Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

מנא ,מנא, תקל, ופרסין

The financiers that have feasted on the carcass of our country need to be brought to justice.

Folks, the money is gone. It could be argued that it was never there in the first place. I fail to see any connection between the productivity of this country and the shenanigans of Wall Street. They slice and dice things, add their 10% fees, and do absolutely nothing useful. Then they bring out the bull throated cry of the thief "free markets and capitalism is the best system in the history of the planet".

What they really did is sliced and diced the heritage of future generations to sell us crap we didn't need.

The writing is in the wall, we have been weighed and found wanting.

You cannot trust a bank

My family is pretty recent immigrants, I am second generation. My great-grandparents and grandparents came over from Italy and worked in the coal mines until they got their stake saved up. My grandfathers worked the coal mines, my grandmothers took in boarders and did laundry.

They bought their farm in 1932 for $7,000 cash. None of that money ever saw the inside of a bank. The money was earned and saved in a big coffee can underneath the oven under floorboards in the kitchen. All of my family hated bankers with a grand passion. I still do. If you look at it, the only reason that I grew up on a farm rather than in a mining town is because my Grandparents had this clear vision of what banks are. The chances of a bank taking their money and collapsing with it were pretty high at that point in time.

We are sliding into the first stage of Orlov's collapse continuum. Let us get the reason out there in the open my friends, it is because the greedy fucking assholes in the banks tried to set it up so that they would own everyone and everything through the magic of credit and low monthly payments.

What I love is the way that the media (who, by the way, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the greedy fucking shits) have tried to break it out as bank and non-bank, Wall Street, Investment banking, brokerage, etcetera, ad nauseum. But in the end, the fucking assholes are the same greedy shitheads that drove the country to the brink in 1929.

Anyway, back to my family. My Nona would never go to a bank because they were "stesso come la mafia" (same as the mafia). This idea came back in spades in the 1990's and 2000's. The banks paid off their other employees, the Congress of the United States, to pass a law that made bankruptcy a thing of the past, and hired the federal government to make sure that the lumpenproletariat never missed a payment. Then they decided that there wasn't enough margin just screwing American lumpen, they decided to gut the country's production sector and move it to third world countries where they could repeat the process for the poor sorry bastards there.

In the end though, the fin of this sorry and sad cycle is the collapse of the financial sector. But you know what, maybe, just maybe, that is not a bad thing. Maybe now we can push to get the banking sector driven to its knees. They have nothing in common with you and I, and our pain is their gain. I say now we should take them down now that they are weakened by their own greed. I think that we should re-regulate them in a serious way. If any bank, US or foreign, owns a US bond, it should be defaulted on. Plain and simple. Fuck 'em. The collapse will be painful, but so will watching them line their pockets with what remains of our savings. Let's get real folks, they have it and have no intention of giving it back.

Like it or not, the world banking system is a huge parasite with a great public relations machine. Lets kill it.

Just a short post today

Working on a longer piece presently.....

Move along, nothing to see here

Gust Front

Just spent some time reading a post from Mayberry where he legitimately talks about his sense of foreboding.  I think that where we are in the process of breakdown is similar to the meteorological term "gust front".  It is that point in time where there is a lot of gusty winds whipping about in front of a main storm.  When I was growing up in Utah, we always knew a storm was gonna hit soon when the wind started going all different ways and we could "smell the salt".

I understand completely where he is coming from.  The little man whom he speaks of in his post has been talking with me for quite a long time now.  Sometimes he makes a lot of sense, but he doesn't live in the same world of kids, family, and community that I live in.  He says to me "run for it now, get thee to the hills".  Hell, if I were solo, I would probably listen to him.  But, I think that a better example would be my Grandpa.  When he "smelled the salt", he would just patiently start buttoning up the work that he was doing, getting ready to get the equipment out of the rain.  That is what I am doing with my preps, getting the equipment out of the rain so that I will be able to use it later.

