Please go read this over at Jesse’s

Notes from the underground

Big Cities, Cities, Small Cities, Villages, Rural

I think that we will need to begin to discuss how we foresee things will play out at the varying levels of material civilization.

Obviously around the beans, bullets, and bandaid crowd the view is different than the yuppie preppers in their gated communities, but what will be the pro’s and the cons for each type of prepper will be different. There are too many of us for all to consider the “back to the country movement. We will have to make a myriad of accommodations to the new realities that we are facing.

Big Cities

I doubt that NY will turn into the penal colony described by escape from New York anytime soon, but there may be a good solid chance that it will return to the seediness and decrepitude of the 70’s. Hell, they will probably be that much the cooler for it. NY has a tendency of making whatever it is cool. Read the new post over at ClubOrlov for an idea of what could very well be the New York response. Los Angeles is well and truly fucked, but then, who cares. Chicago will come out of it best, they still serve a useful purpose as a major entrepôt for the agriculture and manufacturing capacity of the midwest. The other really big cities are more marginal. Atlanta will rule the south and the big cities of Tejas will duke it out.

Cities

These are the Seattles and Nashvilles and Salt Lake Cities of the country. These are the ones I wouldn’t want to be caught in come the day. They are just big enough to carry all the problems of the big cities but without the power to dominate the catchment areas they will need to survive.

Small Cities (100,000 to 200,000)

It is my belief that these areas will serve as the drivers of where we are going. The are big enough to provide a active and diverse set of specialties to provide for employment and revenue but small enough to have a decent chance at providing for public safety. I really believe that these will be the resilient communities described by John Robb over at Global Guerillas.

Towns (25,000 to 100,000)

These here will be prey. Not big enough to go solo, just big enough to make a tasty target for governmental and non-governmental predators. Usually no significant or single-industry payrolls. Usually greedy and corrupt local officials. Good luck here.

Small Towns (2,000 to 25,000)

These might be OK….They are few and far between and usually remote. They are usually well populated by folks who really don’t mind shooting back. They didn’t move there to get rich, they are usually a good assortment of “just folk”. Might be the spot.

Rural

I am leery of this one. Isolation makes for easy prey. Unless you are seriously remote, this may very well turn out to be a bad place to be. You have to sleep sometime. Depends.

Taleb's 10 rules

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, gives his 10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world with dignity."

1. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2. Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3. It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5. Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.
6. Learn to fail with pride and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error by mastering the error part.
7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take 'no' for an answer (conversely, take most 'yeses' as 'most probably').
8. Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Cookies for snacks for the week

Since it is cold outside today and I want to warm the house, cooking is definitely in order. If you guys have kids, you know how important it is to have food around, especially with teenage boys. Gabe is so skinny that you can see every rib, but he can make a half pound hamburger disappear so fast your head will spin (what is starting to worry me is that he is now starting to eye my food. I can see the calculation as to whether he can take down the old bull and eat his food too. Thankfully he still thinks I can take him, but I wonder how long that is gonna last?)

So cookies are the order of the day.

• Pound of butter
• 3 cup packed brown sugar
• 5 eggs
• 1 cup sesame butter (look, it was huge sale $0.89 a pound jar)
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract
• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoon baking soda
• 5 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup dried cranberries
• 1 cup chopped walnuts (my only tirade today is to get rid of all the fancy electrical choppers/food processors/cuisinarts and just get a damn sharp knife and chop them up yourselves…it took me less than a minute)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. In a medium bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar and white sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the peanut butter, water and vanilla. Combine the flour and baking soda, stir into the creamed mixture. Finally, stir in the rolled oats, walnuts, cranberries, and chocolate chips. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto an unprepared cookie sheet.
3. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven, until the cookies are lightly toasted on the edges. Remove from the baking sheet to cool on wire racks.

And the kitchen was at 65 F the entire day.

What is going to be interesting

Everyone want government out of their hair.  Except of course when the government does something for them.  There is no one that reads this blog who is not accepting some kind of government money.  Mortgage tax credits, farm subsidies, student loans, food stamps, government jobs, jobs from government subsidized industries.  The list is near endless.  If you think that you aren’t, I would posit that you just have thought about it hard enough.

But pretty soon the “guv’mint” is gonna have to start axing some of the programs.  At first, the programs axed will be virtuous.  These are the least important and those with the smallest set of tit-suckers attached.  But by them being the smallest, with the least constituents, they will go down easy.  We will mock the scum who dared feed on such foul meat.

But, mark my words, sooner or later, they will hit something that you are sucking on. 

Now the question is, will you have a little class and let it go?  Or will you join the legion of squalling losers who realized that their favorite titty has run dry.

Goin’ North Dakota

Staying warm is a spendy thing. Unless I am completely out to lunch, it will probably get more so in the future.

With those antecedent premises, and an already too high electrical bill, I am going to discourse on the mistaken concept of central heating. The house I live in runs on a heat pump. These are one of the cheapest possible means of central heating available. It is still too expensive and wasteful by a long shot.

So this year we are heating the North Dakota way. We pick out a couple of rooms, heat them when we need to, and leave the rest of the house cool to cold and just pass through. We choose the kitchen as one of the rooms, it has a fireplace and it can be separated from the rest of the house with a simple curtain. Since I cook in 99% of the time, that heat is conserved. A $30 ceramic heater from Costco keeps the temp nice for the most part, and when I cook or bake, the room is toasty.

