Stupid & Proud of it: the new American ideal!

Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

http://www.PoorManSurvival.com

For Independent Minded People!

ISSN 2161-5543

 

The greatest dangers of liberty lurk in insidious encroachment of men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Louis D. Brandeis

From The Smiling Dog Saloon Files

 

“Learned Helplessness”:  Fewer children can think for themselves today. It’s what teachers are calling kids today who spend more time with electronic devices than outdoors or learning to solve problems. Or, are we being 'dumbed-down' by design?

 

In This Issue:

1.       Down, Dirty n Quick food storage plan

2.      Boost the value of a grocery coupon

3.      The $300 Underground Greenhouse

4.      Stupid & Proud of It: the new American ideal

 

 

Planning for food storage most people find
themselves suffering from a lack of time, money, and space.

People fret over the "perfect" food storage, but it's much
more important that emergency food storage be done and in
place than perfect. Perfect may never happen…

The absolute simplest way to get this done is to grab a
cart as you walk into the store, go grab 3 plastic bins,
head over to the canned food aisles, and start loading the
bins with one of every "type" of food in the canned food
aisles that you eat. Canned veggies, canned tuna/chicken,
beans, potatoes, rice, instant breakfast, maple syrup,
honey, etc. When you're done, head over to the dried fruit,
candy, and sports bar section and add a box or two of Cliff
bars or something similar.

This is obviously NOT a pretty plan or a perfect plan, but
it IS a plan that you can get done incredibly fast so that
you have SOMETHING in place today. If a disaster hits
tomorrow, having this plan executed and in place will feed
your family a heck of a lot better than a "perfect" plan
that you haven't pulled the trigger on yet.

If you decide that you don't like some of the food that you
bought, replace it with food that you do like and take the
food that you don't like to your church or local food bank.

 

As a note, this plan costs a tiny fraction of what you'd
spend for dehydrated or freeze dried foods, AND you can
pick this food up on the way home from work.

Besides that, it won't raise nearly as many eyebrows to buy
a bunch of food at Costco or another big box store than to
have big boxes delivered to you that are marked up all over
the outside with "emergency" or "survival."

So you can see there is no longer an excuse to not have an
emergency food supply on hand.

Now let's talk about some nutritional assumptions that you
need to properly calculate the amount of food to get for
your family for 6 weeks....

* 1200 - 1500 calories needed per day per person (this plan
provides 1,800)

* protein requirements are 50 - 150 g/ day

* aim for 70,000 calories per person

* be sure to include vitamins, spices, and condiments

Remember stress burns calories so you must control your
stress. (I cover this in a LOT more detail in the course)
If you're under the kind of stress that burns 4000 calories
per day and you're not used to it, it's very likely that
you won't sleep well, digest food efficiently, OR live very
long. In other words, don't worry about storing up 4,000
calories per day.

Your situation may be a little different, but we have the
food that we use most often in our kitchen, and bulk food
in another room. What we do is prepare our meals with the
food that's in the kitchen, go "shopping" in our bulk food
storage to replace it, and replenish our food storage the
next time we go to the store.

This system works for a number of reasons including:

* limiting food spoilage by rotating your stock

* easy, making food storage accessible for anyone

* no special equipment

* scalable

* when you've got "extras" of items that you normally use,
you don't have to make as many "emergency" trips to the
store when you run out of things.

You'll also want to make sure that you get vitamins,
supplements, enzymes, and probiotics. This is important
because if you are forced to switch from fresh foods to
primarily shelf-stable/processed foods in a disaster
situation, it may upset your digestion and not provide the
nutrients your body needs to stay healthy unless you also
use enzymes and probiotics.

You also need to consider water. Humans can go longer
without food than they can without water and two people
will require a minimum of 42 gallons to survive 6 weeks.

Some easy solutions are rain capture barrels that you can
get on craigslist for $20. Another option is to line your
bathtub with plastic sheeting and fill with water. (you CAN
buy a "Water Bob" but simply lining the tub with plastic
sheeting or even just covering the drain hole with plastic
sheeting/trash bag and duct taping it down will work at a
fraction of the cost.)

 

Home Prepping Database Program and other bonuses including…

This software will assist you and your family in what and how many supplies you will need when you will need to lockdown in your home until things settle down.  Learn more and order at:

http://www.poormansurvival.com/Pages/NoBSSurvivalManual.aspx

 

 

PM’s Roundup of Useful Resources…

Boost the value of a coupon…New site increases the value of coupons for food, cleaning products, pet treats, health-care and more by doing easy tasks such as viewing videos.  Learn more at: www.Hopster.com

 

$300 underground greenhouse grows produce year-round, even in severe climates
(NaturalNews) With staggering food prices and shortages looming, there's no better time to grow your own produce. Sadly, most greenhouses are expensive to build and impractical to heat during cold, wintery conditions. Thankfully, a solution is found with...

