third the price is nice

THIRD THE PRICE IS NICE


Baby Jesus on a pogo stick! What a friggin Monday this is turning out to be. Yesterday was a mixed blessing, with wife #4, again!, deciding to leave to go live with her daughter. Good in a way because ever since she came back seven months ago she has been more of a handful than normally ( and not a good handful ). Very high maintenance. Although I’m sorry to see the relationship end it is trading one slightly less stressful problem for the other. If I can convince the Little Brain not to do anything too stupid this should work out as a plus. However, this was also bad in a way since this time she took the cats with her. I’m used to the last five years of the pitter patter of His Lordship moving around at night, nuzzling under the covers, etc. I did not sleep too well last night. So this morning despite a pot plus of coffee I’m totally brain dead. But wait! That’s not all- if you order within the next five minutes we’ll throw in a very rude e-mail from wife #2. I don’t know when she started monitoring my blog. Perhaps one of the kids dropped a dime on me to save themselves from her wraith. But she was gloating over last weeks article, claiming I wasn’t going to see a fifty percent drop in child support since the state will readjust the support on one child upwards. Perhaps. I need to contact them and get an official word. I mean, more than likely I get screwed. This is the state of Florida which has dry humped me more than a few times. What’s a few more? It does point out how little she needs the financial help for anything other than to punish me. If she needed it she would be worried about a drop instead of cackling gleefully. But I really am too tired to care past the elevated blood pressure she caused me hours ago. Same old.

*

Please forgive me if today’s article is revoltingly uninspiring. I am going on auto pilot here. Yet I know that as good as I am even when I’m bad, you have come to expect perfection. So my apologies. This will give you the excuse you needed to hate me and say hurtful things and cause me to curl up in a fetal position and whimper. I hope you’re happy. As I said in a previous article, it is far better to have a slightly dangerous item in your survival preps than no item at all. Far better a sickly, cancerous, bloated bird in hand than two healthy ones in the bush. Money being saved for perfection equals zero when the balloon goes up. Less than perfection when that happens turns it to gold. I even admitted that it was far better to have the Russian bolt gun and its ammo than the far superior Lee-Enfield which cost twice as much. Do you know how hard it was to write that? Comparing the Mosin-Nagant to the Lee-Enfield is like comparing an eunuch to John Holmes ( did I remember that right? The porn star unnaturally endowed-easy, ladies!-that died of AIDS awhile back ). The one glaring fault of the Czar’s gun which I cannot forgive is the lack of a bleed valve to protect the shooter from a ruptured case. But it had to be said. If you are insanely dirt poor, so broke you can’t pay attention, making eighty grand a year between two incomes but unable to keep up with your spouses insane consumer lifestyle, then you have no choice but to make the Russian gun your main battle rifle. Not because it costs half the amount of a Brit or Kraut rifle as I originally spouted off, but because it will only cost a third! Third the price is really friggin nice.

*

I might have been off slightly, but I couldn’t find a cheaper ammo price than The Sportsmen’s Guide. I looked on the Internet for a few minutes and couldn’t find a better buy. Of course, the power went off in half the town and even though it came back on in time for lunch our broadband connection is still down. But I think after checking Alamo Ammo and Cheaper Than Dirt, it is safe to call Sportsmen’s the winner. You might have to buy 440 rounds of 7.62x54 to get the twenty cents a round price, but consider that this is only slightly more expensive than a hundred rounds of 303B. No, it isn’t a perfect comparison since the Brit is reloadable and the Russian is not. But I can’t imagine you can reload cheaper than twenty cents a round ( forgive me if I’m off here but I seem to recall powder being almost twenty cents a round for reloading-please correct me if needed ). But seeing as how it would be suicide to have too much less than 500 rounds of ammo for the end of the world, this is a good place to start comparing as a bare minimum. Reloads would be the next step up the prepping ladder. For now, what’s the minimum. 400rounds should do nicely.

