I don’t know if it is still posted, but last weeks Woodpile Report was outstanding. I know Ol’ Remus has had nice things to say about me. While certainly my due, I do appreciate other acknowledging my demigod
like superiority over the mere mortals that pollute my very air. But thank goodness I had posted his site link on my web page the week previous to his glorious review of my works or I would certainly be looking like a giant suck ass right now. Sometimes my timing is actually pretty good. Like being one of the first to tell you that you would die a horrible and elongated death if you consumed dairy contaminated by Japanese fallout
. You didn’t believe me then ( silly Jim, he’s so paranoid! ), and now you silently curse the very day you were born because of that, but after you read today’s article you will be able to excuse yourself. *
Rawles
has furthered his case for relocating with some current hoo-ra-ra in Florida over something to do with toll road payments. Hey, I could have told you Florida’s government sucks infected monkey testicles through a straw. I probably already did in fact. They cost me two years lost higher wages through sting operations ( using the Junior Pigs that look old enough to buy tobacco or alcohol ) and changed the terms of my divorce to both get arrears and extend the time of my child support. Depending on how you do the math they cost me a minimum of $20,000 in gross wages. Which is more than a years income. But don’t forget that every state has its own particular ways of screwing you over. Even the beloved Idaho ( who da ho? ). It is only the luck of the draw if you DON’T get screwed. And the odds work against you more nowadays as the apparatus fights for its life. If you think that any civil servant
is going to sacrifice benefits or a pension so that they play fair you are indeed living in a fools paradise. And his approved states, while agricultural areas, also are infested with socialistic governments. Their behavior will only get worse. Which, as bad as it will be, only mirrors the problems seen by serfs
yoked to the land. After stability is regained, being a farmer will be beneficial. During the collapse you are a sitting duck. Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to believe me. Or even if you do, you might rightly just chalk it up as the lesser of evils. I’m down with that, dawg. And being a stationary target, semi-auto’s might actually be what you need. Just please try to keep in mind that there are other ways of feeding yourself.*
I’ve put my book, The Frugal Survivalist
, on Kindle for $2.99.
I don’t see a link at the paper version page but if you do a search at Amazon both options pop up. For those that simply must have the book but don’t want to read it on a regular computer. One day I’ll get around to posting the direct page link.*
The Ranger Man brought up fear mongering in a recent post:
http://www.shtfblog.com/newsweek-apocalypse-now-and-shtf-blog-design/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SHTFblog-AreYouReady+%28SHTF+blog.com+-+are+YOU+ready%3F%29
This is of course a subject near and dear to my heart, as I love surfing the Doom
Wave. And unlike those surfer dudes
, all righteous and knarly and such, who surf the big tsunami and expect to die in the attempt, I’ll be happy to survive the experience. Well, the surfing part. I’m sure out amongst you is one extreme asshat, building up a powerful hatred, ready to smite me with the approval of Baby Jesus because I said something that got you all butt hurt. So I’ll be dead about five minutes after the End Of Civilization
despite all my preparations. And I doubt pleading for my life, willing to swap out the wife even, will do any good. Which is okay. The journey is the important part. I just hope I can inflict a parting wound that will fester and kill my attacker.*
Let me just come right out and say it. The only people that will change their lives from fear mongering are around the age of five and below. I’m not talking about fear being instilled by direct action from others, but just the reporting or talking about of fear. Proclaiming that we are all going to die will influence no one that isn’t already frightened. Then fear mongering only educates them in the finer points of their paranoia
. I can scream about why we will die and all of you will simply ignore me, going about your business of driving SUV’s and paying a mortgage. To you, I’m just an entertaining nut bag. You have your world paradigm hard wired into your brain. Without true trauma, no one changes their basic programming after kindergarten
. Which kind of underlines the basic idiocy of the schools attempts at brainwashing. But then, they can’t even educate the basics so I imagine we should set the bar of approval for public education pretty low. Anyway, regardless of the facts or logic of what I give you, you will find one excuse or another to ignore what I am saying if it doesn’t already agree with your own outlook. Fear mongering is harmless to the average person.*
Now, what about those ready and willing to be scared crapless? Is fear mongering going to harm them? How? They are already primed and ready to fly off the handle. If no one scares them they will just scare themselves. In this case, fear mongers actually do some good since they do point out reasonable fears rather than unfounded ones ( even Y2K
did immense good at giving folks a great ten year head start when everything was much cheaper and employment much more secure ). We do the major worrying, analysis and research and tell you HOW afraid you should be. You’ve already decided on your own to be afraid. So, to the unbelievers I provide entertainment and to the paranoid I provide guidance. Am I a super duper guy or what? You are welcome.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.
