rediscovering disco

REDISCOVERING DISCO

It isn’t that I hate Glen Beck ( Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure ). I think his heart is in the right place. Or at least as right as it can be after most of his brain cells were drowned in alcohol for so many years and then he joined the Born Aginers. Not that finding religion is bad, it’s just that I don’t want to join your cult so don’t tell me about the conversion process. Baby Jesus already loves the crap out of me, being such a swell guy and all ( I know this for a fact since he has gone through all the trouble of preparing me through adversity ). I don’t need to formalize it by joining a church. I don’t mind listening to Beck, and I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing when others do as long as they keep in mind it is entertainment only. Don’t take it too serious. Today’s Beck Radio Blather was going over the list of the projected inflationary prices that have been making the rounds ( where coffee was $75 a can, etc. ). Then he mentioned something about a projection that very soon a quarter of Americans won’t be able to afford food. So Beck was urging his listeners to stockpile food ( Family Food Stockpile for Survival ) in anticipation of inflation. So the guy can’t be all that bad if he is urging the masses to store food. The standard advice was given about talking to the spouse and pinching pennies to put food away. No panic, no talk on falling global production, no need to worry his listeners. But hence no urgency and no good advice on affordably stockpiling.

*

Stockpiling is NOT about putting conventional groceries away in the pantry. You can’t afford that. If a canned food item costs at least a dollar on average and you need four or five a day to get a minimal amount of calories then you are doing no better than if you had bought MRE’s ( 9217 SurePak 12 MRE's- Meals ready to eat. ). If you don’t want to be bothered with whole grains and grain grinders, if you just want a month or three of cushion, or if you want to start cheap and work your way up, just buy a few big bags of white flour. They are under $9 a twenty-five pound bag, even now after the price of wheat has shot up. That’s $3 a week in emergency eating ( no, it isn’t nutritionally complete- but it will give you the minimum needed calories as the core of your SHORT term food storage ). If you tell people they need to come up with $100 for a months worth of canned goods they will put off buying it. $9 is simple enough for anyone to find and low enough not to miss. And better than nothing when that is what you have. If every person had a bag of flour in the pantry there would be no panicking at the Wal-Mart cart corral.

*

History is a great tool, but more often than not it is used as the wrong tool. Most notably, a crutch. Folks use history to justify their own agenda, including myself. I use history as an illustration of why we should panic. So I do use it to advance my own agenda, to illustrate my own beliefs. So, really, misusing history is dangerous if you are wrong and helpful if you are right. I’m just as bad as those Pollyanna’s out there using history to try to prevent panic. But let me illustrate what I’m talking about so you can say, “he’s better than everyone else”. “You panicked for Y2K ( Y2K -- It's Already Too Late )and nothing happened”. “We had an oil crisis in the seventies and everything turned out okay”. “Rome took 300 years to collapse so we still have 250 to go-no need to worry”. “They’ve been telling us we would run out of oil for over 100 years and we still are pumping it”. Basically, think of all those as the danger of linear thinking.

*

Nothing moves in a straight line, especially not history. For a short period of time things seem to move in a straight unbroken line but as soon as you zoom away and look at a longer period you see that there are uneven waves rather than a line drawn with a ruler. This should seem obvious, but since most of us are living in the forest we can only see individual trees. You tend to accept possibly different realities intellectually but act on the emotion that nothing changes. Even a long slow collapse would reinforce this as folks became used to incremental worsening. But nature works in abrupt collapses ( sudden herd starvation at the tipping point where the numbers fall far below the original number that could have been sustained ). Man might be able to postpone, mitigate or soften this reality but usually just punishes a future generation disproportionately in return of present benefit- in other words, the collapse is postponed but when it comes it is far worse than it would have been originally.

*

Y2K never happened. This is a favorite of the wife ( and, I imagine, of your spouses ). Okay, a bad call. But you also bought a lot of supplies far cheaper than you can today so it really wasn’t like you wasted anything ( my Enfields were $75 to $100 retail and surplus ammo was practically given away on stripper clips in bandoleers ). And who cares if you can’t forecast worth a crap. You are prepping for ANY event, not a specific one. But, to our subject which is that history ( The Greatest Stories Never Told: 100 Tales from History to Astonish, Bewilder, and Stupefy ) shouldn’t be a crutch. Just because you were wrong once doesn’t mean that will continue. Or, as a wag stated before the turn of the century, the question isn’t if you are right but, what if you do nothing and are wrong ( or words to that effect ). No one is always right or always wrong. And past performance is no indicator of future returns.

*

The 70’s turned out okay and they keep forecasting oil shortages. Here there is confusion on the TYPE of oil. The century of crying wolf ( Crying Wolf ) was taken as proof that we won’t run out of oil. No, what was worried about was running out of cheap and abundant oil, not just oil in general. As the last huge shallow area ran out the industry was forced to go deeper with less returns. More expensive, less accessible oil. Saudi Arabia was the last huge cheap sweet crude find and there haven’t been anymore like it. And that was over forty years ago ( about the max for an area bell curve production ). And, yes, Peak Oil ( A Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash ) advocates just added to the confusion with our cries of disappearing oil even when we meant that it was cheap and abundant oil that was running out. As far as the 70’s, it was only our end as the worlds premier oil producer that caused the economic meltdown. We switched all aspects of our existence around to become the number one consumer. Now the difference is the globe is running out of the affordable stuff and the increasing population, even if using less per capita, is demanding more oil.

*

And you can’t compare an agriculture empire collapse to an oil empire collapse. Every comparison between us and Rome or the Mayans misses that point ( but, we talked about that last week so I won’t rehash here much ). It isn’t as important to know what happened historically as to know WHY it happened. Or you will be drawing erroneous conclusions.

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.
*
Please support Bison by buying through the Amazon links in each article. 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.