Thanks to jim for the cash to keep my interest level up enough to continue. The new site homepage will be
http://www.comradesimba.com
This blog is moving to: http://www.comradesimba.com/blog/
I’ll get the compost board moved over when I can get out of the garden long enough to do that geek stuff. My brain hurts from moving this thing around.
Blue host is 8 bucks a month – Jim is keeping us up now for 9 months. Perhaps the power will still be on at that time. bwahaha!
It’s been grand out here in cyberspace, but I gotta call it quits. Tired of the maintenance time on the home page, the message board, and the blog. I’m even tired of surfing doom sites. I reached a saturation point this week and just need to move on. The damn world should have gone fucko bazzoo but it looks like we get to watch the ‘08 dog and pony election show after all. Watch the banks keep pulling rabbits out of hats, and watch the new highway on ramp get completed etc. Business as usual.
I don’t want to be and active participant in the yapping of how shitty life is getting for the third world and suburbia. I’ll surf and see that the misery index is moving higher – I just don’t have anything to say about it anymore.
If you choose to remember me, do it by shitting in a bucket. Bwahahahaha!
comrade
So the old Jesus thing is that if the Word has reached your ears and you do not put down your fishing pole and walk the path, hell awaits you. You were called but ignored it and then you missed the opportunity. Or some shit like that.
Well, folks, it’s End Game time in the wide world of Peak Everything. The powers that be have pretty much mapped out their course of action and what degree of cross fire you get pinned under is on you. If you’re rich I suggest taking the Paraguay option. 9 to 5ers with a permanent aversion to dirt and labor should relocate within walking distance to the nearest National Guard Armory – that’s where the bottled water will be handed out on the platform to the permanent residence camps where the tv is always on and the cafeteria serves three meals a day. And you lose because the work detail consists of ‘tater diggin’ crews or a cushy job in the laundry. Think “prison”.
Us slobs out here in Cunlick get to make hay while the sun shines and hide in the woods picking off marauders when the opportunity arises. Beating a pair of rancid overalls against a rock to get the caked on shit off. Interesting things in the stew pot and frying pan. “Bob ate a bunch of this wierd looking leafy stuff last week and didn’t get the runs… toss it in the pot or stir fry it with those grubs and skunk grease.” Waiting out the Disruption Period. Having the important stuff stashed in buckets and barrels in shallow trenches under the hedge rose making do with what you can load up and carry on your back in 5 minutes. Wood smoke and potblack. Bug bites and dozens of minor cuts and scrapes. Learning what a human really smells like, and then not noticing it at all.
Picture the “autonomous collective” in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. I love the line “he must be a king… he ‘asn’t got shit all over him”. But those of us who chose the “outside” will be free.
I know solar towers can be built for generating huge amounts of electricity dirt cheap. Tidal power. Windmills. Low Temperature Carbonization turning shale and tar sand into petroleum. Stirling engines running off of woodchips and algae. Wood gas generators bolted on old 9N Ford tractors and ‘64 Chevy trucks. Geothermal for the price of well casing and a drilling rig. All these and more if “The Price is Right”. The price being culling 90% of this rabbit/rat/bacteria like species and controlling the procreation of the remainder.
And I choose to remain. I will gladly burrow under three feet of dirt till the fallout subsides. I will run half naked in the forests turning over fallen trees for dinner and eating fairly unpalatable berry things and mud turtle. “Survivorman” without the camera gear. I will not stand and hold ground – the concepts of “ownership” and “mine” are what got us here in the first place, if I can’t be content with what the Earth provides, or what is left laying around from collapse I may as well march off to the FedGhetto and bitch about whats for dinner.
So everyone gets to make their own call. If you’re on this blog you know the basic components of the score. Starvation, gummint cheese doodles, or bugs for dinner. The dinner bell is being rung right now. Unless, of course, we all see the errors of our ways, begin to value our neighbors as ourselves, and voluntarily powerdown making sure no one suffers needlessly. I think I’ll reserve my wishful thinking to not having to abandon my chicken flock to a hungry mob coming down the road. That’s pushing it, I know, but you gotta hope for the best, eh?
