Lovely Spuds

I think more than any crop, potatoes give you the best bang for the buck. I will always keep at least a third of my garden in potatoes and if times are good, I will give them away.



A commercial farmer can get about 17 tons per acre. Hell, the worlds record is 32 tons per acre. Now you aren't going to get that kind of yield, they spray the fields big time with all kinds of nasty crap. But you can sure get 8 tons per acre out of your garden. Now, I realize that most of you aren't gardening an acre, but for an example, I can usually get about 15 pounds out of every plant that I put in. This year my total yield was 172 pounds for the 12 plants I put in.

What is best about them is that they are so dang easy to grow. I really think that I spend less time with my potatoes than any of the other plants (Don't get me started about carrots). The real issue is storing them.

Now, if you are like me, if you are just gardening as a hobby, you will eat the potatoes fresh dug and new. Man, the combination of butter, salt, pepper, and potatoes is a gift from god. While things are holding together, this is the way to go. If times are looking rough and the potatoes you are growing are part of preps, then you want to handle it a bit differently.

First, you have to let them go in the ground for a lot longer. The ideal is to let them stay in the ground until after the first frost and the vines have died completely back. Then you have to sort them and pull out damaged ones and ones with "stuff" that don't look right. Then you get to sweat them by putting them under some burlap for two weeks out of the rain.

Now that the potatoes are ready to store, you have to put them in burlap sacks. Don't listen to anyone who tells you otherwise, burlap is the best for this use. It lets the air in and helps keep the potatoes longer. I guess that you could use good cardboard boxes, but I would use waxed boxes and make dang sure that I wiped them out well with a chlorox solution a couple of days before you put the spuds in them.

Then you have to store them in a cool dark place. If you have a root cellar, your life is good. If not, just do the best you can. The warmer the storage, the shorter the storage time.

The potatoes that you will get won't have them yummy thin skins that everyone loves so much in new potatoes. Instead they will have think, nasty tasting skins that will help the potatoes last.

Content

You know, some people see the doughnut. Some people see the hole.

I have been gazing into my own navel of late. This nirvana thing seems to be eluding me. It is difficult to keep your eyes on the prize in this society. There are just too many things to distract you.

But what most folks out there think that what we strive for is happiness, but I would think that happiness is a very transient occurrence that only happens occasionally. We here in America are especially vulnerable to the siren call of happiness. In a sense, that is why the big corporations are powerful and we are in the mess that we are. We tried to buy the stairway to heaven.

Because to strive for happiness all of the time is a losing game. The truth of the matter is, happiness is a mirage, a brief interlude where things are going just right and Mr. Murphy is no where in sight. Needless to say, most people don't achieve this state all that often.

Contentment is a more achievable goal. It is what is truly possible in this world, and in a sense it is almost diametrically opposed to happiness. I think that the best analogy is the difference between good sex and a good marriage. Good sex is great, it puts a smile on your face and a song in your heart. But no matter who you are, whether a porn star or just a schmuck on the street, it can't really take up that much of your life. A good marriage is a different matter altogether. Sex occurs, but the frequency decreases as the years go by. The marriage is instead taken over by the pleasant day to day contentment of being with a loved one and creating and maintaining a common life. Is sex great? Absolutely. But how many marriages based on sex truly last.

So the key to surviving the coming storm really doesn't center around your preps. They will center around your attitude. If you think that happiness is your goal, you will probably fail and die miserable. If however, you try for contentment, and try to lead a simple, virtuous life within the physical constraints that will be placed on you, you are going to get by.

And in that span of storm years that we will have facing us, you will find the stretches of contentment and the moments of happiness that will show that you have had a good life.

This one is great

Watch This

Problems Involved in Chowing Down on Lotuses

I am not without sin, let that be known first.

Let us begin this encyclical by referring to a recent post by Michael Panzer over at Financial Armageddon called "Red Ink Trickling Down". OK, now that we have all read the starting material, lets begin dissecting the article. In these sob stories, the businessman go out, gets greedy, and sees a way to make beaucoup money for his imagined future of golfing and pederasty. So he goes to the bank and says "lend me the money, and I will pay you more than you lend me". This is the way that the world works in the sadly flawed world view that is being discussed.

