Somewhere along the line, it may have occurred to you to ask”Why is this Ure fellow so wrapped up in research related to longwave economics?”

I hope you won’t be too disappointed:  For me it’s all about being prepared for the future.  As I have said uncountable times, there are two ways to win in Life.  You can play for maximum gains (in which case I assure you I would be stinkin’ rich by now) OR you can play for minimum loss, in which case you find me with a lone gold coin, surrounded by large trees, money in the back, wonderful wife, debt-free, and so forth.

OK…this has what to do with the future?

Well, if you don’t have a pretty good idea about what the future holds, you won’t be able to project what is coming.  Thus, if you hold to the “plan for minimum losses” approach, you won’t know what to plan for.

Take any number of past topics around here that we have seen coming well in advance.  Like the present shortage (in some areas and some calibers).  I first started to write about this back in 2007 or 2008 when the Gun Owners of America noticed something odd happening.

Research followed and a few selected bets were made.  And so I never have to worry about that aspect of future.

Same thing with food prices and shortages. 

Researched the hell out of things, and sure enough, we think the outlook for food, especially in light of the energy and bee picture is pretty grim.  How to hedge?  Coauthor a book on hydroponics and have all kinds of preps in that regard and the large (20 panels worth) of solar power to ensure we will be cool and fed into the future.

When that first appeared, the critical items (MaxiGrow and MaxiBloom) were picked up in bulk.  Again,; another problem we won’t have to worry about.

And so it goes:  Future appears, gives hints, one proactively plans and then kicks back to watch how the play follows as 7-billion people follow along behind.

—

Economics is not the only way to play this game, of course.  I used to write a good bit about an approach called predictive linguistics.

But the goal posts are now moving in that arena.  In fact, just yesterday, a EurekaAlert offered this:

A system detects global trends in social networks 2 months in advance

Works using just 50,000 Twitter accounts

This news release is available in Spanish.

A new method of monitoring identifies what information will be relevant on social networks up to two months in advance. This may help predict social movements, consumer reactions or possible outbreaks of epidemics, according to a study in the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) is participating.

The aim of the research, on which scientists from the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, the NICTA of Australia, and the American universities Yale and the University of California-San Diego have also collaborated, was to test what is known as the “sensors hypothesis” on the social networks: Is it possible to find a group of people (sentinels or sensors) with a special position that would allow the information that “goes viral” globally on the internet to be monitored? “If we could do that, we would be able to predict that viral spread, which would allow us to better understand social mobilization, debates regarding opinions, health, etc., and to determine how they become global,” explains one of the researchers, Esteban Moro Egido, of the Interdisciplinary Complex Systems Group at UC3M (Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos).

Nice work, huh?

Of course the problem with this is that we (you, me, the genpop at large) will never see all the outputs from this because why?  How about “We’re not writing the checks…”?

A good bit can, however, be done with simple tools like word frequency analysis, which is why our very public www.nostracodeus.com project runs daily and posts bits, clips, but mainly words that are either ascending or descending and these give us a sense of future.

While yesterday’s data has us looking for some kind of replay or referencing of Nelson Mandela over coming days, we are intrigued by the present word groupings Sanctions, War, Attack, Economy, Collapse.  Grady will have an update on the www.nostracodeus.com site this morning.  Main thing is this is not a system where so much interpretation is left to the discretion of an informed analyst.  Rather, the data is the data and we can all look at the tea leaves using the tool.

And that gets us to the point.  (At last!)

The other way of “seeing alternate futures” is by paying attention to dreams.

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Ure’s Grand Universal Theory of Reality (GUT-OR) was shaken from the ether at exactly 12:56 AM this morning.  A time that will live in infamy.

There I was, laying in bed as a huge lightshow appeared outside and a few minute later the rains arrives, part of that weather system that’s now killed about 20-some people as it meanders up the midsection of the country.

A few minutes on from here, the soft “splaht, splaht” of rain on the screen porch metal roof changed to “ting, ting” as barely pea-sized hail began falling.

“You’ve got better hearing that a dog sometimes,” she offered.  “Why is it you can’t hear me when I ask you to…”

Oh-oh…Quick!  Time to fake a ‘snork’ like I’m only half awake.

But I was more than half there.  My brain was working through the arrival of UFO’s over the Roswell NM area in 1947 only about 94 miles from the Trinity Test site where the first atomic weapon was exploded that eventually was credited with ending World War Two.  Would something like that happen, oh, about now?