I’m on Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation monday morning posts like flies on half composted chickens. He has a particularly good one this week, but I gotta chime in on one of the comments that appeared there:
Yes, we are moving closer to the edge. And I do think people are feeling the “eerie vibe” you speak of. But most of the talk these days seems to be of raising awareness and changing policy…. oh, and increasing our consumption of all those shiny new green products.
Truth is, even people who care and are fully aware of what is happening get up in the morning, drive the same route to the same job that they afraid to lose since they have no safety net and a ton of debt. So what is this family to do, living as they are, paycheck to paycheck, no healthcare, needy kids, maybe needy parents? What are we asking them to do with all the information and warnings about climate change? Pile everything they own into the aging SUV and head… where exactly?
Posted by:Francesca Johnson | April 28, 2008 at 01:56 AM
Boo Hoo, what to do?
I’m not asking people to do jack shit. Well, I take that back. I’ve asked my brother repeatedly to get his ass down here and start building a cob cottage before economic collapse forces him into a tent down here anyway. I’ve begged the wife’s sister and her husband to chuck the deathburb in Topeka and drag a trailer down here. We’ve offered the guest house to my mother in law a dozen times but she is comfortable in a rental house in a former cow pasture subdivision 5 miles from the nearest grocery store. And maybe the guy who answered the ad for “doomer wanted – free room and board for farm help” will actually come down for the summer.
It’s like pulling fucking teeth, man.
So no, Francesca, there really is no Santa Claus. All is not well enough to just go back to sleep. I saw the writing on the wall and pulled all kinds of financial machinations to get out of the house in town and onto the farm. My arms are sore from shoving potatoes in the ground, only one more 50# sack of seed spuds to go. Then I get to start in on the beans and corn. The fruit trees beat the frost this year so if I keep them sprayed I buy myself a couple of hundred hours over a rocket stove canning fruit later in the year right after a couple hundred hours of doing the same with tomatoes and peppers. I’ll squeeze next winter’s woodcutting in there between my blissful state of consciousness raising episodes weeding the garden. Oh yeah, the goat milking, chicken tending, and everybody’s favorite game show, “Fatten the Hog!”
Etc, etc, yeah boo hoo. So to respond to the money shot:
So what is this family to do, living as they are, paycheck to paycheck, no healthcare, needy kids, maybe needy parents? What are we asking them to do with all the information and warnings about climate change? Pile everything they own into the aging SUV and head… where exactly?
WTF are these people holding on to? A shitty job in a shitty town with a shitty mortgage payment or a shitty rental house is nothing to hold dear to your breast. Why not drop back 15 and punt? Sell everything but the clothes, cast iron, tools and dog, load the family jalopy and head out to Dicksville or Cuntlick and knock on doors until you find a farm where there is the old unused house the grandfolks used to live in on the place and trade out some work for a squat? For that matter, beg for barn space. Or a tent site by the spring. There are too many good folks out here in flyover America that would jump at the chance to give a family a new wholesome start for restringing fences and other odd farm labors that have gotten pushed back for too many years.
When you truly swan dive into the wide world of poverty fresh air, food stamps, and the free clinic are all there for the taking. Why work for an asshole sticking tab A into slot B 50 hours a week to buy crap that is given away through church charities? Even deadbeats that are too lazy to work or cut wood get their propane tanks filled via energy assistance programs. If you haven’t got shit but love where you are, no, don’t leave the comfort of Plasticland. But if you’re fucked, like the example above, and it sucks where you are, staying put in the face of economic meltdown is suicidal and homicidal if you have kids in your life. Make sure you know the location of the nearest FEMA camp and don’t waste any time running there as soon as it opens… you’ll get better bunk space that way.
I’ve heard some really idiotic excuses for staying in the wage slave mill over the years. Shit like we’d move to the country but where would the kids go to college? The wife/ husband just got a raise so we should be okay for awhile. When the second car gets paid off. Just put my mom in the nursing home and need to be close to visit. Finally got the yard looking nice. Don’t want to take the penalty cashing in the 401k. And my all time favorite – What will we do with the cats?