In the discussion, Michael Panzer seems to think that the act of taking out credit for this expansion is the most natural thing in the world to do in a business setting. There is the underlying current of emotion that the act of the print shop owner walking through the banks doors and signing a promissory note is a virtuous act. It is the bank squeezing the poor disconsolate shop owner that was evil.

Well my friends, the print shop owner was a greedy fuck who unwisely tried to hasten his access to the promised land of wealth. Why couldn't he make do with his old operation for a while, reduce costs, and save the money for the new operation? Why wasn't that discussed? Why didn't he implement a piecemeal plan of expansion by bits and pieces to achieve the production gains that he so obviously didn't need?

The take home lesson from this little morality play is that the entire system is tainted. The idea of incremental savings and slow organic growth is considered so hopelessly passé that it is no longer discussed by serious and thoughtful writers like Mr. Panzer. It is out of their realm of comprehension. The use of credit by industry is considered almost a sacrament. The use of credit versus savings has made nearly a total victory, with the adherents of savings being assigned to the same lunatic fringe that the phanatiques were assigned in 16th and 17th century England

This is where the problem truly lies. Our society is hopelessly addicted to the rapid and ultimately self-destructive use of credit. We feel that rapid growth is our birthright and the use of credit allows us to have things NOW. We seem to constitutionally incapable of slowing our growth and personal greed to a sustainable level. And it is only when we manage to learn to live within the organic limits of the world that we will manage to break out of the self-destructive cycle of credit-boom-crash that western societies have been engineering for themselves.

One of the standard responses that one hears to "how's it goin'" was, for a bit, "Living the dream".

Just remember what is the true substance of dreams.

Your Call

I love reading John Michael Greer over at the Archdruid Report . He writes very well, and I am covetous of his ability to turn a catchy phrase. His articles are well thought out and and qualify as essays.

He has got me to thinking. Maybe I should post less and put more effort into the individual posts. Perhaps if I reduce the number of posts per week and do longer, more in depth posts, I could do better. Hmmm.

I will think about this. If I can, I will also try to put up a poll

Trading

The best place to find decent information on the current state of the economy is on the trading blogs. Good stuff this. The folks are bright and capable, the conversation is brisk and intelligent. Reading them is a joy. Mish, Michael Panzer, Yves, and Jesse are all witty, cogent, and write superbly. Please take your time to read them, you will not be disappointed.

But when you stand back and look at it, the actual things that they talk about is really kind of odd. They are really talking about second or third level abstractions from the true economic activity of the country. Now perhaps I am an uneducated rube, but to me economic activity boils down to folks creating goods and services and selling them and the using the money to buy goods and services from other folks (while reserving a little bit to buy equipment and a tad to go into savings).

So these guys are concerned mainly with buying share of companies which employ folks doing economic activity. So they are one level of abstraction away from true economic activity. I can live with that, but they really aren't producing anything. They are merely allotting capital in a more or less rational manner.

Then you have the folks who buy mutual funds. These folks buy shares of people who buy shares of companies which employ folks doing economic activity. Another level of abstraction added.

You can go through the process with banks (the way I figure it, two steps of abstraction), hedge funds (three), derivatives (four), etc, etc. etc.

Maybe it is just me, and I am certain that this question will infuriate the free-market fundamentalists, but shouldn't there be a more rational way to run an economy?

-end-

A Cheerful Refutation

Dorcas' Daddy wrote a comment on one of my recent posts (Cassandra), and unless I am mistaken, it was a gentle reminder that speaking out has it's own merits, and that not speaking out can lead to a greater tyranny.

The trouble is, he uses the same tired quote about the beginning of Nazi Germany.

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

I am sick to death of this quote. It is not applicable. Maybe if someone would have passed it around in Cambodia in 1974 it might have had an effect.

The quote itself is applicable to a rising totalitarian empire. What we are looking at here is the dying gasps of an overreaching dying empire.

Why is it that in the USA anyone or anything that we dislike or we are afraid of has to be brought back to the simplistic and black and white of the second world war and the defeat of Nazism. It appears to me that this is no longer a valid construct to use to describe the current state of affairs.

Give that shit a rest. Start discussing instead the problems faced by Rome in the crisis of the third century. The reforms of Diocletian are much more pertinent. Look at the vagaries of the Late Sung Dynasty.

But for Christ's sake, not everything in the world can be related to Nazism.

