Was in a local supermarket today and saw, for the first time in a while, some flats of canning jar lids. Specifically, wide-mouth lids. I ‘standardized’ on the regular width jars and lids years ago, and I have plenty of both, but I’ll probably pick up a flat of lids anyway, ‘just in case’. But, more than anything else, it was the availability that surprised me. Was it like seeing the first swallow returning to Capistrano? Is this the harbinger of an end, or at least a loosening, of the supply chain and demand issues that made canning lids unobtainable for the last year? Dunno.

But, what I have noticed is that some items are coming back in terms of availability. Maybe everyone who needed to stock up has done so and now demand is lower. Or production picked up and therefore there are now more of a particular product to be had. Or maybe I just got lucky. But, overall, while prices have not come down, I think availability is starting to loosen up.

Of course, a reasonable person might opine that the reason availability is up is because the increase in prices reduces the amount that people are buying…an example of why price controls usually lead to shortages.

Gas went up again by a dime, which puts local go-juice at $4.10 per gallon which is officially higher than I’ve ever seen it. The folks in power are quick to spin it as “Putins inflation” or “Putins gas increases” but any idiot with a calendar can tell you this has been going on for quite a while before Putin went all tanky on Ukraine.

For me, things are still fairly calm. I complain about gas prices, drive a little less, don’t let the shelves or gas tank get empty, and thats about it. Worried about a nuclear exchange? No. Worried about WW3.5? No.Concerned about a new Iron Curtain falling over Europe? No. I’m still of the opinion that there is nothing going on over there that’s worth the life of any American. If Europe is worried about it, let Europe deal with it. Send ’em guns and ammo, give ’em access to satellites and intel, and let them deal with it. Isolationist? Yeah, probably.

This has been a remarkably bizarre century thus far, the last ten years in particular. Ever watch a TV show that they completely changed the cast and direction of the show and it bore virtually no resemblance to the previous season? The post 2000 world is pretty much like that. I feel like the last twenty years could be best summed up as “WTF? Are you kidding me?”

I was up at CostCo yesterday in the battery/tires section. I over heard a fella asking about tires for his vehicle and he was told that “they werent in yet” and that “we’re not sure when theyll be in.” Hmmm. So I asked the guy behind the counter if they wer having availability issues with tires these days. He replied that they were. I asked him if a person thought they might need tires in the next year or so if it would be a good idea to buy them now. He said yes. Now, I understand that you don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut, but perhaps a pre-emptive purchase might not be a bad idea.

Even if availability isnt an issue, I’m pretty confident pricing will be. I’d almost guarantee the tires I’d buy next week are gonna cost more in a year. Like, 99% certain.

You know, when I was a kid and admittedly a bit wet behind the ears, I thought the most likely survivalist scenario was the gun-heavy WW3 nukefest or something equally dramatic and unlikely. Now that I’m older, though not necessarily wiser, I foresee the most likely survivalist scenario as an economic one…either on a grand scale like a national or global depression, but more likely on a personal scale like a job loss or similar.

But, there’s nothing sexy about living on a budget, paying your home early, and having money in the bank/safe/mattress. And yet…my belief is thats the direction things are going to go – less .50 BMG, more $50 bills.

Technically a holiday, but me and the rest of my department had to go in. On the bright side, I’ll get eight hours of holiday pay in addition to the hours I actually worked today. This is good, because with inflation at a 30-year high, it takes more greenbacks to buy the same things as last shopping trip.

Speaking of shopping trip, I’m continuing to stock up on odds and ends. It’s interesting to try and contemplate what exactly to buy. Am I buying this item because I feel inflation will make it too expensive to buy later? Or am I buying this item because I’m concerned oer availability issues? Or am i buying this item because its a good item to have ‘just in case’? There can be a lot of existential thinking in Aisle 6 at WinCo.

But, at the end of the day, the facts remain:

• There are ‘supply chain issues’ for many things currently
• Supply chain issues may continue or reappear with little warning
• Inflation is making life more expensive
• Virtually everything you buy now will be more expensive next month

And if you really want to call inflation what it is: your $1000 paycheck next month may only buy you what $900 gets you this month. Thats inflation robbing your money of value. Thats why Großvater Karl took a wheelbarrow to work with him back in his working days.

Personally, I don’t see anything good coming, economically, on the horizon. I’m not an expert on economics but I can see for myself the effects of it on my surroundings and what I see makes me head up to WinCo and buy a case of soap and another 50 rolls of TP.

Did some running around today to pick up a few ‘nice to haves’ and to do some price checking. I was looking for 15-gallon blue barrels, NATO-style gas cans, and MagLites. Of those three items, you’d think the MagLites would have been the easiest. I mean, every Lowe’s and Home Depot would have them right? Well…you say that….

