Two from The Onion (language in both NSFW): Steve Jobs obituary and “Nervous American Voters Worried About Botching Another Election.” One from Ragnar in a recent comment section. Sort of a redneck punk rap song, “My Country, My Ass.” (“Teacher used to say we had a Bill of Rights. I think they took our rights and sent us the bill.”) Regulators vs an enterprising ship salvager. What to do if you can’t afford a vet. DRM encourages piracy. No surprise, really. Neither is this. (Not that the fedgov should be subsidizing anything, of course.) Funniest pet Halloween costumes. Think it’s…
Category: Preparedness
A while back, I wrote verbosely about a concept that’s better described in one word: Endgame. Justin Raimondo got me thinking about Endgame again this week when he opened one of his sterling rants with a reference to the final stages of the American empire. The article he linked with the words “final stages” would seem like a little nothing to most people. The link takes the reader to a news item about the South Korean government buying gold. Only awarefolk would grok why Raimondo considers South Korea’s purchase of gold to be a sign of final stages of anything…
… but it definitely belongs on your preparedness shelf. —– The Prepared Family Guide to Uncommon Diseases Compiled by Enola Gay, et al. 148 pages May 2011, Paratus Familia Press I was pretty squeamish in my younger days. I felt faint at the sight of blood, especially other people’s. I imagined I had every grotesque disease my older female relatives described (“OMG, I’m coming down with pellagra!”). And they really liked to describe them. The more horrible the better (“No. Oh heavens, I think it’s tetanus!”). As I grew up, I got over that. I am (knock wood) immune to…
L (who might possibly be on some mind-altering substance) writes: For some time I have been frustrated with web-based pontificators with memberships/advertisers touting “the end is near.” I have no objections to the notion that we are headed for calamity, and in fact think we are. BUT My frustration(s): 1) Would someone toss me a freaking bone and tell me WHEN … I keep hearing “any day now” and have for the past 12 years … I am getting “survival fatigue.” (NOTE from Claire. Only 12 years, L? Why, you’re just a babe in the woods. “Any day now” has…
Darned clever strawberry beds: A friend took me into the hills where people she knows made these neat raised strawberry beds. Around here, if you plant strawberries, what the slugs don’t eat the birds will. So these folks found (or as my friend put it, “found”) a culvert, sliced it lengthwise and built it into raised beds. The beds are lower on one end for drainage, and the contraptions on top are covered with hardware cloth and rigged so that they can be raised at the plants grow. Since every one of my hoity-toity certified-organic strawberry plants disappeared without a…
Optimism? Optimism? Does that preposterous word dare raise its head around here — again??? And in association with matters economic? Never fear. I know nobody in these parts is as blind as Bernanke or as oblivious as Obama. Is the economy going straight to hell? Yes, of course it is. Are things likely to get worse long before they get better? You can bet your six-gallon superpails of hard red winter wheat on it. Are your children’s futures in peril? Oh my. Will politicians continue to try to “cure” the economic poison they administered with ever-higher doses of the same…
This is a follow-up to last week’s “Middle-Class Shrug” blog. —– We hear about economic “pressure on the middle class.” Business media tell us the middle class is being squeezed. Popular media try to break our hearts with profiles of couples who have fallen out of the middle class and into desperation. But the picture they paint is incomplete and distorted. The “squeezed” mostly remain an abstraction. The “fallen” families beloved of the media are, as often as not, a misrepresentation; they’re usually folk who made dumb decisions (mostly by buying houses they couldn’t afford at prices they should have…
Dirt-Cheap Survival Retreat: One Man’s Solution By M.D. Creekmore Available from Paladin Press Available from Amazon.com $12.00, 79 pages, 2011 While many would-be survivalists were waiting to win the lottery or planning to discreetly bump off a rich uncle to build their Ultimate Survival Retreat in Idaho (complete with underground bunkers, escape tunnels, a decade’s supply of dried lentils, and customized Super Whizz-Whacker 3000 rifles at every lead-shuttered portal) … a handful of authors have been telling us how to do it another way: cheap. First came Brian Kelling with his Travel-Trailer Homesteading Under $5,000 Then along came Phil Garlington…
I can now confirm that the rumors are true. The rumors aren’t as exciting as the ones about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child or even the ones about Botox Mom. But they are true. I’ll be with the Backwoods Home gang at the Mother Earth News Fair in Puyallup, Washington, on the weekend of June 4 & 5. I’ll be there signing copies of Hardyville Tales and (if the Duffys permit) taking orders for any and all of my books from other publishers. (I can also take advance orders and hand your autographed copies to you at the fair.) The event…
A few choice items mined from comments and emails from blog readers: Have you thanked the above Wholesome Homeland Security Hero for keeping us safe by groping your children? Turns out TSA agent Thomas Gordon is so dedicated to our welfare that he even studied young girls in his spare time. (From winston; who noted oh-so-correctly that this news was inevitalble. Bet it won’t be the last.) From Pat: Turns out you can get paid for trying to inflict a conscience on Obama. Unfortunately, the few bucks these folks might receive doesn’t even begin to offset the thousands they had…