The Endarkenment gets physical

Our dishwasher gave out a fairly long time ago, and we put off the service call, as Rusty was keeping up with the dishes. But then it started leaking backed-up wastewater on the floor (which turned out to have been a result of Rusty mucking with the hoses under the sink) so we felt we had to. We got a terminal diagnosis. I contemplated a replacement, looked on line, finally went into Sears to see what they had, and for how much. And I decided to forget about it. Now, my parents always had a dishwasher. I’ve had one when I could.It seemed like one of the essential accessories of middle-class life. But I have an issue with spending $400 or so on something that will last only 6 years. The salesman at Sears told me they’re only getting 7-10 out of them, because they’re made more cheaply now. And the new green dishwasher detergent doesn’t work worth crap. So why should I eat $7/mo. plus operating costs, for something that doesn’t operate? This is, I think, the first time I’ve abandoned a technology because politics and politically-distorted market forces have made it useless to me. It’s not an issue of scale, like avoiding a haybine in favor of a scythe, or a bulk milk tank in favor of gallon jugs and mason jars. We dirty enough dishes to make it worthwhile and desirable…if it worked and would last.

And there’s Japan. Practically the first thing I said to Rusty about it was, “Watch the electronic supply chain get screwed.”  It wasn’t quite that, but the Tee Vee this morning was all about Japanese cars and their availability or lack thereof. Most of the plants are here, and as long as they can get parts, they’re OK. But the Prius is made over there, and over there is shut down. Now I’m not going to cry about some liberal douche in Madison WI not being able to get the car he wants. But it’s clear evidence of the fragility of our most advanced technologies. Rusty said she heard that American auto companies were helping their Japanese counterparts, and she said, “Screw that; they should overtake them.” That’s what American companies used to do, you know; somebody would stumble, maybe through no fault of their own, and they’d grab their market share.

Regardless of how the nuclear issue turns out, when the techno-monks of 2100 write the history of the collapse of civilization, the market crash of 2008 and the earthquake of 2011 will be the defining moments. You haven’t seen the last of this disaster, boys and girls, not by a long shot.

PS: This guy gets it.

Book review: Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life as we knew it

Susan Beth Pfeffer
Life As We Knew It
Harcourt, 2006

There’s a whole subgenre of survival novels out there, particularly lately. But it’s pretty old tradition, and the classics in the lot (Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson) have become young adult classics.  But now, I’ve learned, there’s a trilogy of such novels written for young adults. Since I have a 14 year old granddaughter who can always use a present, I figured I’d check it out.

The premise of Life As We Knew It is that an asteroid knocks the moon into a different orbit. As TEOTWAWKIs go, this one is pretty dire: tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes leading to an early and severe winter, air you can barely breathe. But this is not a “how-to manual” in the John Wesley, Rawles manner (though certainly lessons can be drawn). The tale is told through the diary entries of 16 year old Miranda. Her mom is a writer who does keep some food around, but is scarcely a prepper… though she does a decent job of last-minute stock-up. Her dad had run off with a younger woman (who is pregnant, and has asked Miranda to be godmother). She has older and younger brothers. In small town Pennsylvania, spikey-haired mutants aren’t the problem. Sure there are gangs, and the hospital is fortified, but mostly people are well-behaved while waiting for starvation or the flu to kill them. Even the gangs would rather steal than kill.

The main moral of LAWKI is that family and discipline will get you through, and helping others is secondary (if not tertiary) to that. There’s no real end to give away; the family survives, and things seem to be looking up. All the kids, especially Miranda, mature and rise to what’s required…which is a good thing, as I found the first pages hard going, not because there’s anything wrong with Miranda, but because she’s so very 16. A teenager might not mind through.

I have two minor gripes. One is that Mom has Bush Derangement Syndrome. Oh, the President’s name is never mentioned, but he has a ranch in Texas and is an idiot, and the book came out in 2006; you do the math.  It’s rather odd, because a government bailout arrives in the nick of time. The other and more serious gripe is the role (or non-role) of faith in the community. The only believers are Miranda’s friend Megan (and her crowd) who has become a fundamentalist cultie in the wake of the cancer death of another mutual friend. Megan becomes a sort of Christian breatharian and starves. Miranda confronts Megan’s minister, who miraculously has not lost any weight. That’s IT for the influence of religion, and it’s not a pretty picture. You’d think that, faced with an event of such enormity, somebody somewhere would mention God…though Miranda does dream surreally of Heaven, and is to be a godmother…whatever that means to her.

