Monthly Archives: April 2020

Roof Korea is best Korea

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Its the anniversary of the genesis of that unique subset of Americans – the Roof Korean. Someone sent me this link and it’s too good to not share:

Roof Korean Week is here again. After the savage beating of Rodney King at the hands of police officers and their subsequent acquittal, rioters took to the streets in what is known as the “LA Riots.”
Korean citizens and their businesses/homes were intentionally targeted by the rioters. Sure they had nothing to do with King or the police officers who beat him, but “their prices are too high, their attitude is wrong, they have no respect for the community.”

Koreans were savagely attacked, while their businesses and homes were looted and burned.

They did what good citizens do, they called the police and they waited for help. Unfortunately, police were stretched thin and were also being targeted for violence.

I swear, I never get tired of those guys. Interestingly, while articles like the one mentioned above pop up with frequency, I have never encountered any interviews with any actual roof Koreans. I get that many of them may not want to admit to things that may still get them in trouble, but there’s also gotta be a lot of them who just hung around the rooftops with their Mini-14s, never got a shot off, and could tell their story.

Scenes from Costco

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If you flip around the blogosphere enough you start seeing those clickbait ‘Things That First Disappear From The Shelves During A Crisis” sorts of lists. Apparently my local CostCo is proving to be a source of a bit of empirical data:

Most of that stuff on the first sheet makes a lot of sense, the rest…well…reasons.

Interestingly, we’ve seen that, as far as a pandemic goes, the masses went straight to the TP and rice aisle and cleaned ’em out. The more savvy folks hit canned goods and then went to the appliance store and bought freezers.

There’s that saying that the military is always planning on fighting the previous war. (Which is why a lot of guys fought Gulf War I in woodland camo.) It’s easy to fall into the trap of preparing against the previous disaster…meaning that you you’re so wrapped up in what did happen that you neglect to prepare for what could happen. Take note of what sailed off the shelves this time, but don’t make the mistake of assuming it’ll be the same way in the next one.

As an aside, when I go to CostCo I also usually hit WallyWorld. The selection is broader at WalMart and the crowd is not restricted to members like CostCo is, so WalMart is probably a better representation of what the hordes will be after. While WalMart has had some of its shelves swept clean, they get them restocked mighty quick. Their logisitics footprint is probably bigger than Costco’s and their network of supply and transport is probably also commensurately larger. Point being, sometimes wading through the human genetic frappe that is their customer base may pay off when you can’t find something elsewhere.

Monkey on my back

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I need to get this gun buying thing under control. Or I need a small concrete bunker hidden in the woods. Who am I kidding? I’ve always needed that.

Years ago, my ideal was to have enough guns on hand to equip at least five other people with common arms…same rifles, same shotguns, same pistols, etc. It seems I can field a larger fire team now. Funny thing is, I’ve more guns than friends who can use them.

Ah well…they’ll always hold their value. I almost never buy guns unless theyre a good deal, and when people need a gun they’re pretty much not gonna bark about the price. Silver dropped, DJI got cut at the knees, oil crapped the bed…. but guns and ammo prices stayed the same or went up. Interesting, that.

Article – Ranks of Absent U.S. Food Inspectors Swell on Virus, Union Says

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Well, normally I take anything a union says with a big grain of salt. Add in another heaping tablespoon for it coming from Bloomberg. But…it makes sense.
As I pointed out to someone in comments earlier, most people just looked at the immediate consequences of this pandemic (“I might get sick”) and many fewer looked at the downstream consequences (“The guy who fixes my car might get sick and I need to have work done on it.”, “The guy who delivers the food to the market might call in sick”, “I may not be able to schedule that root canal in two weeks”, etc.)
Meat inspectors? Sure. Probably the same for vehicle inspectors, air safety inspectors, engineering inspectors, etc. (Which might underscore that perhaps we have too many inspections required in our everyday lives.) Occupancy permit for your new addition on your house? City inspector isn’t coming out. Vehicle inspection so you can renew your tags? Most garages are at half staff and have huge waiting lists. You get the idea.
All of this, though, is completely predictable if you think far enough out. What is it that you cannot do yourself and will bottleneck things if the person who does it is unavailable? Thats the question. The answer, of course, is to have a workaround in place…could be stockpiled materials, alternate vendors, DIY, or a Plan B to make do until later.
And, maybe, it’s a good idea to make sure the freezer is topped off. Just in case.

Article- Five threats to US food supply chains

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The coronavirus pandemic has upended food supply chains, led to closures of meat producing plants and left Americans with the unsettling experience of seeing empty shelves at supermarkets.

Coupled with the run on toilet paper that led to severe shortages, recent events are leading Americans to wonder if the nation’s food supply is secure.

Experts say that by and large, Americans don’t need to worry about food running out, but that does not mean all food will be readily available.

