What We Expect From Jobs

I received a comment on an old post recently, and it got me thinking. The post reads.

Seems to me if a job can be done by a mindless machine then that job isn't one that anyone would really want. Sure, people will say they want that mindless labor because they want the paycheck, but they'll be entirely unfulfilled and will resort to liquor, drugs, violence, and TV. Go read Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line.

You know, this comment itself kind of makes me giggle. We have exported our jobs to Asia. The jobs that are left are straw jobs, made up jobs like website designers and service workers and mortgage brokers. Actually working to make something is now considered "Unfulfilling".

Think about it folks. This is the same mindset that makes you a "consumer". So many people are caught up in the arrogance of their jobs that they think that what they do to earn their daily bread is really important to who they are.

Our economy is in a shambles. We import everything from everywhere. Our manufacturing is gutted. We export sleazy and dishonest financial products, our hard earned knowledge and expertise, and dollar bills that are rapidly becoming worth less (note: this is worth less, not worthless). So I think that folks had better climb down off of their high horse and stop thinking somehow work is beneath them. Because that is really what you are talking about when you say unfulfilling...you are saying the work is below your high station.

People better get over that shit. I have a sneaking hunch that having a job will be a great thing. Just having a job will be "fulfilling".

Blind Faith

The other night Mayberry had a great little set of comments about the trolls of the world.

The thing that kinda bothered me was the flames that spewed when the mousie made some rather unfortunate comments about our "Owed Allegiance". Needless to say, he was shouted down rather vehemently.

We might want to think about this behavior. If we can get one person won over to prepping...even something as simple as getting someone to put some food aside will be one less needy person we will have to deal with later.

So, maybe, just maybe, we should give the mousies once screw up with kindness. Try to engage him and bring him over to the light side. Now, if he continues being a screw up, he should be flamed to a crisp. But if a guy is reading our blogs, he might be thinking things aren't that good. He might be able to be reached by common sense.

Mean Spirited

I love reading James Kunstler. He has some of the most insightful and cogent commentary on the American experience in the entire blogosphere/media/celebrity universe. He has outlined the problems we face with clarity and humor.

But it is obvious that he is a social snob. His mean-spirited tirades on the non-pretty and the less than slim have become tiresome. In a sense, he lives in a fantasy construct as all encompassing as the Landscape of Nowhere. It is a world where the lower classes toil in picturesque beauty, providing a pleasant field of view for the intellectual elites to survey as they jet from conference to conference. For some reason, people who don't look like liberal preppies really seem to get his goat.

But the world he desires is as unattainable as the happy motoring fantasies of the 50's. Us Proles have always been a rough crowd. We don't clean up well and get pissed off if you try to make us. We are rude, crude, violent, and uninterested in proper socialization by the improvers. I should know, that is the world I grew out of.

So James: Please get off your high horse. Yes, we like our cheetos and our beer. Our waists are bigger than our inseam. Some of us have a tattoo or two and we curse more than strictly necessary. A lot of us are unemployed because some corporate puke moved our jobs elsewhere and we really don't have any desire to become a website designer. We build shit and work. We don't add value, we create value. Sure our lives will suck when the shit hits the fan, but we will persevere and get through it. Sure some will fall by the wayside, but that has always been the case. We will be skinnier (against our will) and our tattoos and attitudes will fade.

But at the end of the day, we will also be the ones who will be rolling up our sleeves and grabbing the shovels to dig our way out of the shitpile when you and the intelligensia will still be having conferences concerning how best to maximize our urban environment.

Us lowlifes are as much the country as your elitist dreams.

Occams Razor

There is a lurker out there. Seems to be a nice guy and he leaves polite and thoughtful messages. But one of the messages he wrote recently concerns me. I am asking in advance for forbearance from him for refuting him without contacting him first, but it seems that that is the cost of being a lurker.

Anyway. He set a link to a site that explained how maybe peak oil is a head fake by the ruling elite to force the shift to nuclear, which would be more susceptible to the powers-that-be's control and would allow the further entrenchment of the current power elite.

Folks. You have to assign probabilities in this life. Maybe the tenets proposed in this theory are true, but I have to assign this theory a probability of <1%.

Here are my reasons for assigning such a low probability.

The powers that be have some intelligence. I believe that this is refuted by reality almost every day.

The powers that be aren't completely in over their heads right now. Iraq, the housing implosion, the baby boom retiring, Israel and Iran posturing, sytematic looting by the current administration. All of these things combined are out of the reach of solutions, now you want me to believe that a secret cabal can surreptitiously put through a shift in primary power sources?

That we haven't known and ignored the oil was running out for the last 50 years. L. King Hubbard wrote his article in 1958.

That nuclear power is sustainable. Fissionable material is incredibly rare. Think about the drain on that resource if we start building reactors in a serious way.

That a secret can be kept.

I know that it tempting to think that there is a lot of oil there and we can keep our happy lifestyles if we really wanted, but the facts don't point that way.

William of Occam and his "Least Hypothesis" says that "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

Lurker my friend. The overwhelming odds are that we are running out of oil. Your link and the idea posited may very well be true, but a person would be a fool to bet money on it.

Its Sunday, I'm Taking a Break

I'm gonna do nothing. Read, maybe drink some beer. Most important, I am going to take a break from preppin'.

All work and no play

An odd choice

I have a friend here in town Mr. Icarus. He's a great guy, but at the same time he is almost a poster child for what is wrong. He is well off, made some serious coin putting together scrape-and-rape subdivisions of McMansions north of town. Now he is holding on to some seriously depreciating properties and cannot quite figure out why all of this is happening to him. Seems that business is shitting on him and he is losing income.

Wifey is the perfect skinny blond princess, drives the Cadillac crossover. Kids are the perfect straight-toothed, right out of Norman Rockwell specials. Private schools and every available lesson and distraction is available.

So Icarus is getting creamed by gas prices on his SUV. Says that he is running $300.00 a month or more. So his solution is: Wait for it....Wait for it.....Park the SUV and go out and buy a little Honda Fit for $17,000 plus tax and dealers.

So the guy spends 17K to save on his $300 buck a month gas payment when he is looking at the abyss.

We wonder why the country is going to hell.

The Life of a Serf

One of the hardest things that we will have to come to grips with is the imperative that in the next two or three generations, there are going to be a lot more people in America working on farms. Consider this little blurb

• In 1945, it took up to 14 labor-hours to produce 100 bushels of corn on 2 acres of land.
  
• By 1987, it took just under 3 labor-hours to produce that same 100 bushels of corn on just over 1 acre.
  
• In 2002, that same 100 bushels of corn were produced on less than 1 acre.

