Category: politics

Friday, 23 December 2016

09:47 – Barbara is off to the gym and supermarket. I just issued a PO for 10,000 15/415 bottle caps, which should hold us for a while. I remember the first time I ordered a carton (1,440) of those caps, and thought that was a lot. Then the first time I ordered a case of 10,000, I thought I had all the caps in the world and would never run out.

We repackaged some macaroni yesterday from the original 5-pound bags into clean, dry 2-liter soft drink bottles. We got 14 bags transferred into 24 2-liter bottles. We still need to label the bottles and add an oxygen absorber to each. Then there are the other 14 bags still sitting on the kitchen counter.

Barbara commented that this was more macaroni than we’d eaten in the 33 years we’ve been married. It isn’t, really. It just looks like a lot, sitting there in one place. Once we get this last batch repackaged, we’ll be up to about 475 pounds of pasta packaged for long-term storage. That’s enough to provide the grain portion of our diet for the five of us, including Colin, for about four months. The rice, white flour, and other grains we have stored extends that to about a year’s worth. And the 24 cans of Campbell Chunky Soup that arrived the other day can turn those grain products into 24 more tasty main meals.

The special session of the North Carolina house and senate that was called to repeal HB2 has failed, so it’s still illegal for perverts to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. The progs’ attempts to redefine biology has failed yet again, at least in North Carolina. People here are smart enough to understand that, other than a tiny number of monsters, there are exactly two sexes, male (XY) and female (XX), and two sexual preferences, gay (XX+XX or XY+XY) and straight (XX+XY). XX’s who believe they’re actually XY’s and vice versa are, to use the technical term, delusional, and people here understand that. And we understand that we’re under no obligation to humor their delusions.


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Saturday, 3 December 2016

09:40 – I think it’s funny to watch the progressives panic. Their latest campaign seems to be an all-out attack on “fake news sites”, which ironically are the sites that are reporting truthfully. And the attacks are being made by the actual fake-news sites like CNN, AP, NYT/WP, and ABC/CBS/FOX/NBC/PBS. Those traditional “news” sites have completely destroyed their credibility with the American public, and are now in flat-out panic mode. What a bunch of progressive scum. It’s nice to see them getting what they deserve. Well, not what they deserve. That would be seeing them hanging from lamp posts. But at least seeing their lies starting to catch up with them.

Another lurker has begun posting comments. Welcome to Eugen (Romania). It’s always interesting to hear what folks from outside the US think about things. The first time I ever had extensive face-to-face contact with anyone from eastern Europe was in 1981. I was dating Lee Bowie, a girl who went to Clemson University, and driving down from Winston frequently to spend weekends with her. She rented a house, and her housemates were two girls from Poland, Cassia and Goga. Their take on the US was fascinating. They were actually afraid of uniformed cops, which I guess was understandable. Just as we’d all grown up watching TV and movies about nasty Soviet spies being foiled by heroic CIA agents, they’d grown up watching nasty American spies being foiled by heroic KGB agents. They were scared to death of the US military and nuclear forces, just as we were scared to death of the Russian military and nuclear forces. They were just normal people, and quickly came to realize that we were just normal people as well. I think all of us quickly realized that they were afraid of our government and we were afraid of theirs, both with good cause.

The only real difference between us was that we were used to plenty and they were used to shortages. The first time I visited Lee in her new rented house, I carried in my bottle of Coke from my Jeep and opened her freezer to stick it in and rechill it. It wouldn’t fit in the freezer, which was literally crammed full of frozen pizzas. Lee explained that Cassia and Goga had discovered supermarkets. In Poland, they’d had to stand in line for food and take whatever was on offer. They couldn’t believe that in the US they could just walk into a supermarket and carry off as much as they wanted of whatever they wanted. We had some interesting discussions after that about the relative efficiency of capitalism and free markets versus socialism and a command economy.


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Saturday, 26 November 2016

08:47 – Rot in Hell, Fidel. Fidel Castro dead at 90. Too bad you didn’t die 90 years ago. Ah, well. At least Fidel has become a Good Commie.

Barbara is due back sometime this afternoon. She’ll have her car full of stuff, and a Christmas tree riding on top. She’s going to make a quick stop on her way home at one of the many Christmas tree places locally. The Sparta area is a major producer of Christmas trees. We’ve watched trucks loaded with literally thousands of them rolling south on US21, headed for who knows where. I suspect there are other trucks heading to all points of the compass.