Turns out that Home Depot, Lowe’s, Murdoch’s, and a handful of other places that you would think would carry them…didn’t. I wonder if maybe MagLite did some sort of change to their pricing or distribution program and got dropped from the stores. Oh, sure…they’re available elsewhere but I really expected them in home Depot.

While I was at Murdoch’s the woman in line in front of me asked the clerk about canning jar lids. She said that their website reported they had three boxes of them in stock, she wanted them, but didnt see them on the shelf. The guy told her they keep them behind the counter because…”Theyre a high theft item.” Canning jar lids. High theft item. let that ferment in your brain for a minute. As someone opined to me after hearing that, “Youd think someone who would steal canning jar lids would be too lazy to can.”

As for the 15-gallon blue barrels I wanted…nada de suerte. Same for the gas cans. And, yes, they’re available online but I find it interesting that the local supply is picked over so thoroughly. Signs of the times, it seems.

In the course of my travels I also hit the restaurant supply place and while they had a pretty normal selection of stuff, some things were absent…certain cooking oils, large cuts of meat, etc.

For me, all the things Im after are just really gilding the preparedness lilly. I’ve got enough of pretty much anything that I’ll come out the other side of whatever happens just fine. But it’s interesting to see the evidence that theres a restlessness amongst the natives.

The world continues apace.

It’s hard to know whats ‘real’ and what’s just clickbait-generating hype these days in regards to to ‘shortages’ and ‘supply chain disruptions’. Oh, there’s no doubt that there’s shortages going on with factories unable to get their materials, store shelves with big gaps in them, and that sort of thing. I’m just not 100% sure why we have them. We had Wuhan Flu and it’s restrictions for all of 2020 and we didn’t see this sort of thing. I suppose you could argue that there were already plenty of things ‘in the pipeline’ and that it’s only now that it’s catching up to us. Or perhaps it took this long for the disruption in Chinese manufacturing to take hold. Or maybe longshoreman and dockworker unions have decided this is the perfect time to hold up management for more money. Or…or…or…

The reasons, to me, are somewhat irrelevant. I don’t care which iceberg hit the Titanic, all I care about is getting my lifejacket on. I suppose the smart thing to do would be to go and buy an extra set of ..well…everything. Thus far my experiences in “whaddya mean you’re out of [XXXX]” have been limited to canning lids, ammo, certain guns, and satisfactory postal service. But I suppose its only a matter of time before a bearing in power turbine somewhere craps out and, surprise, the German company that made it can’t get parts…or a ship to carry it…or someone to unload that ship…or a truck driver to haul it from the docks. It doesn’t take a lot to throw a wrench into things…there’s plenty of potential failure points along the way.

Me, I’ve been kinda sorta  preparing for this thing for a long time. Longer than some of you have been around, actually. I’m expecting, for me, some direct inconveniences but nothing too dramatic. What I’m worried about is people who should know better clamoring for .gov to “do something” and, Crom help us, thos idiots actually do something.

At the moment, the current plan to ‘fix’ things involves spending more money than actually physically exists and creating a debt that is mathematically impossible to payoff unless you go Zimbabwe, have World War III, or literally just renounce the thing like a $50 credit card bill that’s followed you since college. It seems like for all intents and purposes the notion of national debt has become meaningless except as a scorecard to see what country is in the lead for the race to the bottom.

What to do? Same as always, man: keep cash, metals, land, food, guns, meds, fuel, and that sort of thing. The same thing you’ve been doing to get ready for the boogaloo, the Rapture, the UN invasion, Xenu’s arrival, or Great Depression Mk II. From a disaster preparedness standpoint, having precious metals, money, food, fuel, and guns never goes out of style. Being outta debt helps too.

I wish I had a good track record of predicting the future but, alas, I do not…that’s why I have a basement full of food and ammo. But, I think it doesn’t take a lot of foresight to figure that as society starts to fray around the edges there’s going to be more occasions of violence that come into our lives. Whether its increasing amounts of deranged homeless wretches wandering the street aggressively panhandling and doing opportunistic burglaries, or it’s mob violence as some disaffected-group-of-the-moment decides that your ‘privilege’ is an affront to their dignity, it seems reasonable to see things getting a good bit more dangerous out there.

Price increases, ridiculous taxes, consumer goods shortages, racial violence, a renewed push towards socialism, and who knows what else is on the horizon. Is it any wonder we’re buying canned goods and 9mm?

Hmmm…solar panels and LifeStraws. What do the folks at CostCo know that the rst of us don’t?

