transition

TRANSITION

A guest article earlier today, scroll down.
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Is it me or is everyone pretty much just immune to panic? Are we becoming so accustomed to shocking news that it fails to excite, panic, or move us off our fat asses? Country after country are rioting in the middle east, the last pond of oil left, and we just yawn and go looking for the next X-Box video game release. Silver shoots up as the dollar tanks and we worry about what’s for dinner. Oil goes up every day and we think our 401(k) needs a bit more attention. I look at the general collective doomer/prep sites and blogs and we are talking about starting fires and worrying about the ratio of gold to silver. It seems like everyone is just treading water. Hell, I’m having a hard time getting excited myself and I think I set the bar pretty damn low. I’ve been panicking for years, and I finally have something concrete to point to as justification. I don’t think I cried wolf. If you had panicked along with me you would already be on your doomstead, sleeping on buckets of wheat as your boxspring, the bookshelves made with buckets of wheat groaning under the weight of reference volumes, grabbing your Enfield and racing to the gunport everytime the dog got a constipated look on his face. You wouldn’t be worrying about any of this. So why does it seem everyone is played out? Just because you can’t feel the Japanese radiation changing your molecular structure doesn’t mean you can relax. Oh well, don’t mind me. I’m just navel gazing.

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I don’t remember how much of this I covered previously. Who cares, right? You all are just moping around feeling sorry for yourselves since you didn’t buy an AR-15 when the price was lower. So I could pretty much just write about anything and you would all make soothing sounds to shut me up. I think when I was making fun of the Rawles milk whey guy I mentioned that you shouldn’t be stockpiling items that aren’t close to what the other side of the collapse will offer. In other words, coconut isn’t something you’ll ever see again after trade collapses so it is friggin retarded to make it part of your food supply. Wheat on the other hand, that will be grown a mules walk down the road. You’ll never see another synthetic piece of clothing but you can bet that from a meadow near you someone will start shearing sheep for wool. And the great part about this is that most of the time you’ll be buying better and cheaper anyway. We’ve debated endlessly the merits of living in petroleum luxury until the last second. You squawk about enjoying life while you can, I counter that without practice it is hard to get used to a more primitive lifestyle. I think the same thing applies to transition items. The closer you are to future technology the easier it will be to adapt and overcome. I’m not advocating wearing buckskins and making your own black powder rifle. While great sustainability wise it is poor strategy. In the middle is probably best- or, as I keep repeating to deaf ears, everything in moderation.

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Going high tech militarily is stupid. Semi-auto, MRE’s, night vision and digital radios are all well and good but in the end they are too complicated, expensive and temperamental. Bolt action surplus rifles will not equal semi’s, but they are 80% of the performance for 20% of the price. They won’t last as long as black powder, but with ammunition conservation they can take you far down the road. You don’t want to immediately handicap yourself with an inferior weapon even if that is what you’ll eventually end up with. The average untrained survivalist will waste ammo in the stress of battle. With a semi you will arrive at the need for black powder faster than the bolt owner, all things being equal. With food and clothing you can go primitive now, and face far less disruption. With a small amount of investment you can go to exclusively solar and wood heat now and avoid petroleum disruptions ( just as I’m trying to make a motor vehicle strictly a luxury ). Most choices aren’t either/or. You can stairstep down in technology. Solar panels and 12v batteries powering your lights ( with LED’s of course- and have some extras in Faraday cages ). When the marine batteries fail, you have the shoebox size solar AA/AAA battery chargers and handheld LED lanterns or flashlights. In a best case scenario it will be years to decades before you must use oil lamps.

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It becomes a pick and choose. Try to adapt primitive now sometimes, but embrace the high tech that won’t handicap you on their reliance. If my only communication device is high tech, what do you fall back on? With the LED lighting if all goes wrong you have an easy substitute. We need to start to transition now, because now we have the luxury of voluntarily stepping down on our own timetable. If you wait too long, living large until the last second, you face severe challengers, more stress than is healthy and lack of what were once simple and cheap choices. And you save a lot of money. I just ordered a few wool blankets for $8 each. How much does that brand name sleeping bag cost? I’ve told you of my dollar store LED purchases. Scattered around the trailer, and stored in sealed cookie tins, I have dozens of back-up lights. All for pocket change. You have a three thousand dollar diesel generator with ten gallons of fuel. Who is going to see in the dark the longest? If you said the Amish dude with tallow candles, you are technically correct. But I was going for “me, with my cheap lights”. This intermediate step for sustainable illumination will work long enough to be well worth the marginal cost. Can you say the same for all your techno-wonder toys?

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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