• In 1890, 42% of the US population listed farming as their occupation. (Ref. Here)
  

I would not be surprised if the percentage isn't back around 40% within 50 years. The cards are stacked this way, and the deck is frozen cold. Unless someone comes up with a way to violate the second law of thermodynamics with inpunity, a significant minority of our children and grandchildren will be laboring on farms.

Now, there are a bunch of you out there who will be delighted by this prospect. "A return to a natural way of life", "Living in harmony with the earth and seasons". All kinds of mindless drivel like that.

Screw that. I grew up working on a truck farm in Northern Utah. The work was backbreaking and endless. Any jackass who likes to think that he would seriously enjoy this is more than welcome to grab a hoe and go out to weed an acre or so of beets or tomatoes. Try it the rain for a couple of days. Or go and spend a day harvesting tomatoes. I can almost guarantee you that the work will begin to pall after a week or so. After a summer of work, going back to school was a grand relief. The thought of staying on the farm kept me focused through a four year tour in the infantry and the GI bill to get through college so that I didn't have to stay on the farm.

Folks, there is a reason that we hire Mexicans to work as agricultural workers. We in America for a short time were so rich and so resource wealthy that we could throw energy and money at the problem of agriculture to allow us a generation or three of respite. Those of us who took advantage of this break should fall on our knees and thank God for the gift of leisure that we have been given.

But no, what we have is a bunch of spoiled idiots thinking that the luxury that they have been blessed by is a natural right and all we will have to do is call our elected officials in Washington to have them do something about it. But at the end of the day, not even our vaunted representatives in Washington can do something abut a system that is going to become more and more energy constrained.

Right now we have geared our agricultural system around

1. big farmers driving around in expensive machines burning oil,
2. massive injections of fertilizer made from natural gas,
3. bringing in lots of Mexican migrant workers so that the agribusinesses and big farmers can screw Mexicans instead of paying a decent wage to Americans,
4. Americans (like me) desperately searching for any means whatsoever to avoid an honest day of labor and ignoring the first three points because it does keep them off the farm.

So, old gomers like me can probably dodge the bullet, but I think that my children's children will have a radically different set of choices ahead of them. But they can handle it. If my Grandparents can make it being coal miners and farmers in the 1930's, my grandchildren can handle something similar.

But don't blame our descendants one little bit for thinking of us and our profligate ways as "those jackasses who got us into this mess".

Please, Please, Please read this

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun08/survival6-08.html

A good post by Dragon

I like this one. (link)

There is a reason that the "scientists" changed the name of the phenomenon from "global warming" to "climate change", that way they can take credit no matter what way the climate changes. Hmmm.....maybe they ought to consider a career change to be economists.

Freezing Eggs

I always shop at a little liquidators store here in SW Washington. I am not telling you the name, because finding great places to shop like this is kinda like finding a favorite fishing hole. Sharing the location is not something done lightly, but it is just above Fourth Plain on Main. They go and buy pallets of short-dated and non-moving stock from the big stores and sell it to us cheapskates for usually less than half the cost of the same item in the corporate stores. It is kind of strange shopping there, you definitely don't go with a shopping list. You buy what they have and then you plan your menu when you get home.

Now the other day, there was a sign out front "Organic, cage free brown eggs, 99 cents a dozen or 5 dozen for $4.00". So I beelined in and picked up about 10 dozen. Took them home and went to the handy-dandy Georgia Egg Council website and found out how to freeze them (thanks Google). I also made two dozen pickled eggs to go with my beer (so Mayberry, you think that you had a problem with flatulence when eating preps, beer and pickled eggs would put you to shame my friend) So the first lesson yesterday was to take advantage of sales and put things aside, there usually is a way to do it, and it will save you money and add to your preps.

The second is a different thing entirely. I have watched the organic food thing take off during the past two or three years. For the most part, this is a middle and upper-middle class female phenomenon. Oh sure, there are folks out there who are serious organic types, but usually they garden a lot, and they usually steer well clear of the chain stores.

The chain-store organic phenomenon is a marketing ploy aimed at the middle class to pry more money out of them for the same product. The way that it is played in the media and in the advertising, a mother might as well give her child to the man in old van over by the school than let the child eat food with "bad stuff by bad companies" on it. Being a member of the stunned masses these folks are force fed information by mass media, they never sit down to think that the "organic" foods that they so righteously purchase are grown by agribusiness, transported thousands of miles by truck, and are purchased in corporate stores. They are paying a premium (usually twice the going rate) for food that is just as strange as the foods they are rejecting.

How this ties in with the eggs is that the stores that I frequent (I usually refer to them as "Used Grocery Stores") are starting to become heavily organic (Thank God they don't price as organic, one price fits all for specific food type). What this shows me is the depth of the commitment to "Safeway Organics" that the middle class have. At the end of the day, this fashion will fail, the high price of gas, the high price of buying organics, and the low production yields of organic agriculture will conspire to drive this "premium market niche" back to the fringe and specialty stores where it dwelt all the years before the yuppie uber-moms picked it up as a status symbol .

The myth of suddenness

The blogerati out there in tin foil hat land (the subkingdon of blogdom where I am a proud and contributing citizen/member), seems to be having a little bit of trouble with the idea that the world just is not going to hell in a handbasket as quickly as they thought it would.

Now, sometimes I get caught up in this idée fixe and I wish that the damn apocalypse would just get here so that we can move on. But here is the rub folks. Whether you like it or not, you have to strangle this obsession whenever it shows up. The reasons are simple, the longer that the show stays on stage, the better prepped you are and the better chance that the folks around you will get started on their preps.

A slow decline would allow even the most dense SUV-drivin', triple-yamaha-boating, mcmansion-owning doofus to figure out that things maybe aren't as good as the government says they are. Let's say that things managed to string out for four more years. If we could get another couple million people prepping, figuring out how to garden, learning to walk to work and help their neighbors, we might be able to weather the storm.

I do really try to convince folks that having some preps put aside isn't a bad thing. I try to do it as low-key as possible. You can point out that when inflation is hitting like it is now, it is better to buy now when it is cheap than later when it is expensive. You can chat about how screwed up the government response to Katrina was and how those folks might have had it a little easier if they had something put aside. You can casually mention how the grocery store only has a three day supply on hand at any time.

I really think that the better prepped everyone is, the better we can get through this

Big Al and the Big Dream

Ya gotta love Al Gore. Of any major politician, he come closest to telling the world the truth. Granted, he misses the mark by a humongous margin, but he really does seem to be the best that we have to offer. Sad state of affairs that.

So anyway, he proposes a crash course to replace fossil fuels. Sounds great. But what Al doesn't tell you or won't tell you is that we have to get rid of a lot of our baggage to hit that mark. Let's run down and take a look at this. Please criticize and correct any mistakes. This is just a back of the envelope look at the issue. I would genuinely like to refine this to come up with more accurate figures.