*

I couldn’t find case 303, so you are stuck with the low being 75 cents a round, in boxes of twenty. The rifles themselves are $90 for the Russian, $150 for the British. The ammo is $80 and $300. $170 versus $450 total. Almost one third for the cheaper. At a thousand rounds, it is $290 versus $900- less than a third the price. If you can’t afford a $200 arsenal, well, you frankly deserve to end up in the stew pot.

END


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the accidental doomer

THE ACCIDENTAL DOOMER


I know that generally you assume only great things from the keyboard of your favorite survivalist writer. That’s me, Bison, by the way in case you forgot. Usually by Sunday after a day’s rest I am inspired to deliver on that assumption. This time it almost didn’t happen and you came really close to getting a standard space filler such as a solar water heater. Don’t relax, it could still happen. But at the last minute I remembered an amusing tale I have been meaning to share with you, how your very same favorite author of all things paranoid and apocalyptic came to be such an enlightened guru for you. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a survivalist for decades. But why did I take the dark path towards full blown despair and doom? No, I’m not talking about my unbalanced mental state. Rather, those small events in life that equal more in their sum than their parts. If it wasn’t for a few different events, I would still be content with 300 pounds of wheat berries, a water filter and a handgun. Instead, I am huddled inside my tin box in the desert, eagerly awaiting the crash of civilization. Why? Instead of just planning for a failed harvest or earthquake, caching enough supplies to cover 90% of possible disasters, why did I come to embrace the idea that we are all destined for the stewpot?

*

I could point to discovering Peak Oil, or being advised to read one or another particular book. But, really, if you aren’t already primed for that kind of message, can it ever take root? I don’t think so. Of course, having said that, I still try to preach to my minions, even though I should know better. You are living in the city, have a mortgage, drive an SUV and are content with a garden and a skeet shotgun. Not because you are ignorant or refuse to listen to reason. Because you have no reason to regard my message as the truth. Why disrupt your life and family if you don’t really believe, right? So, let’s go on that dangerous trek into my psyche and dig around a bit. Don’t worry, we aren’t going too deep. I don’t want to scare the children. Or the dogs. We’re just going to scratch the surface. And, as you might expect, as usual the cause is found in wife number two. Listen, don’t roll your eyes at me. I told you we aren’t searching too deep. There won’t be any recounting of High School gym class, communal showers, sleep deprivation brainwashing from the military, my smoking habit traceable to inadequate breast feeding or anything else. Wife number two was the closest I’ve ever come to true, pure evil and it made a lasting mark on me.

*

Have you ever been touched by a demon from the lower depths of Hell? It is a traumatic experience. Don’t judge, you unfeeling bastard. Let’s start with my honeymoon. After the ceremony we had a reception. My boss at the time was really generous and closed the station early and we all got drunk ( even the teenagers ). He left after a decent interval and we all broke out the illicit substances. A good time was had by all, and I enjoyed a pizza talking to me and my stream of urine changing into the colors of the rainbow. That night, as we were in a hotel room, I watched Tango And Cash at least half a dozen times on cable. The next morning I was feeling less than optimal and my blushing bride drove up to the redwoods. Well, it turns out that I had really pissed her off by not servicing her the night before. She was no pure virgin when we met and we had been sleeping together for a year, but she was so pissed from that night on she started denying me sex more often than not. Yes, I know, I’m an uncaring bastard, more to a relationship than sex, blah, blah. Jimmy couldn’t get his rocks off, boo hoo. Hey, I’m telling you, this was a traumatic event for me. But that isn’t where I’m leading with this. You see, I really thought this was my one true love, that we were destined to live together for the rest of our lives. So I didn’t see this as the relationship altering experience. I was totally blind. I thought it was just a normal thing where a relationship goes from white hot to a normal simmer. What an idiot I was. So, after our divorce, I was seduced by her promises that we should get back together. I still didn’t see the problem when she broke it off a week later after I had moved half way across the country to move in with her. She was kicking me out and the only thing I could do was go back to wife number three.

