Saturday, February 13, 2016

Where We're Heading





Prepper, sustainable and homesteading blogs seem to be taking a real beating here lately. More of them are falling into disuse or closing up shop than I can count. Typically I remove a blog from my roll when it sits idle and not updated for about a year. Often times I will let em sit for longer but these days I seem to be removing more "prepper" type blogs than adding new ones. Even counting the loss of hits I was getting while having the updating problems my overall traffic has been down for the last year as well, falling from 3 to 4000 hits a day to only around 1000 to 1500 tops this Winter. Also traffic generally slows during the dead of Winter too which I find odd but whatever.

None of this is really a surprise to me though because as I pointed out some eight years ago we decline in a stair step fashion and at different intervals. At the moment we are at a landing for the masses where things have stayed pretty level while the decline has been more focused in the large scale or upper tiers of business, finances and governments. While the decline is still quite evident and continuing along at a steady pace in many ways the symptoms of it right now actually work out as a benefit to the little guys like us.

For instance? The price of fuel. Right now those who have survived the collapse better than others or managed to keep from sliding down too fast are really enjoying the dramatic drop in gas prices. When gas is cheap most Americans start to feel like the world is their oyster and things are going to be just fine. Of course in today's environment cheap gas prices is usually a very bad sign of extremely bad things to come in the near or midterm future, but hey live for the moment and all that.

Another side effect of falling commodity prices and reduced retail sales are lower prices for manufactured goods. Let me tell you the sales these days in many areas are hard to beat too. Tool prices have been falling along with many other items in the home improvement line and clothing prices seem to be following behind closely as well. A lot of this maybe after the holidays type sales but there seems to be more left for this type of thing this year.

So all this is fine and well and good you might be asking yourself but when am I going to get to the part about what comes next? Well I think it is easy to see what comes next. All tiers of government are going to use this time to put the screws in a little tighter. More taxes, more spending, more increases in salaries and pensions to drive the wedge between the shrinking middle class and the new aristocracy class of government employees a bit deeper. More calls for monetary controls  even an end to cash itself if they can get away with it as the Fed or central banks continue to eat debt and manipulate the figures. We recently saw another crash forming in the markets until all of a sudden the big hidden buyers started firing up their machines once again and seemingly pulled assets back up by their boot straps.

Remember. And you can take this to the bank. The markets will not crash until the collapse is already in full un-controlled free fall. AT this stage of the game no Western government can allow a market crash like we saw in 08. The devastation it would wreck in the pension market is just too great and would cause wide scale panic.

Governments are going to grab all they can while they can for the next several months once again. Generally people with more disposable income are more agreeable to new taxes, fees etc. and no government is going to let this opportunity go to waste. Now would be a good time to convert taxable property into non-taxable property or non-trackable storage items. Expand your preps but shrink your footprint so to speak. When this commodities and energy price decline breaks the wealth disparity is going to jump and widen by leaps and bounds in a very short amount of time and we need to be prepared for it. The current lower prices is going to have some bad side effects in the business debt and bonds sectors and many companies will not survive it leading to possible shortages when the bubble pops.

So my advice right now is as I said reduce your taxable footprint while increasing stores and items that will prove useful in the near to long term future.  Focus on things that will continue to produce and can be used for barter or trade in a cashless or semi-cashless environment and reduce bank accounts to levels that will fly under the radar if at all possible. Get ready for inflation (especially in fuel costs) and shortages to rear their ugly heads when the corporate bond and debt bubble bursts because more stealth money printing will be coming to avoid another market crash when that bubble does burst. If you have the means increase garden size or output as we may very well see shortages or highly elevated food prices by the end of Summer or Fall of this year. Depends on how long the Fed can continue to eat corporate debt and as I have said before they amaze me at how far they can kick that can. It is possible they will attempt to deflate the corporate bond bubble by shafting the investors in that market so I would definitely get out of that sector if I was in it.

At the end of this cycle we are going to see a dramatic shift and increase in the wealth disparity once again. Many of us that have managed to hold on to the shrinking middle class shelf will find ourselves falling off it if we don't have a government check safety this time.

Better get ready.

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!!!!




25 comments:

  1. I think you have a good handle on what is going on. People are going to enjoy the deflation until their employer won't be able to pay as much or even keep them employed.
    I am afraid that one solution to the economic problems that they will take is to start a war or even WW3 as it has always worked before. None of the socialist policies work but a war will bring people together to sacrifice for the mother land or father land or these days it might be the significant other land.
    I think that maybe a lot of people see what is happening and have just lost motivation to talk about it in a blog. Kind of like running around on the Titanic yelling that the ship is sinking, everyone one has figured it out, everyone that counts at least. It is time to prepare and almost time to lay low and not draw any attention. The question is how ugly will the beautiful people get?