Cars:

• To the best of my knowledge, 70% of all oil goes to fueling transportation.
  
• We currently import right around 20,000,000 barrels of oil a day.
  
• Now a barrel of oil yields about 20 gallons of gasoline (give or take) and
  
• a gallon of gasoline yields 36 kWH of power
  

The numbers to switch to Big Al's non-fossil fueled world looks something like this.

20,000,000 barrels
X 0.7 (percentage used in transportation)
X 20 gallons per barrel
X 36 kWH of power/gallon gas

10,080,000,000 kWH/day additional electrical generation capacity. or

3,679,200,000,000 kWH/Year additional electrical generation capacity.

Let's use nuclear for the sake of the heebie-jeebies that it gives environmental types. A pretty good sized plant is around 1,000 megawatts. A 1000 MW power plant, running at a 60% load factor, generates 5.3 x 10(9) KwH per year. So to replace all of our evil gas-guzzlers with happy-face wearing electrical vehicles would mean that we have to build a mere 693 one thousand megawatt nuclear power plants in the next ten years.

Now remember that we currently have 100 of these babies purring along. They provide right around 20% of our current electricity. So adding 700 more will more than double our current electrical output in this country. What will we have to pay for the distribution system to keep it going?

If you don't like nukes, do the math for wind power, or solar power, or any of them. If we get rid of fossil fuel, we simply go back to riding horses. The numbers just ain't there. What Big Al is saying is that we are really and truly fucked and we are going to have to scramble like hell to cobble together a system that will allow us a energy use 30% of our current levels.

When do we start?

http://physics.syr.edu/courses/modules/ENERGY/ENERGY_POLICY/tables.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html

The Trouble with the Show

I love watching football and train wrecks. Its true.

But what really bugs me lately is the commentators in both sports. They talk so much and analyze so much that it is really starting to detract from my enjoyment. At least in football, the commentators are usually ex-football players. They have played the game, and they are talking about a game with a defined set of rules that has a clear outcome and a defined time frame. They still talk too much, but I guess that I can live with it.

The train wreck analysts are so much worse. in the financial train wreck game MSNBC is especially irritating. The men are used car salesmen with slick suits and a line of patter designed to separate the mark from his money. The women are expensive looking hookers who use their looks to separate the mark from his money. They spout endless rah-rah and analysis that is wrong so often that one's head spins at the sheer effrontery of these morons offering an opinion.

In the political train wreck league, it is hard to decide which of the networks has the bigger idiots. Katie Couric has the credibility and intellect of your standard day care worker. The two men are talking heads straight out William Hurt's character in the movie "Network News", and PBS is so busy camouflaging it's liberal bias by finding the current tame conservative commentator that they really don't have time to piss off anyone. I would guess that PBS is the best of this bad lot.

The moral train wreck league is covered by Trinity Broadcasting and Fox News. Fox is clearly the loser here, as their coverage leans extensively toward mouthing moral outrage while supporting any theft whatsoever by the corporations that currently run America. Trinity is at least amusing. An afternoon drinking beer and listening to cheerful and poorly thought-out biblical interpretation is a great way to relax. Martin Luther and John Calvin are rolling over in their graves, but these folks are sincere and that covers a lot of sins.

The cable was canceled 4 month's ago. I don't miss it in the least

Do It Yourself?

I have a friend, let's call him James. When I talk with James, I start realizing all of the problems that will be faced by the people in the community who have prepped and those in the community who have not.

James is a low-grade prepper. He has built up some food in his basement and reads the latest NRA propaganda and grumbles about the decline of the West. In short, he is a lot like all of us. When I visit him, he always wants to give me the fruits of his latest labor. He dabbles in just about everything. Blacksmithing, carpentry, wine-making....hell, he even produced some of the leakiest damn barrels ever made. When you go to his house, the place is an anthem to Home Depot. The guy has done everything to everything in his house.

Why I am telling you all of this is that, when you get right down to it, James really sucks at doing all of these things. The barrels that I described earlier were of a kind with the rest of the stuff in his life. Not really all that well done. He see something that needs to get done or need doing, and he immediately rushes out and gets a how-to book and does it himself. But he really doesn't have that much skill at any single task. He does serviceable work. But the quality just isn't there.

Now, if y'all are like me, you may have a tendency to follow in James footsteps. Hell, I read things about making my own soap and start the planning for it. But I think that we had oughta be careful about this tendency. I am not certain about this, but perhaps the best way to approach it is to pick something necessary and useful and get really good at it. That way if you have to react to the bad times, you have something that you can trade that people will want.

Remember that this is a warning to myself as well as a warning to you. Don't dilute yourself too much. You can't know and prepare for everything. The best that you can be is be useful and fit into a society of other useful people. You can dink around with all things, but realize that maybe there is another way to do things.

Hygeine Items

As the transportation and chemical plants slow down. I think that we will be surprised on how the costs and availability of basic items will drastically change. That has been said in a whole bunch of different ways, but the truth of the matter is, we currently have no inkling how bad it will be. I am hoping that the losses won't be too severe and will be manageable, but if I had to place my bet, I would bet that the shortages and cost will drive us crazy.

Consider shaving. Now, I like a beard in the winter, but in the summer, they are hot and scratchy. So a razor is somewhat essential, I can live without it, but would prefer not doing so. But the razor's nowadays come from one or two companies back east (Schick or Gillette), or are electrics. If the availability or prices of these items change drastically, you are currently beholden to a company for an essential. You might want to try to locate a straight razor. You might want to check this page out

Soap is going to be an issue, when you look at it, soap has the same trend as razors, a couple of manufacturers, a couple of plants, the majority of the country beholden on a few. Not a stable system. You might want to make nice with your local hippie-type. They always seem to know folks who make their own soap. You can probably even get stuff that you prefer. Check this page out.

I am not going to run it down product type by product type, but I think that you get the point here. I don't know about you guys, but I like being clean and wearing clean clothes and general sanitation. This is a great thing. Make sure that you have a means of maintaining your cleanliness and health in the changes that are coming.

Working on the Canning Preps

I am trying to spend time cooking with the dehydrated foods that are the mainstay of my preps.

The biggest thing that you have to concern yourself with is the total loss of spontaneity in your food choices. You have to get over this now. Your ability to order a pizza and be lazy for an evening is rapidly evaporating (I did this last night, I don't feel guilty about it, but I am telling you this is because I want you to know that I am going to miss it...a lot).

But in truth, my life will be better. I am preparing my own beanie wienies now...they are GREAT. Lima beans and ham are wonderful. Beef stew mix is some of the best. I am eating better food now, and the things that I once ate are now less than what I wish. I am baking my own bread and it works great. Phony meat hamburgers even have the boys approval.