(BTW: DD, I haven't forgotten your shiny silver eagle, will send it to you early next week. Keep reading, keep commenting, and don't be offended when I disagree)

Stealin' from a Thief

Mayberry wrote a good post the other day. I have been thinking about the credit card idea ever since. He is right about the idea of credit cards as evil. But it is an odd evil, not so much evil in its own stance, but rather something that allows the worst of men to come to the fore.

Credit is a dicey thing. The ancient prohibitions on usury cross any number of cultures, the Muslim and Christian cultures never thought highly of it. It is a subtle slavery, a backdoor means of keeping you on the straight and narrow and working towards the goals that the creditor sets.

But in our society, we have sufficient wealth and freedom that we have loosened the bonds between the lender and the borrower. The main reason that people keep up with their credit is the loss of face inherent in not keeping up with the Jones'.

Well, we are in a transition point in the society. Everyone is at or beyond the level of prudent use of credit. The financial sector has grown too fast and big and now holds the bag on a country of debtors who can't keep up. Currently the problem is in the housing sector. The next sector to fall will be the credit card sector. As times get worse, people will start walking away.

Right now, not keeping up your credit payments is anathema, but as things get worse, it will become common and accepted, and eventually it will be seen as what it is, just stealing from a thief.

The trouble is, when you steal from a thief, there is a good chance that the thief will try to get nasty. The big banks (and you all know my opinion of banks) will use their pet politicians to try and enact laws to keep you in thrall to your prior stupidity. My guess is that they will succeed in passing the laws, but fail in enforcing them.

So in nutshell, here is how I see it. The country went into too much debt. We can't pay it back. We will default. The lenders will try to bind us to them. They will fail. The country will be a lot poorer in material goods. The government will have to ratchet back on its promises. People will manage somehow.

So lets get on with it.

-end-

Homo Economicus

I think that it is time to have a discussion on the nature of freedom.

What I have been noticing in the past thirty-odd years is that somehow folks have been so jaded by the incredible amount of freedom and material wealth allowed us that they have been steadily narrowing their sights to focus on some very marginal activities and treating minor transgressions of those marginal "freedoms" as a cardinal sin. As I stated yesterday, not everything puts your feet upon the slippery slope to Nazism and Fascism.

More importantly, folks have been heaping more and more importance on "economic freedoms". The idea that being rich is somehow equivalent to being free.

This damaged and sadly mistaken idea was popularized by that old fraud Milton Friedman in the 70's and 80's. He had his little PBS show to tell the boomers (as anyone who reads this screed knows, I place the problems that we are in now at the feet of this pathetic excuse for a generation), that they could have everything that they want, and everyone can be rich, and the money that you make is a symbol of your freedom.

What an asshole.

When I consider the nature of freedom, I cannot with good conscience assign financial success an importance beyond a secondary or tertiary input. What is important to me is the access to knowledge and free thought. By concentrating on the desire for material wealth and social status within this society, people actually limit their freedom of thought and freedom of action.

You see, I cannot imagine a society based on economics as being truly free. Economics is necessarily a zero-sum game. All the posturing that we have been doing about the unlimited possibilities of the internet, the global economy, the idea of a platform economy, are all based upon the idea that you can get something for nothing. As you are seeing now, that misconception is being rather rudely brought to heel.

At the end of the day, a society based on an individual's personal wealth will always degenerate into a mirror of the Ancien Regime with its nobles, it's priests, and its peasants.

So to me, all the squealing about the ban on short selling or whether or not the government is going to far into the economic sphere is nothing but some folks being seduced by an illusion. What is being attacked now in the sphere of Wall Street and finance is the idea of wealth being available to all, and that wealth is deserved by all.

So give up your dreams of a fairyland of golf and material goods. Look instead for your freedom in the ability to have discussions such as these. Read Machiavelli and Hobbes, read Friedman and von Mises, read Erasmus and Luther, read Schirer and Hitler, because your true freedom lies in the thoughts in your head, not what is parked in your driveway.

-end-

Always Remember, Never Trust A Banker

Never trust a banker. They are all about privilege and taking care of their own.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aUj_9.k13q7s&refer=home

The Invisible Hand

Again, I am ragging on how the free-market fundamentalists enshrine the writings of Adam Smith without really having read the original work. In a real sense, Smith's work and the New Testament Have a great deal in common. Both are widely quoted, they are invoked as rationale for bad behavior, and they are usually badly misunderstood.