My room stays cold around, 40-50 F and I just sleep in there. The boys room has the TV and the games so we have a ceramic heater in there as well. It stays on at night until bedtime, then turns off when they are in bed. I turn it back on in the morning when I leave for work and I leave the heater on to keep the kitchen warm when they wake up. It limits the use of the living room, but the only thing there is the TV for football on Sunday.

When I think about it, this is how my friends in China live. I was always amazed about how cold they kept their homes. But the kitchen was warm there and everyone congregated to make it even warmer.

The winter won’t last forever, we will get through a couple of months of inconvenience and we will be plenty warm enough. Hell, because we are stuck together, the boys and I are talking more than we used to. All in all, these might actually be the good days.

The Weapons Probably Won’t Work

More than anything, it seems to me that the real issue is that no one is sure what the hell to do. But, like all good Americans we say go on anyway, lets take a shot.

So far we have managed to piss away a big pot of money. But guys, lets not be complete rubes here, the “money” that was pissed away was never really there. The federal government said “look, you guys in the banks are fucked, lets pull you out”.

They didn’t start up the printing presses and run off some bills, and you know damn well that they didn’t head down to Fort Knox and grab some gold to give to the banks. No, instead, they had their computer tell the banks computer that there was a different series of zeroes and ones in the banks computer than they had the previous millisecond.

Poof, according to the geniuses that are running our treasury department and our banks, that is how a problem is solved.

I wonder why it isn’t working?

Hopium

Apparently, there is a cynical as shit writer in Chicago who labels BHO’s flavor or snake oil as “Hopium”. My sister, who lives up in Glenview informed me of this today and for a little while, I did the expected and sneered. “What kind of fool could believe that hogwash?” sez I. But then Sis threw me for a loop.

Apparently she and a close friend sat down together and watched the whole inauguration dog and pony show together. Her friend (my nephew’s piano teacher) is blind so Sis described everything to her. They were both so happy that the change had occurred that they “suspended disbelief” for a couple of days and they seem much happier now for the process.

Now, let me explain how this is so unusual. Sis is a serious, dyed in the wool, Republican in most things. She moved out of Utah into the South Side of Chicago and clawed her way up. She knows money, and she is more than aware of the corruption and dishonesty everpresent in the Chicago machine politics that spawned BHO. She comes from the same white-trash world as I do and took home the same basic lessons as I did. Hell, she is even prepping, she now has half of her yard in gardens and fruit trees. She is betting on another great depression.

So how the hell did she buy the snake oil?

So I put on my shoes and hat and went on a stroll though the neighborhood. It is the same old place. When I got back, I finally figured out what she was so happy about.

In the end, the change of power symbolized by GWB and BHO and their wives sitting down for a friendly cup of coffee and then wandering a couple of blocks to transfer power from the old to the new just shows that the system still works well enough to have a chance. It might not be a big chance, it may very well just fall flat on its face. But a chance is there, and that is more than King George and his merry band of morons had to offer.

The continuity of government was handled well, the failed ex-president walked out gracefully. The new president was as smooth as silk.

So Sis got a couple of days of rest from worry. She has a brief moment of hope and happiness and a rare and precious moment with a close friend. It isn’t much, but maybe there is a chance that that moment and others like it, in their stubborn displays of resilience and hope will allow us to energy and courage to hold the politicians and oligarchs to the high standards which will allow us navigate the storm.

And if Obama doesn't deliver on the promises that he made, maybe that will give her the anger to use that well-deserved rest to good purpose.

Chickens and Eggs

A polemic to the Archdruid (BTW…Would you guys please buy a set of cathedral doors!)

I put up what I still think is an excellent article by the Archdruid the other day. At first I thought that it was an epiphany, then after more thought, and some prodding from a reader (thank you very much Överlevare), I came to to the point that perhaps it was a bit more complicated that the Archdruid presented it. Since this should occur with nearly everything that you read, at first I didn’t think too much of it. But as I started to chew on it, I started to think that maybe the way that behavior at the political level is maybe nothing more than a reflection of the status of the culture.

From the article by the Archdruid, the implication was that Fascism and Naziism grew out of a loss of civil political discourse in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Överlevare countered that they were in fact bastards, why not call the kettle black?

So now to the title of the article. What came first? I have finally come to the conclusion that The Archdruid is tragically wrong in this issue. I am a fan of the Annales school, where history is presented as a long-term evolution of societies. To say that the level of politeness in political discourse during such a vanishingly short period had anything other than a cursory influence is just plain wrong.

It is my feeling that the level of vitriol in political discourse is a symptom, not a root cause. To mistake it as such could be dangerous to your ability to gauge the level of danger in the society you are living in.

What we are going to be living through in the next 20 years is the beginning of the deconstruction of Western Society. This deconstruction will not be done in the cafés of the fifth arrondissement, it will be done at the barricades in any number of places. Neither those who have most benefitted and have the most to lose, nor those who have been left behind and who will have to carve out their survival from those who currently control those resources will maintain any advantage by “playing nice”.

Playing nice and politeness in politics is a function of the wealth of a society and thus its stability. To posit that one can stave off bad things by only indulging in “polite political discourse” is a mirage.

The only thing I want to stress now is the absolute need for courtesy in your personal sphere. This is even more important when times are bad.

Good old Neil

A lazy day, baking and writing and watching the snow melt.

The best read of this week is over at Ashes, Ashes. Please take the time

From the Brother in Law

Actually, it is the ex-brother in law.  But since he led to such things as Braudel and has excellent taste in fiction, I usually listen to him.

Here is an Adam Smith quote that I heard this morning on Christa
Tippett's "Speaking of Faith" radio program, which caused me to pause
mid-shave and ponder. Very relevant to you recent blog posts I'd say. I
copied the quote from the "Speaking of Faith" web page linked below.
I had to look up the word OPEROSE, an adjective meaning "wrought with
labor; requiring labor; hence, tedious; wearisome".