But it will take a while before the loss of convenience is forgotten, and the 3,000 mile Ceasar Salads in February are not mourned. But now is the transient joy of eating so much watermelon that you get sick of it, because the season won't come again for another year.

We will live again in tune with the earth. We will go there screaming and kicking and saddened by the perceived losses at first. But as we mature, we will have a better life.

We should look forward to the trip.

watching

I don't have a dime in the markets. Pulled my money two years ago and haven't looked back.

But the vast majority of folks out there are shitting themselves whenever the market moves down. Their sacred little 401-K's are taking a beating. They won't be able to retire by the golf course. They won't be able to fly anywhere and complain about how the people there aren't acting like they did in the old National Geographic magazine that they looked at when they were kids.

This is going to be hard on these folks. These sheeple have been fed these dreams of theirs with their mother's milk. These dreams are the only options available. They have saved 15% of their salaries since forever in the hope for the golden years. Now it appears that the boyz on Wall Street used them the same way that shepherds use sheep. Their golden years are in the same category of illusion as the myth of unlimited oil and American geopolitical superiority.

All of these things tie together. We took too much for too long. Our dreams of retirement was a dream of taking even more. We got the idea from the liars on Wall Street that their wizardry would allow us to put an apple into savings and when we retired we could take out five apples. The reality is folks, if you save an apple now, you can eat an apple when you retire, the other four apples that they promised were so much hot air.

Now, if you plant the apple, work hard at growing it into a mature tree, care for the tree, harvest the fruit, you can develop a means of getting back more than one apple. But the boyz on Wall Street didn't do that. They skimmed 10-15% off the top to line their own pockets, then they used the rest to pay off the early adopters of their Ponzi scheme, and then they left the bulk of the 401-K investors bupkis my friend.

So what I am going to be amused watching is the reactions of the boomers when they realize that they have been taken for fools. The children of the sixties are now a bunch of sad, aging, middle management doofuses with delusions of grandeur and lumbago. These are not the stuff of revolutionaries.

They had better get used to cat food.

Cheap Food Storage

Read this today and I can't find anything to criticize. An excellent article

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/07/15/food-storage-on-no-budget/

Spices

Everyone is eating in more. Not only that, but everyone is probably trying to stretch their food dollars as far as they possibly can. In my opinion, the best way to do stretch the foods that you have been putting aside is to have a lot of beans, rice and taters, and have as little meat as you can get away with.

This kind of eating is common in the rest of the world. When I was working in Thailand and China, I ate with the folks that I knew there at local restaurants. Since I was always the only gwailo or farang at any of these restaurants, I knew that it was how the real folk ate. There was not to much meat at any of these restaurants. What meat there was was usually chicken or pork. But the food was always great. They usually spiced it perfectly.

So plan on keeping a store of spices with you. You can usually get the best spices at the local ethnic markets. Mexican food stores are usually the best. They have a gazillion types of peppers for less than a buck a package and their spices are low priced and cheaply packaged. Spending the money that the corporate stores want for spices is silly. Occasionally there is a spice that you have to buy at the big stores, but do it grudgingly.

I am trying to find a way to store spices. I am thinking that vacuum packaging them and maybe even putting in an oxygen scavenger pack would greatly extend their shelf lives. If anyone has some knowledge about this, I would appreciate it.

Man, there is nothing to say today

I am in a mood that says....what the hell, might as well go fishin'

Keep your chins up, I'm pullin' for ya.

You guys have to read this one

From the Onion

See ya later....the day off calls me

I think that this is very much worth reading

Resilient Communities

The joys of a pressure cooker

Get yourself a pressure cooker. For that matter, get yourself a couple of pressure cookers.

Whether you like it or not, you are going to have to watch your energy usage. A pressure cooker allows you to create great meals for a very small fraction of the energy costs of conventional cooking. Yeah, you will have to learn how to cook differently, get over it, you will have to do a lot of things differently pretty soon.

Also get a canning pressure cooker. We are heading into a world where you make hay while the sun shines. If you get some surplus, you had better be able and ready to preserve it for the cold times. It might not hurt you to get some mason jars put aside as well. You can get them cheap at Goodwill.

Things are tightening up my friends, your preps may be useful soomer than you think, and your ability to keep them replenished will require more than going to Safeway's

Hoping Israel Doesn't Rush Into This

It seems that the stars are aligning for Israel to go ahead and bitch-slap Iran. I had really hoped that this wasn't true, but it does kinda seem to be the way that things are going.

The US

Well, Cheney has been foaming at the mouth to do this for quite some time. He is an old sad man, with a bone to pick for imagined slights in days past. He has always wanted to do it and Junior is too stupid to stop him.

McCain has pretty much given Israel the green light, with his second holocaust and "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" jokes. Obama would oppose it.

So from Israel's POV, if they are going to do it, it will have to be before the election. Obama is in the lead and seems to be pulling away a bit, so if they do it before the election, it would strengthen McCain's bid and get the job done before Obama gets in.

Europe

This would suck for Europe. But the truth of the matter is, they have so thoroughly deboned their military they no longer have a dog to take to this fight. This is a invitation to a street fight, talking doesn't really seem to be of any use in this milieu. These folks are getting ready to dance, the only way that you can stop them is to threaten to kick both their asses.

India

Pretty bad, but they are so busy with Pakistan and stirring the shit in Afghanistan, they can't bring too much to bear. They will stand there trying to tell everyone to play nice, but they are vegetarians at a convention of meat eaters.

Russia

Putin probably has a huge erection just thinking about this. The US will get sucked in, the costs and impact on the military will cripple the ability to erect that missile shield. The cost of oil will skyrocket, allowing him to get a great bang for his buck on his peaking resources. But the best part will be poking a stick in our eye. A clear win.

China

This isn't in China's interests. But they have a whole bunch on their plate right now. They would miss the oil, but they have some good contacts with oil that doesn't go through the Straits of Hormuz, they might be able to weather the loss better than we do. Couple this with the fact that they don't really play the peacemaker role unless it clearly benefits them, and you have a recipe for ambivalence.

Conclusion

The truth of the matter is, Israel attacking would be stupid. But they feel threatened (and I can't say as I blame them, Iran without nukes is an annoyance, Iran with nukes is a really bad neighborhood). But Iran doesn't seem to have the same goals as we and Israel pursue, so they will probably never back down from their nukes.

Spring 2009 is the point where Iran gets dangerous, from what I can see, 3,000 centrifuges will have enough time to create a critical mass of fissile material at that point. I am praying for an outbreak of common sense here.

But that doesn't usually happen in politics

Fuck Robots

I have little use for robots. They are greed exemplified. When you see a robot, you are looking at the means of taking bread out of someones mouth. You are looking at the sourcespring of the oodles of crap that we have lying around.