Consider the concept of the Invisible Hand. In current market orthodoxy, this is seen as kind of like the hand of God. It is the idea that the market makes everything right in the end and will lead us to a nirvana where all the chillun's got shoes. When I read the original, I got the distinct impression that Smith was talking about the Law of Unintended Consequences. That if you jacked around with the market, you would probably not get the results you were aiming at.

Now, all of the free market fundies have been squealing like stuck pigs about what has been happening in the markets. But the truth of the matter is, we are in a pickle because the markets haven't been anything but rigged for going on forty years now.

The FM fundies are mostly bitching because things are changing. We are substituting the market being messed with by government instead the group of Wall Street Weinies who have been hosing us since Ronnie Reagan set up the temple.

But from the view down here, it doesn't look as there is much difference. We po' folk are gonna get screwed, all that is being discussed is who gets to go first. But the folks who are standing in line to loot our pockets are probably not going to have things work out the way they have it planned. The invisible hand will insure that their best laid plans will gang aft agley.

To a Mouse

By Robert Burns

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

-end-

I wonder when they will run out of bad ideas

I have been reading quite a bit about the money that the administration is trying to steal from American citizens.

My god, these people have some nerve.

Maybe I am unsophisticated, but what the hell are we getting for this money? Paulson and friends want to spend our money buying shit for better than market prices in order to spoof the economy into thinking that all is well. In other words, what they want is for the game to hold together long enough to get out of office and have the whole mess fall apart on someone else's shift.

There is a huge amount of bad stuff out there. 700 billion can't bring it all in, What they want to do is make sure that their banking buddies at the club have as much of the crap as possible taken off the books of the banks at the taxpayers expense. Because remember, Paulson and Bernake are first and foremost bankers. They worked for banks before, they work for banks now, they will work for banks after they leave office. They will make sure that their own bread is buttered quite well, thank you.

I am hoping that congress flushes this idea. But remember first and foremost that this is an election year, and our elected official's collective IQ goes down into the single digits this time of the electoral cycle. Don't get your hopes up.

CK Michaelson over at Some Assembly Required said it best

"Buy bonds. Grab up financial stocks. Either things will soon recover smartly and you'll be set for life, or they won't and the loss of a few bucks will be dwarfed by all your other problems."

My messages to Senators Cantwell and Murray

Senator Cantwell:

This administration has never done anything correctly. Please do not give them 700 billion of the peoples money so that they can continue not doing anything correctly. Sooner or later you have to look at the incompetence of the administration in your deliberations.

I know that things are bad. But handing 700 billion to this group of bozo's would be like handing a bottle of whiskey and the car keys to a teenager.

Oh, by the way, we are well and truly fucked now

Man, is it just me or is the government getting a little big for its britches here?

It would appear to me that they just wrote an IOU for a couple of trillion dollars and started handing out the money to their buddies on Wall Street. Unfortunately, they kinda have power of attorney and, when you read the fine print, they signed they agreement with the US citizenry holding the bag afterwards.

I think that things may hold together for a bit yet, but this kind of move usually signifies desperation. The market rally following this move is beyond my comprehension. It is kind of like some folks are saying "Whew, thank God, the Government is stepping in, now things will start going right!"

Needless to say, that phrase doesn't appear in my lexicon

Keep prepping, keep your eyes peeled.

Update @07:52

I think that they are getting into this now....The credit card is burning up

NY Times article


-end-

Cassandra

It would appear that the folks in the doomer community may have been right in saying that the sky is falling. That is a bummer. But now we have to talk about what comes next.

OK, let's say for a minute that the fewmets are in fact striking the fan. Bad news that. Now the most natural thing in the world is for us downtrodden of the lunatic fringe to mount a podium and explain how we knew it all along and if only those idiots had listened to us, everything would be hunky-dory.

Well my friends, I would suggest you hold onto that thought like it was a fart at a prom. There is nothing positive that can happen to you by saying it at this point. The best thing is that you will be considered an ill-mannered boor. The second is that people will believe you and get pissed off that you didn't try harder to stop it.

The worst thing that could happen is that their little pea-brains will figure out that you did in fact have it figured out and probably did something to make it better for yourself (read here: your preps). Once they figure out that you may be the proud owner of good preps, they and their close associates may come over for an impromptu inventory of your basement.

