is it too late?

IS IT TOO LATE?


I know you think I mock you. Foolish Earthling! Your puny efforts are for naught. Kneel before my greatness and tremble! Alas, I am not allowed to have a superiority complex per Bison Rules And By-Laws section three, subsection one hundred and thirty two. No person or persons shall be belittled or denied loyal minion status even if they have not seen the obvious fact of western civilization crumbling around them as the non-renewable petroleum sources are depleted at an alarming and breathtaking speed and you have had plenty of warning from both His Most Exalted Paranoid One and other unlikely sources such as Baby Bush since there was no other reason to occupy the middle east other than to secure the last of the oil reserves and thus you have had at least eight friggin years to get ready. Hey, I didn’t make the rules. You can look it up yourself, it actually uses “friggin” which should tell you how serious the Official Revised Bison Rules And By-Laws writers were about the whole thing. Even though you have had plenty of warning I am still not allowed to mock you, which tells me they are pretty sweet guys and really want to see you survive ending up in the stewpot.

*

I know it is easy for me to crack the whip and yell at you to prepare faster and quicker. I’m already there, mostly. But just because the tools were more affordable to me, that doesn’t mean I had it easy. Since I make less than most of you, even at cheaper rates my preps took a huge bite out of my income, percentage wise. It took me ten years to get to a comfortable position ( not actual comfort such as a steel reinforced bunker and a few hundred cases of MRE’s and a few HK-91’s which would be really sweet if anyone is thinking about stuffing my stocking this Christmas, but comfortable as in at least being able to survive the economic contraction and a year or two after the collapse, Baby Jesus willing ). You DON’T have that kind of time and you certainly are going to pay more for your preps than I did. I bought wheat at half its current price. The buckets for it at 75% of the price now. Same with my rifles- one half to 25% off what they are going for now ( I actually had three Enfield No. 1’s for $75 each, mid nineties, but I got ride of them and went with the superior No. 4’s ). My ammo was mostly surplus at 25 cents a round, with new S&B for $8 a box. A smidge less if I caught the right deal at a gun show. My grain grinders were $20 after shipping, if even that ( with the exception of my Corona which I think I bought locally for $50 ). I bought a trailer when salvageable used ones could be found with some effort for under a thousand bucks. I got most of my land before the real estate bubble, but junk land is almost back to those levels. My silver was around seven bucks an ounce.

*

I didn’t buy at the bottom. I felt I had waited too long as it was, but I never bought unless I found a deal and I did a lot of searching. To start preparing now you are under far more severe handicaps. The job market sucks unholy donkey members. If you pull up now, there are legal issues with your mortgage and near uncertainty that you won’t find a job at your new location. Ammunition, if you find it, is twice what it used to be. If you have to commute from junk land into work, gas has doubled. And you better have a reliable car because no one is getting credit to buy new ones. Basic food staples, beans and rice and wheat, are doubled. Anything with steel in it has doubled. Forget about buying gold, you are lucky if you can afford silver ( it goes without saying this is a post-food supply luxury ). I grant you, the deck is severely stacked against you.

*

But guess what? You don’t have a flippin choice. The Depression won’t stop because you aren’t prepared. The oil won’t stop depleting because it is inconvenient for you to budget in preps. The problem now isn’t that it isn’t possible to prepare. Even after prices double again, and unemployment goes over 30%, you can still prepare. The problem is that it isn’t as easy as a shopping trip like it used to be. It actually takes painful sacrifices now. And the longer you wait the more painful it is going to be. It will continue to get harder, guaranteed. Things are getting worse monthly. Pretty soon, you won’t be able to sell your plastic, digital or internal combustion toys to buy preps. Act now, buy now. The consumer economy ends with the Oil Age. And your ability to buy “cheap” petroleum subsidized goods will end with it. Cheap being relative. If a petroleum input field can produce 130 bushels of corn, and one without any oil or mechanized inputs can only produce thirty, one day you will know that fifty pounds of corn for an hours wage was a screaming good buy. But no, instead you compute how much your family needs to survive for a year. Four people, one pound each a day, four times 365 is Holy Crap! Almost three hundred dollars plus whatever containers cost. I can’t afford that. I’ll just buy a few cases of chili and a fifty pound bag of rice. Well, schmucko, congrats. You’ve done more than most. You are actually trying to prepare. But a cell phone and cable contract now is costing you more than feeding everyone with petroleum grown grain. You spend at least a grand a year on entertainment, just for those two items-and they are entertainment only, not necessities, but you can’t get four hundred bucks together?

*

It isn’t that prices have doubled. We still buy candy bars at fifty cents even though they were a nickel when we were kids. We adjust as prices increase. It is always a downwards adjustment but we manage. No, the problem is that if you make serious sacrifices to prep, not half assed preps but squeezing every dime and giving up 90% of luxuries, then you have to admit to yourself and your family that the end is indeed right around the corner. That rather than become a Third World country, America is going to become a smoldering ruin of lice picking, animal skin wearing, spear throwing cannibalistic savages. And not very many of them at that. Overshoot means 90+% die of famine and cold. A few hundred on grain, a few hundred on ammo, a few hundred on incidentals. It ain’t much at all. But, hey, you aren’t avoiding reality. Reality says coal/nuclear/abiotic oil/green shoots will save us. OK. I guess under a thousand bucks is too much to insure your family. Forget I even mentioned it.

*

It is never too late until the crash. It might get harder, but it is never impossible. Please protect yourself and your family while it is still relatively affordable, even on our reduced wages and even at our increased costs. A minimum wage peon can still prepare if he doesn’t wait too long and he can sacrifice for a short time.

END

Buy my Bison crap at http://www.bisonpress.com/ .  Buy through my Amazon links in the articles.