guest article

GUEST ARTICLE
Save up for your junk land
Ok, you want to cut expenses and buy your junk land, but you work in the city and have little saved up. Or, you need to figure out a way to survive in the urban jungle without having to give up all your privacy! The following idea is not new. I have thought of a few things to add though that might make it more feasible for some. There are some pre-requisites though.


This idea works best if you are single, work in or near downtown and have a van, preferably a panel van with minimal windows. You will need figure out how to get the van if you don't already have one..... Get a PO Box for all your mail now! Don't wait until later. The Post Office checks your address when you get a box, but after that they never really verify if you move. (yes, you are supposed to tell them, but I often forget)


At my employer, they will pay for a monthly parking pass in a 5 story parking garage. This gives me a pass card that allows me to enter and leave as often as I wish at any time day or night. If you do not have an employer who is so nice, the going rate around here is about $140 a month. Cheaper than an RV spot at a park! They have some simple "security" people that patrol occasionally, but they don't seem to really look at anything unless someone is obviously trying to break into a car. I have seen cars sit for weeks in the same spot.


I know some people will say, but you can park for free in local neighborhoods if you are low key! Yeah, and you have to move at least once or twice a day (uses gas) and all it takes is one nosey neighbor to call the cops!.


You need to outfit your van with blackout shades for all your windows. You don't want any light escaping while you are inside. You will need to outfit with a self contained sink for cleaning, perhaps a sawdust toilet (for emergency use only), and some sort of cooking arrangement. All your lighting should be LED, preferably using rechargeable batteries. Use a laptop that you charge while at work (along with your batteries for your lights). The laptop gives you the ability to watch movies if it has dvd, and you get the movies at the library for free. If you have a cell phone, see about hooking your laptop up the internet through it if you really have to have the connectivity.


Most of you already see where this is going- sleep in your van; move it occasionally to charge the battery, go do laundry and avoid being obvious; use the toilet facilities at your work as much as you can maybe a nearby fast food joint at other times; find a local gym that has cheap membership and showers for staying clean; save all the money you can.


Granted, staying warm in the winter, cooking, refilling the water jugs, emptying the toilet and all that will give you some reason to pause, but we are all smart people and can not only figure out how to take care of these things, but hopefully you can even think of ways to improve on this idea!



Insulating the inside of the van can cut down on needed heat. Use the local parks to rest during the summer or even the city library if it is too warm. Get out enough so you don't get cabin fever. Make sure you have a roof vent if you do any cooking or heating with flames-all the usual caveats apply to this idea.


Once you have some money saved, buy your junk land! Save a little more and really outfit your van for comfort and move to your junk land when times start getting bad. You get the idea! I don't have to spell it all out step by step.


TMM

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food prices

FOOD PRICES


Ah, the continuing chorus of minions clamoring for a change in topics. They remind me of the Supreme Court on pornography. They can’t exactly define it but they will know it when they see it. Gee, how helpful is that? People, I’m not mechanically inclined. My interests are pretty much confined to social studies. If you would all write my articles for me, then we could cover more ground. As it is, I am what I am. I’m glad we got that covered-again. We wouldn’t want the three new readers for the year to be behind the curve, information wise. On a personal note, this is to Sam. Don’t send yet more money. I’m not selling the land because I am broke and need money. I’m selling them as a trade. Just like last year, I sold my Arkansas land and insulated the trailer. This year the temperatures were far colder, but even with just a small added amount of insulation I was a lot more comfortable ( do a search for “ghetto insulation” to find that article ). Selling the other two lots, I want to insulate the hippy bread van. I’m thinking about using thick foam, like in auto upholstery. I still have to research that, prices and R value. If not, I’ll glue rigid board to the metal interior, then fiberglass on interior stick wall. Either way should have great insulation. Perhaps even enough that with nothing but solar I can survive post-propane. I’ll still eventually build underground ( anything under a hundred square feet needs no permit ), but I’m still unsure which lot will be my permanent spot. The van can be moved. I’d love to hear from anyone that cheaply made a super-insulated dwelling ( straw bale is not that cheap after all is said and done ).