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/buddhaintheworld/pa
rticulars.shtml

"The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition,
when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich.
... It appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of
beings, and, in order to arrive at it, he devotes himself for ever to
the pursuit of wealth and greatness. ... Through the whole of his life
he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he
may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is
at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he
should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable
to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it.
... Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and
operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to
the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must
be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of
all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush
in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. They are immense fabrics,
which it requires the labour of a life to raise, which threaten every
moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and which while they
stand, though they may save him from some smaller inconveniencies, can
protect him from none of the severer inclemencies of the season. They
keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always
as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear,
and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death."

--Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments 1759

Space

We just take up too much space.  For some reason we here in the good old USA want huge houses.  They are inefficient and costly.  They are vulgar status symbols showing the neighbors what large wankers we have and how well we are suited to mate. 

I think that the dinosaurs that we currently live in will be liabilities soon.  New houses are usually particle board and vinyl abominations that will bleed you dry in order to heat them heat in the very near future. 

So now I am looking for a smaller place.  Much smaller if it is possible.  The ideal place would be in the 800 sf to 1000 sf range with an area for a garden.   A wood stove would be ideal.  A basement would be especially nice.  I would like to rent for a while until the dust settles.  Buying in this market would be a nightmare.

Buying in close to the city center would be optimal.  Like it or not, the cops will defend these areas ferociously…the burbs may very well be left to their own devices.  An established community is a good idea.  Folks knowing folks is your best chance at surviving. 

Gotta look at transit.   Being close to the main core transit lines shows wisdom.  Keep the car gassed up and tuned up and ready to cut and run, but rely on mass transit to keep the day to day moving.

Wherever you live will have its own set of costs and benefits.  I think that perhaps if you took a hard look and a rigorous inventory of your needs, you will be able to establish the infrastructure that you will need to get through the cold times.

Back to the basics

If you are to get through the cold times, I feel that it will be essential to define what it is you need.  This will have to be done at every level of your life. 

Because in a sense, we will be looking at a period of time where possessions and stuff will have to pull their weight.  If you are dragging something along because it “is valuable” but it serves no purpose, that thing may very well be the weight that pulls you down.

Look at things and establish their true worth.  What is more valuable, a cell phone or dried preps?  Good boots or your wide screen TV? Blankets or a couple of bucks in your 401K?

It may very well be that the storm times will leave you swimming in strange currents, trying to get to the shore.  You will need to choose things that will help you get to the edge, not drag you to the bottom.

So: Why couldn’t we

The concept of moral hazard is a slippery little bugger.  Usually when I hear folks spouting it, I put my hand on my wallet and listen very closely.  Usually the person spouting has an idea that his behavior has been all virtuous and others have, or in the near future will, use him sorely.

In today’s America, I believe that I would be pretty hard pressed to find a person who was without fault in the debacle we are experiencing.  Like Diogenes searching for an honest man, I think that I would have to get a lamp and a walking stick and go walkabout.  The most likely sources would be kinda odd sorts, Amish and Mennonites and Hutterites would figure prominently.  There would be a sprinkling of aged and new hippies, some genuine constytooshunalists, and the occasional odd duck.

But these folks would be in a serious minority.  One in one hundred would surprise me to no end.  So with that as my starting premise, why don’t we call it a push and have a jubilee with forgiveness of all debt?  No credit cards, no mortgages, no derivatives, no CDO’s, no SIV’s, no hedge funds.

Poof, no one owes anyone anything.

Start again.

 

Could it be any worse than what we are going to have to do anyway?

From The Archdruid…..His best yet

The Pornography of Political Fear

Quoted in its entirety and with nothing but complete respect

Please think about this folks

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

In most respects, despite the media hoopla, yesterday was an ordinary day. Amid brisk January weather, one of the world’s large nations marked the installation of a new chief executive with the usual round of ceremonies and celebrations. The transition was orderly to the point of dullness; the retiring president and his replacement had coffee together in the White House before the ceremony, and afterwards walked together with every evidence of cordiality to the helicopter that would ferry one of them back into private life.

I am not sure how many people noticed that the clatter of rotor blades as that helicopter took off put a period at the end of some of the most extravagant rhetoric of the Bush era. For the past eight years, a great many voices had insisted that the weary Texan who left the White House yesterday was about to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, cancel all future elections, order dissidents to be rounded up and interned in concentration camps built by Halliburton, and a great deal more of the same kind. If, dear reader, you were one of the people who spent George W. Bush’s presidential terms insisting that these things were about to happen, grab a beer from the fridge and have a seat, because we need to talk.

The rumors I’ve just described were very nearly an article of faith across large sectors of the American left in the years just past. Hundreds of websites and a sizable number of talk radio programs presented them as matters of simple fact, and vied with one another to accuse the Bush administration of the most diabolical intentions. Those who pointed out that the purveyors of these ideas never quite got around to offering the least scrap of evidence to back them tended to be dismissed with scorn. Yet the fact remains that all those claims were quite simply wrong.

It’s a bit uncomfortable to be the one who points this out, because I am no fan of George W. Bush. I voted against him in two elections, and have never regretted either vote. He and the neoconservative movement that used him as its sock puppet did a great deal to damage the country I love. Yet it’s always seemed to me that a person should be criticized for the things he does, not the intentions that his worst enemies impute to him. Bush was certainly a bad president; he may even, as many of those enemies have claimed, be a bad person. Somehow, though, it seems to have been forgotten that these points do not justify telling lies about him.

