Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Apparently you can re-arrange the letters in “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan” into “my ultimate Ayn Rand porn”.
I have no idea if that’s funny or not. I kinda think of it as..well…promising.
This is going to be a very entertaining election year.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Really? Overthrow the .gov? Couldn’t they at least wait until after November to see how it shook out?
Well, they turned out to be more serious than 99% of the self-appointed ‘militia’s out there…they actually killed someone.
You know, I live in the heart of ‘anti-government extremist’ country. I’ve met the guys at the Militia Of Montana, I’ve met Randy Weaver, and I’ve met a lot of people who have the most fascinating basements and garages you will ever see, and I’ve read the literature, seen the movies and heard the speeches. My conclusion? These guys were not going to achieve their goals with $87,000 worth of ‘assault rifles’ and training camp. They would have had a better chance, several orders of magnitude better, if they had taken that $87k and bought themselves an election. Pick a personable, likeable, photogenic, squeaky clean guy who is on the same wavelength as they are and run him for political office. Then, once he’s in, work on getting him higher and higher up the food chain. It’s low risk, high reward.
Now I’m not saying you can’t change the direction of a national government through attrition…most countries in Africa hold their elections to the sound of gunfire and screaming…but when you get into First World countries the whole ‘we are here to liberate this country in the name of the people…’ nonsense just won’t fly. It’s hard finding a hundred guys who believe in something so strongly that they’ll give up everything they’ve built, including their lives, to storm the halls of power at gunpoint. But you can easily find a hundred thousand people who will fork over ten bucks to achieve a similar end result (the end result being change of government). Even way back during the American Revolution, if you look closely, you’ll see that money was a big, big part of making it a success.
I think you’re far more likely to achieve your political aims through greenbacks rather than black rifles, but thats’s just me. Sure, maybe someday it’ll come to that…but I doubt it very highly.
And, as the saying goes, ‘three can keep a secret if two of them is dead’. Forming your own super-secret armed ‘committe of freedom’ is just not going to work in an age when no one can keep their mouth shut. Oh, you may think to yourself “Ha, you’re wrong! Me and my cadre have been active for several years and we’ve never had a problem!” Fair enough. But when you and your buddies move on to actually, you know, doing stuff and one of you gets caught…well, I’m pretty sure group cohesiveness will plummet as everyone scrambles to be the first to take the deal the .gov will be offering to the first one to turn on his ‘comrades’.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
If only, if only……..Talk is cheap, man.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Some people, it seems, never learn. If you live an area that is prone to evacuations, wouldnt it make sense to stash enough gasoline on hand to get outta town without having to stop for fuel? Heck, you could even stage fuel at points along your proposed evacuation routes. But, some folks don’t ever seem to learn.
I’m not sure how I feel about price gouging. I’m against .gov telling anyone what price they can or cannot sell a product at. If .gov could jump on a station owner for raising prices on the argument that the public has no choice about the purchasing, then couldn’t ‘gov also force the station owner to keep the station open if he decided to just close shop entirely for the emergency?
This sort of thing is why we keep stored (and stabilized) fuel on hand. To my way of thinking, MPG x gallons stored / 2 = effective range. So, if we have 60 gallons on hand, and the truck gets 15 mpg, thats 900 miles, right? Wrong. I figure a 50% penalty ‘just in case’ for things like detours, backtracking, stop-n-go, idling in traffic, etc, etc. So, to my way of thinking, that’s really a 450-mile range.
Truly, I am amazed that people who would live in a region where an evacuation due to hurricane is likely would not have supplies and fuel in place for this sort of thing.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
A year-round 58-degree temperature would be a nice way to beat that Tennessee heat. I’m sure some sort of heat exchange system could be built to regulate the temperature of a house built nearby. But, man, think of the awesome fish farming opportunity…several acres of what is essentially an indoor lake. Obviously a man-made cave…but still….
When you step out of your car ,at the road ,on a 95 degree day, you can feel the 58 degree air hit you. As you walk into the front hole the ceiling is about 25 to 35 feet high(as it is throughout the whole cave) and goes back to the back ,I’m told, an 1/8th of a mile. It has some land inside the cave but is mostly a indoor Lake. It goes from 30 feet deep in some places to up to 2 feet. I have ridden in a canoe back to the back and it is pitch black. I am guessing that there is 5 acres underground in this cave. At this time there are Bass and Bluegill in the Cave, but I have ordered 500 Rainbow Trout.
Can you imagine the revenue brought in by making this a pay lake. The temperature is the same ,YEAR-ROUND, no matter what it is doing outside ,it is a constant 58-60 degrees. What about renting boats and fishing. Renting out to Cub scouts ,church and school events. The possibilities of making money are endless. You could camp inside the cave during a Rainstorm, blistering heat, or even a Tornado and not be affected. I have seen no bats, the cave is very clean and the water is crystal clear other than right in the front where the sun shines in and makes some algae. Don’t miss out on this tract.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Fella comes to the door yesterday, clipboard in hand, to take a survey for a political candidate. Among the questions was “What is the most important issue to you this election?” and he rattled off things like the economy, debt, jobs, immigration, etc, etc.