*
By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there.
*
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.
) of my arrival to any store. An undercover agent is sent scurrying to the coffee isle first, to make sure no generic coffee at $5.28 is available. If there is still time they also rush to the isle with rice and beans and make sure the beans at half price are all hidden. Sometimes I can do a fake movement towards the non-food side and then quickly switch back to the produce section where the coffee is just one isle away. At times I can get the last can of coffee, even as the staff are busy trying to push bread racks in my way. Once they ran out of time and could only dash the side of the can on the shelf, hoping I wouldn’t buy a damaged item. Lately I’ve had no luck getting the beans. When the 68 cent one pound bags are gone ( they even started labeling those “approved for WIC” in a pathetic attempt to deny me my supplies ) you either buy the name brand for over a buck a pound or have to buy the twenty pound gi-normous sack to get the cheap price. I just went ahead and bought the big sack, at sixty cents a pound. Then, since I had a bit of extra cash I bought another bag of cat food and a tote to put it in. The cats need their 
food to supplement the ground squirrels.
- thanks to 
for the reminder ). But then, disaster. I reorganized the van to make more room for trailer clutter ( and put more water in The Pit- I have a connection at the bottled water place for the occasional jug ) and decided to empty out a tote or two. I was going to empty the bags of grain into the available poly buckets, put the buckets in The Pit, and use the totes for junk storage. And I ended up throwing away five hundred pounds of corn. Mold in five out of six bags. I know it isn’t the storage in bags. I’ve done that often with no problems. My van stays bone dry. And the bags not ruined were the old brand in paper bags. Those with mold were another brand in those plastic weave type bags. I’m ninety percent sure they came with the spores. But just to make sure, no more tote storage- buckets only. And, no more corn. Just 
. I’m not too worried about the replacement cost which will be under two hundred bucks ( I’m assuming that kernels still follow the general price rule of matching retail white flour, so about $36 a hundred pounds- I haven’t been to the feed store for awhile ). I do hope I can replace the grain quicker than the middle east oil is cut off or whatever other BS happens to us. I don’t like being under a three year supply which I think of as a minimum. Moral of the story- use small storage containers to limit damage to your grain. And think hard if you really want corn. I’ve never had damaged 
.
had an article on an old military 
being turned into an end-o-da-world retreat. A software engineer bought a old silo for a quarter million bucks and is going to retrofit that bad boy and sell the condo units to the rich and clueless. The condos start at $900,000 and he has already sold three out of seven stories in the complex. Start at almost a million apiece, and you are almost half sold out. As you are still retrofitting the place where the rich and powerful can wait out the apocalypse in the style they are accustomed to. This tells me that a lot of people are rich enough to buy this kind of insurance, although presumably not rich enough to build their own underground mansion, and that most of these rich people are incredibly stupid. The place advertises military level security and five years worth of food, with power being supplied by geothermal and wind turbines. Let’s start out by listing the problems this place is going to have, shall we ( and by the way rich dudes, this advice is free but feel free to hire me for a more realistic plan )?
