Article -Treasury warns of need to deal with national debt limit

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The Treasury will continue to initiate the types of bookkeeping maneuvers it has used in the past to keep the government from breaching a level that would trigger a default on the massive national debt.
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The amount of the debt that is held by the public currently totals $22.1 trillion, an amount slightly higher than 100% of the entire economy and heights not seen since the huge borrowing the government did in the 1940s to finance World War II.

I genuinely believe that, in one way, the national debt has become absolutely irrelevant. Simply, there is no feasible way to pay it down without going Weimar on it’s  butt. The best anyone can even hope for is to slow down it’s growth.

I remember the Carter years and the inflation. I don’t remember it’s real-world affect on those around me because I was just a kid with no real interest in economics. Nowadays, I’m an aging survivalist with a real interest in not being a homeless, broke, beaten down wretch…so I follow economics like a man with cancer follows drug trials.

End of the world? Probably not. End of your world? Quite possible. A smart man will have eliminated as much debt as possible, put away a goodly amount of cash or cash-like instruments for when his job disappears, and stocked up on things he’d rather not be forced to buy during a period of austerity. And….thats actually a good policy to have even when the economy is doing well.

There is a time when you can still do something to save the ship, and there is a time when the best thing you can do is head for the lifeboats. The critical part is knowing which particular moment you’re in and acting accordingly.

Hedging bets

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Well, if you’ve ever wondered how many 27-rd Magpul Glock mags are in a case, here’s your answer:

One hundred. Here’s the funny part – this isn’t the first case of them I’ve ordered. Here’s the scary part – I’ve lost track of how many I have. As far as 9mm Glock mags go, I’m somewhere around…mmmm….700, I think.

Because man does not live on 9mm alone, I also took the opportunity to add to this:

Funny thing is, in this market the gold is probably not as valuable as 9mm. Go figure.

And hit another milestone today (ETA: NOT my birthday…but thanks!) which reminds me that, sadly, I’m really not a kid anymore and I have to be a grownup. Darn it.

I miss Neverland.

Video – Rob a CCW class. What could possibly go wrong.

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I mean, technically there is nothing funny about this video. But still….
You try to rob a class full of people who are taking a concealed firearms course, and then you try to get stabby with the po-po. Is there anyone…I mean anyone…who cannot imagine what happens next.

Here’s the interesting part. There are people out there walking the streets who think that trying to rob a roomful of gun-carrying people while only armed with a screwdriver is a perfectly reasonable plan. That level of stupidity, coupled with the disregard for personal safety and .. you know…the law….makes this Darwin winner a very dangerous animal. His victim selection model did the rest.

It’s a wild world, baby.

The weekend routine

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Summer touristy season is starting here in the great state of Montana (Motto: “Welcome! Now go back to California!”). As such the local RV place is doing their $5 fillup on propane tanks, so I’m taking the 20# barbecue bombs up for a refill. Kerosene is my first choice for end-of-the-world stove/lamp/heater fuel, but a good survivalist keeps his options open, y’know? I was at CostCo the other day and they had new 20# tanks for sale and I figured it couldnt hurt to have another one in the line up. Plus, who knows, maybe I’ll get off my armored butt and actually do some barbecuing this year.
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And, since it’s the weekend, it’s a trip to the ‘Co’s…CostCo and Winco. Sure, it serves the purpose of keeping the shelves filled, but it’s also a barometer of the Current Situation. I can see how prices and availability have changed since last week. Remember when this Wuhan Flu stuff started and rice and toilet paper were cleaned out? That was a pretty good gauge of how the public perceived the situation. The current ammogeddon is a similar canary-in-a-coal-mine as well. So, these grocery trips aren’t just about restocking…theyre also about taking the pulse of the population. When everyone in front of you at the checkout is loaded up on canned goods and bottled water, maybe you need to pay attention.
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And, because it’s better to be safe than sorry, an itsy bit of more gold was added to the stash. The Metals Pimp has been giving me a good deal on generic 1/10 gold lately so I’m working on getting a tube full of those. I think the odds of the day coming where I’m standing at some sort of flea market trading gold for antibiotics and batteries is as close to zero as you can get, but…I’ve been wrong before. And if the world doesn’t go off the rails I can always cash it out..any loss is simply allocated as the price of having that insurance and peace of mind over time.
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That video fo the guy blowing himself up with is .50 BMG has been getting massive airplay in the gunblogosphere. No doubt, it was an extremely sobering video. I’ve had guns blow up in my face before but nothing that caused the kinda physical trauma that poor bastard experienced. I got a little ‘shaving cut’ from the rear sight flying back in my face and that was about it. Nonetheless, I think I’ll start making sure the first aid gear is sitting on the table right next to the shooting gear next time i go shooting, rather than just sitting in the gear box behind the seat of the truck.
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Also wound up letting my lizard brain get the better of me and, in a spate of late-night websurfing, bought another (!) case of Magpul 27-rd Glock mags. I think that, at the moment, I’m sitting on something like a total of six or seven hundred Magpul Glock mags. :::shrug::: What can I say…I’m easily influenced. But tell you what…when the next mag ban comes down I am gonna be such a player.
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And, of course, I continue to work on the financial side of increased resilience. I’ve been dabbling in options and have been making a couple hundred bucks a week inside my Roth doing covered calls. As such, it’s a nice way to get more money in my Roth once I’ve maxed out my contributions for the year. In case anyone cares, it’s mostly the meme stocks..AMC, BB, and NOK. Absolutely no uncovered calls or naked shorts…thats a fast road to trouble.
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Still waiting for final grades to come in. Got one class that’s unaccounted for and thats, naturally, the one that I was most concerned about. Should be up next week, but I’m on pins and needles until then