I’m seeing more and more articles like this pop up lately. The cynic in me says it’s simply the media looking for a new equine to flog. The conspiracy buff in me says it’s TPTB warming us up to the idea of Soviet-style grocery shortages. Regardless, I post the link here for your own scrutiny.

The article does make some sense about the threats to the food chain. For you TL;DR types, here they are:

  • Virus outbreaks at food plants
  • Agricultural reliance on guest workers
  • Supply chain mismatches
  • Increased food insecurity (Which really has nothing to do with the food chain)
  • Crunch on delivery capacity

The first one, virus outbreaks at food plants, are already happening as several meat processing plants have had to dial back. The rest…we shall see.

But despite all this, for now, my local supermarkets seem to be puttering along just fine. Of course, everything works fine right up until the point it doesn’t. Is this the calm before the storm of empty shelves? I have no idea. But… you don’t wait for a drought to dig a well, so if you’ve got some gaps in your pantry now might be a reasonable time to get ’em plugged.

 

Article – Food Rationing Is New Reality for Buyers Once Spoiled for Choice

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(Bloomberg) — At a Publix store in St. Petersburg, Florida, handmade signs limit customers to two packages of beef, pork and Italian sausage. In Toronto, shoppers at a west end Loblaws can’t buy more than two dozen eggs and two gallons of milk.

Spoiled for choice before the pandemic, North American shoppers are finding they can’t get everything they want as grocery stores ration in-demand items to safeguard supplies.

While the panic that swept through supermarkets in the first weeks of the coronavirus lockdowns has eased, people are still filling fridges and pantries with stay-at-home staples from flour and yeast to pasta sauce and meat.

The strong demand comes at a time of supply disruptions as food makers adapt to dramatic shifts in buying patterns and some processing plants close as workers fall ill. As a result, stores are restricting purchases to prevent items from vanishing from shelves. For shoppers, that can be unnerving.

Wait..so there is a global crisis that may cause disruption in the availability of some food products? Who couuld have possibly predicted such things? Well, pretty much anyone with half a brain, really.

Hazlitt said that economics was not about just looking at a particular action, but rather at the consequences of that action, for all groups, further downstream. It seems like many people figured that out, on a subconscious level mostly, as people wet out and started buying huge quantities of goods for reasons they couldn’t really articulate.

Which reminds me, the Current Situation is showing what people (as a group) are truly made of. For all their ”we are in this together” nonsense, even the most obnoxious NPR-listening, Volvo-driving, limousine-liberal is out there buying up  more than her ‘fair share’ of goods. Why? Because when it really comes down to survival we put our ‘tribe’ first. That tribe can be your family, your religion, your race, your class, your region, whatever…but we all have one. For 99.9% of us it’s our families.

Food rationing? Maybe, but not as it really is… ‘food rationing’ is not settling for store-brand Mac&Cheese because the Trader Joe Organic version was sold out. That’s not rationing. Rationing is getting something that is probably not what you want, not in the quantity you want, and not in the quality you want…and you’re grateful to have it.

Gun Jesus has a nice four-part series on food rationing in Britain during WW2. It’s interesting to see what you would have had to work with.

Generator Day

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Reminder to self: Today is Generator Day.

Took advantage of the nice weather to go out and do some yard cleaning. Took out the EU2000i , fired it up, plugged in an electric leaf blower, and spent an hour playing hockey with the leaves. Generator gets a workout and I get a better looking yard.

That Eu2000, by the by, has been a useful item. I put a run clock on it when I first got it and it has only about a dozen hours on the clock. This makes sense because I’ve only actually had to use it twice for emergencies, which turned out to be only of an hour or two duration, and the rest of the time are little 20-30 minute episodes of me running it every few months to verify it’s function.

For my needs, it’s enough generator..for now. The only thing I absolutely need to run is the freezer and maybe the security cams. Ive lighting that will last me a month on battery power, so no point in using the generator for that. I wouldn’t mind creating another small battery bank to keep the router running, though. Sure, its likely that a large enough power outage will take out local internet access but in the past the outages have been rather localized and I still had internet. (I was the only place in the neighborhood, actually, to still have wireless….made me very popular with the neighbors.)

It seems like every year for the past fifteen years I keep saying I’m going to get some big batteries, run a panel on the roof, and have a nice bank of backup power on hand. And, like a lot of things, I never seem to get to it. This year is proving to be the year of I-Should-Have-Taken-Care-Of-That. No blackouts or rolling brownouts yet, but fire season will be here soon and you never know what’s gonna happen next.

Whatever I wind up doing, it won’t be cheap. And right now is not the time to be spending money unnecessarily. But, I suppose I can keep an eye on Craigslist for panels or similar items that wind up hitting the market as people start seeing their cash reserves drop. Or as the local renewable energy* places try to drum up revenue.

* = As I recall, you cannot create or destroy energy, you can only change it. Thus, wouldn’t it seem that energy is not ‘renewable’? You’re not ‘making’ energy, you’re simply taking it from somewhere else.

