After The Math

[curt]

....or, how to deal with the inevitable aftermath of the approaching collapse of the US and with it, the World economy. We had a thread like this going good over at the first RBC...remember, the one we all moved to from other cyber places like The Smirking Chimp and Project for the Old American Century ?? Those were the days. We were hot on convincing people the USA is fascist. Life was rough. Nobody listened. We screamed our lungs out, some of us. Still, nobody listened. The Bush bashing took the front seat of most every discussion. No time for reality. No "Blick in die Zukunft" (view in the future). Tough titty, too late, the train is gone and now we have to look around for "a place to sleep". (after a personal experience as a young GI in Frankfurt. Life sucks when you realize you blew it big time by not listening to people's warnings)

Quoting Bo......(from a mini crusade he was on today);

"Well, here's your future discussion topic: The USA is dead.

The body's been burned to a crisp, hung from a bridge, and the limbs are falling off.

The RBC is now making plans to survive the aftermath. That's the reality we need to prepare for now."

So bring 'em on, those survival techniques. Copy & Patse from the other other RBC too. What good will it do us o'er there when the damn place (TribeNet) collapses ?

[Mouse]

In this market town in wealthy Surrey the owner of the local newspaper and its gaggle of newsprint relatives, has sold a community hall right in the middle of town to an evangelical group that had my daughter in their sticky mitts for a while (3 years?) recently. She has extricated herself, and thus undone the invisible judgements that marooned me. It is delightful to feel her approval again in so many ways.
Didn't tell you (didn't want to make you jealous) that she took me out to dinner a couple of weeks ago. My first dinner out for six years, and my first proper curry since before she was born. When she was a baby I dreamt that I walked into town and bought a take-away curry while she was asleep in her cot, and woke up in horror when I realised that I had left her alone and still so much hill to climb with the curry going cold in its bag. That put a lid on extra-curricular interests for me.
So it was a rather special meal. She was looking more beautiful than ever, very pregnant, glowing and calm.

[littleoldme]

Good on you Mouse. Tell her hey, and enjoy the calm before the baby storm.

[curt]

End-time for USA upon oil collapse just about wraps it up, dunnit? Has me wondering why I'm not in the rain forest learning to live off ants and grub worms. And it raises the question WHO WILL survive?

[waldopaper]

And Lo! You can also eat sweet-potato LEAVES!
Some good links here: http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/library.html

[curt]

# Lockpicking for the beginner
# Hotwire cars

Now THAT sounds interesting!

That tool kit looks to be what your basic survivor needs to know to survive. But how does a potential survivor know he/she will actually survive? You can't know. But if you do survive....whatever it is that wipes out the rest of the world, leaving you and a few others to fend for yourselves and you DON'T have these basic skills in your head and in your daily routine, you're not likely to survive surviving and you become a delayed casualty.

There's something wrong with my life and I know it. Am I gonna do anything about it? I doubt it. There's a commune out in the desert in Arizona. I wonder if they would survive more easily than people who regularly congregate at WalMart & Safeway. It would be a field trip for an anthropologist to walk into the commune and search for the weak spots, the ones that will make the community fail to sustain without outside help and point these out to the community. What am I thinking? Like out of a SciFi paperback from 1971. A group of friends are celebrating a birthday in the cellar of this guys house....an old stone house, more like a mini fortress, somewhere in southern France. A flash goes off and most of the world population is killed. The group locks itself in the cellar and lives off provisions there until they see the need to go out again and there are these half-melting sickly zombies stumbling around looking for water and food. The cellar people have to arm themselves and kill the zombies and dispose of the bodies. The zombie wave dissipates and the cellar people realize they are quite alone so they make a plan on how to survive. They plant corn and wheat and potatoes and because they've never done so before, the first crops fail miserably. But they keep going and even though a few die off for various reasons, the group survives and a baby is born. Humanity survives. Holy Shit!!

[waldopaper]

what was left of Hurricane Ike just passed thru... 35mph winds... and our power went out. Back on now... but if such a little puff can shut down our juice, i better get crackin. Not enuff bread left to set up an off-grid power system... altho reasonably efficient, we still ALL-electric.

So... thinking about putting in a hand-pump and an outhouse. I can disguise the outhouse as a "garden shed," and use it as one... until we gotta use it for real. Not as cool as the inside composting potty... but will solve the poop problem- and the hand-pump gets at the water problem. We can avoid freezing even in this huge drafty brickhouse. Now... food.

I haven't even messed with the gardens- altho the raised one is MUCH easier to weed... we'll see what it produces- BUT it wouldn't be nearly enough. Better than nothing. Meanwhile, Curt and I sat in on the "warcrime conference," and must say... altho I mocked it at first... made MUCH more sense than any other political bullshit seen so far. The "legal system" is still somewhat intact... and the kapo goons still rely on it to give them a hint of legitimacy and justify their toys. I imagine they would enjoy doing their usual whackadoodle on some fat richpig more than us po' niggas. That's gotta get boring after a while.