I see that Jeff Bezos via the Washington Post is accusing many of the news sites I read regularly of being Russian propaganda mouthpieces who’ve all been doing their best to influence the election. Pot, meet kettle. The WP, along with the NYT, ABC/CBS/NBC/PBS/CNN/FOX and other mainstream media operations have done themselves untold damage over the course of the 2016 campaign. Before that, a significant minority of Americans disliked and mistrusted them. Now, that’s true of probably a majority of Americans. Man or woman, young or old, rich or poor, white or black, religious or not, most Americans now recognize the MSM as a propaganda organ for the progressives. Many of them approve, unfortunately, but the point is that now most understand that there’s no objectivity in the MSM. They’re making themselves increasingly useless to anyone, and among them I most definitely include FoxNews, which is no more conservative than the Democrat party or the GOP. They’re all progs, damn them to hell.


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Wednesday, 23 November 2016

09:36 – Barbara said Bonnie had a great time yesterday on their trip up to Galax. Bonnie spent a couple of hours driving the scooter around the Walmart aisles, shopping for food, clothing, and household items. Just getting out of the house was a treat for Bonnie. Barbara said they could do it again after Christmas.

Barbara is off to the gym this morning and then to the Friends of the Library bookstore to volunteer this afternoon. Tomorrow morning, she’s driving down to Winston to spend Thanksgiving with Frances and Al. They’re going to the craft show in Greensboro on Friday, doing a couple things Saturday morning, and then she’ll head back here. That means two full days of wild women and parties for Colin and me. We have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches planned for our Thanksgiving feast.

The Lowe’s delivery truck showed up yesterday afternoon with our gas cooktop. It’s currently sitting in our foyer bathroom, awaiting Blue Ridge Co-op to install the propane tank and piping on December 9th. Once it’s all installed, we’ll be able to cook off-grid for a year or two if worse comes to worst. Barbara is looking forward to cooking with gas again. She did that until she went away to college, and has been using an electric cooktop ever since.

I see that Trump has a lot of conservatives worried because of his back-pedaling on promises he made during the campaign, such as exporting only illegal aliens who have committed serious crimes rather than exporting all of them and building a wall. I’m not too worried about it. What Trump says varies from moment to moment according to his audience. What he actually does won’t necessarily bear any relation to what he says he’s going to do. My take on Trump is that he’ll probably turn out to be a pretty decent President, far better than Obama, Bush, or Clinton were. No one is going to get everything they want, but on balance I think Trump will satisfy most conservatives and libertarians. They may get only 50% of what they wanted, but that’s far more than they’d have gotten under a new Clinton administration. There’ll be a lot of bitching and moaning from all sides, but overall he should be at least okay if not better than okay.


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Wednesday, 16 November 2016

10:21 – Yesterday we got 80 pounds (36+ kilos) of pinto beans repackaged into 21 two-liter soft drink bottles, at just under 4 pounds per bottle. That’s sufficient to fill out the amino acid profile for about 500 pounds of rice/pasta/oats, in combination yielding complete protein.

Barbara volunteers with the Friends of the Library. They had a Quiz Bowl event last night, and Barbara had volunteered to be one of the judges. When the lady from the library called Barbara yesterday afternoon to verify that she’d be there, I asked Barbara what it involved. She said there’d be teams of high school kids competing against teams of adults. I told Barbara I’d be happy to help out if they needed more adults. She checked with the librarian, who said they could always use more people.

So we had an early dinner and headed over to the library about 6:00. I ended up sitting at the back of the room with several of the other other adult volunteers. I was between Tom Smith, who’s the Chairman of the County Commissioners, and Bryan Edwards, who’s the Sparta Town Manager. We got along great, making whispered remarks about what was going on up on stage. Tom’s a funny guy, and at one point I remarked to him, “You know, that’s the fourth time that you said something just as I was thinking it.” He replied that the two of us were going to get along fine. Bryan is also a funny guy, and between the two of them they made me feel like part of their group instead of a newcomer to the area.

Few or none of the adults had ever done a Quiz Bowl event before, so they started with two teams of the high school students facing off so that we could see how it was done. The winner of that round then faced another team of students to determine which team of students would face the adult team in the final. We had two teams of adults, so we had another round to determine which adult team would be in the final round with the winning student team. The adults, of course, crushed the student team in the final round.

