Feds use GPS to Track Non-Criminals, Uses for Foil, USPS Broke

Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

http://www.PoorManSurvival.com

ISSN 2161-5543

In This Issue:

1.       Unusual uses for aluminum foil

2.      Post Office going broke – raising rates again

3.      Feds using GPS to track non-criminals, Avoid transaction tracking

4.      Economists predict 2012 and 2013 to be worse

"The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time."
-- Ayn Rand

Postal System Going Broke

With all the woes following our Postal System, I thought you might find this interesting…

Do you know the amazing story of Lysander Spooner? He lived from 1808 to 1887. His first great battle was taking on the post office monopoly. In the 1840s, he was like most people at the time: fed up with the high prices and bad service. But as an intellectual and entrepreneur, he decided to do something about it. He started the American Letter Mail Company, and his letter business gave the government some serious competition.

It opened offices in major cities, organized a network of steamships and railroads, and hired people to get the mail to where it needed to be. His service was both faster and cheaper than the government’s own. Then he published a pamphlet to fight the power: “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails.” It was brilliant. It rallied people to his side. And he made a profit.

The government hated him and his company and began to litigate against him. It dramatically lowered the price for its services, and used public money to cover its losses. The goal was to bankrupt Spooner, and it eventually succeeded. Spooner’s private postal system had to be shut down

Spooner didn’t go away. He was more than an entrepreneur. He was a brilliant and pioneering intellectual, as the collection The Lysander Spooner Reader makes clear. He was a champion of individual liberty and a passionate opponent of all forms of tyranny.

Spooner advocated what he called Natural Law – or the "Science of Justice" – wherein acts of initiatory coercion against individuals and their property were considered "illegal" but the so-called criminal acts that violated only man-made legislation were not.

Spooner spoke plainly: what you call the Constitution has no authority to take away my rights. Hence his famous essay: “Constitution of No Authority.” In “No Treason” he argues that the state has no rights over your freedom of speech. In “Vices Not Crimes,” he shows that people in any society are capable of doing terrible things but the law should only concern itself with aggression against person and property. Reading them all together, as they are in this book, is a radicalizing experience — a liberating experience. It makes you see the world in a completely different way.

You can order the book here:

http://www.lfb.org/

To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of Coke
into the load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run
through a regular cycle. The Coca-Cola will help loosen
grease stains. It will also clean road haze from your
windshield.

PM’s Compendium of Useful Resources

USPS Announces New Rates, Priority Mail to Rise over 3 Percent
The USPS will raise Priority Mail rates by 3.1 percent overall in
January, is introducing a new larger Priority Mail Regional box,
a new Express Mail Flat Rate Box, and is adding a new Package
Intercept service. EcommerceBytes breaks it down!
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y11/m11/i23/s02

Transactional Databases
Most of your daily purchases are tracked, stored and searchable by just about anyone who wants to know about your spending habits. Find out how you are tracked and how to avoid it.

http://www.howtovanish.com/2009/11/transactional-databases-what-me-worry/?awt_l=9mqfI&awt_m=1lCdXCXDnCxNxm

Buy solar panels
Interect Inc. is a wholesale distributor of solar systems and provides solutions for
on- and off-grid applications

http://www.interect.ca

Aluminum Foil - A good kitchen friend

Aluminum foil saves a ton of clean up time and has many wonderful uses which we’re sharing here.

Sharpen your scissors. In between professional sharpenings (or for those 99 cent pairs of scissors that you don’t want to pay to have sharpened), use aluminum foil to keep your scissors in top form. Cutting through 6-8 layers of aluminum foil will improve the cutting surface of most scissors.

Shine up rusty chrome. With a bit of water on a wadded-up piece of aluminum foil, you can rub most rust spots off of chrome car parts.

Keep your oven clean. Tired of scraping burned-on food out of the bottom of your oven? Line it with aluminum foil before making something particularly messy. Don’t leave it in there permanently, however, because it can lead to oven damage over time.