I guess that I am different from a lot of the folks on this ring of blogs.  I am not planning to go anywhere except in the extreme case that I am forced (against my will and probably at gunpoint) to go refugee.   I am a product of my world.  I actually feel a sense of responsibility for what will be happening here.  So I will stay here and work to ameliorate the problems.  Hell folks, there is a working society in Sadr City.  It is dangerous, but it is a society.  We can at least do that well.   

Interregnums are tricky things, but I honestly feel that a new society will spring out of the wreckage.  It isn't going to be easy, it will probably be dangerous, and it will take more work that we can imagine, but it is a job worth doing.  I would have my sons and grandsons  believe that I tried to fix things, even if I fail.

These crooked bastards

I was reading Der Spiegel and this caught my eye.

Under its bylaws, the IMF is charged with the supervision of the international monetary system. Roughly two-thirds of IMF members -- but never the United States -- have already endured this painful procedure.

For seven years, US President George W. Bush refused to allow the IMF to conduct its assessment. Even now, he has only given the IMF board his consent under one important condition. The review can begin in Bush's last year in office, but it may not be completed until he has left the White House. This is bad news for the Fed chairman.

So, Georgie the Puke wants to well clear when a disinterested party shows what a greedy, corrupt administration he has run...can't say as a blame him. Move over James Buchanan, there is now a new all time worst American President.

Big bite yesterday in the markets, pity the fool that holds a 401K

Man, the Dow down 350, oil at >$140.

The financial crack up is in process it seems, a lot of this really has no bearing on daily life (I was out of the market completely a year ago). But a lot of folks have bought the line of bilge that their 401K was going to bring them home to the promised land of Starbucks and golf courses. I think that they are now getting a look at what the boyz on Wall street had planned for them all along.

The 401K was the biggest boondoggle ever conceived. Wall street used your money to pump up prices on everything, pay themselves absolutely obscene salaries and bonuses, and then got out. You will note now that the folks who have put the most into this crackpot scheme (The boomers) are now lining up for their payout.....what's that you say Wall street?.....The money is gone?.....

I don't know that it was conceived in malice, but our financial system seems to have figured out how to use a poorly thought out plan (the 401K) to best set up the lumpen in order to strip them of the bulk of their money.

From James Kunstler's Blog

I found this a very interesting idea.

1. Beware the Electric Grid this Winter

Jim,
I just did the math. The Northeast Electric grid is going to collapse next winter.

A gallon of home heating oil is 130,500 btu's and oil burners are 80% efficient. At $4.50 a gallon 1000 btu's of oil heat costs $0.043.

A kilowatt hour of electricity is 3413 btu's and electric heaters are almost 100% efficient. At $0.15 per kilowatt hour (what we pay in NH) 1000 btu's of electric heat costs $0.044.

The public will soon figure out that plugging in electric space heaters and leaving the electric stove on 24/7 will be a cheaper way to heat the house next winter than to run the oil burner. Besides the electric utility companies are prohibited from shutting off your electricity during winter.

Sixty percent of the homes in New England heat with oil. There is no way the electric grid can handle the increased demand.

Might want to figure out some alternate heating/lighting strategies

Man, I would just love to hear some good news

The fact that I write for this blog shows that I think that the world is heading the wrong direction. I prep to get through the mess to the other side where we start rebuilding.

But the truth of the matter, I am really getting sick of this "death by a thousand cuts" routine that we are being treated to. I wish that either the world would pull its shit together or fall apart.

I hope for the "pull its shit together scenario" as using the preps we have in the manner we plan will be a lot less than fun. But, thus far, it doesn't seem that the world gives a shit about my opinion. So I guess that it will be "carry on" for a bit yet.

Progression

Consider the analysis of Dmitry Orlov on the serial layers of collapse possible to a country. Dmitry has excellent insights into the issues we are addressing in our culture. I don't always agree with him, but I have yet to be able to dismiss his views outright.

1. Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.
2. Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
3. Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
4. Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
5. Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.

Now, a lot of the time, folks seem to make the assumption of a "slippery slope", that if we start slipping, we will just keep going, without the ability to stop, all the way to cultural collapse. I feel that this fear is a best misplaced, and at worst, counterproductive.