The only robots that should be allowed is the ones that take the place of humans in dangerous places. Bomb disarming robots are a good idea (though I think sending child molesters out with a set of rusty pliers and a bobby pin offers an equally attractive option).

When we start rebuilding our manufacturing capacity (you know, the one we gave to China in order to line the CEO's pockets), we should try for a system where the roles of robots are minimized. Work for pay should be performed by humans, to earn their way, to feed their families and provide a life. Robots replace humans and those savings just go into the bosses pockets.

(A side note, I love Despair.com, I laugh hysterically at their stuff)

I bet you that we give the bastards their money back

Read This ARTICLE

Screw 'em, if China was stupid enough to give those bastards at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, their money, they took their chances and we shouldn't pay them off.

Handmade

Sorry about the rambling yesterday, I just re-read my post and it was very badly written. I apologize.

I've been thinking about Mayberry's blog of a couple of days ago. The one where he describes the pain of finding out that you can't make things as cheaply as china mart sells them.

Let's stand back and think about this for a bit. In the way of research, I went to china mart today to take a walkabout. What a pile of shit. Most of the stuff there is not even close to necessary, and is so cheaply made that it may break on the way out of the store. The essence of the place is cheapness. It isn't inexpensive, it is cheap and shoddy.

What we have to get over is the idea of lots of stuff as a sign of success. Wal-Mart and the big stores are built around selling you shit you don't need. If you do need it and buy it at Wal-Mart, check it over closely, make sure it is what you need and make sure it will serve the purpose well. I think that we are going into a world where you have less stuff, a lot of the stuff that you have will be made close to you by people you know, and the stuff you have will be yours for a long time. It is a world where Wal-Mart cannot survive.

Buy stuff that will last, don't buy so much crap. Figure out what you need and don't try to keep up with the Joneses, those days are over. When you can, try to make stuff yourself, that way you can make it well and learn how to make it.

He's right and he's wrong

Phill Graham has never been anything but a shill for the banking industry and big corporate interests. If he thinks that we aren't in a recession, he is an utter moron, but he has the right of it when he says we are bunch of whiners.

John McCain

McCain Economic Adviser Calls US 'A Nation of Whiners'

By Jonathan Weisman

Former senator Phil Gramm, a top policy adviser of Sen. John McCain's, said the nation is in a "mental recession," not an actual one, and suggested the United States has "become a nation of whiners."

The interview, published today in the Washington Times, could compound the problems of the presumptive Republican nominee as he tries to show his concern for Americans struggling with six months of job losses, near-stagnant economic growth, and soaring energy and food costs. It comes after McCain appeared to call the system that has financed Social Security since its inception "a disgrace."

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," Gramm said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. "We may have a recession; we haven't had one yet."

"We have sort of become a nation of whiners," Gramm said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline" despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy.

Since McCain admitted last winter that the economy was not his strong suit, he has made a concerted effort to look smarter on the issue, stressing his sympathies and saying whenever he can that he understands Americans are hurting. But Gramm is a close friend and adviser, and his words could haunt the senator from Arizona.

L'inverno viene

Winter is coming. My Grandpa used to say this all the time when harvest was on. Anyone who has worked a harvest on a truck farm knows that it is up early and to bed late. Well folks, you might want to think about that.

TEOTWAWKI is a difficult concept to put your arms around. But what we are doing now is placing our bets on how the play will end. Even the folks who are ignoring everything are making their bet, they are betting that everything will return to a nice carmel-coated America of the past, with full shelves and money to burn.

If you are reading this, the chances are you take a different slant on the issue. I have grown to respect Dragon and Mayberry's opinion on things, though I take a different slant on the world. Dragon, Selous Scout, and Mayberry seem to be more mistrustful of human nature than I am. Truth of the matter is, this trust in human nature may very well be the death of me, but I am not sure that I can reconcile the ruthlessness that is needed should they be right with my beliefs in Christian ethics.

What I think has to happen is for the current financial and commercial systems to flat out break. I also think that this is what we are currently experiencing. The financial system is under serious attack, and the underlying commercial system is weakened. I feel that these two stages of collapse will be behind us within a year. The financial system is not a huge loss, the thieving bastards will get what they deserve, and to a certain extent, we will all find out that we have been, to a greater or lesser degree, part of the thieving bastard category.

The collapse commercial system will be a little harder. Matter of fact, it will be a lot harder. Getting the basics will become a priority. Getting the fluff will be impossible and a fond memory. Folks will have to start working as groups here. This is where you will create your circle of help and start hammering it into shape. It will be a lot of little things, sharing extra vegetables, working together canning, having stone soup parties, walking the neighborhood watch.

But this collapse will allow us to clean out the poison of banks, corporations and their slaves. I have read in the past that while a lot of slaves in the old South fought bitterly for their freedom and won it, there were as many slaves that supported their masters. This concept is beyond me, but it did exist. Similar divides were noted during our own revolutionary war. The Tories outnumbered the Patriots for a great deal of the war. It took a while to put a spine into a lot of people.

How we will break the commercial and corporate interests that are trying to enslave us is to bankrupt them. They are creatures of lucre, not honor. But the cleansing will not be fun, and it will be painful. Be careful, keep your wits about you, and keep your options open. Winter is coming.

Energy

The your ability to get through the cold times will depend on your access to energy.

Food energy, heating energy, cooking energy, transportation energy. All of these will be required. Now what you have to do in come up with alternatives and options for the types of energy you will need.

Food energy will be the diciest. Gardens are fixed and depending on your ability, probably insufficient. Food storage is good, but you have to have energy to execute this as well, as refrigeration, freezing, and canning all require significant energy inputs. Salting is not so intensive, and sun drying is good, but these are real skills that you had better start practicing. You will be able to buy food, but prices will be high and supplies will be fitful.

Cooking energy is also needed. Propane and coleman fuel offer good bang for the buck and are storable, but how secure is the supply. Natural gas and electricity might be available but intermittent, you might have to create a series of backups, where you use electricity and natural gas if it is available, then drop back to coleman fuel and propane as a first backup and then a rocket stove as a final backstop.

Heating will be a little less critical. If you are out of the rain and wind and you are dry, sweaters and coats can keep you happy. Spend your time trying to figure out how to heat as much as possible with solar and passive means. Keep your options open here, propane and catalytic heaters are great, and even those little electrical heaters are efficient as hell for heating the room you are in. The main trick here is to get over the idea of heating your whole house. Heat the room you are in and keep the rest of the house cold. Blankets don't require any external power source.

Transportation power is critical. I doubt that I will have to bug out, but I would be a stone cold fool not to have something in place in case I have to. Keep your tank full. Fill it every two days or when it drops below 7/8ths. Keep a rack for your bikes, if you are going to bug out, you will need transportation where you wind up. Don't plan on having friendly smiling people offering to fill you tank at the Shell station.