The mind was working through the odds of a UFO being brought down in one of our fields in the Texas Outback.  You’d assume they wouldn’t crash at an airport or in a big city, if possible.  But there was something about electrical discharges involved and my mind then went to work on whether that indicated that antigravity was ultimately going to be solved with a static discharge system like the Biefield-Brown experiments, or whether it would be broken with the rotating B-field theory that my buddy Vince and I keep working on.

Somewhere about here, the B-fields (turned so as to make a spacetime vortex pulled into the lead as I thought back on an email that had some in Friday from reader Warren.

Warren, in case you’ve misplaced the memory, was the fellow who took his lawnmower out a while back, mowed a BIG yard, and put the lawnmower away.  He then discovered (later) that the mower had use no gas.  Zero, zip, nada. 

That was Warrens first face-off with the World of Woo-Woo, but his note Friday revealed it was back…

Has anyone else been ‘gaining’ or ‘losing’ time? e.g., take a look at the clock and it’s 12:30 PM, look at it again an hour later and it’s 11:30 AM. That sort of thing? That’s happened to me several times over the last week or so…

Nope. No ‘free’ mower gas this year…not yet, anyway.

And that got me back to the lightning storm going through here overnight.  Will be have an uptick in WoWW reports this week because of so much “static” around with the tornadoes and such, or at the WoWW events more likely because unlike 1947, when they showed up too late, are the UFO drivers making a baseline survey before 2015-2016 when some of our remote viewing readers have run into a “road block?”

WoWW 2

And that gets us to another intriguing report…this time from reader Dana…

Dear George,

Your reader Mark, whose books and almond butter disappeared/reappeared, asked if anyone else had two or more items go missing at the same time. A couple hours after I read that post in your blog, I had a WoWW of my own:

Working at my home office desk Friday, having a cigarette while doing a writing assignment.

About 11:30, went downstairs to replenish coffee cup & get a new pack of cigarettes.

There were two packs in the pantry. I took one, removed the cellophane & foil, grabbed coffee cup

and returned to desk.

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Here we go again:  Another “Planet X” claim.  The inbox (and the recycle bin) usually dispose of them without me so much as getting a look at them.

But the catchy headline this morning “Midwest quakes surge caused by Planet X/Niburu, not fracking!!!” strikes me as a new low point in mental acuity.

A few facts, if we can? Not to ruin the doomporn business, but let’s face it, the end of the world from a runaway planet is not something to be taken lightly.

So we look at the latest 30-day map of 2.5+ earthquakes around the world, zooming to North America and what do we find?

This is not particularly hard shit to figure out:

There are a whole bunch of quakes that are going on up and down the west coast.  No scientist in his (or her) right mind would place the burden of that on Planet X.  No, this most assuredly has to do with the long-term activity of the Pacific Plate which has something to do with mountains running into it – like the Sierra Nevada and back a ways, the Rockies.  And more importantly, current times coastal ranges.

And that explains everything from the Continental Divide and west.

The little cluster of quakes down in the area of Puerto Rico is (again) plate making mountain ranges.

Maybe this hasn’t been widely explained enough in school: Most of the Caribbean islands are sitting on top of undersea volcanoes.   If you buy that – and the idea that the earth had more wrinkles on it than the average 100-year old, then we are left with what?

A gob of quakes in what Midwest state that has fallen ass-over-teakettle for what?  FRACKING!

I will go so far as to admit that the link between fracking and earthquake is maybe only 95% probable.  However, even in states like Oklahoma if you read this 2011 report, you’ll find admissions like this (highlighted part):

What’s going on right now is a clever (more or less global) move by the Oil & Gas industry to “negotiate” an acceptable level of earthquake increases in order to address the problem of Peak Oil.

Oh, that.

Yeah, well, as I pointed out in this past week’s Peoplenomics report, the USA is consuming about 6-billion barrels per year and we are only producing 2.8 billion per year (in spite of the BS about “unlimited oil” which is a pantload).  At best, therefore we only have about 12-years of domestic US oil reserves left.