I do not dismiss this possibility out of hand, but I do assign it a low probability. I feel a much more likely scenario would be stopping at one of the first four waypoints (If you wish me to wax specific I give the chances at 40%, 35%, 15%, 8% 2%).

As we proceed down this ladder, your preps are going to become increasingly valuable and difficult to defend. Be aware of this slope and keep a realistic assessment of where you are. I would think that your preps will be the most useful in stage 1 or stage 2, the risks to them are low and their value to you is high...life is good.

They will have higher value in stage 3, but this will come at an increased cost in potential danger. In stage 4, the danger and the value will be about equal. At this point here, you had better have a small cohesive group formed that is able to watch each others back.

If we in fact do proceed all the way to total stage 5 collapse, I would suggest that your preps target value may make them a net liability. At this point, a decision must be made to go the refugee route (always dangerous) or actually become one of the looters. In the case of stage 5 societal breakdown, the choices will be stark.

Above all, remember that you are in a continuous process of risk evaluation, the risk to you and your will rise and fall, keep your wits about you. Pay attention.

In Memoriam: George Carlin

His harshest, and unfortunately, most accurate routine


"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians,"

"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'"

We just took more than out fair share

I read the papers and I see “Peak This” and “Peak That”. I am really starting to to think that the work “Peak” is the politically correct rephrasing of what my my mother used to say to me. “You greedy little shit, you ate it all, now what will your sisters eat?”

There are people who say there is no peak oil. I find them to be almost tragic. Usually it is folks like my two brother in laws, mindless “Republican” morons who have found an intellectual home in a NeoCon vision of government repressing the people while handing the keys to Fort Knox to big business. They are trying to shovel as much into their greedy little maws as they can. They just can’t imagine for a minute that the party will stop.

But it appears that the number of folks on the planet, coupled with the rampant greed, is going to lend itself to quite a show. Consider this article:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article4193017.ece

This just adds another layer of complexity onto a world that is rapidly spinning out of control. Peak oil is here. Peak natural gas is close behind and that will have huge impacts on agriculture due to the fact that natural gas is the main feedstock for commercial fertilizers. All of the other critical materials are running short.

In other words, you had better work on your garden and your preps. Keep your wits about you and know the lay of the land. The current system is running out of it’s critical inputs, and when one of these inputs goes critical, the consequences will be a world that is a lot different than what we are currently used to.

Pay attention, risk is high.

PS: This is unrelated, but I just read this article and think that you all ought to take a look at it. Remember above all, your fellow man is as much a part of you as anything else around you...remember to be kind to folks if you can. Give to that local food bank, buy a bum a drink, tip your bartender.

Beer

Learn to brew beer.

Lets face it, there are going to be times where a drink will be needed. If you are a teetotaler, that is cool, but continue reading.

One of the things that will be needed is relaxation, if you brew beer, you can provide that. To yourself and to others. Handing a cold (or even cool) beer to a friend after a hard day work is an act of kindness, even if you don’t drink. It is also an excellent trade good. A six pack of beer for a couple dozen eggs or some meat is a great deal for both sides of the bargain.

The actual process and equipment isn’t that difficult either. Of course there will be brew nazis that will tell you that only the most intricate and expensive equipment is appropriate. Fuck em. The Babylonians brewed beer 5000 years ago, it can’t be all that hard. If you are spending more than $50.00 on equipment, you are probably going overboard. A good beer is easy. You aren’t doing this to show off to your buddies how cool you are...it is a part and parcel of getting by.

This week I am going to buy some basic supplies for a year of brewing. I am going to vacuum seal the crushed barley malt with oxygen scavengers, buy some bulk hops and parse them out, and have some yeast in the freezer. I am also starting to think about what it is going to take to maintain the ingredients. I have some hop plants out back, they didn’t grow this year, but that is not that abnormal, hopefully I can get some yields next year. Malting barley isn’t that hard, I just have to find some barley, and propagating yeast isn’t too much of a chore. I’ll update you as this gets going.

Start looking at the peripherals of your life. Most of us have sufficient preps to get by, but if we are going to thrive, we have to start adding a few non-basics to take the edge off the monotony.

For you other urban types......excellent