Still, it mostly reads well, has a timely message, and I wouldn’t hesitate to gift it to Sara. I’d like to know how the family made out in the end, but evidently the 2nd book, The Dead and the Gone, is a parallel story involving a Puerto Rican boy in New York City. Rebuilding is intrinsically more interesting than collapse, and none of it really happens in LAWKI. But I’d still give it a 4 out of 5.

UPDATE: I went to Amazon to post a version of this, and found I’d missed a real howler: they have running water until their well runs dry, even without electricity. And it wasn’t raining, so forget gathering rainwater.  They would have been dead by the end of chapter 3; end of story. And book 3 unites the 2 stories and carries them forward.

Preparedness FAIL

So I’m out, using the 2-cycle blower on the drive, and I run out of gas. Which I announce to the Ferrous One.

“You don’t have any gas”

“I know. I’ll make some up.”

“You don’t have any gas.”

So I dump the 2 cycle oil in, and go to where the various red cans are. And there is no gas. Not a drop. “Have you been subsidizing your Tina route with our storage gas?”

“It was old gas; it was from the summer.”

“I put Stabil in that. That’s our preparedness gas.  Why didn’t you tell me you were putting it in your car? What if we’d had an actual emergency?”

Now, Rusty is definitely up with the prepper mindset. She didn’t start burning wood until 2 weeks ago, because we were short, and what if the electricity went out? But she got caught in a cash crunch, or a gas crunch, and figured that it was OK to lie-by-omission to her hubby. Which is kind of sobering really; if my own most trusted friend would do that just to avoid some slight personal embarrassment, what’s going to happen when my neighbors are in genuine need? She’s feeling cussed out, and I’m just trying to stick to the facts.

So I went to G-ville and bought 18 gallons of gas ($65) plus some for the car (to $75, when the pump stopped). I put 7 plus the 2-cycle where they went; the other two 5-gallons went…elsewhere. “There’s your allowance, and then some,” I thought as I pumped. See, I’m real new at this sole-support thing, and I only started giving her walking-around money 2 weeks ago.  And I’m cheap (which she is OK with) and selfish (which she’s not particularly OK with), and she’s done a wonderful job in training me on this “us” thing, but I still have a lot to learn. I’d forgotten to give up the money last night, and contemplated not doing so. But then I realized that the reason she’d done that screwup was that I wasn’t giving her anything, that I’d made a promise and had to keep it. So I paid up, and told her this, pointing that I didn’t want to channel my inner [name of abusive man we know]…and she claimed I had no inner-such-thing to channel. So we’re cool.

But dang…

Crank out the jams!

New from South Africa, for all you survivalists: a hand-crank mp3 player.

PETA to survivalists: go veg!

When, like Robert Vicino, you’re in the business of constructing underground bunkers that people can buy into for when TSHTF, you’re going to get a certain amount of publicity, and lose a certain amount of operational security. And that publicity draws PETA’s attention like a cowpie draws flies. So, of course, PETA now urges preppers to stock only foods of vegetable origin. That’s somewhat prepperly anyway, given that grains and beans store more easily and longer than meat. But the short human intestinal tract does require a certain amount of preformed nutrition, quality fats, and protein.  A better way to provide this in a crisis might be to invite a PETA member to your retreat. After all, PETA believes that animals rights are equal to man’s. It’s perfectly common and doubtless ethical for animals to eat their own kind, including their own children.  Therefore, they shouldn’t object to feeding us.  They’ll be tender, though perhaps lacking in essential nutrients.  And there will be a temptation to slaughter the PETA early, given their tendency to foam at the mouth. They could also be used to buy off spiky-haired mutant cannibals. As Tim May used to say, the dieoff will be glorious.