It’s not like the US is alone, either.  The British Parliament has a report that says, in so many words if you understand the playing field, that the Brits will bend over as much as needed not to be the “first out” in the oil depletion wars that are forming up now.  (Like Ukraine is the gas war, right?):

The Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering have reviewed the risks associated with fracking. They concluded that the health, safety and environmental risks can be managed effectively in the UK, by implementing and enforcing best operational practice. However, they made several recommendations including calling for more research on the carbon footprint of shale gas extraction.

So that’s where life is going:  More and more drilling.

And last night, I politely explained to the folks who want to drill some 60-foot deep seismic wells on Uretopia Ranch lands (and load them with 2 1/2 pound charges for a 3D survey) that I’ve turned that whole matter over to my attorney to deal with.

Believe me, I understand the game here, I know the problem, and I am not amused to find that virtually everyone in Texas (who doesn’t own their subsurface rights) is, in effect, a squatter on a problem waiting to come by and make demands that their (superior) subsurface right not be infringed.

My friend Howard mentions a horrifying reality – far more urgent than Planet X:  “You ever look at the red/blue maps and the oil/subsurface rights maps?”

All of this, no matter how you cut it, is going to come down to a process and the object of the game is always a deal because the supply of oil is NOT unlimited and Big Oil knows this and doesn’t want people to figure out that over time we’re going to be moving (more and more) into a world of trading seismic impacts and surface rights for energy consumptive lifestyles which are marvelously profitable for Big Oil.

So if someone sends you bullshit about Planet X being the cause of Oklahoma quakes, suggest they go back to wherever they went to school and demand their money back:  Clearly they got conned.

You might also suggest, if they can handle something more than a picture-book, that they pick up a copy of  Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

Still, if you insist on demonstrably stupid ideas, I’m sure the Oil & Gas trolls will be along with another whopper next week, rather than explain the real trade-off in play. 

“Second Gunman on Grassy Knoll Responsible for Quakes…”    Way more probable…

Meantime, I’ve penciled out a budget for the pending “My attorney is better than your attorney” if reason doesn’t prevail. 

I figure to cut the checks and watch the floor show.  Sometimes in life (oil exploration and divorces come to mind)  delegating to a good attorney the least stressful way to approach things and they’ve been trained in the art…

But I have mentioned that  an effective radiated power of 5 kW at 14,300 MHz is not the kind of power you want to be mindlessly using electric blasting caps around.  Just sayin…

The Friday Twofer Woo-Woo

Reader Mark has been vexed by missing almond butter and reference books, in our latest tour of the world where things just happen that shouldn’t:

“…when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Sherlock Holmes, from The Blanched Soldier

Hi George, 

This is a twofer woo-woo. 

Case #1. About six weeks ago I was working on a client project and needed to access a couple of my writing/marketing reference books. I have an ordered library system, where my reference books are always in the same place on the same shelf. I went to get my two books and they were gone. There was also an empty space where the books would normally be. So I’m thinking that I must have pulled them out and used them previously and left they somewhere else. 

George, I literally pulled my office apart looking for these books, not once, but three times! Nowhere to be found.

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Sometimes, I mean like every so often, you have to look at coincidences and ask “What does it all mean?”

Yesterday morning ( 8 AM) I posted an article for Peoplenomics subscribers called “What Ever Happened to “Peak Oil?””  Pretty interesting article – and it supports what both comments here (and from Oilman2) have been saying: Peak Oil isn’t gone, it’s just a jagged peak.

So there I was, outside, working on the Never-ending Project (the sun porch) and who calls?

A man identifying himself as being with an oil exploration outfit who wants me to sign off (for $10 bucks an acre) permission for the company he reps to come through and set off seismic charges to see if there’s oil under the property.

Of course there is.

1.  This is East Texas which has already been mapped pretty well.

2.  I mentioned a couple of years ago that we have friends who pioneered an electromagnetic pulse system of oil exploration so we already know what’s “down there.”

Well, now, this poses certain “difficulties.”  I mean yeah, sure, it’s a kind of an odd thing:  Write article and within 8-hours, here comes a seismic crew.

But the difficulties go beyond the World of Woo-Woo (WoWW) come-a-knocking. 

We didn’t buy our little place in the woods to be disturbed.  In Texas, if you’re a surface rights owner (we are) the holder of the subsurface/mineral rights does have the right to develop their property.

That said, they have to do so in a minimally invasive way and compensate the surface rights owner for any damage.

Since our property is a tree farm, if any trees are cut down, then that would be an economic loss for us. 

