reprieve not pardon

REPRIEVE NOT PARDON


Everyone seems to be gripped in the glittery unicorn embrace of prepping essentially free with couponing. Oh, my aching, leaking ass. One comment accidentally slipped through which sums it up quite nicely. Coupons discount already high priced items. You are playing their game, not yours. Brand name tuna fish is, say, 99 cents a can. You get a coupon for twenty cents off. Your nipples threaten to compromise the structural integrity of your shirt as you rapidly fire off an e-mail telling all your prep buddies how you bought Mercury Flavored Chicken Of The Seven Seas brand tuna for a mere 79 cents a can. Joe Bob just waited for the case sale and paid fifty cents a can for generic. Sure, it only happens once a year and might be dangerously close to expiring, but who cares? Canned meat can last decades. Pretty much any can holding carbs or protein, not containing acidic items will last well past the apocalypse. Don’t store canned veggies, as their vitamin content degrades. Don’t store ( long term anyway ) tomato items such as paste of Chef-Boy-R-Dee. Or pineapple. Almost anything else will go nicely well past the expiration date. Do not buy dented ( harder than it used to be- I swear the metal has gotten thinner ).

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A few months ago I noticed the Bison Compound Of Doom Super Deluxe Foxhole, Root Cellar And Underground Lair ( the covered pit ) still had moisture on the underside of the trap door. I had pre-placed several PVC pipes horizontal to the ground into the pit. One was for electrical wire and propane hose, if needed. Two were for a solar heater, if installed. And one was for ventilation. One on each side to hopefully achieve air flow. I had placed screen on one pipe but not the opposite one. I removed the cap and put screen on the other and was hoping the water content droped. It did go from clinging drops to just a fine rust on metal parts. But since then I haven’t been back to the pit, it pretty much just slipped my mind. I need to redo a few ceiling foam inserts that fell down, and I do have the used couch cushions waiting in the van. But no idea how the temp is holding up in their through the colder days. I’ll get down there again soon and report back to you.

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If you go on over to

http://americanenergycrisis.blogspot.com/2011/01/slack-in-system-commodity-prices-and.html#links

you can read a very good article on the sum-to-date five year saga of oil import decline. I agree with our intrepid energy reporter that the slack in the system has been a heck of a cushion so far. But certainly you would be a fool for expecting that to be repeated. I don’t agree with his assessment on our future natural gas supply. I could be whistling out my ass here, but I think the frac gas supply is short lived. And, yes, no collapse is single caused outside the three favorites-Yellowstone, nukes, solar flare. Well, okay, and UFO’s delivering death ray destruction instead of the promised room temperature fusion. And come to think of it, doesn’t Obammy’s head kind of look like a little green alien in disguise. “V” is happing as we speak!!! Anyway, collapse is of course a perfect storm, many and varied weak points converging to put us all in the stew pot. And he is also right on about the imports falling to a possible zero in as little as ten years.

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As was said, we got a reprieve, not a pardon. For you silly little twats out there playing at prepping for no other reason than you have no other good hobbies and you like the sweet smell of roasting plastic as your semi-auto overheats, just because we survived the twenty percent decline in oil imports without the earth cracking open and sucking us all down into hell does not mean we can survive the next 20+%. That’s quite correct boys and girls. In five years our oil imports have declined 20%. And since imports supplied 75% of our oil supply, that is a very big deal. In 2005, we saw global oil production plateau. Since we offered nothing but paper derivatives and China offered actual physical widgets, the oil went to China. In two years, the oil import decline was small enough we failed to notice it. Then, the ass fell out of the financial markets. A year after that, Joe and Jane Public noticed something was seriously amiss. Two years after that and we are still trying to fool ourselves that the printing press ( this time around we just use computers, but everyone can visualize the problem of inflation with a physical printing press running around the clock ) will revive our economy. No, silly rabbit, only a growing supply of energy can pay for our perpetual growth needed to pay the interest in our economic system. America has been growing for almost four hundred years by mining the resources of a continent ( and after WWII, the rest of the world ). That has ended. The resources have run out. Oil alone feeds us, we no longer have sea to shining sea amber waves of grain from the natural fertility of the soil. Nor do we have enough rainfall and must run oil powered irrigation.

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We might have enough resources to survive for awhile longer yet, but we have already passed the point of being able to grow with our available supply. No growth, no interest. No interest, no banks. No banks, no commerce or trade. No trade, no importing from other areas, even our own. You might think we can last a bit longer. I agree. But for how long? One good crop failure, one dirty nuke, one round too many of quantitative easing and a wheel falls off. Even if it doesn’t, even if we slowly suck ass to the end, the point where the collapse effects you could be any time now. Panic now, not later. Then sit back and enjoy the show.

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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