Among that list was jobs, federal spending, the deficit and the economy. To me, they all pretty much roll together into one big category of “the economy”.
I was talking to the wife later about the questions and she asked me why I said the economy. To me, that encompassed the most amount of things that directly and indirectly affected our lives. Bad economy? Higher prices. Bad economy? Higher unemployment. Bad economy? Business failures. Bad economy? Higher taxes. Bad economy? More desperate people.
Once in a while, I get asked why I would prepare with fuel, food, ammo and that sort of thing against what I forsee as an economic disaster. After all, if it’s an economic disaster then all you need to guard against it is an economic defense…such as a big ol’ box of cash and gold, right?
Nope. Here’s todays example..a fella laid off from his job comes back with a gun and shoots former coworkers. And although the story is still very fresh, and the details will probably change, what remains true is that in a bad economy more people are getting laid off, putting them under more stress as they try to keep their homes and their families together and some of those folks are just gonna snap under that stress and take some folks with them. And that doesn’t even include the folks who don’t snap but simply start knocking over 7-11′s, daylight burglaries and doing stickups at ATM’s to keep their houses they couldn’t afford.
So, indirectly, thats how a bad economy affects your safety. It creates a larger group of desperate and unstable people who at some point are just going to go off the rails and commit acts of violence. And this is why in a bad economy it isn’t far-fetched to believe that your preparations and plans against that bad economy should take into account some serious personal safety plans…like things that have triggers and magazines.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Well, that was fun while it lasted.
I can’t tell the future but, hey, it’s an election year with a lot at stake. Might be some folks are stocking up against the possibility of continued economic fail.
Of course, it could also drop back below $30 as people see ‘$30′ as their ‘sell trigger’ and unload a buncha the stuff. Who knows?
In the meantime:
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
For my birthday, a lovely gal I know got me one of these (Goal Zero 24001 Light-A-Life LED Lamp
The light comes with a connector to plug it into the proprietary batteries the company sells. However, they also send along an adapter to allow you to run it from anything that has the usual ‘cigarette plug’-style outlet. I happened to have an old ConSci portable power pack laying around and hooked it up to that. (And, to go off on a tangent, that ConSci PPP is pre-Y2K and still seems to run just fine for a little battery-in-a-box portable power supply. Very rugged, very durable…so, of course, it appears to be no longer available. No big deal, easy enough to make your own similar device.) The light gives of the usual sterile cold white LED light but it gives enough to light up the bunker enough to get around. A nice touch is that each light has nine feet of cord and a socket to daisy chain more lights. Well, that certainly sounds interesting..let’s explore that.
Turns out that this week the local CostCo is having Goal0 as one of their visiting ‘roadshow’ products…you know, they clear off a section of floor, the sales rep sets up a little kiosk or something and starts shilling his product. So I went up to CostCo and price checked. On sale at CostCo for $26.99…that was about ten bucks off what Amazon had them at. Ok, I picked up three more and brought them home, giving me a total of four. I daisy-chained ‘em all together and strung them across the length of the house. Killed the lights, flipped a switch on the ConSci PPP and -behold- light. Not just light, mind you, but good light. See, you stand in a dark room and stick a flashlight or other small portable light int he corner and the room looks…stark…and downright brutal, like some sort of interrogation chamber. But, two, three or four lights spread around the room actually lights it up so it looks rather homey. I was quite pleased with how these lights worked. I need to get a few more and then need to start doing some battery math. Ideally I’d want a battery that could run five lights for eight hours a day, for several days, without needing to charge the battery. Hmm..actually, let’s see how this would go… each light is 3 watt at 12 v. so it’s .25 amp. Five lights = 5 x .25amp= 1.25 ah. Run those five lights for eight hours a day comes out to 10 ah/day (8 x 1.25). Run those lights for five days would be 50ah. If I didn’t want to discharge my battery below 50% I’d need a 100 amp battery. Or a 200 amp battery if I didn’t want to discharge below 75%. That sound right?
After playing with these lights for the last couple of days I gotta say I’m pretty pleased. The ability to daisy-chain them together is a huge, huge plus. For setting up a small, self-contained, ‘renewable’ emergency lighting system these things look like the way to go. I need to scale up the battery to some sort of low-maintenance, non-venting type, set it up somewhere out of the way, get a decent solar panel to keep it topped off, and I think that’ll do it. As I said, I just need to sit down and figure out a buncha battery math.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Hazlitt’s ‘Economics in one lesson’ is, I think, an excellent book. It’s very dated material, since it was written shortly after WW2 when the economy was very different than it is now, but it’s one main message remains: “…the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
Long-term thinking….yeah, I’m a fan.
Anyway, here’s an online copy for you to read at your leisure. You may not agree with it, you may think it is simplistic, dated, or biased in some areas, but it does get you to think.
How does this relate to preparedness? Well, first of all, looking at the long term effects of things is definitely in the realm of preparedness. Secondly, understanding why some things in the economy happen the way they do is also a big advantage…forewarned is forearmed, and all that.
I’d be interested in hearing the opinions of those of you who read the whole thing.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Not as terrible an article as the MSM usually paints for guys like him.