*

Let me explain about number three. She was a good wife. Cooked like a goddess. Wanted sex more than I did. But she was chunky when we met and put on pounds by the day after we got married. After a time the sight of her was revolting. She wanted to please me but she had a mental short circuit where any stress at all called for a Twinkie and some Doritos. So after a time she really went full blown Pear Person. Gross! I have no problem with chunky, but full on blubber is just too much. But I had to go back to her after being kicked out from #2. Needless to say, when number two AGAIN batted her eyes and promised me the moon I was eager to leave. To make a long story a bit shorter, that was the last time I switched between the two wives. I left number two for good after she threatened to call the police on me. Not because of any actual threat but because she wasn’t getting her way in an argument and that was her last card to play. Trumped up abuse charges. From that day on, all the crap from the past actually stuck with me. The threat of homelessness. The financial rape. The threat of being unjustifiable incarcerated. Having to mount the Pear Person. Only then did it all seem real, like I was no longer able to roll and slide with the punches but that there were actually forces out there that could alter my life for the worse. Before that day, I could give a crap about money or possessions. I could always get another job. I could always live cheap enough to survive a temporary financial setback. But after the drapes of reality were swept aside I could no longer be so blasé. I was now running scared for good.

*

I actually feel a bit of gratitude. If it wasn’t for that one day, and of course all of the events leading up to it, I never would have eagerly embraced the coming of Y2K. I never would have buckled down to a serious pursuit of writing. I never would have started both saving and investing. The last twelve years, roughly half of my working adult life, have been a time of transformation. One in which I’ve become more and more paranoid and fearful, but also much better prepared for calamity. Perhaps it is nobody else’s fault that I flew in such a trajectory at such a velocity but my own. Perhaps I’ve turned much too paranoid. But the genesis was a stubborn little bitch willing to ruin someone’s life to win an argument. If my one time “one true love” could be so evil, how could I expect strangers I didn’t even know to be fair or to find it in their hearts not to sacrifice me in their own pursuit of pleasure or wealth? I certainly couldn’t. I had always been withdrawn, a Dungeon & Dragons playing nerd with his nose buried in a book. My survival strategy in life had been to avoid everyone, to hide in plain sight. After my personal wake up call I was still a withdrawn nerd with my nose in a book, but now I studied all the ways I was going to get screwed so I could take steps to minimize or neutralize. Thank you, number two, for the only time you truly enjoyed screwing me. It woke me up.

END

My web site http://www.bisonpress.com/


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book review:militia porn

BOOK REVIEW:MILITIA PORN


Militia porn is a diversion. It is pure entertainment. Not that some of its basic tenets won’t come to pass, but the simple fact is that you have much bigger problems ahead besides gun confiscation and semi-auto bans. Like the coming famine. If not this year from drought than in a year or three from oil declines. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be smart to bury a rifle and some ammo. It will, for various reasons besides NATO ninja troops kicking in your door. Like when the fire department is underfunded and lets your house burn, you have a backup for protection.

*

Of course, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have this kind of diversion. I was so enthralled with the books Enemies Foreign And Domestic, Domestic Enemies and Foreign Enemies, each almost 600 pages, that I fundamentally changed my bad habits. All through the cloudy winter I’ve complained about the periods between the PV panel recharging the batteries where I couldn’t watch TV. Once I started reading the trilogy, I quickly realized how much I hated TV and how much I missed reading more often. Before, I would go months and months without TV, and then when it was available I overindulged in it. Now, I’m at the point where I watch TV three nights a week. Period. House, then Two And A Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. Tuesday isNCIS ( not the huge steaming pile of crap that is NCIS:LA ). Friday is Medium. That is all the TV I’m watching. I dropped the Sunday cartoons on FOX ( The Simpson’s, Family Guy, etc. ), I dropped Wednesday’s ABC comedies ( which while very good, aren’t top rated by me ). No more local station Thursday night movie, or Saturday Night Live. I’ve doubled and tripled my reading time and enjoying my leisure time much more. It is obvious I needed to discipline my drug TV better.

