Category Archives: Uncategorized

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….

Canned beef back at Costco

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I usually have an aversion to canned meats. Intellectually I know that the meat is, in fact, what it says it is on the label… yet, every single time I open a can of chicken, beef, or tuna, it smells like cat food. Years ago, I tried the Costco canned roast beef and, once you got it into a pan and heated up, it was delicious. I mean, really good. So I grabbed a bunch and, naturally, Costco stopped selling it. It has been, no lie, probably five or six years since I’ve seen canned roast beef at Costco.

Now, one thing I have noticed about other canned beef products is that virtually none of them are made-in-USA. Invariably they are from Brazil or Argentina or some other south American country. And while I’m sure (eyeroll) that their quality control standards are first rate, I think I’d rather stuff my face with American beef rather than something some gaucho carved up and processed through a semi-Third World processing plant.

Anyway…..

Up at Costco today and beheld this:

Let’s do some math.

4-12 oz. cans at 9.69 means each can is $2.42. Each can is 12 oz. so that comes out to $3.20~ per pound. Now, I know what you’re going to say – “But Commander, part of that 12 oz. is water weight from the broth its packaged in.” You are correct, sir. However, this is $3.20 per pound of cooked beef, whereas the pricing youre comparing your meat counter purchase to is for raw beef. We all agree that a quarter-pound burger patty ain’t 4 oz. once we’re done cooking it, right? So, to my way of thinking, I’m guessing that the post-cooked weight of the canned beef with its broth is probably pretty close to what the pre-cooked weight of the actual raw beef would be. So, I’m reasonably comfortable with saying its $3.20/#. With that said, $3.20/# is actually a decent deal these days.

But, even at a dollar a pound it’s no bargain if it tastes horrible enough that you won’t eat it. So, let’s cook up some rice, throw the contents of the can into a pan, heat it up, add in some soy sauce or chili paste, serve it over some rice, and see if it’s worth going long on.

So, lets grab a can of the Kirkland stuff and compare a few things. These cans are pull-tops whereas the Kirklands were not. I prefer non-pull-top because if that pre-scored seam on the can takes a hit from something it can let go pretty easily. But, this can be mitigated with proper packing and storage.

Opening the can and…….merciful Crom, it always looks like dog food. There was some congealed fat floating in there, which is good, and the meat appeared to not be heavy in the gristle or undesirable-parts department.

WHY!? WHY DOES IT ALWAYS LOOK LIKE DOG FOOD!?!?

Ok, I’ll be honest…I held my breath until it was in the pan and on the flame. Once it got some heat under it I added some chopped onion and soy sauce. Shoulda skipped the soy sauce. More on that later.

I ran it over high heat to make sure it was heated all the way through and to reduce some of the broth. There was a very strong ‘well done beef’ smell from the pan. I cooked up half a cup of rice and added the contents of the pan.

How was it? Good. But salty. The meat was wonderfully tender and this would go really nicely in a soup, stew, or bourguignon. As it was, just the rice, onions, beef, and soy sauce worked out just fine. A meal that you could do pretty easily and quickly in a power outage or shelter-in-place situation.

Comparing the nutritional label data between this and the Kirkland roast beef showed something interesting. The Kirkland is listed as four servings per can, this stuff says six. What that means is that when you figure that out as RDA per can, you get this:

Kirkland = 32% of your RDA of sodium, per can
Butterfield = 72% of your RDA of sodium, per can

So, yeah….it wasn’t just the soy sauce that made it taste salty. But, if you really think that when the end of the world gets here you need to watch your salt intake…well…clearly you’re priorities need some review. After a long day of sweating through your cammies as you hang looters and man roadblocks, stress over the mutant zombie biker gangs, and generally lead a pretty physical and stressful life….you’ll welcome that little bit of extra salt. But if it really, really matters to you…just cut the sodium in half. How? Eat half as much. Problem solved.

Another odd thing. look at those nutritional labels. Both of them show a serving size as being the same – 2 oz./56gram. And both cans are 12 oz. But the Kirkland says there are 4 servings per can, whereas the Butterfield says six. The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that the Kirkland numbers are net of any liquid. Or maybe it’s bad math. But if it really is true that both are the same 2 oz. per serving, once of them is packing 50% more sodium per serving than the other. You go figure it out.

Final verdict? Worth it. It comes out cheaper than the Kirkland stuff Costco was selling ten years ago. Texture and taste seem fine and it cooks up quite nicely. I approve of it enough that I went back to Costco and bought a case of it. (Because I’m sure as heck not gonna buy a case of something without trying it out first.) If you really wanna go nuts…a can of this stuff, a bottle of soy sauce or other seasoning), and a vacuum sealed bag of minute rice would store literally indefinitely in just about any environ and give you a hot meal that you could fix over a sterno stove.