But here’s the delicate part:  I’m an extra class ham radio operator and I don’t take kindly to the quiet enjoyment of my hobby being disrupted.  And I operate (at times and as conditions warrant) at power levels (on all the HF bans) that go up to 1,8-29 MHz. 

And yes, the property is posted with signs that inform people that RF fields here may at time exceed the maximum recommended for the general public. 

And that’s the problem:  Electric blasting caps.

Typically, these kinds of seismic studies are done using ammonium nitrate explosives placed about 25-feet down a 3-inch diameter hole.  Then a web of wiring is stretched out and off goes the shot. 

So besides the “normal” issues of surface owners, I’ve got a tree farm and I have radio equipment which may interfere with electric blasting materials.

Is there an alternative?  Oh course.  There are various “thumpers” that can be used, along with the new electronic pulse technology.

But this is one of those situations where I have to trust someone besides George:  So I will have my (local) attorney send them a letter informing them that I don’t take kindly to disruptions, potential damage to property (as had been experienced many places) and I sure wouldn’t want to have any blasting accidents.

Sometimes, it’s better to let an attorney do the talking.  Not all the time, but now and then…

What Cost of Living: Canadian Style

From a reader out on the great flatlands who’s enjoying the “negligible change in the cost of living” than Canucks hear from their hype-monster, just like we get here:

So as per usual we are being told that our inflation up here is negligible.

Here’s my list of negligible

Gas is now over $6 a gallon

Packs of cookies have dropped 50 grams out of the packages and are still the same price as the 350 packs

Cheese Whiz was $10.39 a 900 gram jar.  I bought it on sale last year for $5

This is just a skim of the increasing food prices around here.

Apartments are over $1000 for a two bedroom

Cheapest crappy war time house is over $250,000

Minimum wage is $10 an hour for comparison.

Apparently, our reader has a serious addiction problem:  Eating. Near as I can figure it, governments have worked out “quantitative squeezing” to cure us all of that one.

Speaking of the World Oil Picture

Got a nice lead from a subscriber in response to Wednesday’s report:

George,

This is related to your post today on Peoplenomics. It’s an article describing talks between Gazprom and Turkey about expanding the capacity of the pipeline to Turkey.

Notice the name of the Deputy Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee … Alexander Medvedev. 

I believe I saw a quote by someone in Congress saying Obama is playing marbles while Putin is playing chess.

I can’t swear to Putin playing chess, or not.  But I am bright enough to figure out that our “Golfer in Chief” is just playing a round…

Example:  The president is skipping the funeral of an aunt to play golf, reports The Daily Caller.

Oh…and if you’re looking for a real conspiracy to dig your teeth into this morning, how about this one:  Why is it the “Obama Golf Counter” site hasn’t been updated since February, huh?

But except for the occasional mention (in articles like this one) the press seems to be giving our favorite duffer a pass.

On the OTHER Weight Loss Program

While I’m presently at a new, lower, weight this morning, a note from Doc Zero came floating across the desk:

Saw your link to the Mega One Meals.  They look pretty good. I have read The Gabrielle Method years ago after he was on Coast to Coast.  Didn’t help me lose weight.  But in the last couple of months I heard one nutritionist on Coast (Who’s name I can’t remember) say, the way to lose weight was easy.  Take your weight in lbs.

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You ever walk into a casino?  There are carefully controlled aspects to it you seldom think about.  But, just as one example, there is never a clock around.  That’s because (for obvious reasons) casinos don’t want you knowing what time it is.

Similarly, in the financial markets, the little matter of “What Time is It?” is of more than passing importance.

If, for example, the stock market is headed for new highs, which some of the data would suggest (like the stronger than expected leading indicators), the people who run the markets (the commercials) would love nothing better than to load the boat ahead of time – buying when stocks are cheap.  That way, when stocks run up, they will sell at higher prices and keep the casino going.

On the other hand, if the crap is really going to hit the fan in eastern Europe,; then there would be a massive re-ordering of the world’s economy and that would run the other way for casino owners.  They would be dumping stocks, going to cash and letting the public take the bath.  They’d wait patiently for a good bottom to be put in, and then buy again.

Normally, the Long Wave is pretty clear.  We have been in a period of declining interest rates since about 1980’s, so with all parties, things are going to have to end some time.

The problem is When?