The enthusiasm with which those rumors were minted and spread is all the more ironic, in that some of the people who participated most eagerly were among those who complained bitterly when right-wing pundits and websites meted out the same treatment to Bill Clinton during the latter’s two terms. I think most of us who were around at that time heard more than our fill about UN troop convoys rolling down American highways, black helicopters crisscrossing the skies, and Clinton’s personal plan to put America under the yoke of a tyrannical world government that would send gun owners and evangelical Christians to concentration camps. Those stories were just as unsupported by evidence and disproven by events as the equivalent claims about Bush, or the flurry of similar stories already beginning to circulate about President Obama.

The last two decades, in fact, have seen the rise of what might best be called a pornography of political fear in America’s collective discourse. Like other forms of pornography, it flattens the rich complexity of human interaction into a one-dimensional world in which abstract shapes and motions stimulate unthinking reactions from the brainstem levels of its viewers. It thus debases what it claims to describe, even as it pursues whatever raw sensation it evokes further and further away from any human reality. The payoff of the pornography of political fear is different from the one experienced by those who have their hands down inside some less metaphorical pair of shorts, but it is every bit as reflexive, and its results can be just as messy.

The nature of that payoff deserves some discussion here. Hate in contemporary America has much the same status given to some other words with four letters in earlier times: a great many people affect to despise it, and condemn those who practice it publicly, while thirsting for the chance to engage in it themselves. The pornography of political fear appeals precisely because it provides a culturally sanctioned opportunity to indulge in the forbidden pleasures of unrestrained hate. The intoxication of feeling justified, and even virtuous, while wallowing in hatred for an irredeemably evil Other is a potent force in today’s culture – and it may yet become an equally powerful factor in tomorrow’s politics, with disastrous results.

An earlier post on this blog explored the way that terms such as “fascist” have been stripped of their contexts and turned into all-purpose epithets with no other meaning beyond “I hate you.” This common pattern of rhetoric makes it difficult to draw any useful lesson from the bitter history of 20th century totalitarian governments, but the effort needs to be made, because certain features of contemporary culture display unwelcome similarities to the conditions that helped those earlier nightmares claw their way into waking life.

One of them is precisely this habit of allowing pornographic fantasies of political evil to pass unchallenged as reasonable discourse. In the decades leading up to the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, rhetoric no more heated than today’s torrents of partisan vilification spread through all sides of the political controversies of the day. This did much to create an atmosphere of collective hatred in which it no longer seemed unreasonable, to far too many people, to single out one group within society as the source of all its problems – and set out to remove those problems by exterminating their supposed source.

More than two thousand years ago, much the same process was mapped out in precise detail by a long line of Greek philosophers, who explored the ways that the republics of the classical world gave way to tyranny. The key to the process, according to many of these ancient witnesses, was the rise of bitter factional struggles over wealth and power that spun so far out of hand that the machinery of civil government broke apart and the rule of a tyrant became the only alternative to chaos and civil war. In a nation where a noticeable number of members of either party don’t seem to be able to walk past a picture of the other party’s candidate without screaming obscenities at it, we are closer to that outcome than most people realize.

Such habits flourish these days because representative democracy has always been an easy target for its critics. Abuses of power and displays of rank incompetence happen in democracies and closed societies alike, but in democracies they are more likely to become public knowledge and can be denounced in comparative safety – those people who fling the word “fascist” at today’s democracies, for example, can do so without having to worry in the least about being dragged from their beds in the middle of the night by armed men in jackboots and hauled away to a prison camp. Since politics in a representative democracy requires a constant process of compromise among competing pressure groups and power centers, furthermore, it’s rare for any side to get everything it wants, and this breeds dissatisfaction with the system.

That in itself is no vice – reasoned dissent is the lifeblood of a republic – but when dissatisfaction festers into the insistence that one’s own side ought always to get everything it wants, and the habit of demonizing the other side for standing up for its own interests and hopes for the future, something has gone terribly wrong. It may be one of the bitterest ironies of the next few decades that those who label their political enemies as fascists, by that very act, are helping to build a climate of political hatred, and contempt for flawed but functioning democracies, that could make something like fascism inevitable in today’s America – and a future totalitarian state, it bears remembering, could as easily arise from today’s political left wing as from the right.
It may already be too late to avoid that experience. Still, the effort is worth making, and one place to start is a principled rejection of the pornography of political fear. So, dear reader, when somebody tells you that Barack Obama is personally plotting to enslave you – and you will hear that claim in the near future, if you have not heard it already – I suggest that at the very least, you ask for some evidence more convincing than the splutterings of a fringe media personality or a conspiracy theory website that made exactly the same claims about Clinton and Bush. If we are going to get through the unraveling of industrial civilization with anything like a functioning society, the bad habits of rejecting the claims of a common humanity, demonizing political disagreement, and projecting the shadows of our own frustrations and failures onto the faces of our political enemies, are luxuries we can no longer afford.

Freezer Backup

I am considering a do-it-yourself solar panel backup for my freezer. I am thinking that a solar panel with a battery and an inverter should be able to keep my frozen stuff frozen for a bit. I am not talking about long term storage here, but rather, a way to run the freezer in the case (very likely case) of blackout and brownouts as the power supply gets more constrained. Long term running of the freezer will take more effort.

There are some other things that I am planning. If the power looks like it will be going rocky, I will go down to the local Baskin-Robbins and buy up dry ice and toss it in the freezer. Once the dry ice is in there, a whole bunch of blankets to keep the cold in. I also keep a bunch of water filled milk jugs in there as beer cooler ice and to act as a thermal mass (the bigger the thermal mass, the longer it will take everything in the freezer to thaw).