*

“Wired” magazine just did an article on the UG-99 wheat rust. Of course, being the optimistic, high tech wonderkids that they are, this is little cause for concern since some propeller head will stumble on a new resistant strain. Seriously, I wonder if a big agri-corp was responsible for the reemergence of wheat rust. They would have the most to gain. But, this article isn’t about blight. That can cause food prices to skyrocket. So can hyperinflation and drought and global weather changes and overpopulation and Peak Oil. Odds are, food prices will go up. Forget about sudden collapse right now. That is what your emergency stockpile is for. For now, let’s just assume that we will stay in a slow collapse. In a slow collapse, the kind we’ve been in for forty years with time off for good behavior through half of the nineties when Billy raped the military and SS to balance the budget and Russia was giving away its oil for a one off surplus event. Food prices have been going up for five years, and that is before any of the above bad things happened. Unless you are a mouth breathing moron with wet dreams of green shoots coming out of your ass, you should be counting on food prices to continue to rise.

*

Traditionally, in European urban society with a middle class and only mild wars ( before the Industrial Revolution )and before famines, food was about half of your income. It might take awhile to get there, although right now I’m seeing grocery bills almost at thirty percent of my take home. And that is with eating 800 calories a day in whole wheat bread. Of course, some of that is storage food. Not that I’m a good representative sample anyway. Food should once again, in the not too distant future, take up the biggest portion of your income. Now, take a look at your budget. What can you cut? Nothing. The car and gas ( also rising in percentage ) are needed to take you to work. There are no jobs for the spouse, and you are only employed with direct divine intervention. You’ve already cut cable and cell phones. The kids are selling blood and organs. The biggest help for you right now would be if you didn’t have rent or a mortgage. Alas, you never bought any junk land. You never declared bankruptcy ( or whatever is needed to break away from your mortgage ). You kept waiting for a recovery. I kept trying to tell you there wouldn’t be one, you kept ignoring me.

*

Buying junk land isn’t so much about simplifying your life or living frugal or being self sufficient as it is about surviving the collapse by optimizing your options economically. Just don’t live so far away from town you trade one problem for another. Without a car or house payment, you can far more easily weather the economic collapse. First comes the economic collapse long before its okay to shoot zombie bikers or California refugees. Or garden bandits for that matter. Even if you live in the city ( assuming you don’t face mobs or fires that will be uncontrollable ), if your house is paid off I would seriously consider staying there. A legal squat is going to be imperative on our way to collapse. Especially if all your meager wages must go to the absolute bare minimums such as food. Your woods, stream and huge garden will not feed you after the bank kicks you out when your mortgage goes unpaid.

END

of course there is a free lunch

OF COURSE THERE IS A FREE LUNCH


Some of us grew up with Robert Heinlein science fiction, others started reading him after we discovered Libertarianism. No, he ain’t no Ayn Rand, but how many people really ever wade through her 1200 page bible of free market worship? I have twice, but it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Speaking of which, I think I’m about due to read it again. It has been over ten years since the last time. Of course, I also tend to stock book series having the vague notion that I’ll be unemployed soon and be able to better enjoy those books without the pesky interruption of a bedtime, or a twelve hour work day. When I first moved to the Compound I was unemployed for three weeks, a near record amount of time in my working career ( once, I was unemployed over a month and ending up eating potatoes for all my meals ), and while there was a HUGE amount of stress involved I did get to leisurely read Neal Stephenson’s Cyptonomicon. I can’t imagine wanting to do nothing but read once unemployed, it loses its appeal during potato meal #32. But I would like the option anyway. Anyway, I do have all three novels by Rand and I guess I’m waiting for the implosion of the economy before I read all about the wonders of capitalism unencumbered by government.