*

The first book is great, and basically covers the staged stadium massacre and the push for national gun control as a result. Several main freedom fighters are portrayed waging battle against an evil storm trooper agency of the Feds. In the second book, one of those characters goes to find her son after being in a prison camp and is sidetracked with the New Mexico political scene trying to return the southwest to its Hispanic inhabitants. This is the weakest of the three books. Only buy it if the $20 is burning a hole in your pocket. The third book covers the international troops fighting the insurrection in the Tennessee area after the Greater Depression goes full blast and the New Madrid earthquake screws up everything. This one of the three seems to be the most involved with the most layers of activity, and hence my favorite. It has far more meat to it. The ending seemed to be in route to a contrived conclusion, but it wrapped up with a surprise ending that didn’t insult your intelligence too much as long as you realize the ending had to be somewhat on a happy note. The whole series could be picked apart with details. My biggest beef is the standard “only a few bad apples spoil the government and they are evil conspirators” rather than an overview of all the bad influences that control our empire. But really, that would have entailed too many sequels and/or not enough focus on the characters. So, really, there was no choice in the matter. As it was, a huge array of details was covered anyway. I can’t really fault the author for how he did it. Rather, I was very impressed overall.

END

My web page http://www.bisonpress.com/

druid dread

DRUID DREAD


I wish to thank my minions for their alert on the Druids Dread in this weeks post. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ . Don’t think that he has joined the Dark Side ( doom and gloomers ), because it clashes with his fundamental philosophy and would clash with all his publishing’s. I’m not dogging on the Druid Dude. We have a huge divide in how we view the world, but this is one smart cookie who I respect. I’m just saying that he isn’t going to change his spots. None of us do. Even if we change the velocity of our views, the views stay the same. I’m sure he could phase it in much more colorful two bit words. This is the man that turned me on to “Overshoot”, the best book bar none on framing how I look at resource depletion and collapse. I love his own books, “The Long Descent” and “An Ecotechnic Future”. I can’t believe we both get such different views out of the same book, but I guess that is a good life lesson for everybody.

*

Druid Dude seems to be saying that his view of the future has started coming true much faster than he had previously thought. I can’t see him saying that we are going to have a waterfall collapse. My view, and while I try to live under its assumption I also acknowledge that I could be overly paranoid, is that we are headed for a waterfall. A constant series of small failures until suddenly the tripping point is reached and we fall straight down. His view, and he can proudly also point to living what he preaches, is that collapse is a staircase. We go straight ahead, hit a problem and fall down slightly, then make adjustments and continue straight ahead until the next small fall and adjustment. Remember, we both base our assumptions on the same book. Which, by the way, is really the only book you need on understanding the coming collapse. I think he is wrong in his views but that does not diminish my respect for him on an intellectual level.

*

If nothing else, I suggest you read this weeks article for its concise history of the American continent and its energy sources. His will showcase to you how we have already been in a long descent for forty years. In other words, we don’t have the luxury of time ahead of us. No, I have no idea when the waterfall crest is reached. This year? Next decade? How the heck would I know. I just know that panicking now is where the smart money is. Do you really think I could give a rats ass about my writing income because I am so laid back and mellow? I don’t look on this income as something that will see me into retirement. I act as if I must write that kind of output, I act as if this is what will put food on the table in the future. Because, just in case…But really, I know deep down the probable outcome is that all this, the Internet, UPS, the ability of readers to buy products from advertisers, all that is only years away from vanishing. Don’t discount my intangibles here. I really do care that the most people possible get prepared cheaply and quickly. That is my charity ( not stockpiling for refugees ). I’ve written for years at a loss. Profit is recent. I really don’t think it is going to last. If it is a choice between my book and a sack of corn, I would be the first one to heckle you if you bought my book. Words to the wise, I trust.