If you haven’t already chosen a freezer, get a chest freezer rather than a stand up. When you open a chest freezer, the cold stays put. When you open a stand up, the cold flows out. Lots more energy use to keep it running.

If you guys are like me, you keep stuff in your freezer for preps. You gotta keep electricity flowing my friend. Better figure out a back up system and get it set up.

Google and other such oddities

I am thinking about getting rid of my high-speed internet and going back to the primitive use of a dial-up service with a local provider.  There are a couple of reasons behind this, some of them are mundane, some of them are complex. 

1. The money is tight.  Trying to squeeze all of my bills out of a GS-5 salary when I am used to living larger than that is quite the chore.  Right now $40.00 a month is $40.00 a month. 
2. A variation on the issues that I have brought up in the past with sewers being delivered into homes.  In many ways, high speed internet offers the same sewer in a different package.  By backing down to dial up speeds, I seriously limit the availability of YouTube, porn, and mass media strangeness into my house.
3. Google scares me.  They store all of your data and apparently has no desire whatsoever to get rid of it at any point in time. 
4. What does “high-speed” internet really offer me?  Does it make my life better?  Does it allow me to better raise my children or maintain my home?  Most of the answers to the critical questions appear to be “no”.

Any thoughts?

Gold Standard?

I took some econ classes in college long ago and far away. Some of the knowledge stuck, but most of it was sluiced away in the act of drinking beer with Bill, a linebacker from Eau Claire.

Thank you Bill for that kindness.

Now, this post is a discussion of fiat money and my take on it. From my point of view, it would appear that fiat money is a great thing provided you are sitting in a resource-rich, reasonably unpopulated world.

Because at the end of the day, fiat money is little different than credit in my mind. The desire to
expand the money supply is the equivalent of taking a loan out because you know that your new job will more than pay for it (or the expansion of your industry will make up the difference when you expand the money supply).

But I think that one of the basic FACTS that we are facing is that we are living in a constrained world. Peak oil is real. Overpopulation is real. The preponderance of evidence shows that global warming is real (I will admit to a little wiggle room here, but not much. I have a sneaking hunch it will not take more than one additional bit of evidence (solar input analysis) to push me over to the "real" designator).

So, in fact, there is not "better job" to pull us out of this one. So we should probably look at this idea (fiat money) as maybe not appropriate for us in the world as it currently stands. Now I realize that there are any number of folk out there who have designed economic systems ab initio to replace the sytem that we currently use, but usually these don't pass the giggle test. For something as important as their money, folks aren't going to go into a re-enactment of potlach economies or carbon sequestration credits. (just remember how well Thermidor went over in the French Revolution...most people need continuity, not radical change).

So in my mind, beer sodden as it is, it looks to me that in the end we will have to return to the gold standard. Oh, I am not like the gold bugs or my idol, the Mogambo Guru, but maybe the inherent constraints of a gold-standard monetary system is better suited to the world of less we will be inhabiting.

Yes

This is a very good article

Think on this for a bit.

Later note: I don't agree with the redistribution part, but it is still a good article.

Steve Waldman

The way that folks are looking at things

I think that the tide is starting to turn. I think that folks are now realizing that their habits and lifestyle these last thirty years were, in fact, a serious, perhaps fatal mistake.

Now we are sitting in a pretty precarious position. Because you see, folks won't want to give up any of the stuff and money and power and perquisites that they have amassed at every level of society. The financiers will want to keep their money. The politicians will want to keep their power, the lumpen will want to keep their oversized pickups and their football games.

So now, as a society, we know deep-down that we are going to have to give up quite a bit. No harm in that, we'll get by. But we won't like it a bit and we will get angry. We will go hunting for someone to blame other than that pesky bastard who stares back at us from the mirror every morning. So we will begin witch hunts and try to fix the blame somewhere else and on a different someone. That will make us feel as though we weren't a part of the fall, that somehow we were an innocent bystander, sorely used by our designated scapegoat.

But if we are truly adults, we will refrain from this. Because in true justice, blame is usually pretty well parceled out among all the parties involved, and there are very few who have lived virtuously in these decades of excess.

I'm not holding my breath.

False Flag

Could be an interesting week ahead.

Damn...it's chilly

So an ongoing experiment this winter has been to see just how little I can give the electric company to heat the house that I live in. In December I ran the heat pump and kept the temp low (55 F.) and was awarded with a dandy $186.00 electric bill. Well, up here on the mighty Columbia where electricity is cheap, that is not at all good.

So here in January I turned off the heat pump. We are now relying on two small ceramic heaters to heat the house when we are in it. So here is the skinny so far.

#1: Make sure that you keep your slippers and sweaters around. That is a huge difference right there.

#2: Cooking helps a lot. When you bake your own bread it really helps the warmth in the house. Firing up the oven will give you warm bread and warm heart. It doesn't really cost that much, an hour at 350F will burn up around 2-3 kW, cost you around a quarter, and raise the temp in the kitchen 5-10 degrees.

#3: Fires on the weekends will keep the house warm when you are in the house the most. An insert for your fireplace is a great investment.

#4: Blankets are nice to keep around, even downstairs. There was a reason for lap shawls and other such rot back in the old days. If you are pottering about the house doing chores, you stay warm. If you are trying to read or relax a bit, you get cold. A blanket/afghan over your legs and lower body makes you a lot more comfortable.