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    1. Sf - I hover on the line that war is obsolete right now. Real war I mean. It might come after a collapse has severed so many of the global economic ties but as it stands right now it would cost all the major powers too much money to fight. Besides why would say China or Russia go to war against us or any Western country? We are already destroying ourselves for them. I see a war on those like us by our own government before an all out real war. Sure police actions will continue but I doubt any of the major boys start messing with each other yet.

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  2. I, too, think a great number of homesteader/prepper folks have decided to drop off the internet and focus their energy on final preparations. We have studied, read, learned, and accumulated. Time to more fully implement. Blessings to you and all like-minded people...

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    1. Anon - Ya the surge we had in such blogs is falling as their ain't much else to be said. A lot of folks are afraid to post too much info so shy away from the "what I am doing" posts and there hasn't been much new blood come in. Many of the fly by nighters and the simple hoarder blogs ran out of steam a long time ago or turned into the penpal blogs they really wanted to be anyway.

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  3. I agree with Sunnybrook Farm. War is coming.

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    1. Anon - I see you'alls point but not sure myself on it yet. I think things are just a bit too interconnected for war right now and we would have to suffer a big economic decline before the ties would be undone for it to be feasible. For right now anyway.

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    2. My grandfather said the following about cars; "It takes hundreds of screws to keep a car together, but only one loose one to scatter the rest all over the road." You can say the same thing about our current world "order." The veneer of civility is as thin as onion skin now. Beware... Prepare...

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  4. I've always felt that the best security comes from working for your self, not someone else's business. It's really the only way to control your own destiny without depending on somebody else to make the right decisions that will keep you secure. When the SHTF this will still be the case. People will still want food and people will still give the church money. During The Great Depression (1929-39), the entertainment industry made out big time. People went out to forget their troubles and spent what little they had to spare for entertainment. Thus the old copper still I have stashed away. :-) Not to mention Oregon's newly legal crop which will always be in demand.

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    1. MV - I agree with a caveat. It depends so much on where the money of your region comes from. Around here White Men starting a business for themselves can't hardly compete for the real money as the only one spending for this area is the government and there are always too many strings. The government simply plays favorites and chooses the winners.

      Yet your advice and the qualities and skills it takes should still make one ready. You just have to learn to be very frugal as long as the rules are against you.

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  5. PP,

    I said to the wife last night that I crossed a line the other day. I've prepped and planned and trained for s long time. I've taken every medical course I could without going the next step and going for an emt ( which requires too many hours and too much being away from home).

    I've been sick. It seems every 3 or so years I come down with a cough that becomes a chest infection that I recognize the signs. Mid January I had been sick for 2 weeks and called my family doctor and got the next available appointment.... which is the 1st week of march.

    Last week end I was so sick and coughing up crap I tried the ER and they told me that wait lines in the city are so bad people were driving to our rural hospital so our wait times were 12+ hours.

    I went home and broke out the antibiotics my doctor prescribed me to have for an emergency when I was doing fly in northern work. I'm feeling actually goid enough to get seedlings started today and install a new bathroom vanity. I realized the fact its a 7 week wait to see a doctor is a sign we are really in trouble.

    On a side note the newest numbers are in. Our province elected a bunch of far left NDP last june they have trashed the economy ( oil prices were a big issue as well) to the point 100k people had gone on unemployment in the 1stv6 months of NDP rule. Now we are hearing it's 120k workers who lost their jobs and went on unemployment since last june. Plus another 50-70k workers who lost jobs but where contract and not eligible for unemployment.

    So nearly 200,000 new unemployed in a province of 4million. Except nearly 20% of our population is under 18 and 25% is retired and over 65. So 10% of the working age people have lost jobs in the last 8 months....

    Exile1981

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    1. Exile - Wow it sounds like the Canadian health care that all the liberals down here claim is so great is kinda failing. Sorry to hear about your illness and being saddled with progressives by the mass stupid voters.

      That's too much for any man to have to take at once.

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    2. I know fellow Canadians who have only good things to say about our system. My experiences have been less than stellar. Over the years it's gotten worse as the doctors are retiring and the population is aging as well. Our little town used to have 3 doctors caring for the community and the surrounding farms the reservation next door and a hospital 30 minutes away.

      One of my volunteer tasks is I run the town historical website. Our town is old for a prairie town. I have records going back to 1895 and our population has been steady since post WW1. From 1911 until 2011 we had 3 doctors serving the area.

      One doctor died a in 2011, another one had so much work in the town 30 minutes away she closed her practice here in2012. Now we have one elderly lady doctor who is assisted by the medical student of the month. We also used to have an ambulance stationed in town; but now it is always away; they even sold the building it stayed in.