So, if stuff is going down, my advice is to shut up. Keep your head down and listen more than you talk.

-end-

Oscillations

Up and down and round and round.

It seems to me that when a system starts displaying the kind of volatility that we have been seeing, you are looking at an increasingly unstable system. That the finance system in our country is going through this kind of gyration is a cause for worry.

The banks are falling like flies. The guv'mint is queuing up to stick its nose further into the problem and that can't possibly be good. I think that it is time to get some good old cash out of the bank and squirrel it away. If you owe money to the bank, stall, it may be the bank won't be there in a bit.

Maybe things will settle down. We would be fools however, to count on things coming to that pass .

Prep on.

-end-

Wolf

This is not the end of the world. But the world is going to get a lot poorer tout suite.

The big boys are scrambling. The big boys are panicking.

Keep buttoned up. Keep prepping and don't do anything silly.

My sister and I have been laughing hysterically about a statement some government idiot made during the Lehman talks. "We have reestablished moral hazard" says the idiot.

Sad part is they then sold it for 85 Billion.

-end-

Things are strange

Folks:

Stuff is happening so fast that I don't know what to write about, I am absolutely paralyzed by the number of things that are occurring.

I'll get back to you later in the week. I need time to watch and figure out what the hell is going on.

I do think that it is time to fill up all of the propane tanks and make sure that I have enough fuel.

Tomatoes need harvesting. Need to pull up the potatoes.

In other words, keep an eye on the big picture, but keep up on the little things.

Urban Farmer?

I have been woolgathering lately about the possibility of setting up a system of garden plots in the city to create a "farm".

The city is filled with unused space. You can find it anywhere. The key is how you would be able to manage a system of distributed small plots. We have a tendency of thinking about farmers as lantern-jawed white guys sitting in their combines and bringing in the wheat harvest. That isn't gonna go away, but it sure is gonna change.

Most of the fruits and vegetable that we enjoy here in the city were probably grown down in a mega-farm in the imperial valley, loaded on a truck, and shipped to where we live. I can't say that I see this as a viable long term solution.

But I do see a solution where a person might be able to "sharecrop" a bunch of garden plots in his area to produce vegetables. A percentage of the yield would go to the landowner as payment, the rest would go to the sharecropper as his cut. A booth in the Saturday market or a route of paying customers and access to vegetables would be the sharecropper cut.

Now don't get me wrong, this would not be a way to "live the dream". It would be damn hard work. But it has the advantage of low capital outlay and access to foodstuffs outside of the current "iffy" system of agriculture and distribution.

-end-

Stuff has been happening, time to review

My posts have been getting thin and spotty lately. I guess that I have to work harder on getting a schedule together.

Anyway. I am thinking that it may not be a bad idea to talk about SHTF scenarios when the best best option will be to stay put and ride it out. IMHO, this grop will constitute >90% of all plausible scenarios.

I think that one of the main attractions of the TEOWAWKI is that you won't have to go to your damn job the next day and you will finally be doing something interesting. But now lets talk about the unfortunate situation where your piece of the world manages to stay intact enough that you will be able to follow the general outlines of you present life while things around you change.

In a SHTF scenario like this, you will probably need to pay more attention to personal security. This doesn't mean going to an open carry idea. But you will have to watch arond you and your home a lot more closely than you do now. I think that I would concentrate on mundane things such as hardening my residence enough that getting in is more of a chore than the bulk of folks are willing to attempt.

The other thing that you will have to do is figure out a foraging scheme that matches the current reality. Unless it is a catastrophic event, the means of getting provisions will be there, it just might not be something that you are used to. I have no hard and fast thoughts about this, It is just something that you will have to figure out as things unfold.

I have already spoken about money and specie. Have several fallback positions of exchange and barter ready.

Water storage may become important. I assign this a lower probability than most, as most places will bend more efforts to keeping the water running than just about any other task. But review your filtering and purification methods.

Fuel may well become a serious issue. Keep your tank topped up.

Just a checklist for my own brain. Other thoughts would be appreciated

-end-

rules based animals

The new job is already providing me with interesting tidbits.

So today's preps discussion is blindly following the rules without question.

Kids Nowadays

I am always talking about my friends. Such is the price of being my friend. Along with the scintillating conversation, good beer, and excellent food at my place comes the possibility of your ideas being discussed (and usually dismissed with prejudice) on a public forum.