#5: Move around. You are a heating element yourself. Go up and down the stairs, pick up all the crap you need to pick up, bend over, clean the bathroom, sweep, mop, keep your house spiffy. When you are working you aren't cold.

#6: Beds are your friends. Because I have to wake up so darned early every day, I go to be early too. Warm blankets and comforters are great things. I think that I am actually sleeping a lot better when I sleep in a warm bed in a cold room.

All of this draws us back to an ongoing theme through all my writings. We will just be going back to a simpler time with less luxury. A good life does not need luxuries every day. When I talk with my mother about what I am doing, she just laughs and tells me that it doesn't sound any different that the winter's in my Grandparent's house when she was growing up. Granted, they were "poor" and it was the depression, but they all lived through the time and, even now, they seem to remember those times as being good.

Maybe we should start thinking that luxuries taken too frequently are a drug. I think that if you live within your means, when you have some extra for a luxury, it becomes that much more sweet.

So I will have a warm house tomorrow. Friends will be coming over and we will have four or five men drinking beer, three or four boys running around like idiots, the playoffs on and a big pot of chili on the stove. The furnace will stay off.

Now that is the way to heat a house!

A hard look in the mirror

This is a continuation on a couple of themes that I have been pounding on for the past couple of days. The main theme of sin is going be woven through this.

I would recommend starting out over at Wikipedia (please make a donation) for a quick review of the seven cardinal sins and why they were placed there.....that being done, we can continue onto how here in the US we have really done up the greed and envy.

Greed is the driver of our current problems. The corporations that have defined us as a country for the last one-hundred years are constructs of greed. Nothing more, nothing less. Their sole purpose is to accrue money. Oh, once upon a time, long long ago, they were out to make things that folks wanted to buy. But in the 1990's, that fuckwad Jack Welsh put paid to that nonsense. Currently a corporation is a nothing but means to make its management and shareholders wealthy at the expense of people and the environment.

Now if your goal is to make things that folk want to buy, it is a pretty self-correcting mechanism. If folks don't want to buy, you shrink. What you want is a constant stream of customers coming to your door so that you can make enough to eat every month. You make your stuff well, you become a part of the community, you control yourself, because if you don't, you won't have any work next month and the wife and kids will begin to complain.

But, over the past hundred years, we have moved away from this, we have moved into the desire for money.

Money is an odd thing. Unlike too much food or too much stuff, it is nice and compact and tidy. You really can't see how you can have too much of it. So when you shift from making things to making money, you shift into the realm of greed. You make too much stuff and flood the market. You make crappy stuff because if you have good quality, people don't replace it. You begin to screw your workers, because if you pay them money, then you don't have it. You screw the environment, because being careful where you dump your shit costs money.

The creation of a corporation sends all of this into overdrive. Here you sell pieces of yourself to other folks (put into another context, a whore does the same thing, but she is evil, you are an upright member of the community). Now, these folks who buy into your company are not interested in anything but what their money is buying them. They willfully close their eyes to your actions so that that you can increase their return on investment. Now the gloves are off. The pursuit of "shareholder value" as the first virtue and the lining of your own pockets becomes all important.

Now you start experimenting in usury as this allows good returns.

Damn, those pesky workers are bugging us for more money, why don't we fire them and get some Chinese instead.

You know how the rest of the story plays out.

But the real sad part about this is how many of us bought into the greed with our 401-K and our IRA and our dreams of a golden future. We watched Martha Stewart and we sold our souls and the freedom of our grandchildren for a life of comfort.

Watchword

It has become a watchword in our society. A secure future, a secure homeland, a secure retirement, a secure investment....the list goes on and on. Security as a safety net where we never need suffer the indignities that we see ourselves as above.

But the truth of the matter is that there is no safety in the world, never has been, never will be. We can pull away from the "nasty, brutish, and short" but it is always back there lurking in the background. Folks seem to forget that.

I guess that I am finally disillusioned by the feelings of my fellow Americans. It would appear that the need to keep the things "secure" has blinded them to all around them. But the blindness has led them into a trap where all is going to be taken from them soon. We are too wedded to the idea of kumbaya and holding hands and self affirmation to notice that the world is a dirty dangerous place. My sons will probably have to defend what we have, not go out and try to take from others as is the current custom.

We have become the lotus-eaters of legend. We are absorbed in the material things that populate our twisted view of happiness, unaware of the violence being done in our names to secure the supply lines. But in our lack of desire for anything other than safety and the sanctity of our "stuff" we have become less than what we one were. We spend the lives of our soldiers and brothers for the good of the hidden oligarchy who is siphoning off our future dreams. All we want in return is a gilded set of blinders that keep us from seeing the costs of our excess.

Roman mothers would once tell their sons to come back with their shields or on them. This tradition vanished. So did Rome.

Grievances

This is nothing but a list of grievances. Yours will be added if it suits me. Please feel free to send your grievance(s) as comments. Please word them succinctly and accurately. Rants are frowned upon, and if too egregious, will be publicly mocked.

One issue per proposition. Anticipated future grievances are not welcomed. I am not a fan of the concept of a "slippery slope".

Please send in your grievances

Proposition One
The United States government is no longer anything but an appendage of multinational corporate interests. The needs of the people are subordinated to the needs of the corporate entities. Whether one likes the words or not, Fascism or Corporatism define the nature of the American government since 1950.

Proposition Two
Simply put, the United States suffers from imperial overstretch. This overstretch is a direct consequence of the control of government by corporate interests. This overstretch and the military doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance as outlined in the Department of Defense document "Joint Vision 2020" and reflects an expansionary foreign policy bent on securing from their current owners and returning what are considered critical materials to the corporations by force.