END

My web site http://www.bisonpress.com/
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tax return

TAX RETURN


In case you were getting tired of me rehashing six month old articles I’ve decided to give you a treat today and do my once a year tax return article. Some of you are typical middle class worker drone Yuppies, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why you would be reading this site rather than Survival Blog, rather than lower case worker drones, and you might be waiting for April 15th to file in the vain hope that in six months inflation will soften the blow on how much you owe the government on taxes. I think the average half way intelligent worker figures out how much of their own money they can keep without owing the IRS anything at the end of the year and adjusts their withholding amount accordingly. They keep as much as they can each paycheck and get almost nothing back. I let the government have all they want , borrowing my money at zero percent interest. I file 0 on my withholding. To me it serves two purposes. One, I never have to fear paying at the end of the year. Even a hundred bucks is not something I want to rape my savings for. Two, it is another savings account. I have the discipline to save the money. I dipped into my hundred dollar bill stash three years later to help move up to Elko ( I had enough from cashing in my vacation and my last pay check [and that was after paying ahead two weeks on my child support] until I had to replace all the truck and trailer tires ). The bills were old enough to start molding. I just like a variety of savings.

*

In past years I’ve saved half my return and invested the other half. The first half goes to the coming years kids birthdays and Christmas, plus the automobile insurance fees to come. The second half I buy preparedness items. I buy those monthly, but the tax return is for bigger ticket items. One year I bought my rimfire arsenal, a semi-auto rifle ( with a tube mag, although now I wish I’d gone with a single shot ) and about eight thousand rounds of ammo. Another year it was around eight thousand rifle primers and some powder. Or it is books normally too expensive, such as one years purchase of the complete set of the Foxfire books ( do not buy the second half which are worthless for skills, just one through six ). In the past I’ve bought hundreds of rounds of current manufacture ammo. Last winter I kept buying bags of corn until now I can barely get into the Hippie Bread Van. I also splurged and bought the $150 TV ( 7 inch digital only using 13 watts ). Of course a year later it is now $75, and it was no where near a prep necessity. But all apocalypse planning and no play makes Jim a very dull boy. My main point is that none of this money is usually wasted or spent frivolously. I had enough of that with wife #2. The two of us making $25k a year, or her making $35k, it didn’t matter. She is always broke with nothing to show for it except rent and car bills. And a huge ass showing how many restaurants her meals came from. Anyway, before I get myself worked up into a lather, here is how this years return is going to get invested.

*

I thought long and hard about it and decided to pay off my second lot of land. It is a fifty percent increase in the distance from town as the one I’m on so I won’t live on it commuting daily to work. But it is half the distance of my long ago paid off lot ten miles east of town ( and then five miles north on very bad roads ). That lot is why I moved here. In case the economy crashed, I had a ten buck a year tax bill and no rent. The lot down the road from here is my “looking for a job” lot. It allows me to still work but have no rent. Needless to say, it would be a part time job as there is no way I’d pedal from there five days a week. This June my child support cuts in half, and if I become unemployed and must move to avoid rent I can work for a lot less. I need 40 hours a week now ( to keep up with my required ten percent net book buying ), but in case of the worse I’ll then only need to work 20 hours a week. If I pay off that lot now with my tax return. This is not perfect, I would like to get to the point where writing pays the bills and I work zero hours a week in town. But it does still give me much more flexibility in a decaying economy. And by the by, the twenty hours a week assumes none of my other bills change. I keep up with my wasteful habits such as hauling water by truck rather than bike and I keep eating meat most of the nights of the week. And spend $2.50 a week washing clothes in the Laundromat.

*

Certain other blog authors snort about those people that tell you what they eat for dinner in their writing. Of course those same authors get advertisers to pay for submitted articles. Plus instead of allowing comments, they post the comments as articles. Those are blog editors, not blog authors. They have little cause for scorn because they ain’t writers. Very good editors, piss poor writers. I submit to you that since some of you are living vicariously through me ( but not through the winter in my trailer, damn you ), these personal details interest you. They give you a sample of how to do things. Perhaps not the best way, but one way. If I can keep two of us alive on minimum wage, with prep buying and wasting lots of money on books, anyone can afford to do the same. I’m not bragging, because I’m sitting at my keyboard writing in 46 degrees. With three sweaters and my snow boots on. You are reading in 83 degrees. But I have a grand to piss away, which is almost two months take home pay. I’ll take the cold. At least for now. One day I’ll write this from my underground Unibomber liar.