Make your soap last longer. Put a piece of aluminum foil on the bottom of your bar of soap to keep it from sitting in a puddle of water and wearing away quickly

Keep birds out of your fruit trees. Hang twisted strips of aluminum foil all over your fruit trees using fishing line. The light reflections and the sound will keep birds away from your fruit.

Re-soften hard brown sugar. Many people put hard brown sugar in the microwave to soften it up, but this can actually backfire and make the sugar harden even more. Instead, wrap the block of hardened sugar in some aluminum foil and bake in a 300° (Fahrenheit) oven for 5 minutes.

If your TV and DVD player are stacked one on top of the other, you may find the picture is a bit fuzzy. This often happens when the electromagnetic fields from both devices interfere with each other. Place a sheet of aluminum foil between them to cut down on the interference.

Reflect heat into your house. Put a layer of aluminum foil behind your radiator when it is off and completely cool. When the radiator is turned on, more of the heat will be directed into the living area and less will be absorbed into the wall behind the radiator.

Make a solar cooker. You’ll cut down on energy costs and experience a traditional way of cooking.

Makes great gift wrapping paper in a pinch and can be decorated as you wish.

To prevent stuck on food in my baking pans and cookie sheets, I will line them with foil. It cuts down on cleaning time and leaves my pans looking just as good as they did when they went into the oven. Rinse off the sheets if they are not to disastrous and save them for another baking session, or rinse them off and put them in your recycling bin.

The Nanny State Updates…

When the federal government first began putting naked body scanners into airports and began implementing "enhanced pat-downs" of travelers, many warned that hordes of sicko perverts would start applying for jobs with the TSA. Well, it turns out that one TSA employee is now being charged with a nightmarish sexual assault. The following is how WJLA in Washington D.C. describes what he is being charged with....

The suspect, Harold Glen Rodman, 52, allegedly was wearing his uniform and displayed a badge to the victim, a 37-year-old woman.

Police arrested Rodman on Nov. 20. He is charged with aggravated sexual battery, object sexual penetration, forcible sodomy and abduction with intent to defile.

The federal government has become so paranoid that they have been putting GPS tracking devices on the vehicles of thousands of people that have not even been charged with committing any crimes. The following is a short excerpt from a recent Wired magazine article about this issue....

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.

Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.

The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.

The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

Melt sidewalk is by spreading a generous portion of sand mixed with baking soda over the walk and steps.  It won’t stain or damage concrete surfaces.

The Parting Thought – Time is running out

"In 2002 it was bad, in 2008 it was worse and 2012 or 2013 is going to be worse still – be careful"

Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup: "Time is running out fast. I think we have maybe a few months -- it could be weeks, it could be days -- before there is a material risk of a fundamentally unnecessary default by a country like Spain or Italy which would be a financial catastrophe dragging the European banking system and North America with it."

The federal government is now over 15 trillion dollars in debt. During the Obama administration so far, the U.S. government has accumulated more new debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

There is already talk that we may soon see another downgrade for U.S. debt. It is hard to even describe how incompetent the U.S. Congress is.

Yet, the idiots who run the country continue along with stupid regulation that stifle job creation and cost Americans a lot of time and money…Most of the big regulatory agencies of the federal government have totally gone crazy. For example, the EPA is now specifically targeting Americans that use traditional wood-burning stoves.

No progress will be made on the economy until we rid ourselves of these anti-citizen, red-tape strangling policies.

If you have not recently read the Bill of Rights, it is well worth your time to review it. It begins with the truths the authors believed were self-evident. For instance, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The remainder (and majority) of the document is a list of crimes and offenses committed by the British government, many of which are being committed by our government today. Among the reasons given for the necessity of "dissolving the political bands" that had tied the colonies to Britain:

"For imposing taxes on us without our consent."

"For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us" and "for protecting them from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these states."

For obstructing trade, perverting justice, and carrying out "the works of death, desolation, and tyranny."

In a nutshell, is the definition of patriotism: allegiance to one’s own gatekeeper, affection for one’s oppressor?

Yours for “the next revolution”, the Poor Man

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