. Silo’s were not designed to be secure AFTER the 
, but before, with a fully functioning above ground society performing as the primary security. When the folks living around your silo have secure jobs and full bellies, and local plus county plus state law enforcement act as a ring of security around your site, you don’t need serious security. A few wing nuts with 
will do ( and in case of a credible attack the phone lines are working to summon back-up, so the secure doors most likely will do well enough ). But even with a breech, the launch keys will remain secure. The launch was secured, everything around that was marginally defensive, and the large area around the base served as a trip level defense. After 
, grid-up security measures are no good at all to you. Expect outsiders to access your facility if they are so inclined.
and the power shortages do your job for you ), you have a far larger problem if you are a rich dude. Even if the silo is 100% secure against outside attack, you have to worry about the staff on the inside. You see, you are a rich, fat, 
. You contribute nothing to society. You are very well trained in stealing money, but your real world, 
skill set is zero. After you pay your million bucks to live there, your usefulness is over. No one will need you hanging around, demanding room service or hitting on the female staff ( what? You think your banked bucks will buy anything for her? ). What is to stop a small armed security staff from killing all the useless guests so that the food supply lasts a whole lot longer? Dollars to donuts they even secure your room electronically. They just lock you in and starve you. No noisy gunshots to alert the other guests. But even a big messy massacre isn’t a huge problem for a determined 
. This has got to be one of the worst survival deals I’ve ever encountered. Power outages, invader breaches, room-lock in or centrally prepared food poisoning or lack of credible defense to foil the guards ( the bodyguards eat the same food, right? ). Seriously? You think this is a great piece of insurance?
for the wife’s continued inebriation. I’ve encountered these figures previously on the Internet as other folks have compared the cost of beer to hard liquor, as measured by cost per once of alcohol. I just couldn’t remember them, nor could I remember if they were current enough to account for the recent cost of energy and ore shortages. Obviously a twelve pack of aluminum cans takes far more energy to process than one plastic jug. As it turns out the vodka costs one half the cost of beer per volume of alcohol.
. I’m all for religion as a personal tool. If it helps you deal, great for you. But it also has to be admitted that a lot of harm has been done through the ages by organized religion wetting its beak at the expense of others. Don’t even get me started. But I think one overlooked damage by religion has been its fight against 
. By coloring the consumption of alcohol only in moral terms, by painting the drinkers in a negative light suggesting that they are mentally weak and physiologically damaged, are we missing a fundamental question? Is the consumption of alcohol a return-on-energy positive? I’m throwing this question out there with the understanding that I have no answers. But I was thinking, there has got to be another reason most folks drank constantly and heavily all throughout history. Besides wanting a buzz or needing to shield themselves from reality. Or even to purify contaminated water. If wood is scarce, rather than waste it by fermenting potatoes to kill water borne disease, wouldn’t it be easier to just not crap in the water? I understand germ theory is new, but cause and effect observations are as old as we were. Ancient man had no idea WHY alcohol was created, he just knew HOW. Same with contaminated water, surely.
and consume alcohol? If all scarce resources were husbanded by successful societies, why would a fuel scarce group brew booze? My theory, totally unanswerable due to my lack of research requiring resources I don’t have, is that there was less energy cost in turning grain into alcohol calories than into human feed calories. Did the fermentation process provide a multiplying effect? Sorry, once again my lack of hard sciences knowledge bites me in the ass. I could be wrong here, but it is an intriguing question. Okay, enough farting around. Time for today’s article which is another recent trend that could turn you around and take a huge bite out of your ass. The possibility of the disappearance of used 
.
, job security all around. But during the conversation it was mentioned that another way the company is saving money was by recycling plastic buckets. WOW!! Hold the horse, hoss. Full blown loyal minion alert news! Instead of throwing away ( or giving away, as concerns us ) poly buckets that the frosting and filling come in for the bakery, they are being sent back for recycling to recoup some costs. The semi pulls up, vomits out a load of processed food crap, loads up with recyclable material and brings them back. I don’t know if the buckets are washed and reused or chipped and remelted into plastic for a few bucks a ton. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that grocery store chain ( I won’t mention their name just in case I might get someone in trouble ) won’t be the source of used poly buckets for your cheap grain storage unit anymore. What if other chains start doing the same thing?