*

Heinlein’s famous quote was “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. I almost got TANSTAAFL tattooed on me once, but reason prevailed and I got the A with a circle for Anarchy instead. The size of a dime and that bitch hurt. I can’t imagine the appeal of big tattoos. Well, what I am about to say would cause Rand’s head to explode. Bob wouldn’t get too bent out of shape as he had a sense of humor, but Ayn was a bit uptight. You take yourself too serious and you go through life with a broomstick ( or a cross ) up your ass. Hell, even in a collapse you find something to laugh about. Think of the zombie film Dawn Of The Dead, where they were sniping the zombies. That one looks like Burt Reynolds. Boom! That’s good times. You can improvise of course, if there aren’t any zombies around. Look! California plates! Boom. IED. Good for a chuckle or two. Did you see “Inglourious Basterds”? Damn good flick. Look how much fun they were having killing Nazi’s. They could have been all mopey and taking themselves serious. Oh, look, I hate Krauts. Kill, die. No, they added some fun to their hate, spreading terror and scalping and beating in live heads with baseball bats. It’s all about balance. Sure, kill everyone, but have fun doing it. Okay, let’s get to the article, shall we? Enough fantasy. Economics is all about a free lunch. I don’t care if it is capitalism or communism, mercantilism ( which is basically what we have now- look at Steve Forbes. I used to think he was a swell guy but it looks like he is just a whore for investment bankers and Enron style corporations ) or whatever. If the economy progressed past a hunter/gatherer existence into agriculture, it is based on a free lunch.

*

Do you think it was an accident that hunter/gatherers lasted for hundreds of thousands of years and that every agricultural society after that has collapsed in the space of mere hundreds of years? I don’t think we started farming because we liked asparagus instead of elk steak. It wasn’t like we woke up one day and decided to work 12 hours a day behind a plow instead of going hunting once a week. It wasn’t even that we discovered the domestic foods and animals. I think that was already known and used in a gradual manner. More than likely as a good food security in case of hunting failure. No, I think the only reason the Agricultural Revolution happened was that all territory got filled up and there was no where to go to hunt or gather. People got hemmed in after a certain population growth. The growth was very small. We lived below the replacement level of our food for a very long time. But once we ran out of expansion room, we had no choice but to start farming. Unfortunately, agricultural has with it its own built in destruct mechanism. To defend your crops, and at the end to steal someone else’s to avoid starvation, you need population growth to provide breeders and soldiers. Obviously, this is an iron clad rule, because no agricultural society has been able to stay below the lands carrying capacity and been able to survive attack. There is a reason we keep doing the same thing over and over again. Because we have no choice if we want to try to survive. The odds are 50/50 against, but you take any you can get.

*

So, you don’t husband resources, you exploit them. It is always a race against time and enemies. This is why you see time and again the same destructive behavior ( pointing out the few exceptions, keep in mind they had the luxury to conserve. If their very existence was at stake they wouldn’t have done it ). The rabble on the street might be stupid most of the time, but in the hothouse competition of rulers, the rapid Darwinism assures that usually the smarter boys rise to the top. They know what they are doing. The idiots were always there, we are talking about the general rule. Obviously, cutting down the last tree is always suicidal on your island. You don’t do it without a very good reason. So, while a society lasts, there is a draw down on resources. Always more than the replacement level, unless they are blessed with isolation and lack of enemies. Free lunch is baked into the system. It is the day to day operational norm.

END
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evil outsiders

EVIL OUTSIDERS


I wanted to give you a quick heads up on a book I just read, “The Lost City Of Z” by David Grann. You would think this would have been pretty boring, following the quest of the lost Amazon explorer Fawcett who went looking for a fabled lost city in the jungle basin and disappeared in 1925. The disappearance mystery was never solved, but the author did find an archeologist that found the city. It was very well written and kept your interest. One thing I enjoyed was the authors loving, graphic descriptions of diseases and pests found in the Amazon. A micro bee that invades your eyeball. Mosquitoes that lay eggs under the skin which hatch into worms that invade your flesh. A sand flea whose bite causes the flesh around your mouth to start to dissolve. Oh, how yummy. Suddenly, the cold and dry condition in the high desert start to look a lot better. Plus, it is easy to see why folks living in that crap hole would want to turn the jungle into a cattle feeding lot.