Endarkenment 1 mile…check your brakes

There’s been quite a little conversation on Da InnerTubz of late on how to avoid Endarkenment…specifically here. I can’t disagree with the analysis that we aren’t going to vote our way out of this. We might make some limited impact if we all voted for “any party other than the two responsible for this”, but when that begins to look successful, the rules will be changed. For most of us, it’s a low-cost action, but it’s also low-effectiveness.

I don’t think it’s hopeless, though. With God all things are possible. The Enlightenment happened in a Christian world. The people in the US who used nonviolence most effectively were mostly Christians, led by a Christian minister (the REVEREND Martin Luther King). The people who have used nonviolence most effectively to partially escape the strictures of the State are the Amish, though I believe they will have less success in a progressively more anti-Christian world.

My personal problem is to integrate my faith and my politics. I just don’t see total anti-violence as being Scripturally based. It certainly wasn’t the modus operandi of the Jews. Jesus told his disciples in Jerusalem to arm up…was that just so He could do one last miracle in Gethsemane? There are somethings that I am clear are wrong for me (vitriolage, for instance), but many others on which I have no moral clarity at all.

But this I know…and even hardshell Objectivists could agree: it’s going to take a freaking miracle to get us out of this. I’m opting to play on the side of the Miracle-Worker, because how else are you going to get that miracle? As a people, we’ve asked for a king other than Jesus, we’re getting that king, and “the Lord will not hear us in that day.” But there’s the next day, and it may be later than we think.

People were yucking it up when James Wesley, Rawles had the characters in his novel-cum-tutorial Patriots pray before going into battle.He wasn’t wrong, about the prayer, and maybe about the battle.

Laiterie de Rambouillet de l’Amerique

Apparently, having a backyard organic vegetable plot (a la Mme. Obama) is the hot new lifestyle accessory, so now the market has called into existence itinerant farmers who will do all the work for you, including weeding and picking….and especially the thinking, which is the hardest part .I suppose there is no harm in playing farmer, and whether it’s your own work or somebody else’s won’t matter when the endoskeletal cockroaches storm through LA after the Revo and strip it all clean, fertilizing with the blood of the effete in the process.

H/T: Venlet

De Nile

You think that blank-out and disconnect are endemic in the intelligensia now? Wait until TSHTF:

Last fall during a lecture I asked a group of medical residents what they would do if society collapsed. I used the example of an EMP with complete failure of the electrical grid and ensuing chaos. Keep in mind, these are very well educated and intelligent people; they are physicians in training. These people are expected by the population to have the highest ethical standards and morals. Their answers astounded me. In the early aftermath as a group these people said they would go to the store and get what they needed. When I reminded them there was no way to pay with a credit card they seemed to think that it would be okay anyway. Many of the women said they would resort to begging if things became difficult, but most of the males in the group said they would leave for the rural areas due to the availability of cattle and other farm animals. When I asked what they would then do, most responded that they would take “one or two.” It wasn’t until I mentioned that stealing cattle is also called “rustling” and men used to be hung for such acts that it even began to register they were in fact stealing. The notion had not even occurred to them. One of my residents took the discussion further saying, “It wouldn’t necessarily be considered stealing because of the national emergency.” When I assured him the farmer or rancher would definitely consider it stealing and would likely defend his property with a rifle, he answered, “He wouldn’t shoot me. I’m a doctor. Besides murder would be a worse crime than my stealing.”

Self-defence isn’t murder, and stealing somebody’s food is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, so he wouldn’t be a doctor either. That much is obvious, but needs to be restated in case any med students are reading.

“Dead to the world” ≠”Dead in the world”

I think “survival” is an improper goal for a Christian. We are supposed to be “dead” already, having surrendered all this stuff anyway. I do think that “working with your hands so that you may have something to share with those in need” is a proper goal for myself, though.

Uh, no.  You can neither preach the Gospel nor perform acts of charity when you’re dead.  You are largely useless to God when you’re dead, though I’m sure He’d like to have the fellowship and praise.  In  a martyrdom situation, you may be worth more to God dead than alive. But survivalist scenarios rarely involve persecution of Christians.

If God wanted you dead, believe me, you’d be dead. Ergo, God wants you alive.