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Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Are You Living in a 'Hope Bubble?' 10 Reasons You Should Become more Self Sufficient


Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources


For Independent Minded People!

ISSN 2161-5543

 

 

There's no such thing as standing still. Unless a fellow moves ahead, he's left behind.
- Clarence Darrow

From The Smiling Dog Saloon Files

 

 

In This Issue:

1.       Left Behind-America’s Middle Class

2.      Human powered washing machine, Free fruits & veggies

3.      10 reasons to become self sufficient, 10 ways to get there

4.      Frugal living for larger families, New coupon sites

5.      Invasion of the Blue Shirts

 

 

 

On one hand, the economy is growing and creating jobs, with some portion of the U.S. population back to business as usual. Yet it’s also clear that life has gotten tougher for millions of Americans, perhaps permanently.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The gap in employment rates between America's highest- and lowest-income families has stretched to its widest levels since officials began tracking the data a decade ago, according to an analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press.

Rates of unemployment for the lowest-income families — those earning less than $20,000 — have topped 21 percent, nearly matching the rate for all workers during the 1930s Great Depression

Yet jobs remain harder to find and incomes are down, which is why many middle-class Americans feel left out of the recovery…


Many Americans Already Wiped Out, More to Come…


Most American families are living paycheck to paycheck, most of them are not storing up emergency food and supplies, and only a very small percentage of them are buying gold and silver for investment purposes.

They seem to have forgotten what happened back in 2008.

When the financial markets crashed, millions of Americans lost their jobs.  Because most of them were living on the financial edge, millions of them also lost their homes.

Unfortunately, most Americans seem convinced that it will not happen again.  Right now we seem to be living in a “hope bubble” and people have become very complacent.  For a while there, being a “prepper” was very trendy, but now concern about a coming economic crisis seems to have subsided.

As recently pointed out, our entire financial system is a giant Ponzi scheme, and there are already signs that our financial markets are about to implode once again.

Those that have not made any preparations for what is coming are going to regret it bitterly.  The following are 17 signs that most Americans will be wiped out by the coming economic collapse

#1 According to a survey that was just released, 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

But most Americans are acting as if their jobs will always be there.  But the truth is that mass layoffs can occur at any time.

In fact, it just happened at one of the largest law firms in New York City.

#2 27 percent of all Americans do not have even a single penny saved up.

#3 46 percent of all Americans have $800 or less saved up.

#4 Less than one out of every four Americans has enough money stored away to cover six months of expenses.

#5 Wages continue to fall even as the cost of living continues to go up.

Today, the average income for the bottom 90 percent of all income earners in America is just $31,244.  An increasing percentage of American families are just trying to find a way to survive from month to month.

#6 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.

#7 Small business is becoming an endangered species in America.

In fact, only about 7 percent of all non-farm workers in the United States are self-employed at this point.  That means that the vast majority of Americans are depending on someone else to provide them with an income.

But what is going to happen as those jobs disappear?

Click here to read the full list.


Another article I linked to today (on fallacies of living off the land) talked about questions to consider if bugging out to the wilderness is your first choice. Well, this one poses quite a few questions as to what you will do if you’re living in an urban, suburban, or rural environment: “In the case…


 

Or, watch this PBS news segment about the demise of the US middle class.

 


 

 
 


PM’s Roundup of Useful Resources…

 


Here’s a simple way to wash clothes–albeit very slowly–using little more than a 5-gallon bucket and plunger. Note: they do make a specialized plunger that already has holes drilled and is quite a bit more sturdy, just search Amazon for “bucket plunger” or something like that if interested. Here’s the video (guess it ‘beats’ slapping your clothes against a rock at the side of a river).


 

 

Free Fruits & Vegetables for the Taking

FallingFruit.org, a new online interactive map, identifies locations around the world were fruits and veggies are free.  Resembling a Google map it pinpoints where you can gather free produce.  It also identifies public water wells and trash bins with excess food waste.

 

Ten Reasons to Become Self-Sufficient and Ten Ways to Get There (link)

I would think that most of these reasons to become more self-sufficient are inherently understood for those in the preparedness movement but sometimes it’s nice to have a little reassurance: “We are now three to five generations removed from the rural backbone that strengthened America. The world at large has undergone a similar transformation as…


 

How to Hide Money

I learned how to hide money when I was young, in part because we had a busy house with lots of people coming and going. I had some money buried. I also had some inside a wall in a closet. It was accessed by way of a false panel that filled the space above the closet door and was painted to look just like the other walls. My parents may not have liked the fact that I cut a big hole in the wall, but nobody ever knew. The video here has some more ideas for how to hide money...


 

 

Coupons at Checkout

I prefer to shop online. But one of the more annoying aspect is hunting down coupon codes to use in order to get the best deal on what I’m buying. But with the Coupons at Checkout web app installed you don’t have to become a cyber detective in order to find a coupon code.

It’s 100% free, there’s no registration, all you have to do is install the plug-in and shop as you normally would. When you get to check out if the coupon code box is highlighted in red, click it and it will give you a list of valid coupon codes to choose from.

 The free plug-in is available for both Macs and PCs and works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, just to name a few browsers.


 

Frugal living ideas for large families
read more here

 
 
 
 

The Nanny State-We love our government

Zero Tolerance for Common Sense
By Marta H. Mossburg

Parody is now reality when it comes to guns in public schools. In the name of preventing violence since the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., last December, schools across the country are suspending students for bringing toy guns to school, making gestures that look like guns and in one absurd case in Maryland, suspending a student for biting a toaster pastry into the shape of a gun. I can picture the documentary now: "An Inconvenient Pop-Tart."