*

I can’t remember how detailed I’ve ever gotten on the discussion about people being evil, but only in certain instances. I hope this is pretty new to most of you, at least as far as my presentation. I’ve always maintained that people are evil. Oh, granted, some such as wife number two are much more evil. She could be equated with the Richter scale of earthquakes. Most people are a one, only perpetrating evil if they can get by with it ( it’s only illegal if you’re caught ). She is a ten, or possibly even higher. Sent up by Lucifer himself to torment me ( he knows there will be no afterlife torment as I am pure and perfect and a personal buddy of Baby Jesus ), she is mortal and has no special powers but is evil incarnate. She is the type of earthquake that shears land off of continents, like we are hoping will happen to California before all their butt crack showing, jean drooping, baseball cap backwards wearing drug smoking AIDS carrying after they got cornholed in the shower at County welfare dependent masses migrate over across the border and use up all of our ammunition ( yes, I’ll admit it, a good case can be made for semi-automatics in this instance ). But, being pretty lazy by nature, I’ve never gotten into too much detail about their evil nature. I’ve maintained that in a collapse, you will be surrounded by evil bastards trying to kill you. In this reality, few evil people try to kill you. They will bleed you dry, unconcerned with your long term health, but at least you stay alive a bit longer. During the collapse, they will be trying to cram you in the stewpot. So, I’ve just stuck with my story. They’re all evil. However, let’s explore it a bit further.

*

Some people think everyone is special, nice and loving and full of happy thoughts, with a few notable exceptions such as serial killers and my wife #2. They want to dispense charity after a collapse. They think that there will be no stewpots. They look at the Donner Party and excuse the behavior, pointing out how they all ate leather boots and belts first before they were forced to eat the dead ( myself, I would invite the fattest single chick that was making cow eyes at me and invite her into the woods for some loving, then eat her and not in a good way-hey, once you get too weak from hunger the others are going to try to kill you so it really is just self defense ). Society has brainwashed us from birth that we are supposed to love our fellow man. We buy into that because we are social animals after all. Then, a few malcontents talk about how evil everyone is. Yeh, I’m talking about you. So, how about this. Let’s split the difference and say that for the most part most people are decent to their fellow man. In a collapse, it is every man for himself. With an important qualifier. Evil is strictly segregated along tribal lines.

*

There will always be criminals and malcontents and mentally damaged weirdos. But for the most part, even without the long arm of the law, most folks treat each other tolerably. If they belong to their own tribe. With the above exception, we reserve our evil behavior for strangers ( stranger danger!! ). Perhaps in a 99% die-off with mass starvation, famine, pestilence and warfare, those “rules” will be temporarily ignored. But the rest of the time, as a general rule ( being paranoid comes in handy when there are exceptions to that rule ) we can trust our tribe and fear strangers. We think we are all pretty smart ( although the fact that American Idol exists argues otherwise ), yet in the end we are a pack of dogs sniffing each others butts, fighting amongst ourselves to be leader, and in the end closing ranks against other dog packs. So in a sense, both arguments are right. We are good and we are evil. It just depends on who the other person is.

*

Please don’t blow raspberries my way, declaring that I am Captain Obvious and unworthy of your unconditional loyalty. In the debate between the pessimists and optimists over the basic nature of mans behavior, something this simple might be overlooked. It isn’t an obvious choice between good or bad but about tribal behavior. If it is politically incorrect to view us all as anything other than one big happy species, then you just might ignore the obvious. And, speaking of which, I propose that during the die-off, we add PC adherents to our list of acceptable targets, along with the usual politicians, bankers, lawyers and CEO’s. Being a CEO of an investment bank gets you a double dose of persecution, so let’s add torture before hanging. Or, being a PC lawyer. Hey, targeting is fun! PCness is responsible for a lot of ill in our society and there can’t be a lack of repercussions for that.