Gaius (from here on in, they always will be given Roman names to make them sound noble), is of the opinion that the "kids nowadays are worthless". He piles on every bad trait possible to a human and, most damning, he accuses them of being too fond of their cell phones and video games.

Seeing such calumny makes me rise to the chillun's defense.

My feeling is that these kids (let us consider the age group 10-30 as the group) are in fact different than we were. In truth, most of the bitching that you you hear from the older generations is usually begun with the phrase "when we were kids". So what you have is a bunch of oldsters sitting around, sucking their gums, and reminiscing about the good old days.

And you know what? They were pretty good days. But the reason that they were good is that we were burning through our descendants share of the world's resources just a quick as we could lay our hands on them. So now the kids that we are raising are looking into the future and seeing nothing but a train wreck ahead of them. They have a whining, narcissistic, and greedy set of parents and grandparents (the boomers) that will be sitting in their retirement homes and demanding all that the country produces be given to them for their golden years.

They will be inheriting a world with fewer natural resources and lots of other people in the world having the gall to think that they should have a share of the pie. They will be inheriting a country where the jobs have been outsourced to God knows where. They are already saddled with a truly mind-numbing debt and a government that is attempting to grab more and more power with less and less accountability.

All of these things have happened on our watch.

These kids have got to clean up our mess.

So give them a break. Think about it, we fucked up just about everything, why in God's name would they want to be like us?

-end-

Cash?

TEOTWAWKI can take any number of forms. As I have been discussing lately, most of these forms are gradual, with a mundane, workaday kind of flavor to them. But, consider the other options. At what point does the breakdown become sufficient to begin to infringe on your daily living style.

Most of us have a tendency of using electronic cash for a whole slew of things. Pay all kind of bills and daily bread kind of purchases, or we use checks. I see this for of payment being the most friable. I can't say for sure, but if the phone lines are down and folks can't check on funds at your bank, these payment types are not going to get you much if TEOTWAWKI hits.

Cash is good. For the run of the mill SHTF situations, can't beat it. Keep some about. But as our government gets more adventurous in the financial sector, things may come to pass that cash will buy you things, but it may becoming more suspect. Be aware of the possibility and keep an eye out for news.

Silver is great stuff. Years ago my Dad told me that a silver quarter would always buy a gallon of gas, that a silver dime would buy you a loaf of bread. It is still true forty years and a passel of weirdness later. It is small, easily recognized, and people will talk to you if you have it in your hand. There may come a time when the same may not be said for cash.

Gold is the big dog. The trouble is that it is almost too much value in a small place. A gold eagle is sexy, but the reality is, it is an invitation for folks to come knocking with weaponry if times are shitty. I have some, but I am careful with who sees it.

Trade goods are great. My favorite is whiskey. The worse times get, the more people need a drink. Me too.

So think about the savings that you have and the form they take. All of these things should probably be addressed one way or another in your preppin'.

-end-

Got a Job (Finally, 56 weeks later and halfway through my savings)

Goin' to work for the guv'mint. VA Hospital to be exact. It ain't my first choice, but no one else is hiring.

So lets talk about the realities all of us will face. Jobs will be a while coming back to America. It took us 25+ years to debone the country of that pesky manufacturing. Does anyone in their right mind think that it take less to rebuild it?

So, I am grabbing what was offered. One of the realities that you will have to come to grips with is that you had not better turn up your nose at any job. Because without a job your preps become an asset that will dwindle to nothing, and probably quicker than you planned.

Still gonna poke around while I got this job. Because I have no idea how long the gov'mint will have money to deposit into my bank account. Because what you do to bring in the filthy lucre will be an integral part of your preps. I am still trying to figure out a means of bringing in money that is below the table and below the radar.

So it is time to put my nose down and get back to saving money, converting it into gold/silver/preps, and living my life.

-end-

Getting over it

One of the things that I do when I get my preps is to look at them as sacred.

I think that it is a variation on the hoarding theme. I have a pile of stuff that will save me when the time comes and it is sacred stuff. I go and genuflect in awe at the edifice that I have crafted. Life is good. I am a stud.

Then this damn rationality comes and gives me the slapping around that I so richly deserve. My preps are not a monolith. They have to be part and parcel of a system of living that will allow me the flexibility to weather storms.