Barbara commented on our drive home that experience had won the day, and that 20 or 30 years from now those kids would have experience and would probably beat a student team handily. I told her that I didn’t think that was true. The adults are from a generation when the public schools still actually taught. These kids are unfortunately in public school at a time when teaching is no longer the priority. They’re in at least the second full generation of people who’ve grown up attending school but not being educated. Still, I take comfort in the fact that there were a lot of bright kids there, and bright kids learn despite all attempts to keep them from doing so.

I just wish there had been a team of home-schooled kids there. They’d have probably kicked adult ass. Which is why Barbara and I do what we do. Home schooled kids are the future of this country, now that the public schools have been destroyed.


Uncle Remus, as usual, has a post worth reading up on Woodpile Report. FTA

After action report. This is where I disagree with Trump. He asks us to put ill will behind us and work together for the good of the country. He says we’re all in this together. No, we’re not. Sure they’re our fellow Americans, but so are Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson. We’re all in this together in the sense we coexist with termites.

Ayup. I, in common with most Normals, used to tolerate progs, if only grudgingly. No more. In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, “You realize, this means war.”

The leftists aren’t merely wrong, they’re dishonest and malevolent. They still hold us, our values and our heritage in contempt. They still mean to destroy the reputations and careers of dissenters. They still adore illegal aliens, jihadists, dindu thugs and the perverts du jour. They still insult and demean us and teach our kids to despise America, us and themselves. They still mean to trash what remains of the Constitution.

The progs don’t understand that we Normals are by nature polite and conciliatory, but when our anger is aroused it’s a truly fearsome thing. We are the children and grandchildren of those Normals who bombed Germany into rubble and nuked Japan. Like those warriors, we can be pushed only so far before we respond devastatingly. And I’m afraid we’ve reached that point already. And we’ll be opposed by a bunch of effete, unarmed, tofu-eating metrosexuals, very few of whom have even been in a schoolyard fight.

And finally the bottom line:

Gambling with the tipping point, Market Ticker – Urban centers consume roughly 90% of the energy and food in this country yet they comprise 5-10% of the land mass. What if the people who peacefully conceded the result of two elections over the last eight years despite vehemently opposing the outcome decide that if the “blue” folks can riot, loot, beat people who vote the “wrong way” and similar they will not accept any further election result that doesn’t go their way, and instead of rioting or burning things they will simply shut off the flow of food and energy to said “blue” areas? After all, you don’t value them at all—you consider them subhuman, racist, xenophobic, deplorable and irredeemable—all at once. If you keep it up, that at some point, given that you’re utterly reliant on those you’re abusing for the basics of life—the loaf of bread, the gallon of gasoline, the electricity that powers your lights—they decide they’ve had enough. That day your supply of cellophane-wrapped meat and plastic bag full of bread disappears.

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Tuesday, 15 November 2016

09:15 – The progressive attacks on Trump continue and accelerate on all fronts, as expected. Their problem is that Trump is not a member of the progressive team, so he has to be stopped at all costs. Ironic, considering that Trump is what would have been considered a moderate-to-liberal Democrat not all that long ago. Right now, the progs are pushing “cooperation”, which of course means convincing Trump to do things their way.

Email overnight from another newbie prepper, who’s concerned that Trump’s election means an increased likelihood of sustained violent civil unrest. I’ll call her Cassie, and she may well be right. Cassie reminds me a lot of Jen and Brittany, when they were just getting started. Cassie and her husband live in a rural area. They’re both in their mid- to late-20’s, and don’t have children or family living locally. She’s from out of the area. He’s an only child and his parents have retired to Florida. Cassie’s main focus at this point is food. They already have a 30-day supply of canned goods and dry staples, and Cassie would like to expand that significantly.

I suggested that Cassie follow the LDS recommendations for LTS food. Not the current ones, which were greatly reduced about 15 years ago, but the ones that the LDS Church revised greatly downward in 2002. The current recommendations provide only about 1,700 or 1,800 cal/day, which is enough to keep someone alive but constantly hungry. So I recommended the following amounts per person-month:

Grains – 30 pounds of pasta, rice, oats, cornmeal, etc. This provides roughly 50,000 calories, or about 1667 cal/day.