END

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what I did last summer with a bleach bottle

WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER WITH A BLEACH BOTTLE


Okay, first off, get your filthy mind out of the gutter, you pervert. I hate to break it to you, but what all the girls are whispering about is true- your sub-par sized winky would never fill up the size of the hole and, no, don’t give me the “magic in the wand” argument because you ain’t no Casanova. Today, ever mindful of the needs and wants and desires of my loyal minions, I have decided to give you a short break from extreme doom and gloom and just touch on some mundane, trivial, less than earth shattering subjects. Even God himself rested on the seventh day. There are some who contend that he should have taken that seventh day to tweak a few things like the avocado ( remember “Oh, God” with George Burns? ), but, hey, he was doing us a solid by example. If it was up to kings and CEO’s we would still be working twelve hour days seven days a week. If nothing else, and I’m not saying religion isn’t important to most people, so relax and get that blessed sacred underwear out of your crack, at least religion serves as something of a brake on the exploiters trying to kill us off as quickly as possible for their own profit.

*

The feature over at Creekmore’s site ( I think he was the one that originated the concept-if not at least he made it more popular ) “what I did to prep last week” has always kind of reminded me of the idiocy of a teacher having the class write a short paper on what they did last summer. To me this always seemed a bit elitist, since if your parents had money you went to Yosemite or France and if they didn’t you ran around piles of fossilized dog turds in the back yard playing Tag. So when the assignment came due everyone automatically knew who was jet setting material and who was going to end up in the trailer park drinking Schlitz and beating the wife. Was this intentional? Was the school system helping out the females at an early age to pick out suitable mates and helping the males lessen their mental anxiety of a future career by pointing out that they were losers so they might as well just make up their mind now that they were going to retire ( or be carried out in a pine box ) from the coal mine? We all know school was an idea originated by Fascists to indoctrinate small minds into docile cannon fodder and compliant breeders, so was it simply another example of this brainwashing? Think about it, and once you do you will appreciate why I don’t much care for the practice of writing vacation memoirs. I’m not saying I dislike Creekmore’s concept, just that it reminds me uncomfortably about school Nazi’s.

*

I don’t know if I really want to start a weekly update, myself. For one, our sites and writing styles are different. Why start copying each other? So you most likely won’t see that. For instance, how many weeks do you really want to hear about my “canning” pinto beans? That is about what I do week after week. Perhaps once a month I throw in some variety, such as last weekend when I finally, after three years, got around to taking my solar battery chargers ( the AA,AAA,D size type ) and putting them in a Faraday cage. Yes, a Chinese EMP attack is unlikely, as they are defeating us politically, militarily and economically and all they have to do is stop buying our federal debt. Next, they start selling what they have. Even if their remaining holdings drop to zero in value, two trillion is a small price to pay for a war. We’ve spent more than that in Afghanistan and all we got for it was a T-shirt saying “Where In The Hell Is Bin Laden”, with a cute cartoon of him superimposed over an outline of the country with little crosses sticking out like it was a graveyard and labeled “British Empire”, “Russian Empire”, etc. Not that the T-shirt isn’t cool, but a bit pricey as a vacation souvenir. So, the odds are that the Chinese would never directly attack us. We are defeating ourselves. However, if a solar flare could fry such simple electronics as telegraph equipment a hundred and twenty odd years ago, think of the problem we would have today. Perhaps it is a small threat, but it is an even smaller deal to store electronics in a protected state. I simply left the units in their original cardboard box and set them in a Christmas cookie tin, taped shut. A Faraday cage is a continuous metal shell surrounding what is inside, with the object itself not touching the metal. I imagine tin foil over the box is just as good. Of course, with the metal box you also protect the electronic device from regular damage such as crushing or water as well as EMP.