*

What are you doing with your tax return to increase your future security?

END

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Parden me, I had to take #4 into a doctors appointment Thursday.  I only worked a few hours and am a bit behind on mail and comments.  Please bear with me.

let them eat organic

LET THEM EAT ORGANIC


As you might have noticed, we have a bit of an unemployment problem here in America. Well, it is basically global in scope, but we don’t care about no stinking fuzzy foreigners. And there are few places outside of construction that has such a high level of unemployment as comedians. So you would think that our sovereign ruler His Royal Illegal Immigrant Obammy would be a little more sensitive about those members and their employment status. But, nooooo! Here he is making jokes, taking away jobs from yet more funny men. He wants to take twenty billion from TARP and give it to small banks to loan to small businesses so that employment as a whole will prosper. Oh, I’m not laughing at the absurdity of TARP and its phantom riches, being nothing more than credit on a computer that we keep loaning out. I’m laughing at the idiocy of going in debt when you don’t have any more customers. Forget the absurdity of a “jobless” “recovery”. Our jobless rate is growing and there never was a recovery outside of a few stimulus projects. For instance, if it wasn’t for government backed mortgages there would be zero activity in housing. But forget that. If people are unemployed and the consumer economy is shrinking, why does it make any sense to get in debt opening or continuing to keep open a small business? Unless it is freeze dried food or gun sales, your market is shrinking. This is nothing more than more welfare for banks and I hope no one is foolish enough to take those loans ( unless it is for the above mentioned businesses- and I want free samples if one of you take the bait ).

*

It is doubtful that Maria ever actual told her advisor that the peasants should eat cake if they couldn’t buy bread. But it is a great sound bite. Hopefully after 90% of us have died off and things return to normal after a few centuries of medieval warfare there will survive an equally amusing quip attributed to me. I like “last one in the stew pot wins”, but perhaps one of you has a better nomination. Come on, this is much more amusing than the Oscar contest. The winner will receive an old beat up copy of Lucifer’s Hammer. I tried bribing a co-worker with it so she would join the Dark Side but she wouldn’t do it. Anyway, I enjoy all of these plans from all of these writers using forests worth of paper to convince us if only XYZ was implemented than everything would be hunky dorey. For instance, by not wasting resources and by going organic. Hey, the paper is recycled so it must be okay. Forget the fact that petroleum was burned to print and bind the book. If it is for a good cause, like taking a jet to Copenhagen, then it’s all good, dawg. Also forget the fact that those in power will switch to organic about the time that evil space monkeys fly out of my anal orifice. Hey, having evil space monkeys would be pretty cool. Some troll spouts off and I could unleash them. Fly, my pretties, fly! Avenge me! ( sorry, I kind of mixed up Lord Of The Rings and Red Dawn there ). The bad part would be having them fly out of my ass, because to be an effective revenge force they would have to be more than a few inches in diameter. You can imagine the problem.

*

People in power got that way following a certain plan. Generally it does not include evil space monkeys, but sometimes it does include Hillary Clinton which is much scarier. And by no means did the plan have any room for altruism outside of a façade pretending for PR’s sake to give two craps about anyone else. Wealth was created by consuming resources, and consumption is not the same as conservation. If it goes against their interests, if it cuts into the bottom line, there will be no concrete move into any of the lofty goals given to save us. No decentralized organic farms when centralized mechanized patent holding Frankenfood seed planting mega-farms are making money. No renewable energy when coal powered plants have a monopoly on power generation. No zoning for earth bermed homes when stick built homes consume said power and add thirty years of interest payments to the bankers bottom line. And etcetera. Obviously, individuals can fly under the radar and have some independence from unsustainable practices. But as a whole, nothing will be allowed to change. Do you think organics would even be at regular supermarkets if they didn’t command a huge premium? They are a boutique item. A luxury for soccer mom’s driving their brood around in a fuel sucking SUV.

*

Birkenstock wearing, Volvo driving, hemp fabric wearing, dreadlock sporting tree huggers will never be the savior of the planet. At least not this side of the collapse. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice, but it certainly isn’t realistic. The Titanic is going down burning coal, not powered by oarsmen fed with naturally grown soybean curd.