Beans – 5 pounds of dry beans. This provides another 8,000+ calories, or about 275 cal/day.

Oil – 2 pounds, or one quart/liter of vegetable oil, a small can of shortening, a jar of peanut butter, etc. This provides another 8,000+ calories, or about 275 cal/day.

Salt – about 12 ounces of iodized salt. No calories, but essential to life.

Multivitamins – 30 capsules, to replace vitamin deficiencies in LTS food, particularly after long storage.

All of this costs very little, and provides about 2,200 cal/day of complete nutrition. Once she’s accumulated as many person-months as she feels comfortable with, I recommended that Cassie begin adding cooking essentials (herbs and spices, bouillon, baking soda, baking powder, yeast, canned and/or dry milk, powdered eggs, butter, and cheese, etc.) as well as meal extenders (things to turn plain grains and beans into tasty meals; canned soups, stews, vegetables, etc.) Finally, I suggested she add as much canned meat as possible, which will be the most expensive part of her acquisitions.


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Monday, 14 November 2016

09:20 – We got enough chemical bags made up yesterday to build another 15 or 18 each of the biology kits and chemistry kits. With what we have in stock, that takes us to a comfortable finished goods inventory level for this time of year. Sales will be slow for the rest of this month, and then pick up again through December and for the first half of January. Then they’ll slow down again through about tax day.

Anti-Trump rioting continued for a fifth night in many large cities and a few smaller ones, although it seems relatively restrained compared to what it might have been. It almost seems like the only people rioting are those paid by Soros to do so, and they’re having a hard time getting unpaid people to help them riot.

As expected, Trump is already backing off from many of his campaign promises, notably his plan to expel illegal aliens. He now says he’ll focus on expelling only the worst two or three million of them and worry about the rest later. He’s also said he has no problem with same-sex marriage, considering it settled by the Supreme Court decision. No doubt that’ll upset a lot of social conservatives. My advice to Trump on this issue is to repeat what I’ve said before. Trump needs to get the federal government completely out of the marriage issue. He can do that by directing the IRS to eliminate any reference to marriage in tax regulations. Everyone should file their federal income taxes as either single or married filing separately. And the tax rates for the latter should be the same as for the former. A married couple with $40,000 of taxable income should pay the same amount each as a single person does on $20,000. Marriage status should become a personal and contract issue, not a tax issue.

My main concern about Trump at this point is that he’s being disturbingly conciliatory towards the progressives, the GOPe, and so on. Perhaps that will change once he’s actually in office. I hope so. I think Trump’s main priority should be to complete the destruction of the Progressive/Democrat/Republican establishment, leaving them nowhere to run.

This week, we’ll build more science kits, wash and dry a bunch of 2-liter bottles, and fill 20 of them with pinto beans and oxygen absorbers. We also have a bunch of pasta to be repackaged, and more on order. That’s not time-critical, as even in their original plastic bags their best-by dates are 18 months to two years out.


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Sunday, 13 November 2016

09:39 – I see that Trump has some hesitation about living in the White House as President, and who could blame him? Just because he’s been elected President doesn’t mean he and his family should have to take such a big step down in living accommodations. There’d be some other advantages to him living in his NYC penthouse, including the fact that he’d be far away from DC. He could, of course, use the White House for ceremonial events like withdrawing the US from so-called climate-change accords.

Anti-Trump rioting continued for a fourth night, although the MSM, including FoxNews, describes it as “protests”. I hope that local authorities understand that with Obama and his justice department on the way out, their hands are no longer tied when dealing with rioters. Peaceful protests are fine, and in fact should be encouraged. But when protesters cross the line by blocking streets, assaulting cops and civilians, and burning things down, they are no longer protesters. They are rioters, and should be met with lethal force.

I expect things to get worse before they get better, if they ever do. I have a sneaking suspicion that the prog establishment is secretly happy that Trump was elected. That way, when things get worse, they can blame everything on Trump. And things are going to get worse. Decades of prog rule have literally bankrupted the country, and the crash, when it comes, is not going to be pretty.

We’re about as well-prepared here as we can be, although we continue to make minor adds and tweaks as I think of weaknesses that need to be shored up. As always, I want to make sure that we have water, food, heating/cooking, power and communications, sanitation, medical, and defense needs covered. We’re actually in pretty good shape now on most of those. I do plan to put in another Walmart order for bulk staples and some miscellaneous stuff, but that’ll be it for LTS food for at least a while.