In other words, keep your options open. If you can ride it out where you are, do it. Have a plan if you can't, and keep your energy needs in mind.

Adapt

I think that the degree of frugality and adaptability that you practice during the next while will be an excellent barometer for how well you will do during the collapse. It won't be certain, but it will show you where you are when it comes to accepting change.

Let me tell you where this came from. On Mondays, I work in the food bank in a church downtown. I prep the packages that the ladies give away. What I have been amazed at is the quality of the food we give away, yesterday there were seven or eight crates of fresh vegetables, freezers of organic chickens and meat, bags and bags of day old bagels, pies, and baked goods. The food we were giving away probably looked better than my refrigerator.

The more traditional bums were the best. They came in for their food, were polite, and seemed generally grateful for the food. Of course some of them were crazier than loons, but they were very polite and grateful loons.

The first thing that surprised me is how some of the folks came in with the attitude of "I can't eat that" when they were presented with a fresh mango instead of the more traditional apple. One of the folks even looked askance at a frozen chicken, asking if we had any fresh meat.

The 30-40 year old women seemed to be the worst. They had the idea that food allergies were the silent killers, making their families and children sick. No wheat bread was wanted, don't you have spelt? We prefer organic vegetables and fruit please. If this was a single incidence, I would not have noted it, but it happened frequently enough that when I asked the folks who have worked there forever, they told me that it was a pretty recent phenomenon.

So here is the moral of the story. I think that it is time for everyone to go back to the menu that served my family for generations. It was a two item menu, take it or leave it. We had better get handy with dealing what is put in front of us, no specials, no whining, and taking it with gratitude. We don't always get what we want, deal with what you have. No prep is perfect, try to get enough and don't sweat it.

Downloading and Printing Book would be a great idea

Where There is no Doctor.

Odds and Ends

What I figure preps will do is to add to the reduced supplies that I will soon be seeing in a tighter future. There was a great article the other day discussing the types of doomers, and I realized that I really wasn't one of them. You see, I really think that all of this caterwauling and whining about the end of the world is just an odd fantasy.

The world is going to be a lot different soon. People will be the same as they ever were. Some of them will go bad and try to make a lifestyle of taking from others, but good folks will get together, hire a ruthless bastard to put down the outlaws, and then we will move on with our much smaller lifestyles and dreams. You see, I am not concerned because I realize that the last thirty years or so have been nothing but a bacchanalian excess. Like all similar excesses, it was never meant to last. The excess that I had so much fun doing was not real-life, and it was definitely not a right.

So, now we go back to being adults. We live within our means, which means living a with a lot less. The clothes in your closet are going to have to last you for quite a while folks, I would be getting some mothballs and a trunk to store them in. Don't worry if they are too small, my guess is that you are going to be losing some weight, you will be able to back into a new wardrobe.

That car you have in the front, I would consider making it the last car that you own. With the amount of driving you will be doing, it will be easy. 3,000 miles a year should do you fine. Bus travel, bikes and walking will be your transport for the most part. Your garden will be a dream, you are going to learn a lot about that hobby.

Your career is going to change. You are going to have to work. If you are in banks, or finance, or making planes or any other of the "new technology" jobs that have bloomed, you will be trying to find a job that will actually do something.

So my feeling is that if you are planning for the end of the world, you will probably be disappointed. If the world does go apocalyptic on us, your plans and preps will most likely be useless anyway.

International Standards

One of the things that, due to peak oil and the subsequent loss of cheap shipping, I feel will wither away in the future is the idea of international standards. These are insideous things, put in place by big business to make sure that everything and everyone is cut from same mold and is an obedient little servant of the corporations (or as they like to be referred to, the Lords of the Universe).

I worked in ISO-9000 and 13485 shops. The rules were stifling and moronic. They were mostly put in place by the Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) types. These are the folks that the management dredge out from underneath some rock in distant suburbia. They are usually ass-kissing yes-men, married to the concept of "the right way", when in fact, the vast majority of them have never worked in the manufacturing that they so like to control. They create the paperwork that the regulators and inspectors so love to inspect.

These folks, and their counterparts, the inspectors, are the Hitler Youth of the globalization movement. Everything according to rules. Make no variance from industry standard. Cover your ass at all times and make sure you kiss the ass of the man above you so that you can keep your phony job.

If we are going to find our way out of the morass we are in, we are going to have to use our own brains and our own common sense. We will fail sometimes, but we will eventually strike upon the right way of doing things.

A first, clumsy attempt

We have to start thinking about the future in a more positive manner. I am not proposing a polyanna-ish, public school self-esteem positive, but a realistic, self-examined self-image that the monumental screw ups of the past quarter century were just a first, clumsy, and tragically wrong attempt at a better world.

We are not that far away from Jim Crow laws, phlogiston chemistry, and eugenics. I really think that we are at a stage equivalent to a teenager that realizes that his actions do have consequences. We have come a long way, we have a lot farther to go.

So, we should criticize ourselves, but keep an open mind at how far we have come, there are miles to go before we sleep, and a whole bunch of hard times ahead, but we are doing better than we have in the past. Let's just make sure that we do better in the future.

Those poor saps....

Obama and/or McCain

Why anyone would want to be in charge during the the upcoming train wreck is beyond me. The only thing that I can see is monstrous egos, so certain of their intellect and rightness that they feel that they will be able to "lead" us to better times.

In a way, the presidency itself is a crappy position. Unless you have a compliant Congress, you have to go hat in hand begging for money. Can anyone remember a presidential budget proposal that wasn't stamped "DOA" on arrival on the hill? Then you have those old fuddy-duddies of the Supreme Court looking over your shoulder with those prune-faced disapproving looks on their mugs. Crap, a President can't even suspend Habeas Corpus without the press coming unglued.

The worst part is that, even though you have the keys to the car in terms of the military, you can't really go out and kick-ass the way you would really like. Troops gotta get paid, and that means the damn congress gets involved all over again. Then the other side has the absolute temerity to fight back!!!!

So, John and Barak, you have all this hanging over your head, then the day after you get inaugurated, everyone on the planet will be riding your ass, wondering why you haven't fixed it all yet. Now, the clincher, the economy. Since every jackass who held the position you so covet has always claimed that the economy's growth was due to their wonderfulness, that means that the Lumpen will be expecting you to keep all the crap on the shelf at Wal-Mart and at everyday low prices.

Well, Barry and John. You are well and truly fucked. You don't have the power to do anything that makes sense. You have inherited a train wreck of an economy, an unwinnable war of civilizations, a surly and uncooperative people, a bloated and overweening nanny-state, a huge federal deficit, and a debased currency that Carinus would have found appalling.