*

Then I did something as simple as improving my commuting BOB. Which isn’t anything more than thinking what I need to make it home on foot. I just tossed an extra pocket knife and sharpener in my backpack. I always carry two pocketknives whenever I leave. The knife clipped to my pocket is my work cardboard tape cutting knife. It was a dollar at Wal-Mart. Since it always has glue and debris on it I wanted a throw away knife. The knife clipped on my belt is more expensive and stays very sharp. That is my sticking knife, if the need ever arose. I always carry a sharpener on my key ring, a flat metal piece with the sharpening V cut into the piece. I got that years ago, back when the Preparedness Expo’s were still around. But, I’m thinking to myself, what if somehow I lost my britches? It ain’t going to happen I’m sure, but nonetheless, why rely on everything being on or in my pants? I toss in an extra knife and sharpener, a total investment of a $1.88, and there is one less thing to worry about. So, do you see how unexciting my “what I did to prep last week” updates would be? That was an extra busy week. You might think about tracking your own progress, however. That should be a lot more exciting, seeing as how it is your life you are trying to save.

*

I’ve mentioned the bleach bottle shower before. After most spray bottles, both pump up pressure and hand held squeeze, took a really bad turn in quality, I gave up on using them at the compound and went strictly to bleach/detergent bottles. The kitchen unit is a half gallon bleach bottle and my shower is a half gallon detergent bottle. I like the detergent bottles since the plastic is much more pliable and won’t bite into your hand while holding. My bottles are hand held with four holes screwed into the lids ( using a nail split’s the plastic-use a screw ). But both plastics stand up to the cold and won’t split like some plastics. They are for long term use and free at the house or Laundromat. However, the original design for them is hands free ( see "Roughing It Easy" ). I thought I would cover that here today briefly. The hand washing bottle is made by putting an extremely small hole near the bottom side. When you want to wash your hands, you twist up on the lid. A small but steady stream of water comes out. As there is no waste, you can use the gallon for a lot of hand washings. When the hole gets to where it is leaking, even with the lid twisted all the way closed, put a toothpick in it as a plug. Obviously, this hole was made by something small such as a sewing needle. Also, if the lid isn’t snug and lets in too much air when closed, put a piece of plastic wrap between the bottle and lid. Now, for a hands free shower. Put several holes in the bottom of the bottle and plug them up with wooden golf tees ( look in the Wal-Mart sporting goods area for a bag of them if you can’t find any free ones ). The more holes you unplug, the more water you use at one time. The shower jug is hanging from a branch or whatever and is handy to use. I like the hand held one with lid holes myself because you can really conserve the water. But those of you that don’t have such concerns can use the hands free. And don’t shake your head sadly at me. Not everyone goes camping and has experience with makeshift showers. This is actually new to some folks. A perfect way to conserve water when the power goes out. As well as fuel to heat the water ( assuming it is winter or overcast and there is no solar heating ).

*

Now, don’t get too complacent. I’m sure I’ll be back in full panic mode very shortly and write about how we are all going to die quickly. I’m sure sometime this week. Don’t blame me. Prepping a few dozen buckets of grain, buying a few hundred rounds of ammo and a surplus bolt gun, getting a Berky filter for fifty bucks to make your own 13k gallon water filter, hell, even buying a $500 piece of junk land and parking an insulated junk van on it is so frigging simple and so frigging cheap that when you don’t do it, thus providing very cheap insurance for your family, I get all agitated and worked up and try to point out to you how dangerous things are out there. So it is your own damn fault.

END



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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.

*

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? ).

*

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.

*

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.

END

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i don't need no stinkin man

I DON’T NEED NO STINKIN MAN


At first blush it might appear that I am ragging yet again on feminism. Well, that is a bonus of course but as you know every once in awhile, about every other week, I get myself all uppity and agitated about the end of the Oil Age and just talk about it to no end. Valiantly, you wade through my nonsense, my screening wale, your eyes watering from pain and your brain hurting worse than the time your buddy bet you a dollar you couldn’t down a gallon of moonshine in ten minutes and the next morning you woke up in Cambodia in a house of transvestite prostitutes. In the strange and oddly never ending quest to wrestle a nugget of wisdom from me ( hey, it’s free, right? ) you read through everything, hoping against hope that I might have slipped up and included something that was worth your time at least once this week. Of course, this seems awful silly to me, especially since I went to seven days a week publishing. That decreased your odds of finding something worthy by 29%.

