emergency self sufficient

EMERGENCY SELF SUFFICIENT


If you were visiting http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html on February 22, 2010, there is a damn fine rant on unrealistic expectations from readers. To put words into the authors mouth, which I like to do since by declaring that I’m just kidding I can both cover my butt and make fun at the same time so as to cause small children to gaze in wonder and women to swoon in desire, readers are asshats that shouldn’t expect 40 hours of work a week for free and that the author is what he is and you need to get a life and deal with it. Now, I can absolutely relate to unrealistic reader expectations ( “what do you mean you’re not spending 20 a week writing, twenty hours a week using your own money to build experimental projects and another twenty to read about how much you suck the peanuts out of my spoor?” ), but in reality the life of an author long before the Internet sucked. You had to put forth a lot of free effort and time to practice the art, then you had to put forth publish-worthy material on consignment and then you only had a 1% chance of success anyway. You write out of a little love and a lot of psychosis. Not for the money. Anyway, I don’t know if the article had anything to do with my “drinking the Grape Kool-Aid of optimism” article, I might be flattering myself I’m ever known. But he did spend a lot of time debunking the notion of government stepping aside while mutant zombie bikers raped and pillaged. So, for the record, and to lead up to today’s article, government itself will never disappear, but it will change shape to a smaller, more local unit. The centralized state is going to disappear, not government. We go right back to the question of oil and energy.

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Today’s article questions the US government’s ability to survive on its own energy supply. Can our government, through means foul or fair, survive on its own oil supply. The above author seems to think it will be as easy as pie to ration five and a half million barrels of oil a day to keep the helicopters flying to suppress dissent and keep order. Now, with all due respect, that Grape Kool-Aid must have had a light dusting of crack in it, because that is pure poppycock my dear fellows. The math is so simple that I’m in immediate danger of being unable to stretch out this article to the normal 800-1k words. Not that I ever really Honest Injun need that many words to describe anything I talk about. I know there are a lot of minions that pray to their gods that I would just shut the hell up and get to the point. But, alas, my unnecessary length provides the illusion of wisdom and depth of thought and I ain’t giving that up any time soon. Besides, sometimes a proper insult takes up quite a bit of space. We produce five and a half million barrels a day of our own oil. Let’s ignore continual depletion and net energy loss substitutes and just call it 51/2 million a day for the foreseeable future. You know, the time when the die-off is happening. The last time I saw the figures, we used a fifth of our TOTAL energy, imports included, to grow and transport and process our food. It was actually 18%, but I rounded it up as that figure did not include home cooking or personal energy expended for shopping, or, one presumes, driving down to the Colonels for a bucket. And that figure was given when our daily use was about an even twenty million barrels a day ( now down to around 17 or 18 after three continual years of imports decline-gee, I wonder if that would have anything to do with our economic depression? ).

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One fifth of twenty million is four million. Our food supply takes four million barrels a day. And, the last time I checked, our military was calculated to consume a bit under a half million barrels a day. Most of that being aircraft fuel. The kind of fuel you use to fly around and pop a missile into a surrounded group of rioters ( if you read the above article, that reference will make sense ). We pump five and a half million barrels of fuel a day. We use four and a half for nothing else except feeding ourselves and moving the military around. And that leaves a whopping one million gallons of oil a day to keep our entire economy going. Now, granted, a lot of that military juice is used overseas to keep our oil imports flowing in. But even if we take out the fuel used by the military and shave a bit off the food needs as we conserve or reduce waste, we are still using over half of our domestic production of energy just to feed ourselves. And we really can’t reduce the military figure, now can we? A lot of energy will be needed to pacify a domestic populace that is freezing in their immobile cars after they lost their homes. Those living in their homes have no heat. Even if we nationalized food and made sure everyone was fed ( which assumes there would be no decrease in efficiency due to government control-HA! ), there wouldn’t be enough energy left to have anyone employed.

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And remember, all this assumes a functioning government, as if we won’t riot until we are all homeless and desperate. While it is true that for the most part most people won’t take up arms until they are starving, there will still be a few million that act ahead of time to counter the imposed national dictatorship. Not to mention those that fly planes into government building after they lose their pension funds. While we will see a nationalization of energy at the end, it won’t be effective. By then, the military won’t have its current capabilities. Nor will our dollar be anything other than toilet paper or camp fire starter. Remember, centralization requires an energy surplus. So, relax and skip your next militia meeting. The federal government is going to fail on its own. Even with all the oil.

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