So, why is it you want the job?

An absolute must read

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/07/lessons-from-amateur-radio.html

Ron Paul's Message on the Coming Chaos

I have, for the past 35 years, expressed my grave concern for the future of America. The course we have taken over the past century has threatened our liberties, security and prosperity. In spite of these long-held concerns, I have days—growing more frequent all the time—when I’m convinced the time is now upon us that some Big Events are about to occur. These fast-approaching events will not go unnoticed. They will affect all of us. They will not be limited to just some areas of our country. The world economy and political system will share in the chaos about to be unleashed.

Though the world has long suffered from the senselessness of wars that should have been avoided, my greatest fear is that the course on which we find ourselves will bring even greater conflict and economic suffering to the innocent people of the world—unless we quickly change our ways.

America, with her traditions of free markets and property rights, led the way toward great wealth and progress throughout the world as well as at home. Since we have lost our confidence in the principles of liberty, self reliance, hard work and frugality, and instead took on empire building, financed through inflation and debt, all this has changed. This is indeed frightening and an historic event.

The problem we face is not new in history. Authoritarianism has been around a long time. For centuries, inflation and debt have been used by tyrants to hold power, promote aggression, and provide “bread and circuses” for the people. The notion that a country can afford “guns and butter” with no significant penalty existed even before the 1960s when it became a popular slogan. It was then, though, we were told the Vietnam War and a massive expansion of the welfare state were not problems. The seventies proved that assumption wrong.

Today things are different from even ancient times or the 1970s. There is something to the argument that we are now a global economy. The world has more people and is more integrated due to modern technology, communications, and travel. If modern technology had been used to promote the ideas of liberty, free markets, sound money and trade, it would have ushered in a new golden age—a globalism we could accept.

Instead, the wealth and freedom we now enjoy are shrinking and rest upon a fragile philosophic infrastructure. It is not unlike the levies and bridges in our own country that our system of war and welfare has caused us to ignore.

I’m fearful that my concerns have been legitimate and may even be worse than I first thought. They are now at our doorstep. Time is short for making a course correction before this grand experiment in liberty goes into deep hibernation.

There are reasons to believe this coming crisis is different and bigger than the world has ever experienced. Instead of using globalism in a positive fashion, it’s been used to globalize all of the mistakes of the politicians, bureaucrats and central bankers.

Being an unchallenged sole superpower was never accepted by us with a sense of humility and respect. Our arrogance and aggressiveness have been used to promote a world empire backed by the most powerful army of history. This type of globalist intervention creates problems for all citizens of the world and fails to contribute to the well-being of the world’s populations. Just think how our personal liberties have been trashed here at home in the last decade.

The financial crisis, still in its early stages, is apparent to everyone: gasoline prices over $4 a gallon; skyrocketing education and medical-care costs; the collapse of the housing bubble; the bursting of the NASDAQ bubble; stockmarkets plunging; unemployment rising;, massive underemployment; excessive government debt; and unmanageable personal debt. Little doubt exists as to whether we’ll get stagflation. The question that will soon be asked is: When will the stagflation become an inflationary depression?

There are various reasons that the world economy has been globalized and the problems we face are worldwide. We cannot understand what we’re facing without understanding fiat money and the long-developing dollar bubble.

There were several stages. From the inception of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 to 1933, the Central Bank established itself as the official dollar manager. By 1933, Americans could no longer own gold, thus removing restraint on the Federal Reserve to inflate for war and welfare.

By 1945, further restraints were removed by creating the Bretton-Woods Monetary System making the dollar the reserve currency of the world. This system lasted up until 1971. During the period between 1945 and 1971, some restraints on the Fed remained in place. Foreigners, but not Americans, could convert dollars to gold at $35 an ounce. Due to the excessive dollars being created, that system came to an end in 1971.

It’s the post Bretton-Woods system that was responsible for globalizing inflation and markets and for generating a gigantic worldwide dollar bubble. That bubble is now bursting, and we’re seeing what it’s like to suffer the consequences of the many previous economic errors.

Ironically in these past 35 years, we have benefited from this very flawed system. Because the world accepted dollars as if they were gold, we only had to counterfeit more dollars, spend them overseas (indirectly encouraging our jobs to go overseas as well) and enjoy unearned prosperity. Those who took our dollars and gave us goods and services were only too anxious to loan those dollars back to us. This allowed us to export our inflation and delay the consequences we now are starting to see.

But it was never destined to last, and now we have to pay the piper. Our huge foreign debt must be paid or liquidated. Our entitlements are coming due just as the world has become more reluctant to hold dollars. The consequence of that decision is price inflation in this country—and that’s what we are witnessing today. Already price inflation overseas is even higher than here at home as a consequence of foreign central bank’s willingness to monetize our debt.

Printing dollars over long periods of time may not immediately push prices up–yet in time it always does. Now we’re seeing catch-up for past inflating of the monetary supply. As bad as it is today with $4 a gallon gasoline, this is just the beginning. It’s a gross distraction to hound away at “drill, drill, drill” as a solution to the dollar crisis and high gasoline prices. Its okay to let the market increase supplies and drill, but that issue is a gross distraction from the sins of deficits and Federal Reserve monetary shenanigans.

This bubble is different and bigger for another reason. The central banks of the world secretly collude to centrally plan the world economy. I’m convinced that agreements among central banks to “monetize” U.S. debt these past 15 years have existed, although secretly and out of the reach of any oversight of anyone—especially the U.S. Congress that doesn’t care, or just flat doesn’t understand. As this “gift” to us comes to an end, our problems worsen. The central banks and the various governments are very powerful, but eventually the markets overwhelm when the people who get stuck holding the bag (of bad dollars) catch on and spend the dollars into the economy with emotional zeal, thus igniting inflationary fever.

This time—since there are so many dollars and so many countries involved—the Fed has been able to “paper” over every approaching crisis for the past 15 years, especially with Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, which has allowed the bubble to become history’s greatest.

The mistakes made with excessive credit at artificially low rates are huge, and the market is demanding a correction. This involves excessive debt, misdirected investments, over-investments, and all the other problems caused by the government when spending the money they should never have had. Foreign militarism, welfare handouts and $80 trillion entitlement promises are all coming to an end. We don’t have the money or the wealth-creating capacity to catch up and care for all the needs that now exist because we rejected the market economy, sound money, self reliance and the principles of liberty.

Since the correction of all this misallocation of resources is necessary and must come, one can look for some good that may come as this “Big Even” unfolds.

There are two choices that people can make. The one choice that is unavailable to us is to limp along with the status quo and prop up the system with more debt, inflation and lies. That won’t happen.