We’ve been following a particular “replay” of markets in our Trading Model over on our subscribers-only Peoplenomics side of things.  And without giving away the whole plot, we can see a scenario where one or two and maybe even three more weeks of up markets are possible. 

But as explained in yesterday’s report here, Vlad Putin has a couple of firecrackers strapped to his behind, so I’m cautiously looking at adding to a short position going forward.

The market – somewhat conflicted – has edged back into a long position in our model, but the size of the reading is not very convincing.  There’s a lack of conviction developing.

That might improve later this morning when a couple of housing numbers coming in and tomorrow we get the new home sales figures.  But the rest of the week – save Dural Orders – isn’t very exciting, unless the Michigan Sentiment Indicator turns your crank.

Sure, imports are up (and it may be bad for the balance of trade) but as we explained to subscribers recently, the increases in foreign military sales will likely offset some of that, regardless of the karmic implications.

If your life savings is on the bullish side of things, and if your idea of “long-term investing” is two weeks, then you should be in good shape.

Just remember casinos don’t have clocks.  And the reason for it is so you won’t think about how late it’s getting.  And in economic long wave theory, closing time comes along pretty soon.  It might be a couple of years, but again we ask rhetorically:  If you had money in the market in 1927 or 1928…even ‘29….how close do you think you could have plated it then and what do you think it’s any easier a decision now?

Dow futures are up 9 whole points.  Got the time, buddy?

About Those Firecrackers

Veep Joe is off whipping up the folks in Ukraine saying the US will support them.  Presumably, this will mean more than passing around cookies, but we shall see.  As stated earlier, “exercises” with 150 soldiers are not likely to scare Putin.

Since we just got done last week, putting in our payments to the FedGov, you may be wondering how much money the US government has piled into the Ukraine bet:  Well, according to his article in the Kyiv Post, “Nuland says US spent $5-billion to back democracy in Ukraine.”

Ures truly, being dense, and all thought backing democracy would involve elections.  But to be clear, the amount admitted by former Bush turned Obama Stater, Victoria Nuland, that’s the tab since 1991.

Why, that’s only $15.97 per American – and spread out since 1991, it’s all budget dust, right?

Of course, its more like $35 per worker, since retired don’t pay as much tax and kids, well, they’ll eat you out of house and home, not earning their deductions.  But it’s something to think about.

Just put it on the list of other “change” including Gitmo (still there), Stan (still there), keep your own doctor (uh….)….

When the list of promises broken gets long enough, you end up with militias talking tough, but I SUPPOSE you figured that out by now.

Grab Some More

But, in case you haven’t, keep an eye on the Bunglers of Land Management who are now trying to scoop up another piece of property – this one in North Texas.

In this latest fiasco, BLM is trying to rewrite generations of actually deeded land.

Ron Paul’s comments are worth seeing, if you haven’t.

More after this.

Maudlin America

Continuing a theme from a recent Peoplenomics report, we can’t help but be dismayed at the number of people buy in to stories that fill important air time and don’t call politicians to account by asking hard, obvious, and not “pre-filtered” questions of newsmakers.

Instead, the Mainstream media is full of useless stories that are heart still pullers but nevertheless will have little (likely NO) impact of your life, or those of your offspring going forward.

Just, for example, the latest string of stories out of Korea don’t mean jack:  You weren’t really going to take a Korean ferry anywhere in the next, oh, hundred years or so, were you?

Or, take the matter of MH370.  This one is dragging out longer than a bad TV show with no plot and the obvious need for “filler” material, since news departments have doubled down with huge bets that those trip expense reports will be justified by live action of the first body being recovered, if it ever is…

Definition: “Maudlin: self-pityingly or tearfully sentimental, often through drunkenness.”

‘Cept instead of drunkenness, how about through that feel-good pill haze?  Tell your doctor.

Making Up Law

Oh, sure, there’s LAW on the books that say illegals in America get deported.  But care to guess who is making up WHEN to enforce the law, pretending the rest of the time it is NOT THE LAW?

You go read this story and figure it out. 

See William Chambliss’ “Vice, Corruption, Bureaucracy, and Power” (circa 1971).  What works at the city level (where I covered it as a cop shop reporter and the federal grand juries) seems to have grown up and gone national.  Now seems to be untouchable.

We’re either a country or full-time, always equally applied law, or we’re corrupt.  It really is THAT simple.