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When I was working at the casino one of my co-workers was a pretty neat gal. She was middle aged and had been around the block a few too many times. Not around the block as in easy, but as in screwed over a few times. As only frequently divorced and financially unstable people can, she was rabid in her views. I don’t need no stinkin man. That was her battle cry. She was rightfully proud, having bought and paid for her own home ( this was Carson City, a Yuppie Scum enclave and even the “cheapest” dwellings were insanely overpriced years before the housing bubble- may all the California pukes who bought taxpayer subsidized housing and then sold it and moved out of state and jacked up the local real estate prices and yet still expected that the lower wage scum would genuflect before them, eyes downcast, offering to debase themselves for the supreme pleasure of waiting on said scum and bringing them their X,Y, or Z retail item to indulge themselves in since they obviously didn’t have enough cottage cheese leg, over the belt bulging gut or cancerous rectum to proudly advertise their overindulgent lifestyle, may they all rot in the lower depths of Hell after they are brutally violated and put into the stewpot by the natives ).

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This has always come to my mind when a Janet Reno/Billary clone starts spouting about women’s lib and how they must Fight The Phallicrocy ( from the extremely hilarious movie “PCU” ). We don’t need your male oppressions, bitches! Okay, there might have been a few tiny instances were males used their upper body strength to slap down some uppity scank. Perhaps the ladies are still a tad angry that they couldn’t own property a hundred years ago. Oh, boo hoo. A few people of African-American ancestry ( who will hence forth be referred to as Black, since I’m White and am not allowed to have a hyphenated label such as Anglo-American, European-American or even Honky Mo Fo-American ) are still pissed about slavery, but I certainly didn’t have anything to do with it. And I’m pretty sure that rather than being slave owners, my great, great grandparents were exploited immigrants living in slums. So get over your damn serves. Jesus. Now, I’m not just picking on women. My view is that you have a genetic disposition from birth on manipulation, which is enforced through training from the age of vocalization, and in almost every case through recorded history and before, you have really been the ones in charge. Your complaints are a smokescreen. Males are easily controlled through two body organs and it ain’t like it is rocket surgery. But, to my point. Almost everyone that proclaims independence is deluding her/himself. We are all dependent on our petroleum slaves.

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Before that, we were dependant on the greed of strangers or family. I’m not discounting love and nurturing and the benefits of mutual dependency in a family unit or a tribe. Humans can’t live alone, isolated. We are a social animal. But you can’t discount the dark side of that. We are dependent on others. Since it is mutually beneficial we tend to minimize it. But we should be looking at it a lot closer, especially since with the end of oil we will revert back to old school decentralized dependency for survival. Sister, you ain’t going to be able to get along without no stinkin man then. Young adults will usually have no choice but to apprentice themselves ( slave labor at slave wages in return for learning a guild controlled trade ). Guys, whoever controls your collection of lice infested mud hovels, you will be his bitch. You will fight on his command, produce X amount of crops on his command. Right now, today, we are under the illusion that by and large we are independent. But, we are 100% dependent on oil inputs and those that control them. Your freedom is an illusion. The only difference from 300 years ago is that now the control has a velvet glove over the iron fist. Before, velvet was too expensive. Co-dependency has always been a reality. Stop thinking you are a nation of one. You are a nation of seven billion, and they all need the juice to keep pumping or they die.

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Stop fighting your dependency on others. It is a fact of life. You sneer at the Hippies who decried the establishment and then got Food Stamps. But you aren’t any better if you are honest with yourself. Reality is a bitch, and she will slap you if you act up. Honky mo-fo.

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