Keep Our Service Free-Donate

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Money Saving Tips-Holiday Budget, Fuel, Power Outages


Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources


For Independent Minded People!

ISSN 2161-5543

In This Issue:

1.       Tips for a Christmas budget

2.      Are you prepared for a power outage?

3.      Save on fuel tips

4.      Clinton & Carter blast the war on drugs

5.      Part II of the Doug Casey interview about out Police State

 

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.
By a continuing process of inflation,
governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved,
an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

- John Maynard Keynes


Tips to Create a Christmas Budget


Since many people struggle to have a debt-free Christmas, it is important to make make a Christmas budget. Unfortunately, the popular approach to Christmas is buy now and then figure out the payments later. Instead, why not get the cash now and buy gifts according to the budget you created?

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Frugal Christmas List that Blesses Others


1. Set your Christmas budget.


How much will you choose to spend on Christmas gifts this year? The first step here is to decide on something that fits within your budget. You don’t want to enjoy Christmas in December and pay for it (literally) till the summer. Don’t be ashamed if you can’t afford much for Christmas. Set your limits.

Consider Adding a Family Tradition That Involves a Service.


Personally, I think Christmas focuses too much on getting and not enough on giving. To instill the importance of service in our children, we’ve decided to add a ministry/service to part of our family Christmas tradition. For the last few years, it has been caroling with the church at the hospital and distributing Christmas gifts.

Start Making Homemade Gifts


My wife makes some of the best homemade Christmas gifts. As I look around my office, the most valuable items I see are the homemade gifts my wife and kids made. Most people complain that there is not enough time to make homemade gifts, but consider yourself forewarned! Get started now.

Don’t let this Christmas sneak up on you. If you wanted to change something about Christmas this year, now is the time to start making those changes.

http://christianpf.com/how-to-create-a-fantastic-yet-frugal-christmas-gifting-strategy/

Honey is antimicrobial, antibacterial, and antifungal—so much so that it's even been used to treat wounds. Its distinctive brand of sweetness is welcome in almost any dish. Just remember that it's not chemically the same as sugar: If you're making a swap, substitute no more than one-third of the sugar for honey

 

 

PM’s Compendium of Useful Resources

 

Are You Prepared for a Power Outage?
Ah, the beauty of winter! The snow gently falling, the crisp chill in the air, the frequent power outages. Here is what you can do to prepare to power through without any power.

 

If you sell anything related to shooting or hunting there is a new auction site called Freegunshow.com with no fees. Like many new auction sites they take a while to take off, but specialized sites tend to do better than the general ones and this one has no fees.

 

Mini Consumer Guides


 

Save on Fuel

You can earn free gasoline when you go gro­cery shopping. Large supermarket chains, such as Save Mart Supermarkets, S-Mart Foods and Lucky.

How it works: Visit participating retailers to get your rewards card. Scan your card when you check out and earn Fuel Rewards on quali­fied purchases.

Recent examples: Buy two candy bars and get four cents-per-gallon off your next fuel pur­chase. Buy $10 worth of merchandise and get five cents-per-gallon off your next fuel purchase.

Note: The actual products will vary. Different stores have different items at different times.

For more information: www.fuelrewards.com.

 

 

THE CHANGING WORKSCAPE, AND SETH GODIN - "ARTISTS" WILL SURVIVE, "EMPLOYEES" WILL PERISH
The web (and for convenience' sake, let "web" include smartphones, tablets, and ubiquitous WiFi), as you know, is digitizing work. And once you digitize something, it can start anywhere and end anywhere. It can go anywhere, and take myriad forms.

Already, much work has no regard for borders. If you look at freelance marketplaces like
Odesk and Elance and Mechanical Turk, you'll see the process in action. Work is offered and done internationally. As China and India come online, and the web continues to spread globally, work will increasingly flow across borders, like a rising ocean.

Or think of it in volcanic terms. We get in our cars and drive to the office, trusting that everything is at least somewhat reliable, little suspecting that a sea of magma - digitized work and online access - is rapidly liquifying and remolding the "plates" beneath our tires - beneath our lives.

In his new book "
The Icarus Deception" Seth Godin talks helpfully about how we can deal with the strange new realities unfolding before us now. As I've done here myself, he urges that we cultivate flexibility and creativity, that we embrace change and a world filled with the unexpected. In short, we should think of ourselves as creators, as "artists."