So…an addition to the food stockpile. But a yummy enough one that keeping it rotated shouldn’t be a problem.
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“Alexa… Intruder alert!”

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You know it just got real when the lights go out and ‘Fortunate Son’ starts blaring out the speakers.

I absolutely refuse to have one of these smart speaker devices because it is a wildly huge PerSec risk. But…I stayed at a place a few weeks back that had one and it was a heck of a lot of fun to play with. Couple it with a home security system, some sentry guns, floodlights, cameras, and isolation doors, and you’d really have something. Probably HAL.

Re-arranging

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A few years back, a local defunct lumber mill was repurposed into a bitcoin mining facility. As it turned out, bitcoin mining, I am told, uses quite a bit of electrical power and the rumour is that this business managed to singlehandedly generate enough demand to change local pricing and require infrastructure upgrades. Regardless, the business ran for a few years and then recently closed up. One of the things they were getting rid of was a huge amount of the steel wire shelving that I am so fond of. I scored a truckload of the stuff and now have the oddly enjoyable task of adding more shelving to my basement and reconfiguring the stuff that is already there..

With the…hmmm.. let’s call it ‘increase in activity’… in my own stockpiling, increased storage capacity was going to be called for eventually. Might as well get ahead of it.

Other than the increase in stored food, there was also an across-the-board increase in pretty much everything. Cleaning supplies, batteries, TP, toilet paper, dish soap, detergent, and pretty much every consumable you can think of. And that takes space. The payoff? Tremendous peace of mind.

There are a few things I hammer out in this blog over, and over, and over….and one of them is this: you will suffer far more personal, intimate EOTWAWKIs than you will the conventional zombie apocalypse kind. You will experience job losses, unexpected expenses, periods of illness, localized disasters (flood, hurricane, etc.) far more often than you will experience boogaloos. And while cases of MRE’s, .223, and night vision do have their place, you will use them exponentially less than you will use TP, battery lanterns, and wind up radios.

And, as it turns out, keeping all that food, toiletries, extra water, and sleeping bags on hand takes up space. So…new wire shelving. With inflation, economic uncertainty, ‘surges’, and who knows what else coming down the pike it just seems to make sense to keep adding a little here and there, yknow?

Article – Note helped rescuers find two missing campers in Death Valley

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By the time authorities found their car in a remote stretch of Death Valley National Park, Alexander Lofgren and Emily Henkel had been missing for four days.

Inside the abandoned white Subaru was a note: “Two flat tires, headed to Mormon Point, have three days’ worth of water.”

The 8 April discovery marked a turning point in the desperate search for the Tucson, Arizona, couple. Soon after, rescuers from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office found Mr Lofgren, 32, and Ms Henkel, 27, in an isolated part of the California desert near Willow Creek.

The two were on a ledge so steep, the agency said in a news release, that rescuers could not reach them until the next day, 9 April. When they did, they found Ms Henkel injured. And Mr Lofgren, an army veteran and congressional staffer, was dead.

As is virtually always the case with these things, the rescuers found the vehicle first and then they found the people. So if the people had stayed with the vehicle, they’d have been found sooner. Vehicles can only go a limited amount of places..those places are called ‘roads’. So, that means the searchers have a much smaller list of places to search if they are looking for a vehicle. So..stay with the vehicle.

Moral of the story? Stay with the vehicle. And staying with the vehicle is a lot easier, even in Death Valley, if your bring along some basic gear and supplies. Two flat tires and your cell phone doesn’t work? String up a couple tarps, sit still in the shade, drink from the several five-gallon jugs of water you brought, and catch up on rereading ‘Atlas Shrugged’.

 

Conspiracy theory thought for the day….

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Stock market continues to head towards record highs…but the price of many things seem to be going up (lumber, building materials, food)…and the .gov has printed a ginormous amount of money which should result in inflation, right? But..we don’t see it in the reported (keyword there) numbers.

So, I was thinking about that the other day…we’re seeing price increases in many items, not just the Consumer Price Index items, that we use day to day….but there’s no marked uptick in inflation. So, what’s wonky in the way we figure inflation numbers?

Then it occurred to me…inflation isn’t when the price of something goes up, its when the purchasing power or value of the money used to purchase that item goes down, right? So…all these stock market gains we’ve seen. What if those aren’t the values of the securities going up, but rather the value of the dollars that they are denominated in going down? Couple that with the observed rising prices everywhere else and now it seems like perhaps the rising stock market is the barometer of inflation. I mean, did XYZ stock really become intrinsically more valuable than it was six months ago? Or are the dollars used to purchase XYZ stock just worth less and thereby requires more of them to buy it?

I’m all for stocks going up in value, but maybe it isn’t that they are going up as much as it is the value of the dollar, due to inflation, is going down. Do the surges in the market coincide with the creation of stimulus money? I suppose it could be people dumping their stimulus checks into the market that is rasing those numbers..but, couldn’t it also be……