Proposition Three

The control of the monetary and banking decisions of the United States have been abrogated to a consortium of foreign and domestic banks who are running these policy making entities for their own purposes...eg, the funding of the military-industrial complex. This is a requirement stemming from proposition two and is an ancillary profit center of the corporate interests outlined in proposition one.

Proposition Four
The government has, through its pointed lack of oversight on the medical system in the United States created a dysfunctional system that is ruled by pharmaceutical companies and controlled by a medical profession more concerned with profit than with the health of the society.

Proposition Five
These interests and the current Government of the United States have created such excessive debt and future obligations that it will be impossible to service the debt and provide for the other obligations without paupering the future generations.

A big, obvious problem

Guys: IMHO, this is why there are 20,000 troops being assigned to NORTHCOM

Green Chicken Tomatillo Chili

This is just a cooking post, though I will probably throw in some other crap just to keep you interested.

Today's cooking is based around the idea that buying in bulk and what is on sale and putting it aside can really give you a leg up on good food for the cold times. So what started today is a sale at my "little store" of #10 cans of tomatillos for $2.99 a can. Needless to say I snatched them up and started thinking.

When I got home from work yesterday I started going through the shelves to see what else that I had on hand. So at the end of the day I came up with the following.

Green Chicken Tomatillo Chili

1. Last night I started soaking 2 pounds of small white beans.
   
2. Went to the freezer and grabbed some of the Anaheim peppers that I roasted and froze down last summer. Microwaved them for a couple of minute cuz I was too lazy to go get them last night.
3. Stuffed three dried Anchos and three dried California peppers from the dried drawer and busted them up into my french press coffee pot and poured boiling water on them. Waited for about a half hour while they reconstituted and did some laundry.
   
4. Took a pound of salt pork and chopped it into little bits, put it into the bottom of a 10 qt stock pot. When it started getting crispy, I poured the water from the dried peppers into the pot and let it boil off (You lose a lot of flavor if you throw that water away).
   
5. Chopped up two onions, the Anchos and the Californias and sauted them in the good flavor of the salt pork and pepper water.
   
6. Ran the anaheims through a blender with five big old boullion cubes and a couple cups of water, threw that in the mix.
7. Tossed in a jigger of dried cilantro, a jigger of oregano, a pony shot of dried, sliced garlic,
   
8. Drained and rinsed the white beans and put them in the pot and filled with water until they were just covered. Let them cook for one hour at medium heat.
9. Chop around three or four pounds of cheap costco chicken thighs into chunks and toss these in the pot, let it cook for about an hour.
10. Filled up quart jars and processed at 10 lbs for 90 minutes. Had dinner with the rest and it was a big hit. Looks as though I have seven or so dinners in the basement "for later".
    

Bullshit

Yeah, Yeah, I Know, all that I have been doing lately is linking to other's writings reather than writing myself. But hell, they say if better than I do.

Bullshit

This one is good

Hey La, Hey La Dmitry's back

I haven't posted much because I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking lately.

There is the added stress of overtime (I need the money) and a sale on #10 cans of tomatillos ($2.99 a can!!!) that needs to turned into green chicken chili and bottled for the winter.

The best thing that I have read this week is an article by Dmitry Orlov over at ClubOrlov. Like all really good articles, it really pissed me off at first, then made me think, then I grudgingly agreed with the bulk of its premises. I am very happy and grateful that he is back to writing semi-regularly. I eagerly await his articles.

What kinda cheeses me off is that he managed to presage a couple of themes that I was trying to cover in the drafts that I have been working on. He also did it in a manner much more eloquent than the screed that I put out.

Damn Banks

When you read this article, the folks over at the Wall Street Journal seem to think that saving is the problem.

Please remember when you read this, that the folks at the WSJ are the folks that have been cheerleading for the catastrophic policies that have landed our sorry butts in the pickle we are in.

There will be any number of serious students of economics who will froth at the mouth at this next statement, but I don't think that credit is real and I think that the only money that you truly have is that which you have saved.

So I am saying that you need to start saving, real savings. You need cash on hand, not some zeroes in a banks computer somewhere. A little gold, a little silver. Maybe some trade goods that you think will be more valuable later than they are now.

Get out of debt and try not to indulge in too much self flagellation as you are doing it. If you really need to, put your savings in a tin can and tell the banks to go take a flying F#@%.

I cannot prove anything, but we aren't going to be getting out of the mess we are in either easy or soon. You had better have something put aside to get you through.

Thinking

Just pondering...Israel...Iran....Big Three....Rookie Prez...Peak Oil..Greater Depression.

Shit.

Time for a beer

God, It is amazing how some folks just have no sense of humor

Let's face it, Larry Flynt is a dirtbag. But he is too intelligent to be anything other than joking. I thought that the idea of a film "Who's Nailin' Palin", was just too rich

Read this

I think that this whole thing is too drenched in irony and it just tickles my funny bone....why the hell not?

Mish...take a breath, I think that it is a joke.

A shoot off the old Bush

Man oh man.

This guy is already taking pages from George the 43rd's playbook. Well, let's be fair, he is continuing in the bipartisan tradition of spending more money than you have.

So, after a couple of trillion in givaways to just about everyone, and a trillion or so being planned, it now appears that we are paying for all this largesse by throwing out tax cuts.

And the beat goes on

I think that RCBS is overkill

Tell me that this is not reloading taken back to the basics.

I love the simplicity.

Innovation

Now for another heresy.

Maybe new isn't good and we just might have to learn to make do?