END

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collapse naysayers

COLLAPSE NAYSAYERS


At the risk of being just like my baggage train of trolls that follow me everywhere, complaining and bitching the whole way as they consume my free content, I’ll admit to listening to NPR last night. Why not? Our tax dollars at work. Anyway, they had an interesting show on the guy that was both the father of card counting in gambling and the original computer geek at Wall Street. I don’t actually know if there were useable computers available to the early hedge fund operators or if it was originally just mathematical formulas, but I found the whole thing fascinating. His name was Ed Thorp and he was featured in a book by Scott Patterson, “The Quants”. Ed is a pretty smart fellow and had always warmed against the Black Swain events that could invalidate his process, but obviously his modern trading system was kidnapped and raised to be a monster by the greed and idiocy of the financial institution.

*

Today, let’s talk about the collapse naysayers. I won’t name any names to protect the guilty. Let’s just say he is one of those fellows that is embarrassed when a cammie wearing, carbine totting, MRE eating, underground lair dwelling survivalists is mentioned while describing his work on system slow decline. One excuse giving for the decline versus the collapse is the Black Plague of the middle ages. After a twenty five percent population decline, life pretty much went on as usual. There was no anarchy or collapse of government. Hence, large scalecatastrophes will not see a collapse. Now, we could sit and argue all day long about what happened after the fall of Rome. Was it a slow decline over centuries or was it pretty much a total collapse with 90% population declines? You know where I stand on the issue, but it is all based on conjecture. You know, I know, and even Ross Perot knows that with almost no written records on the event, speculation is the best we can do. But the Black Death has much better records. We know a lot more about it. So this is used as proof that us crazy doomers are just whistling Dixie out of our asses, thinking we will all be savagely beating each other over the heads with pieces of concrete rebar and throwing the loser into the stew pot.

*

But the bubonic plague that wiped out large segments of Europe ( I’m sure it did the same over in Asia, but that is where Mongols and Muslims hang out, not to mention where the disease originated, so we tend to dismiss the region in history, or at least the history we are interested in- kind of like Africa is ignored outside a few interesting colonialism tales ) was actually not a disaster at all. The survivors had enough to eat after it was all said and done. Overpopulation was solved, there was then enough fertile land for everyone. I’ve already written about the shrinking farmland leading to overpopulation and famine. Just as in Rwanda recently. Plots got smaller and smaller as more and more people were born until no one had enough to eat. European farmland, even though increasing, its output was not enough to keep pace with population growth. Malthusian theory had already been proven before it was published. The book just put a nice mathematical shine on it. A 25% population decline was not enough to destabilize society in general, but it was enough to take the pressure off the survivors calorie count.

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The coming famines will be caused by decreasing energy inputs. We can go 100% organic and still not be able to feed our population if the transportation infrastructure can’t keep feeding the urban populations. It isn’t really so much the lack of artificial fertilizers and tractor fuel ( although their absence or just their decrease will make a huge difference ) as it is being able to get the food hundreds of miles away to feed the cities. Unless we start today, we can’t relocate millions out of the cities and have then start gardening to feed themselves. Gardening and raising livestock, because our meat producing facilities have been centralized. Which leads to lack of both meat and fertilizer for the gardens. The migration of farmers to the cities took place over generations, in an energy increase environment. You can’t simply move them back in an oil down scenario. Yet you can’t keep feeding people over three thousand miles from centralized locations if energy is decreasing. This is why it is vital for you to have your grain stockpile. No, it won’t support you indefinitely. But it will see you through a die-off. You can’t garden again until order is restored.

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This time around, we won’t just lose 25% of the population. The globe is supporting many more mouths than can be fed organically. Perhaps as much as tens times too many. Only oil feeds them, even, or perhaps especially, in America. Oil down is soil down, water down, centralization down. Grain down. War, conflict, famine, refugee up. Don’t worry, if you forget I’ll keep warning you.

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