Correct, correct, true, true, there aren’t places for the entire population of City of the Dammned dwellers to relocate to. maybe slots are available for only the first half million or so. Act now! Offer expires when the lights flicker…
So I’m just blathering away here, nobody is listening, nobody is moving, no one dooming. Wanna relocate here? Use the comment function. I got plenty of space to park on.
Well, looks like the worldwide grain shortages have started in earnest. I’m sure anyone reeding this is up to speed on the details – I don’t cater to the daytime tv and fox news crowd y’know. I don’t even want to take the time to support the statement with facts, the world can no longer produce enough grain to meet the needs of world’s population – deal with it.
The poor as usual are the first to take the hit. First world cattle, hogs, and chickens trump some poor bastard in Bangladesh. Indo-China is next, and we just take the African Horror Show as a given. I’ve been waiting for months for the price of oatmeal to at least double since the oat crop was so pathetically low last year, but there must be a shitload of it in the pipeline so the price increases haven’t worked their way to the retail level. My personal food doom will be when oatmeal doubles.
Grain crops are funny things. I can turn a goat loose in the woods, bring it in at night and milk a thousand calories out of her 9 or 10 months out of the year. Twenty minutes cuttin’ eyes and dropping potatoes into the ground yields about ten pounds per total hours spent on the job. Hell, even peas and beans are pretty much a low intensity conflict. Blackberry season may be sweaty and sticky but the food value per hour is astronomical. Compare all that to growing grain crops. A one man band with a shovel and hoe just doesn’t have a chance at feeding the family on a wheat crop. You need machinery and shit. I planted a few garden beds in winter wheat just to see what they would do, and I’d say they are not doing much. Nice and green and pretty, but every clump is going to put out a seedhead that will probably take more calories to cut, dry, thresh and grind than it will yield.
Corn may be a bit easier, but forget about trying to feed all the chickens I have running around here on the fruits of my own labor in a corn patch. I have the luxury of buying chops for 6 bucks a bushel to feed these damn roosters ’till they are 8 or 9 months old and have to be pressure cooked all afternoon to be edible. Eggs at 2 bucks a dozen pays for the feed and all the eggs we can eat so no problem. Doom will mean that those hens won’t be running loose – chicken tractors for them and intensive feedings from the worm bins for the cockerels destined for the pot. Using the food chain principle of 10 calories of corn to make one calorie of chicken makes me figure my birds won’t be like the big fat 50 cent a pound leg quarters you get at Vole-Mart. More like scrawny assed birds used to flavor cowpeas and turnip stew.
It’s kinda interesting to think about being that close to food. A garden for fresh vegetables is one thing, but growing food to live on is another. Winter squash may not be as exciting as pizza rolls, but they grow almost maintainence free and keep for months in a cellar. Taste buds in revolt because even hand selected apples ripened to perfection and turned into canned applesauce for winter treats don’t have that familiar yummy factor that comes out of a five pound bag. (four pounds now, but they didn’t raise the price..) Mean beans again and again simply because they plant everywhere, patiently wait to be picked whenever you get a break and have the time, and store without hassle. Same thing with onions. Eating beets just because they have a different flavor and it’s not a cabbage.
At least shrink wrap will be a thing of the past.
Spring.
Usually the shoes come off as a pagan alternative to Easter, but Christ rose pretty early this year. Stupid Moon… So the shoes came off today and boy is my life easier. I hate coming in and out of the house taking the shoes on and off because with all the shit and dirt around here the floor is a mess if I don’t. Every time the wife mops all I can think about is the three bucks a new sponge mop head goes for. Now the foot dunk bucket is outside the door and no more tracks.
I call what’s going on outside “tater rain”. Seems like at potato planting time all it does is rain rain, rain. The old timers (fictitious characters to which just about anything can be authoritatively attributed) say get the taters in before the peaches loose their blossoms. Here’s hoping for a late bloomer. No panic – they’ll get in when they get in. I’m just enjoying the redbuds in flower, the clover coming up, and the chickens laying 2 dozen egg a day.
Got 4 goats milking now. The wife has her creamer and cheese again. Cottage cheese for me and the pig gets the whey. Perfected the sourdough bread recipe and the starter gets fed everyday. Y’know… I got a lot of things to feed around here. Sourdough culture, the worms, chicken cat dog pig goats, and #1critter. Not to mention the huge new compost bins I made out of all that walnut lumber. It’s 8pm and I just finished milking the goats and checking the chickens. And folding the load of laundry. Made dinner, too. I claim “retired” when pressed for information regarding my employment status. I get the veiled deadbeat look when the fact that my wife teaches at the college is added to the mix. Hehehe, judge me from behind your 9 to 5 slave station… I’m eating good, no middle age pot belly…
And running around barefoot.
Jim Beam made a comment about 4 bucks a gallon gas this weekend. My belief has been that Suburbia begins to die at 4 bucks a gallon – the commute to work gets less and less cost effective on one hand, and how many beatings can “disposable income” take before consumers don’t have any money for consumption of all pumpkins plastic? The home equity ATM is closed, the credit cards are maxed out (to the point of people actually not charging stuff on them anymore) and now the gas tank is cutting into the family cell phone budget.
“4 bucks a gallon in Santa Barbara this week. For 87 octane.” – Maybe I’m reading an awful lot into those dozen words Jim posted, but I think the collective consciousness is turning about to where it can at least be aware that things are not as they once were. From there, the Great Leap to they ain’t gonna get no better isn’t that far away. I here people mention the price of gas in muted mumbled tones of vague fear – not the righteous indignation I’ve been hearing for a year or so. It’s hitting close to home, right in the wallet, from Pedro driving to the jobsite 30 miles away to Soccer Mom’s commute to her fashionable hairdresser 30 minutes away on the freeway. Maybe Dad says to hell with hanging the new ceiling fan today – don’t have the right screws and sure as hell isn’t going to burn 9 bucks worth of gas to go to the nearest Home Despot… pick them up tomorrow on the way home from work. (of course the new big box home improvement joint killed off the local hardware store down the street last year,,,)
Dunno, folks. The state highway that runs in front of our place doesn’t have a quarter of the traffic it used to on this bright sunshiny Sunday afternoon. Nobody’s moving around – got no money to go shopping is my guess. And the more times people stay home instead of taking a quick trip someplace the more realization sinks in that everything in their insta-cushy world is changing and it doesn’t look pretty. I know that there are tens of millions out there with absolutely unpayable levels of personal debt, upside down on a mortgage, behind on a car payment broke before payday in a job that depends upon continuing economic growth and a half hour commute.
They ain’t gonna make it. And they’re gonna be pissed. And pissed off people tend to use blame as an escape. Rather than allow the people to take up pitchforks against the bankers and politicians and icons of the corporate realm I’d bet TPTB will probably instigate a full scale war that actually fucks up our happy way of life. Those tens of millions will be waving the flag again, oblivious and patriots the lot, blaming the chinese, ruskies, or senegalese for the power being out and paper bags on all the gas pumps. My money is on a war with China. I figure there are high level negotiations going on between us and them about how to choreograph a major conflict and mutually pulverize both our economies back to pre bubble 1971 numbers. Maybe trade cities – Los Angeles for a major Chinese Port city. Nuke, nuke, declare an undeclared war and play the nuclear standoff game. The surplus chinese population goes back to their villages and starve, suburbia plants victory gardens and lines up and whips out their ration cards on Commodities Day. Flour, powdered eggs, milk, cheese and beans. “Honey! Canned Pears today!”
Okay, I’m getting a bit tinfoiled here, but I don’t know what else can roll this bloated nation back to reality. I sold a kid goat at the sale barn yesterday – a 2 1/2 week old billy that somebody’s children made them buy – hehehe drove the bidding up to rediculous levels. So I was talking to them after the sale and they asked what to feed it. I said “goat milk, it’s a baby goat”. They got that stupid look so I said “or milk replacer”. A little hope shown through, and they seemed like a nice couple so I offered to sell them a milking nanny that really isn’t producing enough per milking for me to bother with but would do fine for raising Herman the Kid. The guy said he didn’t have time to milk a goat, the wife said she’d just buy milk and the two girls with Ipods clipped to their head said ew, no way gross. I’d have sold that milking nanny at a loss to get a family started on the free cheese highway of food security but ya just can’t pull folks off of the teat of civilization. Herman will be a great pet until they tire of him, then some Mexican will get him for a song and put him on a spit at the next big wedding. Or perhaps the funeral feast for a son slaughtered while defending the Puddle in Iraq. And I try not to will ill upon the Ipod Girls, but it’s hard. I see corpses every time I go into town, so my best bet is to stay home as much as possible and plant spinach and peas.
Thanks for reading, now go plant something to eat, damnit. Take your power back people, take your power back.
I’m going to stop posting for now. I’m not sure whats going on out there but things are truly fuckobazzoo. Banks are stinking something awful, gas and gold are climbing fast, hell everything is going up on a weekly basis. A roll of fence wire goes up 5 bucks every time I go get one, and nails, fence staples, anything steel is climbing like I’ve never seen before.
The Shit Is Hitting The Fan.
I’ve got a few minutes a day to surf cryptogon, the life after the oil crash board, and a couple other sites for some updates on the world at large as it implodes but I need to be spending serious time gardening and finalizing preps for the collapse. I’ve blathered on a lot over the last year about how it’s all gonna come apart but I just got real quiet the other day when I felt like something out there snapped. Our society has been wound way too tight and I think something just snapped way up the food chain of the global elite. They’ve gathered all the wealth they can under the radar, got into position to suck up the rest when it all comes apart, and I believe they decided the time to pull the trigger is now.
The Shrub had that “busted” look on him when he was asked about reports and data that point to 4 buck a gallon gasoline before the summer driving season comes around. That total bullshit look as he said “oh, I haven’t heard about that” – those fuckers know whats up. They know it’s coming apart at the seams
I sold some gold to buy fencewire, posts, staples and nails the other day. Gold was 950 an ounce and today it’s 970. I’ll kick myself for unloading it in a month or so when it’s 1200, but that roll of wire will have gone from 97 bucks to 117. If it will even be available… Gold will go up faster than hard assets will – probably a 3 or 4 month lag time for prices to catch up. I also expect gold and silver to drop way below what they are today after an idiot spike, and since my hoard was acquired at 9 dollar silver and 450 gold after a spike and a 75% drop I’ll still be even.
When a chicken will bring 8 bucks at the sale barn (those chick in the post awhile back – sold them last week for $3.50 apiece!!!) rolls of chicken wire are better than shiny metal buried in the yard. I got 5 dairy goats getting ready to come into milk and at 4 bucks a gallon (today – next month it will be 4.50) fencing off that lush vetch pasture is gonna out perform the $20 St. Gaudins that I sold for 95% of spot melt price (cash – no taxes, no questions). And since time is money it’s costing a healthy chunk of change to be pecking away at comrade simba dot com when planting season is rolling around and a fucking head of lettuce is a buck and green onions are 1.29 a bunch. And nobody bitches about my eggs at 1.50 a dozen.
I’m going to drop yahoo as my web host and see if I can’t get the blog and message board onto a free host site. The 12 bucks a month needs to go to shovel and other tool handles. I got a bad feeling that I could get caught flat footed when the balloon goes up, and though I’m better off than 80% of the population at large I think the plan is for only 5% to survive the die off / kill off.
And so, guys and gals, no more new posts here. I’ll check the comments regularly and yak in there. The message board- http://www.csimba.com/compost/ -will stay up though I’m going to purge some shit in there. If I have anything to say I’ll post in the open forum.
The ground is dry enough to work today. It’s peas and onion time.
So long… and thanks for playing.
Power to the peoples, man, power to the peoples.
comrade simba
Earth First – 1 Clint Renner Logging – 0
The local sawmill burned to the ground last week. Now, since Clint is a common as cornbread, big hearted church going country folk without an enemy in the world I suspect this is the work of deep ecology eco-warriors. Fire lit up at 1:30 am on a Sunday night, and he said that it wasn’t localized and spread out – it torched up the whole perimeter at once. Not an insurance job, either – poor sob didn’t have any.
So I’m cleaning out and scavenging “unmarketable” lumber destined for the burn pile and some things began to strike me as way too fucked up. First, the guy who lives in the trailer house Clint hauled onto the property (to enhance security) woke up to the sound of fire trucks. The fucko bazzoo? He still lives in the trailer. I’da has his ass out in the yard tied up to a post making him watch me set fire to all his furniture and possessions. I’m a dick that way. Secondly, Trailer Guy has a dog cooped up in a tiny dog run. The logpile is between the dog and the sawmill. No barkie at things that go bump in the night. And lastly, I’m hauling out massive amounts of lumber, blocks of dried hardwood walnut, nice dried out slabs that didn’t get burned up in the burn pile but seasoned out for sure – And I notice that the trailer house has a 500 gallon propane tank hooked up to it!!! WTF?
Ya live next to a hardwood sawmill and burn propane to heat your house? Staggers the imagination…
So, here’s a couple of pics of my bonanza:
Yea, yea, the yards a mess. That’s Playland. The rest of the place is pretty spiffy. ‘Cuz everything gets dumped in playland.
So I have a huge supply of rough sawn walnut farm lumber. Building a house for Three Dollar Pig, and I’ll finish the huge 3 bin compost bin as soon as it quits goddamn raining – sheesh I hate February. I now have the lumber for all the gates I wanna make, pearlings and whalers for the greenhouse-to-be, nailers for the smoke house etc etc.
But I’d gladly give it all back if Clint’s sawmill could come back to life. Some thing just suck too bad for words. Torching a small family owned and operated sawmill ain’t gonna stop one damn tree from being cut down.
And here’s the bashed and crashed pickup of mine jus’ ‘cuz
239,000 miles and doesn’t use a drop of oil. And when an idiot hit me the insurance totaled it out for a thousand bucks and I bought the salvage for 150. Two hours with a rubber mallet beating out the dents and a 10 dollar junkyard headlight bucket and good to go. I can’t remember how the bumper got fucked up though, and I don’t even drink any more…
http://www.rainbowbody.net/Finalempire/FEchap5.htm“Empire culture and the industrial system are inherently centralizing and simplifying forces. When the Green Revolution moves into a country it must have large acreages so that it can achieve “economies of scale,” meaning simply that within the mass production system it is cheaper, on a per unit basis, to produce a large amount of one item, than it is to produce only one of those items. This means that self-supporting, subsistence agriculture families in the area must move to the periphery, attempt to farm the hillsides and gain occasional labor on the new industrial farm. This means that the hold of the colonial elite grows stronger on the population that is no longer self-sufficient. This means also that the hold of the international political/financial system grows on the colonial elite. Either large loans or opening the country up to the transnational corporations are necessary to start the industrial agricultural system because the factors of production must be shipped in, the trucks, the seed, the irrigation works, the fertilizers and the other components. Because of the huge capital investments needed for industrial agriculture, the chances are good that the country will ultimately be forced into the hands of the international bankers for loans. When the system is well established and the indigenous population is heavily in debt, (in the tradition of the more advanced First World farmers), then the international banking system will send in teams of bankers to administer the government’s economic planning and will promote austerity measures that milk the population for interest money to send to the imperial capitals. As the farm system centralizes and the profit making industrial farmer takes more land, homelessness increases. The phenomena of cities exploding as people are forced out of the countryside is a familiar one in industrial societies. This trend is now particularly serious in the Third World where there is a low level of industrial infrastructure in urban areas. As the “labor saving” machinery is brought in, unemployment increases and people are forced to work at a lower wage under worse conditions. As the production of food increases with the industrial system, the people grow hungrier because much of the food is now in the international system. The food is grown for export to bring in hard currencies to repay loans, purchase manufacturing equipment for the industrial centers and consumer items for the colonial elite- not to buy food for the poor. A major point must be emphasized, the calculation of how much food a country grows has nothing to do with how well fed the people of that country are. The important question in the industrial system is how much money people have to buy food. The international flow of protein goes to the First World countries; they have the money to bid for the food.”