One of the ends that we always hope for in our minds is that our intrepid scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs will use good old American know-how and think us out of the pickle we are in. I hope for it too. As I have stated before, fat, dumb, and happy is just where I like living my life.

We, as Americans, have been conditioned to dismiss the idea that an an existing system is good. New must constantly move in and displace the old, leaving the world better by the mere presence of the new. But most of the new that we have generated in the past fifty or so years seems to be somewhat suspect.

Life expectancy increases can be far more attributed to decent food, clean water, sanitation, and basic antibiotics not the "miracle drugs" that the current incarnation of the patent medicine salemen are hawking.

Finance "innovations" are being revealed as new-fangled Ponzi schemes with MBA's as the hustlers and the shills.

Globalization is an artifact of cheap oil and a transient, overweening empire. The bulk of the products developed from this frenzy are cheap, unnecessary consumer trash.

So the "new" that we have been conditioned to worship and that we have structured out lives around appears to be little better than the statues of l'Molech.

Maybe what we are seeing now is the truth as revealed by the Club of Rome a couple of decades ago. That there are real limits to growth. The hard part of this is that if we accept that there are limits and that we have a defined role, and that our mythos of infinite progress and the ascendancy of the new must wither.

What we will define to take its place will be interesting to see.

Something for every prepper

Yes, we all have guns. Let's see how useful they are without something to shoot out of them.

As a part of that, lets talk about reloading equipment. Now, a lot of you probably have a double ultra-sheen reloader that does everything but pick your nose. You dropped a lot of money on the beast and you still don't mention it where your wife can hear cuz' you know it is just gonna set her off again. This post ain't for you.

For the rest of us, I am heartily recommending the Lee Loader. This baby is a classic. Sit down for an hour and knock out 30 or 40 rounds while watching the sunset. It sure as hell beats watching Oprah. There really isn't a single thing to break and it makes just fine reloads. If you really feel motivated, look at their bullet molds and case trimmers. If you have one of these little babies, and a buttload of powder and primers, I think that you will be set.

A True Believer

I was reading Mish Shedlock over at his blog the yesterday. Now, Mish is a great writer and a wonderful source of news. I agree with a lot of what he says. Can't say enough good things and y'all should read him often.

But, Mish is a zealot. Where the Bible had Simon Zealotes, Mish serves the same function for "free market capitalism"(Mishes Free-Marketes? .....naw.... Not quite the same ring). I will happily continue reading him, and still heartily recommend him, but he is a zealot and this fact must be noted to be able to fit him into the more complex construct that is the real world.

I am mentioning Mish as an example of an occurrence in your life and in the blogosphere. That if you are not careful, you will end up with a out of balance world-view. Whether you like it or not, there are folks out there with world views and ideas that are different than yours and might not even be wrong. It may well pay for you to hear them out. Hell, Unitatis redintegratio was published in the early 1960's, us mackerel snappers been admitting you protestants might be right on the occasional issue since then, who knows, the liberals maybe have some things right...might be worth a look.

So go out of your way to read something that you don't agree with, pick it apart for the good in it. Fold that good bit into a more complex and evolving world view than "kill the bastards when they come for my stuff" that is the staple of the survivalist screed.

Because democracy isn't about being right, it is about compromising and living together. You can't do this unless you know your neighbor and can have some respect for his opinion.

A post out of a Comment

Relevelelrr left a great comment on the Zero Sum post from the other day.

The beginning and end to your questions is the first rule of economics: There is no free lunch.

What has lately been called free markets and capitalism were both violations of that rule. Ultimately, the no free lunch rule always reasserts itself in the same way you can only ignore gravity as long as you haven't hit the ground.

The free market is ultimately free of anything we can say about it that violates the free lunch rule. The allocation of resources demands optimization, and sometimes the return to an optimized condition can be a mean regression.

The free market is something you don't have to have faith in for the long run any more than you need faith in gravity. It is not optional over the long run, and smacks down appearances to the contrary in the short run.

Capitalism is planting a seed of corn and doing what it takes to harvest a whole ear. It has organic natural limits. If you plant one seed, but expect a hundred plants, you can't call that capitalism, but that's what's happened. Why not reclaim reality? It's just sittin there waiting.

I guess why I found this so appealing is his use of the concepts of organic limits and reversion to mean. Those concepts have been dismissed lately. This was due to the dot com boom and folks thinking that 20-25% boom growth was the right way to do things. The old 5-6% organic growth was gone, a new day had dawned.

Even big companies took up the torch of high permanent growth. Jack Welch at GE didn't do anything useful. He never fixed a companies problems, he never worked. All Jack Welch did is sold off companies that made useful stuff and went into the usury game with the rest of the corporate whores.

We will revert to mean. Things always revert to mean. But it sucks when it is a downside correction. So thank you again relevelerr for your comments and thoughts. I appreciate them greatly.

(As an aside, I also like the name. My folks from the old days took off running out of merry olde England because they were Cromwell-followers and Levellers, when the crown came back, they were a mite testy.)

A New Year

The trouble with resolutions is that they can never really be public. If you announce your resolutions, they become a cheap thing, a source of shallow conversations and meaningless discussion.

But you should spend some time on this day of Janus to consider and plan. Not the simple and easy surface issues that folks usually want to change, but the deeper changes that will grant you the wisdom, honor, and strength you will need to survive the darkness that threatens.

I am not going to act as an advisor here. The care and feeding of self and soul is an individuals' personal responsibility and I have little ability to offer cogent advice in such a strange land.

But please take this time to make some quiet and closely held resolutions to make yourself what you need to become.

It may very well be that your life and your soul will depend on this.