 

You know how your grandmother's recipe for spaghetti sauce calls for sugar? Try grated carrots instead. Their natural sugars bring just the right amount of sweetness (and a dose of vitamin A and beta carotene)--with no added sugar

 

 

The Nanny State Updates…

 

Clinton, Carter Blast ‘War on Drugs’ in Documentary

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and
Jimmy Carter say in a new documentary that America’s “War on Drugs” has been a failure.

"If all you do is try to find a police or military solution to the problem, a lot of people die and it doesn't solve the problem," Clinton says in the documentary, “Breaking the Taboo,” which debuts on Friday.

"It hasn't worked.  The drug war has eroded the rights and freedom for all Americans.”

“Taboo” chronicles 40 years of the nation’s battle against drugs, according to
U.S. News & World Report. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it praises Clinton and others who "have had the guts to change their minds."
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/clinton-carter-war-drugs/2012/12/03/id/466311?s=al&promo_code=10F70-1

 

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to propose long-delayed regulations requiring auto manufacturers to include event data recorders — better known as "black boxes" — in all new cars and light trucks. But the agency is behind the curve. Automakers have been quietly tucking the devices, which automatically record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop, into most new cars for years.

 

 

Applesauce (no added sugar, please) is a classic ingredient for cutting fat and sugar out of recipes. Grated whole apples can work this way, too. Try some in your next batch of whole-wheat pancakes and you may not even want to reach for syrup. Diced apples also make a fiber-rich sweetener for plain yogurt. Just don't peel the skin; that's where most of the disease fighting compounds

 

 


The Parting Thought- Part II Doug Casey Interview

 

As the government becomes more powerful, it’s completely predictable that everything — including the justice system — will become ever more politicized. And government very rarely relinquishes a power it’s gained. I particularly like the Supreme Court ruling in April 2012 that allows anyone who’s arrested for anything — including littering or jaywalking — to be strip-searched.
.


Privacy is now a completely dead concept, from both a legal and a practical point of view. If you want to retain privacy, you now have no alternative to relocating outside the US.

Louis: Or any advanced Western country. I’ve read that there are more surveillance cameras per square mile in London than anywhere else.

Doug: I’ve heard that too. The opposite being true in rural Argentina is one of the things I like about it. Back to the list:

“National security” essentially amounts to nothing more than government security, which amounts to cover for the individuals in the government. Nazi Germany and the USSR were national-security states. As I’ve tried to explain in the past, once a critical mass is reached, it’s impossible to reform a government. I believe we’ve reached that state in the US.

 

Torture by field operatives under the stress of combat is one thing; torture as official policy is something else again. But torture is now accepted in the US. Worse, there are far more serious war crimes than torture being committed in the name of the US that are going unpunished.

Louis: This is, after all, a far darker version of the same US government that deliberately infected black US citizens with syphilis just to see what would happen, and sent US citizens of Japanese descent to concentration camps during WWII.

Doug: Exactly. The next point is:

Secret court: “The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group

You no longer live in a free country when there’s zero privacy for citizens, but 100% secrecy for the government and those it employs.

Immunity from judicial review: “Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy.”

The government has outsourced some of its functions — not least the use of contractors in war zones. Increasingly, being associated with the government gives you a “get out of jail free” card. In the USSR they called this a “krisha” — a roof.

Bad as this is, it’s just one example. There’s also the use of domestic drones, and hundreds of thousands of cameras that take pictures of everyone everywhere.

 

Extraordinary renditions: “The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects.”

Yes, if someone is kidnapped, there’s plausible deniability if the torturing is done abroad by a third party. And they’re likely to have even fewer compunctions.



Doug: This just goes to reinforce what I’ve been saying for some time. As great as a US citizen’s risk is in the marketplace these days, the greatest single risk to their wealth and health is the government. People simply must internationalize to diversify their political risk. I can’t stress that strongly enough.

 

Pick up our CD ROM – The No BS Survival Manual and also get the DVD Final Warning with your order…


 

“Until the next revolution”, the Poor Man

 

Follow us on Facebook


 

 Twitter


 

Keep our services free, visit our sites…

Check our Resources

 

New self sufficiency books added weekly


 

A Shallow Planet Production

No comments: