“Fool me once…” seems to be the right way to face the snow and ice in the US Southeast. There is no end of hand-wringing and one press report I read was lamenting how a local store the reported had checked on was down to “corn and asparagus” – which may not be such a bad thing. Especially because of the purported anti-cancer effects of a heavy asparagus diet.
I don’t know about you, but for me, the joy of eating asparagus is eating some, then racing to the closest restroom to “beat the smell.” I haven’t won yet, but next time I eat asparagus, it will be in the throne room with a stopwatch rolling. Science will win eventually.
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A couple of readers chimed in on the “wintry mix” note Monday. One being Tom in Illinois:
It seems like in the old days ( pre-2000’s) we only got significant icing (“ice storms”) very infrequently….
but my point is, something seems to be changing, I don’t know what.
I used to blame it on global warming, ( makes sense, you need warmer layers of atmosphere for winter rain) but who really knows, with the demise of that paradigm? Just more food for thought. We seem to be wrecking the planet in many unexpected ways.
Right Tom is, of course.
Our next item of note is how the National Weather Service is moving into the space of preppers by putting out an advisory like this one:
WINTER PREPAREDNESS KITS FOR VEHICLES.
IN CASE YOU GET STRANDED IN YOUR VEHICLE DURING WINTER WEATHER…IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE A WINTER PREPAREDNESS KIT IN YOUR VEHICLE.
THIS KIT SHOULD INCLUDE…A SHOVEL…WINDSHIELD SCRAPER WITH A SMALL BROOM…FLASHLIGHT…BATTERY POWERED RADIO…EXTRA BATTERIES…WATER…SNACK FOOD…MATCHES…EXTRA SOCKS…HATS AND MITTENS…A FIRST AID KIT WITH A POCKET KNIFE…BLANKETS…JUMPER CABLES…EMERGENCY FLARES AND A FLUORESCENT DISTRESS FLAG. THESE ITEMS WILL HELP KEEP YOU SAFE IF YOU ARE STUCK ON THE ROAD DURING A WINTER STORM.
Extra Socks, hats and mittens? Hmmm…no mention of spare boots, camp stove, or the GPS with the closest Hilton preprogrammed. I expect in the next few weeks the NWS prepper staff will be singing the virtues of rocket stoves and MREs…
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And last, but not least, as we wander up the linguistic trail left by all this “wintry mix” we’ve been tracking, the experience of reader Michal out in Oregon; an émigré from Oz..
I’ve been living with “Wintry Mix” since moving to Central Oregon 15 years ago from Australia, which had even more interesting ways to say things. There is a charm to wintry mix…sort of like Russian Roulette with your car and your life. For us, Wintry mix does mean being prepared for anything, with kitty litter, water, dry clothes and a shovel in the trunk, to a pair of shorts and tennis shoes (to wade through a flooding stream). It just means to leave early for your appointment because you don’t know what shit will hit once you are in your car and driving. The saying here, which interesting is the same for Melbourne, if you don’t like the weather, just wait an hour.
As so, if nothing else happens from all this global warming stuff, at least maybe there will be a new sister-city relationship struck up between Melbourne and Denver, which seem to share aspects of weather wonkiness.
Mobile Radio Notes
Oilman2 is just pleased as punch. He went to that www.missingmoney.com website and discovered that he had a couple of (unbeknownst to him) payments due that had been collected by a couple of states – came out $400+ ahead. Lots of other readers are finding “found money” over on the site, too, so if you haven’t taken a look, please do so.
Now, to the point here: OM2 figures some of that dough will pay off his latest addition to his “go-anywhere” rig, which is one of those Toyota FJ series truckomobiles that look kinda funny, but which are marvelous bug-bug vehicles when you put big mud-running tires, a few cans of gas, a couple of spare tires on the roof rack, and so on.
Talk about a nice job fabbing…right down to countersunk mounting holes.
I’ve got a betting window open on who’s going to actually finish getting their ham radio ticket first – Gaye at BackDoorSurvival or Oilman2.
With a good eye, you’ll see that the 2-meter rig above looks like a Yaesu FT-2800, and that “thing” on top of it is a Cobra CB radio.
Ham radio purists tend to look at CBs askance and with a certain disdain. Back in the day, hams had something of a ‘tude toward CB which was even called “children’s band.” But since the Morse code requirement left ham radio, folks are finding uses for both services…
OM2 is unfettered by past erudite tudes of hams – doesn’t remember with AM meant ancient modulation – plus he does enough long-distance driving to know that CB is THE place to be listening on long-haul truck routes, like Interstate 35, because that’s where you’re going to pick up where smokies are and if there’s an airplane up relaying speeding vehicle info to ground units. Of course, there’s a whole sidebar discussion about whether such reports are heresay, but I’ll leave that for our lawyer/readers to comment on..
About the only thing missing from OM2’s radio suite (AM/FM/Weather/2-meters/CB) might be a trunked scanner for big city cop shops and fire along with an HF radio to provide for chats with someone elsewhere in the country, running before the hordes of people who will be fleeing the big cities when whatever’s going to happen, happens.
Or, in OM2‘s case, he’ll be totally tuned in on what’s going on between his home down in the Houston area and Rancho del a Grease that he’s developing some 30-miles south of us.
One thing you might want to add to your RV or LandCruiser, if you’re planning serious coms as part of your bug-out option would be a couple of books to go with all those radio rigs. Betty Bearcat National Police Frequency Directory – Listings for all 50 States&Canada (although if you figure out how to drive to Hawaii, let me know. The other indispensible (we even carry one in the airplane;s survival kit) is the 2013-2014 ARRL Repeater Directory Pocket sized.
I just read an article recently (might have been the latest issue of QST) about how a guy out backwoodsing was able to summon help on a ham radio handheld because he was in an area where there was no cell coverage.
The ExPat Files
Everyone so often, my buddy Bruce down in Ecuador sends me a note about life in the town of Vilcabamaba where they operate a kind of bed and breakfasty thing. If you every wondered how the “other half” life, try this on:
Life is a lot simpler when you cast your lot with people like these. My wife and I have over 250 phone numbers in our phones. They represent the friends and neighbors we have here. Our fate is bound up with theirs.
A few years ago, the road to the city was closed for over a month. Every evening there were tables on the street where people brought food to share. It wasn’t a crisis, it was a party.
Just came back from the dermatologist to get checked out. She burned off a couple of persistent warts with local anesthetic, gave me a clean bill of health. Cost, $35. Needed some medication for a spot on my ear. Cost $27. While researching what it was, my wife, nurse, discovered it was available from the Wal-Mart pharmacy for $183.
Stopped for my favorite lunch, a burger consisting of two patties, a fried egg and lettuce, and a pile of fries made from fresh cut potatoes. My cholesterol for the week. Cost, $3.
I’ve actually thinking about going down to visit Bruce one of these days…just to see if it’s as cool as he makes it out to be but the video he referred me to over on YouTube is almost Disney-like cool. And yes, he’s got internet…faster than what we have here in the outback of Texas.
Which country is really in the Third World? Thanks to dropped cell phone calls, missing emails, and NSA surveillance, that’s getting to be a hard question to answer.
Introspect: Am I on the “Right Side?”
A couple of stories have emerged in the past week that make me wonder if I’m on the wrong side of things – and a few emails have come in, too. A quick summary:
One note focused on the story about how Vancouver is now home to Canada’s first Crack Pipe vending machines. Say, that’s progress…or is it?
I’d been expecting to see a major upturn in opium dens with the arrival of the many thousands of Nuevo Rich from Asia in recent years; but who would have thought crack pipes?
I’m sure you’ve been following the commentary (west coast) about San Francisco’s plans to hand out crack pipes, too. There, city lawmakers have – for now – said no, but that isn’t the end of it since the lack of clean crack pipes leads to HIV and hepatitis C.
The counterpoint to the story came in an email which featured a picture of a police officer in an eastern city (Rochester) and it was captioned:
“Drugs can ruin your Life. So if I catch you with them, I’M GOING TO RUIN YOUR LIFE.” Odd that circular thinking. It’s why we may never have a border with Mexico until US pot laws are relaxed.
Sadly, that’s pretty close to what things look like, when zoomed out globally as well.
This week on the Russia Today channel on FTA satellite, there was another story about Halden, the Norwegian answer to prisons. Except, that it’s better housing and resources than a lot of poor people in this country have.
They’re not the first: Time Magazine had a photo-essay recently “Inside the World’;s Most Humane Prison.”
Prison with its own recording studio? Loads of education opportunities and so on?
While the US government is contemplating killing a citizen with a drone, we’re struck by the odd juxtaposition of power, crime, drugs.
It’s all “Wake up feel the ViceGrips” and the question “Am on on the right side?” percolates up as the first cup of coffee hits.
The seriousness of this shift in context cannot be over-stated.
An email from a reader this week revealed a lot of things this particular reader had learned about the Luciferians that I hadn’t previously given much thought to.
As the reader explained it, the “Lucies” are putting all their energy into “elevating human consciousness.”
Say what?
As was carefully explained to me, that’s why the battle against old-style 10 Commandments kind of thinking is under attack. Successfully, so, in many quarters, it appears
Two hundred years ago, a movement of consciousness-raising and challenging All in Universe would not have been spoken of seriously. Four hundred years ago, such talk would have lit off a Salem-style burning. Yet now it is starting to manifest in many places around the net.
You can find hints of it in the facts in the background of certain news stories. Of how the deified actor/director was real-life a child molester, says the child. And it peers out from the facts of changing treatment of criminals, drugs, and basis of hard work, and lots of other telltales. Do-overs, the campaigns to stop out eye for eye, and with it, save the animals instead of eating them.
Hmmm…
To the Lucie’s credit, their marketing efforts have been impressive; the gradual desensitizing of people to one another, the ever-increasing focus on the ME at whatever the cost can be laid off on the nearest YOU.
Unless one remembers cosmology and why the Luciferians were kicked “out of heaven” in the first place (challenging the Almighty), a large fraction of humans are being sold into this New Lucy framework of marketing their world.
Toss in a lot of the new-fangled “contextual values” thinking and we seem to be headed for another showdown between the Sides (cast outs/cast downs versus the “Higher” figures of spiritual history..
What’s more, revelations coming from cryptoarcheology, hint the Lucies may not be entirely wrong. Evidence has begun to “fill in” that humans may have been locally bred on this rock to be worker slaves for off-planet visitors. Perhaps our initial destiny was cobbled up in an Off-Worlder laboratory to do grunt work as slaves in gold and silver mines that would later become King Solomon’s. Like I say, there are some pieces being fit together there.
So the New Luciferian marketing plan keys off this: “You were bred to be slaves and look at you!” Bonus points on that one. Slipperier than anyone in the White House…
If you’d asked me 20-years ago whether being on the side of Truth, Justice, and the American way was my allegiance, the answer (along with the basic commandments) would have been simple. Yes.
Here lately, though, the marketing has ramped up a good bit. The Good Guys are doing a lot more “bad” things and the “bad” guys are getting fewer consequences and sometimes do “good” – just like the occasional Mafioso used to do in the neighborhoods during hard times.
And after 220+ years of marketing, due process, speedy trial, yada ya, , our country is going to kill an American without a trial. Hmmm…this is progress?
Granted, I’m not likely to live long enough to see the whole thing blow up on us in another Gomorrah like flash, or the full-on Armageddon, it’s becoming pretty clear that ramping up the “elevating human consciousness” angle will confuse the shit out of everyone.
Consequently, figuring out the “right side to be on” is now harder than ever.
As if to put the capper on the alt. reality of it all, Elaine came over to my office Monday to sagely observe “Did you ever think we would live in a world where someone hitting a ball with a stick, or catching a ball, or kicking it, would be raised to the level of a global event?”
Shit. Have to admit, I hadn’t. Alt. reality, for sure.
When I was a kid, we were wondering if we’d ever be able to make enough money to buy a television set.
Suddenly things dissolved into place: Maybe this was the day’s key insight. Maybe Hard times make good people. And maybe good times make bad people. Things sure seem to point that-a-way.
Off to work on Peoplenomics and do real work now…
Write when you break even
George george@ure.net