Just not what I expected

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So, having been into preparedness (or survivalism) for the last thirty years, you would think that would have been ridiculously ample time to get squared away for something like the Current Situation. So, why the sudden frenzy of buying?

Well, virtually all of my projected scenarios involved some sort of grid-down type of scenario where we are hoarding gasoline, hunkering down, without electricity, listening to our wind-up radios, and that sort of thing. That’s the scenario where you crack open the #10 cans of freezedrieds. As a result, I’ve been prepared for that sort of thing for a while now.

But this particular flavor of apocalypse, so far, has been different. I doesn’t feel dire enough to break into $65 #10 cans of freeze-dried meats. Rather, I can still go to Costco, for now, and buy a flat of pork chops or a 10# brick of 85/15 ground beef. And its that ‘normal’, day-to-day food that I’m winding up going long on right now.

Other stuff like soap, rice, batteries, detergent, aluminum foil, etc….thats all fine… at 100+% on those. But that everyday stuff was a bit lighter than I would have thought and that’s where the focus is now.

As I’ve mentioned, the Current Situation will be a fascinating and illuminating experience to see what does and does not work as far as preparations go. So far, other than what I’ve mentioned, I’ve been fairly pleased. I am especially pleased that in the last few years my focus has moved into financial preparations..eliminating debt and socking away money in case something happened. That, more than the 5-gallon buckets of rice, seems to be the most comforting thing so far.

“So far”…you catch how many times I’ve used that in this post? There is no guarantee that what we are experiencing now will be the same thing we experience later. In fact, it’s virtually guaranteed that it will not. It may be worse, it may be better, but it will be different. For me, in my location, right now, the biggest prep is money. Lotta folks with cut or reduced hours, closed or restricted businesses, etc. For them, it’s living on savings and credit cards. I’ve been adamant about having more than one income stream and, sure enough, if one takes a hit the other can still keep some green coming in. That’s working out as I had hoped. But, thats how things are so far… tomorrow could be an entirely different (and worse) story.

Even the clueless idiots out there are catching on to things being a little squirrely. I don’t see anyone buying 4k televisions, jet skis, or pro gaming computers. When even those people, who normally ‘live for today’, curb their spending you know that the situation has reached a level of seriousness that is unprecedented.

Of course, because of that, the businesses that are open are seeing reduced sales revenue as well. If anyone at the local car dealerships is doing even 1/3 of their normal sales volume, I’d be surprised. I think we might see some very interesting sales and promotions coming up from many different businesses and markets as they try to drive up sales to meet their fixed costs. If you actually do have some ‘disposable income’ you might do very very well on buying a few goodies in the future. Heck, I should go troll Craigslist and see if I can pick up another EU200 or something.

So, here we are a month or two into the largest ‘disaster’ any of us have seen in our lifetimes and…so far….not what I expected. I have always thought the apocalypse was going to be either a ‘real’ one with Katrina-like infrastructure failures and lawlessness, or an economic crisis that, actually, closely parallels what we are in now but without the face masks. Either way, I do feel vindicated about both, the stockpiling of freezedrieds and the financial contortions I’ve gone though to get the finances resilient.

Patriots Day 2020

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One of only a a handful of holidays I actually get enthusiastic about, today is Patriots Day. You can do a search on the blog under ‘Patriots day’ and come up with previous posts on the subject. I try to keep to it’s spirit by going out to the range and practicing for the next shoot-the-Redcoats episode that comes along.

Interestingly, you can buy multicam versions of those hats online.

I understand many of you cannot, for various reasons, get to the range today. It happens. But if you can’t get out and put some lead in the air, you should at least give some thought to the history of the day and what it means to you.

 

Hard not to be an I-told-you-so

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The other day, someone who, in the past, has made fun of my preparedness interests contacted me. They needed an OTC pain reliever of a particular type and brand and it was unavailable at their local pharmacies. I was asked to check my local pharmacies and if I found some I was to send it to them. And all I could think was “If there is a medication that is so critical to you that, when you are out of it, you have to ask people across the country to find you some….well…maybe thats an item you should think about stockpiling more than just one bottle of.”

But…some people won’t learn. When this is over almost everyone who went through it will dismiss the idea of stockpiling necessities against a crisis that wipes out the grocery stores because “Oh, that never happens” even though it just freaking happened.

I’m continuing to round out things on my list (the Preponomicon) because even if we do somehow find ourselves now on the tail end of this crisis (which I don’t believe is anywhere near finished) the economic repercussions are going to last for wuite a while, I think. Anything I can put in place now to prevent me from having to spend resources later is definitely worth doing.

As I wander about I notice more and more people wearing masks. Invariably, they see to be either much older or much younger people. My contemporaries, it seems, are willing to let fate do as it will.

Still haven’t had to break out the freeze-dried pork chops yet. Also haven’t had to shoot any cannibal looters. Lamest boogaloo ever.