So now I am going to spend some time devising a system of use and renewal. The preps will have to be more fully integrated into my daily life. It isn't a difficult change, but it is a change. Menus will have to be changed and recipes modified. Use of equipment will have to be brought into the cycle and the preps themselves will need to evolve to correct for oversights made when I first devised the "plan".

So, after the football game tonight, instead of loafing and drinking beer, I think that I will go downstairs and figure out how to bring things into use.

-end-

Dinking around with the look

Trying to get the blog looking right is the sign of an obsessed, sick individual.

For some reason I am being especially persnickety today. I should leave this computer right now, go down to the basement, do laundry, and organize my preps.

Wait.....maybe I can try this, maybe it will look better.


Arghhhhhh...I gotta get a life


-end-

The Archdruid Report: No Different This Time

The Archdruid Report: No Different This Time

Just in case you haven't already read this.

The view as a boomer

OK, I am guilty as hell about this, but I am a boomer.

Unfortunately, there is not a thirteen-step program for this malady. Even worse, after taking the first step (recognition of the problem), there comes a precipice, nothing you can do about it, mute embarrassment all around.

So I am fifty-four years old. I have always thought that the way that my age group acted was bizarre, taking out too much debt and buying things they really could not afford. I won't even start to address how odd I thought the governments behavior was. The whole generation seemed to be playing out the theme for Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant", without the ending epiphany.

Don't get me wrong. I went out and did some foolishness myself. In the 90's I came to the conclusion that the system knew more I did. Did what was expected, paid a harsh price.

So now I am sitting in the waiting room with my generation. Let's be brutal here. We are getting old. As a society, we have been mouthing banal platitudes about "the golden years" and how people don't lose anything and they are in their prime in their sixties. It is a load of crock.

The boomers are the generation whose main expertise is Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Yes, there are welders and steelfitters and tool and die guys and railroad engineers in the cohort, but they are all trying to figure out how they can get a couple more years out before their body breaks down. Nearly all of them live on ibuprofen to get through the day.

I feel that tomorrow's world will be different in one big way, you will probably have to put in more physical labor than you do now. The percentage of folks physically making stuff and actually working will go way up. There will still be needs for middle managers, but they will be the engineers and the smart boys. Mid-level junior mailroom engineers will find their job prospects somewhat constrained.

But that is then. The ending for this part of the big game that the boomers presided over isn't here yet. The nudges that will take us to the next world will take about 20-30 years and the greater bulk of us boomers will be well-digested compost by then.

So our main task to aid the transition will be a passive one. We have to realize all the different ways that we have failed and get the hell out of the way.

I think that this election kind of points this out. McCain is the vote for folks who don't trust the boomers and look to the old guard. Obama is on the tail-end of the boomers and is not really recognized as such, so he is the choice of those looking for new blood.

It is even more telling that the ultimate boomer poster children, Billy and Hilly and Big Al were rejected before the big game. These, along with Mitt Romney are the boomer's boomers. The aging love children and the clone of Gordon Gecko. If you got these four together in the same room, there would be such a concentration of boomer essence that paisley and bell bottoms would spontaneously appear out of the continuum.

So fellow boomers, I would recommend that, like myself, your keep your little mid-management paper shuffling job. It will be there for a bit yet, and you are too old and self-absorbed to be taught anything useful. Save your money ruthlessly and prep like hell. Your preps and your savings might be able to help you through your retirement.

But mostly, we need to get out of the way. We need to recognize our faults and our mistakes and teach our children not to make the same. If we grow up now, maybe we can become adults at the same time our children do.

What if we did triage?

I wrote a long discussion yesterday about defaulting on the national debt. During the course of the article, I became depressed and threw it away. It was just too damn depressing.

But when I woke up this morning, I still came to the conclusion that we should do a partial default.

We know where the bonds are. We know who has them. Other countries are less important than we are. The math is plain. If another country or an entity in another country holds our debt, we default on those bonds. If a multinational company that moved overseas to avoid taxes holds our bonds, default on those.

If a tax-paying, social security number holding, real live American holds the bond, they get the money. If a US chartered bank holds the bond in its reserves, it gets the money. All pension funds get their money

In a word, if you ain't one of us, tough shit pal. When you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. When you owe the bank 10,000,000 dollars the bank has a problem.

