fight. Indian tribes killed each other and stole each others land, so turn-about is fair play. But I would like us to all remember the dead Federal soldiers who sacrificed so that the federal government could henceforth rule over the States without hindrance. I’d like to thank those that gave up their lives aboard the Maine so that we could gain Puerto Rico and the Philippians from Spain, the start of our glorious empire. I think we should remember the sacrifices of the Doughboys who made enormous profits for the bankers. Thank you, each and every civilian that owned gold and turned it into FDR, getting back Greenbacks that immediately depreciated 40%. You didn’t give up your lives for our masters betterment, but you did sacrifice years of toil and sweat. You understood that you weren’t capable of making the decisions in regards to your own savings and allowed your betters to do so. Thank you, all the moonshiners and rum runners who gave your lives so our embryonic Police State could be born. Thank you to all the soldiers that sacrificed so that we could take over control of most of the globe from Great Britain. Thank you to all our present generation of casualties who sacrificed their lives or their health so that the American people could continue to drive SUV’s and the bankers could save their teetering house of cards.

*

Do I need to continue? Defending your country from actual attack ( the Japanese didn’t attack because they weren’t busy enough in China, we pushed them quite a bit behind the scenes. FDR wanted in a war, badly. And yet, after Pearl Harbor, we scrimped on resources for the Pacific, mostly concentrating on Europe. That was the original war aim ) is one thing ( again, Hawaii was an imperial outpost, not part of the country ). Or, if your population will die if you don’t attack your neighbor and steal his resources, that is also justified. But to be killed because of others desire for extra riches or extra power, that is just sad and wrong. There is nothing noble about it. It is as senseless as a baby in a stroller on the sidewalk being hit by a drunk driver. I don’t disparage the soldiers and squids who died, I do however think it wrong that civilians use their deaths as an excuse. An excuse to profit, an excuse to justify the new war of theft. An excuse to justify a standing army that colonizes the planet. In case any of you flag waving zombies out there forgot, that is something else that is unconstitutional ( the standing army ). Like those warrentless wiretaps your heroic boys in blue are setting up. The Nazi’s were great on waving flags. And great justifying rounding up Jews. We wave the flag as Muslims are rounded up, and are too stupid to see we are next. Really? Does thinking hurt that much? I weep.

END
The Official Bison Web Site http://www.bisonpress.com/
*
My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
*
Anyone can submit a guest article. No minimum word length, no writing skill necessary ( just get the idea across ). You retain copyright ( this must be your original writing ) and I’ll just use the once. I’ve yet to turn down an article, just don’t use the N Bomb or libel another that can sue me. Send by e-mail ( please, label as “guest article” so I can find it easily later ). Payment will be your removal from my enemies list.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.