Tolerance policies are selective enforcement dressed up in pretty clothes for political hacks.  “That law doesn’t apply to me…I’m special.”  Then you ain’t in America, by the law books I’ve read.  But that only works if the Courts aren’t packed…

Why isn’t the press calling bullshit on this and calling people out on this with questions like “Aren’t you selectively breaking the law here?”  “Where is the right to break law delegated to you, sir?”  FMTT.

Seen equality around anywhere? WTFU

Over Russia

The US and Russia are flying spy missions over one another’s countries.  Gee, that sure makes me feel safe, doesn’t it you?

Lights Out

Note from warhammer:

George,

What exactly might the PTB be prepping John Q. Citizen for with the release of this bit of ‘duh’ EMP news.

<http://watchdog.org/138940/solar-flare-emp/>

From burned retinas, blindness and scorched skin for those struck by the sheer awe of a nuclear HAB (high altitude burst), a “new sun” for all intents and purposes, who are drawn to stare at the fireball for too long, to the frying of every non-hardened circuit followed by months to years of trying to survive without power, gas and water, the ramifications would surely be civilization altering (and for many, life ending).

On the other hand, perhaps NASA expects a grand CME on the scale of the 1859 Carrington Event, similarly sending the sun-facing side of the planet back into the pre-electric agricultural age. Were such a CME to hit N. America, most people lack the land, free flowing water, seeds, tools and general know how to provide food for themselves and their families. Millions would certainly perish.

Whether for a HAB or a CME, the news release is definitely most curious. Ure thoughts?

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Mr. Ure is seriously losing weight here lately.  I won’t be so dumb as to put up numbers but I will say that our recent visit here at Uretopia Ranch with my friend Howard Hill was instrumental.

How so?  Well, Howard recommended a book… The Gabriel Method: The Revolutionary DIET-FREE Way to Totally Transform Your Body…which I had loaded on my Kindle in no time at all.  I mean seriously…in like 4-minutes.

What makes Jon Gabriel’s book so cool is that it doesn’t start with calories, sitting around and being a slug, cutting our sugary drinks, or any of the “normal” starting points.  What he does that’s different is he starts with the psychological reasons why some people “turn on their fat storage systems.”

Sure enough, when I started doing some of the exercises in the book, what came through were some leftover mental thought fragments (the kind that can “program” you, if you don’t consciously dredge them up and smash them with full-bright thinking and dealing with them.

I won’t ruin the book for you, but let’s just say that a lower-middle class to middle-class upbringing in my youth included a lot of food-related programming.  Sitting around the dinner table was where a lot of family sharing/caring/learning took place.  And thus, sitting around associating (food with sharing/caring/learning) in a sense programs you to seek weight via food since it must be associated with what was going on at the dinner table, right?

And while there, eating (early on) involved serving portions that were laid out by adults.  Not wanting to shore-change their kids, got more than adequate portions of food.

But we also got two other things that worked into an eventual predisposition to being (how to say this?) less than featherweights.

Aha!  Gabriel’s book is all about the psychological stuff which – in my case – involved two of the most powerful/destructive (yet not intentionally so) commands from parents.

From dad there was “Be a clean plater, or no desert…:” and from mom  “No ice-cream unless you eat all your [fill in the blank].  Well, hell, turns out the answers are always in plain sight…just Gabriel has tons of good sense in his book about finding it.  My thanks to Howard, again, for recommending it.

Oh, and no harm/no foul on the parents…they were just doing what they wanted to guard against from their childhoods in the Great Depression – being hungry.  Many marvelous “D’oh!” moments reading Gabriel’s book.

The Liquid Food Connection

“OK, so how does this get to a discussion of liquid food?” you’re wondering about here.

I got to thinking about other “food programming” from childhood and one of the messages back when was “Don’t drink too much water with your meal or you will fill up on water, not food.”

But, in fact, because young boys don’t drink a lot of liquid during the day (play was hard work) they really needed more with meals.  And that’s where I got into reviewing the kinds of food that I really like.

Things like homemade clam chowder, a bowl of chili, or that lunchtime treat: cream of mushroom soup and a fried cheese sandwich.

In the early sixties, I think it was, my mother tried dieting (briefly) and there was a place up in Seattle called GovMart which was a kind of early-day Costco, except it was for government employees only.  Since dad worked for the city, we’d go there for bulk foods now and then.