One of the two choices, and the one chosen so often by government in the past is that of rejecting the principles of liberty and resorting to even bigger and more authoritarian government. Some argue that giving dictatorial powers to the President, just as we have allowed him to run the American empire, is what we should do. That’s the great danger, and in this post-911 atmosphere, too many Americans are seeking safety over freedom. We have already lost too many of our personal liberties already. Real fear of economic collapse could prompt central planners to act to such a degree that the New Deal of the 30’s might look like Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

The more the government is allowed to do in taking over and running the economy, the deeper the depression gets and the longer it lasts. That was the story of the 30ss and the early 40s, and the same mistakes are likely to be made again if we do not wake up.

But the good news is that it need not be so bad if we do the right thing. I saw “Something Big” happening in the past 18 months on the campaign trail. I was encouraged that we are capable of waking up and doing the right thing. I have literally met thousands of high school and college kids who are quite willing to accept the challenge and responsibility of a free society and reject the cradle-to-grave welfare that is promised them by so many do-good politicians.

If more hear the message of liberty, more will join in this effort. The failure of our foreign policy, welfare system, and monetary policies and virtually all government solutions are so readily apparent, it doesn’t take that much convincing. But the positive message of how freedom works and why it’s possible is what is urgently needed.

One of the best parts of accepting self reliance in a free society is that true personal satisfaction with one’s own life can be achieved. This doesn’t happen when the government assumes the role of guardian, parent or provider, because it eliminates a sense of pride. But the real problem is the government can’t provide the safety and economic security that it claims. The so-called good that government claims it can deliver is always achieved at the expense of someone else’s freedom. It’s a failed system and the young people know it.

Restoring a free society doesn’t eliminate the need to get our house in order and to pay for the extravagant spending. But the pain would not be long-lasting if we did the right things, and best of all the empire would have to end for financial reasons. Our wars would stop, the attack on civil liberties would cease, and prosperity would return. The choices are clear: it shouldn’t be difficult, but the big event now unfolding gives us a great opportunity to reverse the tide and resume the truly great American Revolution started in 1776. Opportunity knocks in spite of the urgency and the dangers we face.

Let’s make “Something Big is Happening” be the discovery that freedom works and is popular and the big economic and political event we’re witnessing is a blessing in disguise.

States Responsibilities

Now that the government free stuff is coming to an end, what I think will happen is that folks in this country will start ignoring the federal government and start to make their own arrangements. From my point of view, the Federal government has never been able to get by without bribing the population. Now that there is a real financial crisis, the government will not be able to keep passing out the bribes to the masses, and now the masses will start ignoring them.

Sure, the federal government will try to assert it's power, but the truth of the matter is that they will not be able to do it. No combination of military and police power has the manpower or the discipline to carry it serious suppression of domestic disobedience should the population decide to ignore the government's wishes. Some folks think that "Blackwater" or "the Black Helicopters carrying UN troops" will do it for the government. Get real, Blackwater doesn't have the resources to hold a single medium-sized city. As for the black helicopters, hell, can anyone show me a UN mission that worked?

So, without the federal government being able to either bribe or threaten us effectively, what next? I see tax revolt to the Fed as one of the first steps. This will be a good thing, it will force the government to first start cutting off the bribes, then will force the government to start defaulting on its bonds. Remember, begin with the bankers and the foreigners first on the defaults.

Once that train has left the station, then it will be time for the State governments or perhaps regional entities to start coming to the fore. Local governments will also have to step up their work ethic and clean up their act. This is going to be hard on some folks, these levels of government have become a group of nanny-state crybabies, screaming for the Fed to help them at every step, now they are going to have to break their suction with the giant federal tit and start doing something themselves. Oh, they will thrash around for a bit, but they will get the hang of it.

The key is remembering that the centralization of the continental state is dependent on the flow of cheap energy and cheap money. Now that the end is near for cheap oil, the continental state simply doesn't have the tools to survive. It will wither.

We won't sink into chaos. There will be hard times, there will probably be some wars. Hell, if the countries of Europe (BTW, I see the EU collapsing too) can live through the all the wars they have lived through and still remain intact, so can we. All we will be losing is an overweening Federal government. Hell, it might even be an improvement.

Buying plastic

I had a compost bin...purchased in my salad days of high wage employment. What a dumbass I was. Let's get something straight, plastic is a strange material, it really isn't that good at all the applications that it is used for.

So now you can figure out what kind of bin I had. So now it is going downstairs to get some mesh screen that I have and to the cull pile at home depot to pull out some cut chunks of 2x4. I figure that this will be a job for two boys who are bored on their summer vacation with me offering sage wisdom and generally unwanted advice.

Anyway, back to the point. Take a look through your house, and take an inventory of the crap you have. Pay special attention to the cheap crap that you have amassed. It is all usually injection molded plastic crap. You know that the crap is going to break at the most inconvenient time.

So, my recommendation today is to start purging it. Most of it you don't need, it is just crap you bought when you had more money than sense. If you can do without it, just throw it away, or use it until it dies and replace it with something well made, or sell it to some gullible fool at your next yard sale. If it is actually something that you need, replace it with a well made unit using metal, or glass, or ceramic.

The days of cheap are over. Manufactured items may very well start becoming more and more difficult to afford as the economy finds its natural state. Plastic is oil, we used it for everything so that prices could be lowered at the Wal-Mart, but even that is ending now. You will not be able to run and replace cheap with cheap, you had better have something that will last.

One of the things that we have to change is our attitudes. When we purchase something, it should be for a purpose and it should be well made. Too much of our massive pile of stuff is impulse buys and crap. You guys have it in your house, it is all over my house. We need to have less and have stuff that is a once in a lifetime purchase that our children argue over when we are dead.

This is one of the best things the Dead ever did, I would recommend listening to the whole thing, more than any song I know, it defines today's world.

How we will get through

The big issue that we have to deal with is; how do we build a real economy?

Down here in the trenches, everyone knows that the "service economy" is a crock. The truth of globalization is that we made rich people richer. We were lulled into thinking that we were above a decent days work for a decent days pay. As a country, we started to feel that we were to good to do actual work, that our job was an endless excel spreadsheet doing analysis of trends. Hell, the real problem with illegal immigration is that every American seems to feel that honest work is above his station.

Hell, what pisses me off is when I hear some idiot talking about the "lazy Mexicans". Face it folks, most of these guys can work most Americans into the ground. They don't ask for the sun, moon, and stars for wages, and they don't need their asses kissed every ten minutes as part of a self-esteem plan.

Get used to it guys. We will have to go back to work. Not this sanitized, white collar crap, but get down to it work making things and selling real services. Now I am less than pleased with this idea myself, but it is for real. As a fat old man, it looks like I get to experience the joy of working myself back into shape. It will be good for me.