The Nanny State-We love our government

Take that, NSA: Communities worldwide start building cheap, homemade Internet networks due to privacy concerns
(NaturalNews) Recent revelations that the National Security Agency has been habitually spying on most Americans' electronic communications in violation of U.S. law have spurred some to create alternate Internet networks for their own personal use

 

People who grow their own food labeled 'extremist' by Dept. of Defense
(NaturalNews) If the founding fathers were reincarnated today, they'd probably start another revolution, this time to break away from an American government that has become far too imperial for its own good. And as such, they'd be labeled "extremists...

 

 

The Parting Thought – Not to worry in the land of the free!

 

Dear Unconcerned Citizen…

 

Stupid and Proud of It – Our National Motto

 

“Learned Helplessness”:  Fewer children who can think for themselves today. It’s what teachers are calling kids today who spend more time with electronic devices than outdoors or learning to solve problems.

 

  Go on, admit it…like most of us you’ve all snickered over the images of the obese, poorly dressed, overly tattooed ‘humans’ we call Walmart shoppers (or celebrities).  We’ve all experienced youthful workers at fast food and retail outlets who cannot count out change if the computer breaks down.  We’ve all heard the stories about why Johnnie can’t read despite spending more on education than any other nation.  We’ve laughed over TV news clips of idiots so distracted by texting on their cell phone they walk off subway platforms or into traffic…or worse those who text and drive, then kill someone in a traffic accident.

You may have witnessed stupid young mothers filling baby bottles with soda instead of milk for their child or the Florida woman with 11 illegitimate children whining about who is going to feed and take care of all her kids – ‘someone’s gotta take responsibility’ she moaned into the camera!

You need not have watched a segment of Jay Leno’s Jay Walking to know how poorly informed Americans are about current events, world events or even our own history. 

Average American spends more time using media than anything else…

The average American spends more time using media devices —television, radio, iPods and cell phones — than any other activity while awake, says a study from Ball State University.

"As a society, we are consumers of media," Papper said. "The average person spends about nine hours a day using some type of media, which is arguably in excess of anything we would have envisioned 10 years ago."

Researchers agree this sedentary lifestyle, coupled with over consumption of fast food and junk  food  is why US citizens are the most obese.  Most Americans are addicted to watching sports as opposed to physically engaging in sports.

Fewer Americans today have an interest in:

·         Self improvement, learning about other cultures, reading, personal privacy, retirement savings, politics.

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."

In the U.S., you will find people freely expressing a variety of opinions anywhere and anytime.  Yet, in spite of this “independence,” almost all Americans end up voting for one of their two major political parties. Individualism and privacy matter less to Americans now than just 10 years ago.

Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America, wrote, "the rise of Idiot America today represents--for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power--the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert than nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert."

 Morris Berman in his book, the Twilight of American Culture argues for the need to preserve what was best in American culture, including all works of art and science. Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reveals how a whole generation of youth (Gen Y) are being dumbed own by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital "crap" via social media.

Is there evidence to support these critics?

Here's some data:

• The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77% didn't know that George Washington was the first President; couldn't name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence, and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5% of students passed the civics test.
• Fox News, the most watched news program in the U.S., has on numerous occasions recommended that school science classes be "fair and balanced," meaning by the teaching of biblically-inspired creationism alongside Darwin's' scientific theory of evolution.
• According to the National Research Council report, only 28% of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13% of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design."
• On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of American's thought Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks; four years later, even though proof had been provided that he was not, 34% still believe he was.
• 18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll.
• According to another poll, the average American voter believes that U.S. foreign aid consumes 24% of the Federal budget, when it is only 1%.
• The American Association of State Colleges and Universities report on education shows that the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of the population aged 35-64 with a college degree, but 19^th in the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associates or high school diploma, which means that for the first time, the educational attainment of young people will be lower than their parents'.
• In a Newsweek poll, of U.S. citizens, 29% couldn't identify Joe Biden as the Vice President, and 44% couldn't describe the Bill of Rights.
• In a 2009 survey of a number of European countries and the U.S. on international affairs, a significant majority of Europeans could identify the Taliban, and just over 50% of Americans could, despite the heavy presence of the U.S. in Afghanistan.

What are Americans interested in?

Polls indicate such activities as shopping, bar hopping, watching video, celebrity gossip, recreational drugs, electronic gadgets and working less top the lists of more and more Americans under the age of 54.

When I went to journalism school there were more than 50 corporations who owned the media in the US.  That number is now five!  Americans now have access to the most corrupt, greed driven media in the world or as one wag stated Freedom of the press is guaranteed only by those who own one. 

Most citizens are too asleep at the wheel to see how easily manipulated they are.  The dumbing down of America is working all too well.  Our sensationalist, celebrity obsessed, dumbed-down media works hard to keep Americans ignorant of matters useful to a strong civilization.  The US has been steadily declining in world ranking since former President Jimmy Carter created the US Dept. of Education (then again, he created the Dept. of Energy to make us energy independent and we see how well that went).

As Thomas Jefferson warned, If a national expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

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Home Prepping Database Program

This software will assist you and your family in what and how many supplies you will need when you will need to lockdown in your home until things settle down

http://www.poormansurvival.com/Pages/NoBSSurvivalManual.aspx

 

 

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