It was from there that I had my first taste of a liquid diet called Metrecal which lives on in memory in the pages of Wikipedia:

Metrecal was a brand of diet foods introduced in the early 1960s. Though its products were criticized for their taste, which newer varieties of flavor tried to improve upon later, it attained a niche in the popular culture of the time. Created and marketed initially by C. Joseph Genster of Mead Johnson & Company, it was eventually replaced in the market by competitors such as Slim Fast.^[1]

Mead Johnson had a long history of creating nutritional supplements for infants and invalids, and Metrecal was seen as a logical progression into weight loss for the general public. Genster was the group director for nutritional specialties at Mead Johnson, which launched the product in September 1959, though it was unclear who conceived the original concept.^[1] Food innovator Sylvia Schur‘s company provided consulting work on the product’s development.^[2] The name for the product was generated by an automated IBM computer system as a blend of the words “meter” and “calories”, referring to the measured caloric intake of the Metrecal diet.

Needless to say, Metrecal worked, but only so-so for mom. This was ‘61, now that I think about it.

Remember, my Danish grandmother who came over on the Lusitania (last successful westbound trip) earned her keep in Denmark as a cook for some minor nobility in Odense.  As a result of this, deserts were one of the really great kitchen outputs at our house:  A twisted deep-friend cookie (Kliner from Klejner)  [recipe here] or the accompanying citronfromage ( a Danish lemon mousse) {yeah, try it sometime].  Lemon custard tarts, Danish pastries of all sorts.  Cinnamon rolls and bear claws and….oh, my, the joy of it all.

Not that the kitchen didn’t turn out low-calorie main dishes, either.  Danish frikadeller (with a rich gravy with dill) was not exactly weight-loss food, either.  Half a dozen red potatoes and here, more gravy?  [recipe here]  Pronounced: FRACK-a-dillah.  29 million calories per serving, plus or minus.

The taste was very similar to the Swedish meatballs you can get at some Ikea stores. except that it was patties, each big as your hand, and eating two was considered a compliment to the cook.  Eating only part of one?  Dissing the cook!  And you see how this programming stuff Gabriel talks about works, right?

Still, because mom wasn’t too thrilled with the early Metrecal, she shared it with us kids.  It was chocolate, and damn good, we thought.  Kind of like cocoa, but thicker.

Now to the point:  I have through about rotating through some cases of Ensure as a prepping food, but that one didn’t really grab me because I have always thought of it as “old or sick” people food.  I’m  not that guy.

So bingo:  A couple of weeks back, along comes a note from Amy at www.preparewise.com and guess what they have? 

MegaOne Meals are the ultimate in emergency meal replacement shakes.  Made from 100% All Natural Ingredients and 28 Super Foods, these tasty shakes are high in protein, daily vitamins and minerals, and are gluten, dairy, and soy free, as well as non-GMO. Just add water for the perfect addition to your survival supply

Total Servings: 15 Hearty / 30 Light Servings 

All Natural Ingredients Made from 28 super foods including Chia, Acai, Goji & more

Incredibly Delicious Long Shelf Life: 10+ Years 

Just Add Water and Shake to Prepare Perfect addition to emergency food storage

Raw 

Vegan 

Gluten Free 

Non-GMO 

Low Fat – Trans Fat Free

Complete Amino Acid Profile

Dairy & Soy Free

High Protein (30 grams per hearty serving) 

Low Sugar 

Complete Vitamin B Complex 

Good Source of Fiber

Immune Booster

Cholesterol Free

Great for breakfast, weight loss, nutritional supplement Great for hiking, camping, disaster supply & more – 

See more at: http://www.preparewise.com/food-storage/megaone-vegan-meal-replacement-shakes.html

Amy’s accompanying note was pretty encouraging, too:

On a personal note:  This really is an amazing product, I have never been one for protein drinks, but now I am drinking this daily, as the ingredients are pretty impressive.    

So, care to guess what goes on my prepping list? 

Total replacement for general prepping?  No.  I mean, as long as the garden is putting out, and my rocket stove is firing (a review of my new one of those maybe next week or the week after) there are still a specific set of uses (hikes, don’t want to start a fire, and things like that) having liquid meals around is a darn fine idea.  A dozen per person in the car makes sense, for example.

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