that you got all the cheap used poly buckets you could NOW. Even if you can’t afford to fill them now, they stack in each other and take little space to store. Do not delay. This could very well be yet another Diminishing Options moments. Remember when 
used to be packed in metal cans at half the price as they are now in cardboard cans? Remember when 
used to cost under $100? Remember when people weren’t living in used 
out of desperation and they sold cheap used? Remember when metal, oil, plastic, silver and copper were affordable? Remember when railroad ties were junk instead of Yuppie renovator high priced decoration? When it becomes cheaper to recycle than replace, the throw away society is dead. You will not be able to live or prep as cheaply. Avoid the rush to more expensive and act now.
decided that they were going to make vast fortunes by controlling the trade in spices ( and you wonder where 
got the idea from ) to Europe. Most spices, THE high value trade item of antiquity, went by sea from the SW Pacific and to the Muslim ports. The towelheads took them overland by 
. This was much safer, safe being a relative term, than over the 
. Europe didn’t have a whole lot the Arabs needed, except slaves from the Caucus region and thereabouts. The slaves were turned into soldiers, which were used to convert neighboring regions into good little Muslim rug-prayers. And of course along the way, those slaves were used to fight any Christian infidels who invaded. So, in effect, the good little Italian Christians sold their religious enemies the tools to fight against themselves. The West selling their enemies the rope used to hang them ( the 
tag line ) is nothing new. For the last several decades the West has bought oil from the Muslims, allowing them the profits to overpopulate, along with the generous immigration policies which allow our fifth columnists to infiltrate legally. Keep this in mind as you read why we are invading Libya. Please note that I’m writing this on Friday afternoon, just in case something major happens to change any fundamentals here.
with Michael Douglas ) that no radiation would be forthcoming from the ruined reactors. At first I thought that the invasion was a great ploy to divert attention from the Japanese 
, but I think that was too simplistic. The days of 
went away with a balanced budget. You can’t afford too many wasted billions on military misadventures but rather need those munitions to matter for your grand strategy. After a week or so it finally hit me like a brick. Now, keep in mind this is a WAG, wild ass guess. I could be way off. But if you ask the question, who benefits, it makes sense. Keeping in mind of course that your world view must take in account that the central bankers manipulate things to stay in power, otherwise it won’t make sense to you. For what it is worth, here is my theory to why we invaded Libya.
market from imploding. The way this seems to have been done is global wide credit and currency expansion. But you can’t simply just keep debasing the currency. You need something to underpin the growth needed to feed the machine. In case you missed it, the last two years have been about bleeding the middle class of ALL accumulated wealth. Hey, better than 
, right? That is getting a bit thin, since every day another integrated part of the puzzle is getting in trouble and needs bailing out. You need real wealth to prop up the teetering system. Which is of course oil. Our oil supplies are contracting, and we need to secure them by military force now. For many decades, near a century, we have been able to secure the oil supply globally by economic manipulation. The dollar, once good as gold, and our control of global banking secured the oil. We could easily buy it with, in effect, IOU’s for our manufactured goods or food surpluses. Inflation bought our oil. Well and good. We might have stopped being self reliant in energy but as long as we could manipulate others into exporting it to us it was just like we were getting our oil from the 51st state. But now I wonder, did the 9-11 attacks do more damage to our economy than we thought? Was the 
needed because our currency was no longer enough? Did we lose the manipulating process ten years ago? 
and control of the oil forced the country to sell oil for worthless paper currency. In that case, Europe now has a secure, free oil supply ( at least a supplement, which might be enough ). This props up the free fall economy. Which protects the huge derivative market from imploding. I know this scenario forces us to actually give the PTB the benefit of the doubt for being intelligent and able to think ahead, but it isn’t like they got to power by being clueless. Control the energy, keep civilization rolling. Right now it is just air strikes, but dollars to donuts we are setting up for a military control, hence oil control, of some kind. If the derivative market is one and a half quadrillion, even one percent failure is bigger than the entire US economy. Spending a few hundred billion on munitions to delay that sure seems a bargain. It is just controlling “our” oil by other means. 