Defaulting on the big multinational banks would also clip those bastards wings. Fuck 'em. We would be able to bail out the US depositors with the money we save defaulting on the bonds. Some US banks would survive. We would get by.

The real end of the day take home message is that we got in wayyyy over our heads. There isn't any way we can get out. Sometimes the most honorable thing to do is admit that you are bankrupt and take the steps necessary to fix the problem.

Coitus Interruptus

I am ecstatic that Gustav missed the mark and didn't do that much damage. I am pleased as punch that we seem to still be dodging bullets in the economy.

I don't want shit to go bad, thank you very much.

But there sure is a lot of folks out there who seem to be genuinely disappointed by the fact that the world hasn't fallen apart yet. Old Jimmy Kunstler is foaming at the mouth waiting for the world to go to hell. Matt Savinar over at the Lifeafterpeakoil site is disconsolate that we aren't fighting rats for food yet.

Being a cheerful doomer is a lot more satisfying. The truth of the matter is, there is a small but significant chance we might somehow manage to steer our way through this mess. I don't assign it a huge possibility, but the truth of the matter is, we might and that is the possibility that I am rooting for (Please note: I am a Raiders and Cubs fan).

I'm still prepping though.

Grand Cycles

My best friend Locutius and I always have the same drunken, intemperate discussion. Come to think of it, we enjoy it so much that we repeat it nearly every time we see each other. Granted, we discuss everything else in sight too,but this one is always good for mock outrage and persiflage.

The discussion is whether the course of human history moves in and upward trending line (his view) or it is cyclical (my view).

Of course he is wrong. But I guess I will try to give him some credit. Taken from the point of view of a person in America at this time, if you choose a time frame of say, less than 70 years, the point of view might be valid. But there is the rub. History considers 70 years just barely worthy of notice. You might even say that 70 years is a single data point, and as anyone is science knows very well, if you generate a theory from a single data point, you usually have a pretty bad theory.

But that attitude, when it is taken up by an entire culture, is a recipe for instability. Boomers like me have never had it rough. We have never lived through a lean time. Oh yes, all of us will give some horror story about the obstacles we have surmounted, but usually, they are personal tragedies, taken on individually, and usually self inflicted. We have never really gone through anything resembling hard times at a national or cultural level.

That lack of experience, and the short-sighted inattention to detail has got us into the mess that we currently inhabit. By never having dealt with hard times as a culture, we have become decadent. A culture of grasshoppers. No savings, no problem. There will always be enough, the government will provide.

We are due for some retrenchment. We have to consolidate and throw away a bunch of trash within our society. We just can't afford a constant rise anymore. morally, economically, as an empire, we have to do less and think more. If we don't, I doubt we will like the results. Of course, we probably won't like it if we do.

The Kum Bai Ya folks have landed here.

It sounds simplistic, but no matter how I analyze it, the blues appear to be the discontented leftovers from the 1960's. As I talk with the blues I come to the realization that they are the disgruntled kids of the same suburbs that I came from. But these are the folks who actually read and paid attention to Sylvia Plath. They are the kids that never learned to take the chip off of their shoulder when they found out about the crap that middle America dishes out.

These folks have designed a new world order (read here: Nancy Pelosi's Democratic Party Platform) to take the place of the one that they don't like. Unfortunately they really don't know what the hell they are talking about. The world that they have designed to replace our current reality is one where the sharp corners are padded and everyone wears a safety helmet.

But this world that they create and keep trying to shove down everyone's throat is kind of scary. They state unequivocally that everyone is equal, yet it seems to me that there are as many levels of ability and worth as there are people. Their biggest problem is the triumph of form over function. Political correctness is just the tip of the iceberg, what is really wanted here is thought control.

They have created this brave new world in their minds. If they are given sufficient power, they would have no compunctions about forcing this bizarre fever dream on the country in much the same way that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge attempted to force their visions upon the people in Cambodia.

Luckily, these are usually the soft-science folks, the marketing pukes, the petty bureaucrats, and lame-o teachers. As a group they are pretty damned ineffective. They have fed greedily on the leftovers from people who actually do something for a long time now.

The trouble is that when everything has to slim down a little because of changes to the world order and the world economy, their pieces of the pie will become correspondingly smaller. They will become like a group of rabid attack wiener-dogs, unable to pay for their Volvos and with nothing left in their ethical investment funds.