Next Spring... two-three more raised plots... and expand the level plot. Pump and outhouse. Ammo and rudimentary fields of fire. Meanwhile, it's getting the wee spiders to see the whole fucking thing is falling down around their ears. As long as their cell-phones work, they don't give a shit. Given them all kindsa links... but they'd rather do facebook. Maybe that's good. They good at the math.

Not so sure about "after."

[BO]

just don't let yer poop contaminate your ground water.

Following the banking collapse with great interest. Housing prices predicted to fall a lot more which should exacerbate the problem. Foreclosure rate has doubled in the (but we're different) Seattle area. The local news is reporting the hard times, finally. Of course mostly we see ignorant rednecks complaining about their mortgage interest rates being reset and being stuck in their loans. Dumb shits. I feel sorry for the poor schmucks losing their jobs, but their claims of ignorance in financial matters just don't wash. They're doing the I'm just a poor ignorant cracker whose been taken advantage of schtick to avoid responsibility.

The end of suburbia is closing in on us fast. The decay is evident. People without enough money to keep their places up. If you have enough property to make a go at pseudo self-sufficiency then rejoice. But 'round here, they've slimmed down lot sizes to a minimum in order produce more housing within a given area--2500 sq. ft. houses on 3500 sq. ft. lots-- so all those particular people can hope for is a continuation of state-supplied services and a steady job. Essentially, they live in barracks. Wage slaves without a clue.

Gonna be puttin' in 13 new houses on the acre and a half that borders our property. Gonna fill 'em with fresh immigrant workers from China or Vietnam. Our neighborhood eagles will be gone. The local lake will become dead in short time. But we'll have fresh tax payers and consumers to keep the economy going. I was the only person in the neighborhood to put up a fuss. So fuck 'em. When the BO family moves, we'll rent our house out to crack addicts as retribution.

Interesting enough, BO is now a junior FBI agent and part of a big sting operation going down in the hood. Called me and asked me to report on suspicious trucks that might be delivering stolen goods to a neighbor. I got suggested cause I work from home. Asked 'em if I could get a get-out-of-jail-free-card for doing it. They declined. Oh well. It's still fun.

Got the whole family out weeding today. Gotta post some pictures of BO's recent renovations. The rains are coming and I'd like to get through this winter without any leaks or other problems. Houses are a pain in the ass to maintain. What I need are two lots--one somewhere warm, and one up north, and a comfortable mobile rig to live in. Wish they made amphibious RV's. Now that would be sweet. Float on down the mississippi in the fall, and drive back up to Canada for the summer.

OK, these be my ramblings for this evening. No point to 'em at all.

[Cal]

Found this link on a permaculture group on tribe ... interesting reading for cultivating the 'gardener' in you ....

"Interesting article from Nat. Geographic this month:

Our Good Earth

[pan]

in WA state a few years back there was a big wind storm that left large portions of the Puget Sound region without power. No one froze but several people died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Some of the dead had generators running in their garage others brought charcoal grills into their houses.

I highly recommend getting a battery operated carbon monoxide detector if you are going to use an alternative heat source.
.
One thought that struck us during that storm - this was when we were in the large, very breezy and cold warehouse live-works space that wasn't very warm even when the heat was on - pitch a tent inside your house, it will help retain body heat if you have no functioning heat source.

[curt]

"pitch a tent inside your house, it will help retain body heat if you have no functioning heat source."

that's a very very good tip. I'll have to try a dry run this weekend. My wife will think I've gone bozo. "No Baby, I'm not camping out, I'm camping in". Good thing I can put my iglu tent up without having to drive stakes in the laminate. Speaking of cold houses, a friend of ours used to live in Siberia. He said frost on the walls was common. I'm talking about the walls on the inside of the house. So the first few years over here, he and his family we're in bliss. They still walk around in T-shirts when I'm all bundled up and shivering. Maybe we're spoiled. We have a wood stove and use it regularly. Never gave any thought to the danger of carbon monoxide. It's real, yip. And we took the smoke detector down cause it was beepin apeshit for some reason. Maybe we're not smart enough to survive the math quiz or the aftermath. Talkin about me and mine here. I've done a lot of survival kit and techniques research but do I have anything actually set up and ready? No. See what I mean?

[Mouse]

Well I prefer to wear a tent indoors. At home I wear long skirts with several long petticoats, having always much preferred the sensation of wearing real clothes, which is how I think of them.

I have a small wood stove, haven't used it for a while. What with the knees and the back, and then my shoulder went. Swinging an axe and carrying wood can seem somewhat risky but I'm saving for a load of wood. The local borough council that is my landlord have decided to install carbon monoxide sensors in houses with working fireplaces and to sweep our chimneys. That's good news.
I put hooks in the ceiling rafters for mobiles, they'd do for constructing something tent-like should the need arise.

[Kate]