The latest incident involves a sixth grader in Calvert County, Md., who was suspended for making a gun gesture while on a bus heading to school. According to The Washington Post, Carin Read, the mother of the 11-year-old student, filed an appeal of the suspension last week, following a principal denying her request to remove the incident from his school records. This follows an episode in May in another Calvert County school where a five- year-old boy was interrogated for two hours -- without his parents first being notified -- for bringing a toy cap gun to school and suspended for 10 days, although the suspension was later lifted
.

 

Pittsburgh Government Outlaws Parking in Driveways It is literally theater of the absurd in some of our cities today. The types of laws the government is passing and enforcing border on the demented. Yet we the people seem to be growing…

 


The “Gun Violence Prevention and Safe Communities Act,” a bill sponsored by William Pascrell, D-NJ, and Danny Davis, D-IL., would nearly double the current 11 percent tax on handguns, while raising the levy on bullets and cartridges from 11 to 50 percent.

The lawmakers say the bill would generate $600 million per year, which they claim would be used to fund law-enforcement and gun violence prevention. The bill would exempt all federal, state and local agencies, including police departments, from paying the tax.

“What the anti-gun interests can’t ban, they want to tax it out of existence,” Alan Gottlieb, chairman for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, told FoxNews.com. “It’s nothing more than confiscatory taxation.”

 

 


The Parting ThoughtNot to worry in the land of the free!

 

Dear Unconcerned Citizen…

Invasion of the Blueshirts

Fort Meade, MD -- The United States, the least free country on Earth, is fighting a major invasion of the Blueshirts.

The most visible Blueshirts constitute a 50,000-plus army that occupies all the airports in America. Recognizable by their blue shirts and their inquisitive eyes and hands, they search and humiliate all Americans trying to leave the country. They regularly peep into the carry-on luggage of their victims, check their prostheses, and grope their bodies. Their official name is the Touch Sex Army (or TSA).

They do not violate the constitution's Fourth Amendment, because nobody is forced to do business with them. For example, one can travel by horse from Boston to San Francisco and avoid the TSA altogether.

The history of the Blueshirts is richer than most people imagine. They came as a natural extension of an older occupying army, the Customs and Border Praetorians (CBP). For several decades, they have been applying the same control and humiliation techniques to people entering the country (
or found within a hundred miles of the border). In fact, the agency is credited with administering the first Constitution-free zones in the country.

The Blueshirts continue to gain in numbers and power. It is generally admitted that their army now includes not only the TSA and CBP, but also the Naughty Surveillance Army (NSA), which is now at the front lines of the invasion.

"The NSA's capacity to intercept all communications in the occupied territories," explains one official, "is necessary to protect the people from still greater tyranny" -- although he said the word "tyranny" is banned from Blueshirt-speak.

A recent leak revealed that the NSA has been
putting backdoors into the code of encrypted communications. Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA's head (if we can use the term in this sense), had tried hard to keep the backdoor program secret. During a high-level intelligence meeting a few years ago, he used the exact terminology that president Lyndon B. Johnson had used more than four decades earlier to defend his welfare state: "I just want you to make sure that no crooks, communists, or c***suckers get into this program." (We apologize to our readers on behalf of the former president for the crude language, but we have to quote literally what he said.)

After this very insensitive remark was revealed a few weeks ago, one crook, one communist, and one c***suckers -- all from the same government bureau -- complained to the Equal Opportunity Commission. Of course, Gen. Alexander apologized profusely. "I have nothing against communists," he said. "They tried to establish the very surveillance programs that all Americans now benefit from."

We asked Gen. Alexander about Operation Sweet Home, recently revealed by The Martian. Under this operation, the NSA has ordered from Asia more than 5,000 containers of sensors to gather metadata about when any American leaves his home or returns. Alexander refused to answer: "I am not going to comment on anything that the traitor Snowden has not already revealed," he explained.

"Better blue than dead," said Alexander, who is known as a great American patriot, before disappearing through a backdoor. President Barack Obama, who taught constitutional law before becoming the first constitution protector, approved: "It is precisely because we are not communists that we can use their methods," he said.

"The Peeping State is here to stay," admits a professor of sexology at Harvard University. "After all, we are just spying on ourselves. It's like the public debt, where we are lending to ourselves. What's the problem?"

Recently leaked documents revealed that the Blueshirts' mission is founded on a simple syllogism: "The Constitution is built around checks and balances; therefore, these checkpoints are constitutional." Our confidential source, a high-level intellectual within the NSA, added rather paternalistically: "Check... checkpoints... capisce?"

The validity of the founding syllogism has been criticized by many logicians, including some inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (known for its high-level thinkers). Asked about these criticisms, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, declared: "We never willfully denied saying that the syllogism was not false."

For the NSA's checks and balance constitutional theory, only checkpoints were considered. The reason is simple: Gov. Chris Christie, movie director Michael Moore, first lady Michelle Obama (
some earthly journalists spoke irreverently of her "big butt"), and several congressmen would simply be unable to go through balance points.

The day your correspondent interviewed the Blueshirts' brass at the NSA's Fort George G. Meade Headquarters in Maryland (just a stone's throw from
Laissez Faire Books' headquarters), he could feel excitement in the air: From Asia, the sensor ship was on its way.

-- Prr Lzkdrqxcwm, The Martian

[Ed. Note: All kidding aside, the government's threat to your privacy and security is very real. They've refused to come clean with just how bad things really are. And the president isn't exactly jumping out of his seat to schedule that public debate that he claims he wants to have].


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2 comments:

MinGrp said...

And sheep will bleat until the end as they are slothful and lacking in wisdom, easily led to slaughter.

Mae West said...

Each post you make is like a mini-history lesson at to how the huddled masses are so easily befuddled.