For future reference: A 2-liter soft drink bottle holds 3 pounds 14 ounces of pinto beans, which are free-flowing through a suitable funnel into the 2-liter bottle mouth.

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Saturday, 12 November 2016

09:17 – Email from Jen. The anti-Trump protests have arrived in her area. Well, kind of. The small town where her brother and his family live, about half an hour from Jen and David, had an anti-Trump protest Thursday. It didn’t amount to much; fewer than ten people gathering in front of the courthouse carrying not-my-president signs. They stood around for half an hour or so and then dispersed. Everyone else pretty much ignored them.

Jen’s first thought, of course, was to check her inventory in case she needed to head out to buy some stuff. But she and her group decided they were about as well-prepared as they needed to be, and a minor protest didn’t warrant taking any additional action. She and David filled their gas tanks, but that was it.

Brittany weighed in to say that the general attitude in her area was happiness that Clinton had been crushed and Trump was our next president. Their family is even more rural than Jen’s, with the nearest city of any size several hours’ drive from them.

It’s pretty much the same situation here in Sparta, although we do have Winston-Salem 60 miles away. This county went about 75:25 Trump:Clinton, and if there are any dissatisfied Clinton supporters, they’re keeping very quiet about it.

And, speaking of dissatisfied Clinton supporters, I see that the Tampa police had to protect a huge group of them who were about to confront a group of US Marines who’d gathered to celebrate the Corps’ birthday and raise money for the Wounded Warrior project. It’s almost a shame that the cops got in the way. It would have been interesting to see what happens when a group of special snowflakes attacks a group of pissed off Marines. My guess is that the final score would be Marines – 1,000+, Snowflakes – 0.

And I see increasing calls from the progs for conciliation. What they mean, of course, is that we Normals may have won the elections, but it’s up to us to adopt the progs’ agenda. Yeah, right. I’m not interested in their feelings, and I suspect no other Normals are, either. I’d as soon shoot them as look at them.


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Friday, 11 November 2016

09:32 – Today is Veterans’ Day, a day to remember the service of our present and former veterans.

The last of our WWI veterans are no longer with us, and few enough of our WWII veterans. Time passes quickly. When I was about five years old, my parents took me and my younger brother to a veterans’ parade in downtown New Castle, PA, where I grew up. There were hundreds of veterans of my father’s generation. They were mostly young men in their 30’s and 40’s, and had served in WWII and Korea. There were fewer but still a large group of my grandfather’s generation, men mostly the age that I am now, who had served in WWI and/or WWII. There were also a few of my great-grandfathers’ generation, elderly men who had served in the Spanish-American War.

I’m sure that most of the veterans there had thought at the time that they were fighting so that their future children and grandchildren wouldn’t have to. Alas, that turned out not to be true, as each succeeding generation had its own wars to fight. So, I sit here thinking about veterans of earlier wars as kids young enough to be my own children and grandchildren fight their own overseas wars, probably thinking that they’re fighting so that their future children and grandchildren won’t have to fight. And realizing that a thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago, our young people were fighting for the same reason. And also realizing that people don’t start wars; governments do.

I ordered a gas cooktop yesterday, but it won’t arrive for a couple of weeks. That gives us time to arrange to have a propane tank and piping installed. In addition to running propane to the kitchen, I’m also going to have the installers stub out an exterior connection and quick disconnect for our generator. I talked to an electrician yesterday about giving us a quote on installing a cut-over switch for the generator. He’s also a Generac dealer, so I’ll have him install a propane kit and cutover on our 5KW Generac so that we can use either gasoline or propane to fuel it.

I’m still debating about tank size. The standard propane tank is 120 gallons, which is a bit smaller than I’d like. Unfortunately, the next size up, 330 gallons, has a lot more restrictions on it than the smaller tank, as far as required distance from the house, pad requirements, and so on.

The nominal 120-gallon tank actually holds 100 gallons when full, the equivalent of twenty 20-pound cannisters, which is about nine million BTU’s of heat content. The largest burner in our gas cooktop is 15,000 BTU’s, so we could run it for about 600 hours on a full tank. Call it an hour and 40 minutes a day for a year. So I guess that 120-gallon tank will suffice, but I’ll need to keep it at least 75% full at all times.


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