PSA – A reminder about range safety

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Why do newbies at the gun range flinch? I mean, we tell them what to expect, we warm them up with .22’s, we show them how to properly hold their gun….and when they pull the trigger..:::flinch:::.

Well,, there’s a really good reason. We’re used to it so we often don’t even think about it, but for a new shooter the biggest thing on their mind is that an enormous explosion is about to take place in the hands right in front of their face.

A lifetime of shooting kinda makes you forget that. At least, until you get an unpleasant reminder that, yes, there’s a metric buttload of kinetic violence happening right in front of your nose:

I hate wearing safety glasses at the range, but you can bloody well  believe that I’m going to do it anyway. This guy is alive only because he had someone at the range to haul his bleeding ass to a hospital while he pinched his own severed artery shut. I usually shoot by myself..I’d have been found a few miles down the road, bled out all over the steering wheel.

Moral of the story: safety gear sucks but what happens when you don’t wear it is infinitely worse.  The apocalypse is gonna be difficult enough with two working eyes and a skull without additional holes in it….why make it harder than has to be?

I suppose another moral of the story is: don’t shoot ammo of unknown pedigree…especially if such ammo is some monstrous high-pressure number like a .50BMG.

There are a lot of guys on YouTube with gun channels who engage in somewhat…..questionably reckless…..gunplay ‘for the views’. Usually its somewhat harmless….but there’s always someone who has to buy 250# of Tannerite, or make a stack of engine blocks to shoot, or decide to see if a lathe turned bullet made out of [unicorn horn/titanium/polystyrene/granite] ‘will shoot’. This guy does a bit of that but it looks like the ammo is at fault here rather than the shooter. But the point remains: your detonating a grenade-equivalent a foot in front of your face. Take precautions.

H/T to the thoughtful Friend Of The Blog(tm) who sent me the link.

Chapter One on the way to national Chapter 11

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Anyone catch the speech that whoever is actually running things gave Biden to say? I swear that this political climate is starting to look like the opening chapters of ‘Atlas Shrugged’. I suspect it’ll start drifting towards the first 3/4ths of “The Mandibles” (recommended) before we’re through. Trillions of dollars. Just for fun, a dollar bill is about 6.14″ long. If you lined a trillion dollar bills up end to end, the line would be a bit under 97,000,000 miles…thats about 3900 times around the earth. Here’s better perspective. Or, put another way, if you literally took every single bit of US currency around the world and put it into .gov’s hands, that’d be about $1.2 trillion.

So, what you’ve got is a guy who wants to spend more cash than actually exists. He could literally take all the currency that exists and it would still not pay for the things he wants.

Kinda hard to wrap your head around that, isn’t it?

Fortunately, as I understand it, the money (such as it is) is simply created with a push of the button. No need to pull the cash out of every person’s wallet. Yet.

Here’s the part I don’t  understand: When Robert Mugabe prints physical money to fund his government, hyperinflation results. When the US .gov does it electronically instead of physically, we get….minimal inflation? Something doesn’t connect for me there.

The old expression is “All politics is local”. You may not understand, care,  or feel that the consequences of this sort of economic behaviour will affect you. National debt? Thats a national problem. But when your paycheck gets smaller as taxes go up, as your purchasing power goes down, as economic growth slows and jobs fade, as .gov handouts pile up and people no longer want to work…then you’ll notice. And then it’ll be too late to prepare.

I’ve no crystal ball. What I do have, though, is a unique perspective and outlook. Sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn’t. But I’m never sorry when it pushes me towards caution, since I’ve regretted too little caution far more often than I’ve regretted too much caution. And now, it’s pushing me towards caution. So be it. If I’m right, I fare better than most. If I’m wrong, all I’ve done is build up a diverse store of assets and experienced some opportunity cost.

Will we be hauling around money in wheelbarrows eventually? Nah. I just can’t see that happening. But, here’s an interesting blog post about if that whole ‘wheelbarrows of money’ thing was actually real.