      The hospital in the town 30 minutes away was built for a community of about 10,000; when that town had 4000 people and 6000 in the rest of the county. Now that town has grown to 10,000 and nearly a third is the massive seniors complex they put in. The wait times 2 years ago where horrible, now you have people driving the 45 minutes from the city of a million because it's 4 hospitals ER's are so back logged.

      One thing our media is really not talking about is how high our suicide rate has gone up. I was talking with a guy I used to work with last week. They laid all the senior QC people off in November at the site they were building and replaced them with a management team from Spain. In a bad economy the province replaced the QC team on a major project with people from out of country and forced the Canadian's to train the foreign workers on Canadian codes and laws.
      He's been unemployed since then and one guy who he worked with had refused to train his replacement and was fired rather than laid off. I'm not sure how your laws work but if your fired then you are not eligible for unemployment. That guy went home and hung himself because without unemployment it was the only option that didn't see him loose his house and his family end up on the street.

      I'm feeling down I guess this week because on Wednesday I got a call that a friend died. Organ failure. He had been on a transplant list for 2 years and it was so long that he died before he got one. He was younger than me.

      Exile1981

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  6. I think many seasoned preppers have gone dark because they see that a huge bubble is about to burst. I give you Frank and Fern, who suddenly went dark a little bit ago. Their final post was truly heart felt and worry some at the same time. For myself, I am topping of some essentials. Making hay while the sun shines so to speak. Since winter has taken hold here in the UP I am trying to make sure inside chores get done now b4 spring. I hope you can last and not go dark anytime soon.


    Carl in the UP

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    1. Carl - Perhaps. I don't know though the true prepping bloggers seemed to always know it was coming or so I thought. The closer it gets the more info is needed I would think.

      Oh who knows but ya getting the stuff done before is always a good idea.

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    1. I saw that. Does anyone think it was actually natural causes? The timing is too suspect.

      Exile1981

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    2. I am still in shock. OMG we are done. Game over.

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  8. Preppy, I think maybe three things are at work.

    1) Blogs take a lot of time (you know that as well as anyone). Consistently coming up with new material can take it out of you over the long haul.

    2) I do think there is a sincere element as well of people putting their time elsewhere to finish up those matters that they feel need attending to.

    3) Not adversing preps or readiness or even opinions? I think there is a growing sense of that as well. I certainly limit what I discuss or talk about, mostly for the reason that I do not want attention on me or mine.

    I do not think there will be another war involving the US within my lifetime, at least one that the country fights as a whole. We are far too divided at this point to come together. It is hard after the rhetoric and actions to turn around and say "Well, all that was then but this is now."

    The lines are, for the most part, drawn in my opinion. To quote Gandalf from The Two Towers, "It is the breath before the deep plunge."

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    1. Two follow on thoughts:

      1) Scalia's death makes the elections deadly serious. I think a whole lot of people are going to have their revival moment of Vote or perish.

      2) When Survivalblog goes dark, you will know it is time.

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    2. TB - YA Scalia's death is something that can have some very bad consequences. I only hope the Senate holds off any appointment.... Might be a vain hope.

      Sorry that is about all I can think about right now.
      I will get back to your other points later Sorry.

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    3. Tertiary thought: If I was someone that wished the US harm, now would be the time to do something awful. We are that separated.

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  9. PP - your posts are always thoughtful...and here's the BIGGEE - they are always timely!!! i, too, have noticed that a bunch of prepper blogs are going silent. i am not sure why? and please remember that Exile1981, whose comments are appreciated and respected, does not speak for all canadians. and as a true canadian, he says so in his first statement. our health system isn't stellar by any means...but when we need we need our health system, it is there for us.

    PP - it IS all going to come crashing down. NOW is the time to print off all of the articles from other blogs and websites that we feel provided good information. Now is the time to ramp up our preps and be on the ready - as you said so succinctly in this latest post.

    we have always gotten good information from your blog...and will continue to do so for as long as we can. don't stop telling it like it is...we appreciate your forthingcomingness...heck - i just made up a new word!

    we are sending much love, as always! your friends,
    jambaloney and kymber

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  10. I can only speak for myself, and I am spending much less time reading blogs and more time getting my preps ready. I feel such a sense of urgency. I'm busy getting my goat barn built, studying to pass my HAM test, and increasing my garden output. I want to do everything possible to feed and protect my family. I'm in survival mode.

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  11. There's always that part of us that says "There's still time." For those of us who have been paying attention, that part has died. People are "signing off" because there's not much time left and way too much to do. The blogs have their purpose, but, like faith, talk without action is dead...

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