In actuality, this is probably just related to summer-outdoor-time rather than descent-into-chaos-time….but, they do sell Mountain House freeze drieds and bulk bags of rice, so perhaps….

Actually, for someone who wants to experiment with an itty bitty solar power setup to practice their skills, that $99 deal might not be a bad buncha cheap materials to practice on.

I swear to Crom, I need to get a little shrine going for the household god of frustration. Seems like every time I take a step forward I get yanked back forty steps. Grr.

But, life goes on…like it or not.

I see that the Biden administration (Motto: is it naptime yet?) is quietly starting to float the idea that, mmmmyeah…that inflation thing might be around for a while. And then, in an epic display of chutzpah, these same mouthbreathers crow about unemployment figures and ‘jobs for the taking’. Hey, I’d have great employment numbers to show, too, if I forced businesses  to close and then counted their reopening as ‘new jobs’.

I’m just getting to be a cynic, I suppose. But, these are historic times. Which leads me to this quote: You do not make history. You can only hope to survive it.

I’m pretty resilient these days, but I’m still not at the point yet where I’d feel comfortable pulling the plug on the rest of the world, locking the gate, and letting the world burn while I do my own thing. Not yet. But…man, I’m working on it.

“Anceint Chinese proverbs” aside, disasters and adversity are, in fact, opportunities for others. We have an economy that seems to have the throttle dialed forward yet we have shortages everywhere, housing prices in the stratosphere with interest rates that are at lifetime lows, and a populace and government that thinks money grows on trees and that everyone is entitled to ‘their fair share’ in the form of absolved student loans and ‘basic universal income’. If the disaster/opportunity ratios are proportionate, we should be seeing one amazingly epic wave of opportunities coming up. Where? Well, I think that real estate is going to contract in a year or so…maybe less. My goal is to be in place to jump on it. Other opportunities? Labor brokers probably can write their own check these days. Same for logistics and transportation coordinators. The energy industry is probably gonna be a nice place to be. And, of course, you can never go wrong selling weapons, food, medicine, entertainment, or sex.

Interesting times. Be curious to see how this all shakes out in a year or two.

“For I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” – T. Jefferson

I don’t do social media for several reasons. However, if I’m sitting at a table killing time between drink orders and the person I’m with has their phone out, I’ll cruise their social media just out of curiosity. I saw this and just had to snag it:

Honestly, both sides, left and right, have a history of this sort of thing. Difference is that now it’s become a bloodsport. Used to be that if  you didn’t agree with someones politics, you called them a dirty name and left it at that. Nowadays, if you don’t like someones politics you ‘deplatform’ or ‘cancel’ them…if you’re too lazy to go to their home and terrorize their family.

Silencing a group, no matter if you agree or not with them, is the necessary first step towards marginalizing that group. And, historically, groups that get marginalized wind up suffering…sometimes it manifests as lack of a voice in political issues and sometimes it’s cattle cars and barbed wire. But it always has to start with silencing that particular group.

Do I think people who think like me are heading for striped pajamas and labor gangs? Nope. But what I do see happening is laws and regulation being passed that will incrementally chip away at my liberties and the people who oppose those infringements will not be allowed a voice to try to sway the public and policymakers. With the increasing complicity of large communication outlets like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc * in shutting down certain opinions and certain topics, there aren’t a lot of high-traffic venues left to get your message out when your message goes against the official narrative.

This is one of the reasons that for the last several years, since Trump was elected, that I accelerated my gun/ammo/mag purchasing – because I could see that the people pushing for a ban were getting more airtime and more distribution than the people who opposed it. When Trump got elected, the ‘deplatforming’ and ‘cancel’ thing really took off. Doesn’t matter if the ban/no-ban support is 50/50 when one of those 50’s doesn’t get to state their case.

Next time you read some article about a particular belief or ideology being shut  out of the popular media channels, ask yourself how that will affect you. For example, shutting down the pro-gun voices mean the anti-gun voice will be that much louder, thus enabling them to sway more people to their cause and probably leading to more gun prohibitions. Result: go buy more guns while you can.

And although this is an extremely personal choice, and most people won’t agree with me, try not to become the kind of person who shuts down other peoples speech. Remember, popular speech never needed First Amendment protections to begin with….its the unpopular, the non-mainstream, and yes even the extreme speech that needed protecting. I don’t have to like the message, but I like people trying to silence other people even less.

* = YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are companies that are absolutely free to censor whomever they want. Thats their right. And I have the right to badmouth them, choose not to support them, refuse to deal with people who do support them, etc. That’s part of the bargain when it comes to freedom…you have to take the good with the bad, otherwise it isn’t really freedom.