Who Are Your Heroes?

Mad Max. Pancho Villa. Clyde Barrow. The Warsaw Ghetto fighters. The Aborigines. Native Americans. The Chechens. William Burroughs. Charles Bukowski. Diane Di Prima. Matt Dillon. Shadow. All wild/feral children. My baby sister. MSR. The Merry Pranksters. America.

Container Garden Update

Strawberries gave three rounds, but they are played out. Started pulling them up today. Trimmed the foliage way back on the earthbox tomatoes, and inside of 2 days some tomatoes are darkening. Time to buy 2 more half wine barrels. Gonna have a lot of free container space shortly. Next up: Plant potatoes, lettuce and Lambs Quarters. Also, gather acorns this Fall & experiment more with leeching and breadmaking.

Perception

1. America is not the Land of the Free. It is the Land of $. And $ can buy a lot. They can even buy narrow forms of freedom. But the backdrop behind America long ago became a backdrop of slavery, slavery to the $. The consumer masses are slaves to capitalism, corporations, corporate-run media, and the almighty $. We need to find ways to sidestep the capitalist paradigm, so that we can again live healthy lives. We need to remember that we don't need corporate consumerism in order to survive. We don't need the $, which in and of itself holds zero value. What we need in order to survive is: Healthy food, shelter, medicine and community. Our society has so limited our perception that we are brainwashed into thinking we are free, when we are not. Potential freedoms within the capitalist consumerist paradigm lie within a very narrow band of possibility, and this band is exclusively limited to the $.

2. The morality we are taught is largely free of any ties to a higher, ethical morality. We are taught to play by the rules, to make lots of money, to excel at text-book education, to be good worker consumer citizens, to do our homework, to pay our debts, to pay our taxes, to support our government, etc. Are any of these things inherently "good"? Is the student who excels at homework really better than the student who does not? Is the knowledge gained from textbooks real knowledge? Is working hard at a soul-less job really behavior we should put on a pedestal? Is accumulating $$$ and voluminous amounts of plastic, energy-sucking belongings an inherently intelligent thing to do? Is it wise to support our government when it behaves in ways which do not benefit the international community as a whole?

3. The multinational corporations are becoming increasingly evil with the passing decades. Chevron dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon in order to kill off the native peoples who would protest their intrusion onto their lands, multinationals gaining control of international water supplies so that they can profit from the world's poor and oppressed peoples, the Haliburtons and DynCorp's privatizing the military so that they can both A. act without regard for law, and B. rob the American taxpayers blind. One day our increasingly-ineffective governments will crumble past the point of any effectiveness whatsoever, and the Corporations will rise to rule the world. Their rule will be short - 5 to 50 years. The Battle of Armageddon will be the battle for the life of planet Earth itself: In the end it will come down to the People -- who wish to live -- versus the Corporations -- who wish to control, enslave and destroy in the name of greed and power. It will be a bitter war, without moral or ethical boundaries. But the Corporations WILL fall, once universal embargoes bring them to a standstill.

Stuff To Buy Before Hyperinflation Hits

A Kipor gasoline generator.

A non-electric grain mill, preferably a Country Living Grain Mill.

A wood-burning stove.

A Big Berkey gravity water filter.

A bicycle trailer.

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Returning Dying Cities to Their Natural State

The US government is actually considering returning large parts of Flint, Michigan and other dying cities back to their natural state.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html

It's stranger than science fiction.

What the Future Holds

If you are interested in prophecies, predictions and visions of the future, I recommend a book called Robes: A Book of Coming Changes, by Penny Kelly. This book hits the nail on the head. In order to get into it, you may need to disregard the heavy New Age premise, which is that little men in brown robes showed Penny Kelly a series of images in 1980, and these images illuminated the future world she would one day live in. Myself, I am not interested in the HOW of the visions, merely the WHAT. And my, this book is packed with WHAT. Dare I say WELL over a hundred pages of detailed descriptions of the future of mankind and planet Earth. And since these visions were seen by Penny in 1980, we are now living in the midst of them. Yes, many of her prophecies have already come to fruition, and the seeds of many more are obviously germinating. This book may have a New Age premise, but it is no feel-good wet dream. If you are a Hippie Survivalist, you need to read it. It will sober you right up. It may induce you to drink to excess, but it will most certainly sober you right up.

Might I add that the one huge, glaring message I gleaned from this book was this: Learn how to grow your own food. Seriously. Start now. Don't mess around. Your life depends on it. It's for real this time around. A 90% human die-off warning is in effect for the 21st Century; the ship is foundering, and then it's going down.

More will be said about these visions in future postings.

The Tiniest 21st Century Potato Harvest

Behold my first potato harvest ever (with 2 strawbabies thrown in for dramatic effect). I think that potatoes are one of the key vegetables for food production, because they are very un-labor intensive, and they provide large amounts of carbs. I am going to focus on growing potatoes vertically in a half-wine barrel, as well as growing Lambs Quarters as a green (finally found seeds online) and the usual tomatoes in grow boxes, strawbabies and lettuces.