 

Assorted brain droppings

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A couple posts back, someone said I should write a book and a couple people jumped on that bandwagon. I don’t think it’s a great idea…there are a zillion books out there already telling you to ‘store what you eat, eat what you store’ and to ‘have two weeks of water on hand’. There is nothing new I could recommend to a person.

However…….

We all know the secret to lose wieght is…eat less, exercise more. That’s no mystery. Yet every year we get hundreds of books telling people how to do it. My point is, in a survival manual market I don’t think the groundbreaking idea is content but rather motivation. Those diet books don’t tell you anything new, the successful diet books are the ones that motivate you to actually do it. Any new survival guide thats going to be a success, in my opinion, should concern itself with focusing on making people want to prepare, rather than focusing on the nuts-n-bolts. Thats is, in my opinion, what the market in survival books is lacking. It’s like that Dave Ramsey money stuff….any idiot knows how to be financially sound – spend less than you make. Not rocket science. Ramsey’s success is from making people actually want to do it. Same thing.

This crossed my phone and I thought it was worth a share:

I miss that guy.

I was commenting to someone the other day that in all the previous ‘OMG its the end of the world’ panics, the panicky exclamations by the public were rather numerous. But now that we seem to be on the cusp of (or actually in) a genuine one people seem mostly quiet. Whistling past the graveyard?

For your internet buddy Commander Zero, its another weekend to head to Costco and Winco to buy some foodco. Most notably, Imma get more of that roast beef. That stuff was pretty darn good and Costco has a habit of bringing something in, selling the bejeezus out of it, and then we never see it again. Also, one of the LMI asked me to pick some up for him. If you can find it at your local CostCo (which I am receiving reports indicating it may only be a regional test market thing) I recommend it.

Speaking of food:

The Grocery Price Shock Is Coming to a Store Near You
Corn, wheat, soybeans, vegetable oils: A small handful of commodities form the backbone of much of the world’s diet and they’re dramatically more expensive, flashing alarm signals for global shopping budgets.

This week, the Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index — which tracks key farm products — surged the most in almost nine years, driven by a rally in crop futures. With global food prices already at the highest since mid-2014, this latest jump is being closely watched because staple crops are a ubiquitous influence on grocery shelves — from bread and pizza dough to meat and even soda.

Hail of fire and plague of locusts should be along any day now….

And, finally, final finals are next week. If I pass them, I’m officially done with school. Fingers crossed, but bribe money is on standby just in case.

Toldja so

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A while back I posted about how the people in the Great White North were moving to classify AR uppers as controlled parts.

Canadian party leaders taking a refreshment break outside of parliamentary chambers….

I astutely and correctly predicted that it was simply a matter of time before the weasels at ATFE pushed for the same. I also predicted that the music was winding down  for the arm brace party. Look, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to to see that when:

a) you challenge ATFE in court about AR receivers not meeting the legal definition of receivers…and win…

and

b) you make ‘arm braces’ that are, let’s be real, not really ‘arm braces’ and sell them by the trainload….

ATFE is gonna think “Hmmm…maybe we should do something about that.” All the clamoring about “Constitutionality” and “will not comply!” doesn’t change the boots-on-the-ground facts: .gov will do what it wants and then address the legalities later. You may be proven right later, but you’ll be warming up a cell as you wait.

I expect that what will happen is that ‘arm braced’ pistols will be allowed to be papered as SBR’s with the $200 tax waived. This is similar to what happened when ATFE reclassified the Street Sweeper and USAS-12 shotguns. For the fella that has a bucket of stripped $29 poverty pony lowers sitting around, its an opportunity to ‘make’ a dozen SBR’s and save some money.

We had a relatively quiet four years under Trump in regards to gun legislation. Not perfect, but not terrible. Only a short-sighted idiot could possibly believe that the Biden people weren’t going to try and push the ‘gun control’ agenda more aggressively.

So…what next? Well, if you thought you were beating the rush by buying a ton of stripped lowers you may wanna fire up your Visa card and order a corresponding amount of stripped uppers….just in case.

Patriots’ Day

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Annoyingly, there is a Partiot Day, Patriot’s Day, and a Patriots’ Day. Every single year I have to go look up the correct one. Anyway…

‘Tis Patriots’ Day! A day that has a host of meanings and symbolism to a buncha different crowds. To some it’s a day to mark the beginning of the American Revolution. To some its the day to commemorate some terrorist events. To our friendly fedgov it’s a day to be on ‘heightened alert’ because..well..because. And to some folks it’s just plain ol’ Monday.

For your buddy Zero, it’s a day to reflect on what your role in .gov is, and more importantly, what is .gov’s role in YOU. And it’s a great day to head to the range and practice with your firearms .

In the meantime….