Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
ISSN 2161-5543
In This Issue:
1.
Conditioned to obey.
2.
Crowdfunding
funds home-based farming
3.
Free online
checking sources
4.
How to hide
money
5.
Free urban
survival guide, US Misery Index Rises
The most common
characteristic of all police states
is intimidation by surveillance.
Citizens know they are being watched and overheard.
Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded."
-- Vance Packard
is intimidation by surveillance.
Citizens know they are being watched and overheard.
Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded."
-- Vance Packard
Conditioned to
Obey - Or Else!
From TSA pat downs to asset seizures to traffic cops and public schools,
Americans are taught not to question authority…
We obey without question; it becomes so
habitual that, at some point, questions do not come to mind. In a St. Louis Today article, columnist Bill McClellan describes vacationing with
a friend on a “small motor boat from the Georgia-Florida state line to Miami.
We traveled on the Intracoastal Waterway, which is, for the most part, a series
of saltwater rivers.”
were [I] to assert my rights as a citizen, I would be
raising red flags. The agents would assume I had something to hide. Maybe we'd
be asked to pull ashore until they got a drug-sniffing dog.… So I stood there,
feeling uncomfortable about my decision to say nothing, as the agent went
through my bag. He looked inside my camera kit. He looked in the pockets of my
bag. He was meticulous. He was looking, I suppose, for a joint or a small
container of pot.
When drying
fresh herbs, wrap them in cheesecloth to prevent seeds and smaller pieces from
falling through.
PM’s
Compendium of Useful Resources
CROWDFUNDING”
SUPPORTS ONE-WOMAN FARMS – AND MORE
Farming is one of the
most ancient home-based businesses, and crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter –
where, as we’ve reported before, people with creative ideas get funding from
the public – support the tradition. Micro-farms (aka “hobby farms”) can make
excellent home-based enterprises, and Andrea Davis is a good example, with
Broken Shovels Farm and Creamery.
Andrea, who coaxes tantalizing cheeses and yogurts from her goats, needed $3,500 to move her operation to Denver, Colo., and partner with fellow farmer Jill Sobel of Fetchin Farms. (You can see Andrea kissing one of her beautiful goats here.)
In her pitch for funding, Andrea said, “I would like to put my years of cheesemaking apprenticeship to good use by providing food for my friends, family and community. Incredible cheese and milk you can feel good about eating, from well-loved animals sharing a happy life with the people around them.”
Her story apparently resonated with the public. She received more money than she asked for – $3,752 as of this morning.
Andrea, who coaxes tantalizing cheeses and yogurts from her goats, needed $3,500 to move her operation to Denver, Colo., and partner with fellow farmer Jill Sobel of Fetchin Farms. (You can see Andrea kissing one of her beautiful goats here.)
In her pitch for funding, Andrea said, “I would like to put my years of cheesemaking apprenticeship to good use by providing food for my friends, family and community. Incredible cheese and milk you can feel good about eating, from well-loved animals sharing a happy life with the people around them.”
Her story apparently resonated with the public. She received more money than she asked for – $3,752 as of this morning.
HOME-BASED
FARMING, CONT’D. – ORGANIC
FARMS AND “WOOFERS”
America and other
economies need many more organic food options, even as the big factory-farm
corporations try to dilute the definition of “organic.” Small farms can offer
one solution. To survive on an un-level playing field, many depend on young
interns – known as Woofers – who work for free to get the experience.
If you’ve ever dreamt of starting or working on a small organic farm – or wondered where you could send your text-happy teen to do something useful with his or her hands – be sure to read this article on Woofers in High Country News.
If you’ve ever dreamt of starting or working on a small organic farm – or wondered where you could send your text-happy teen to do something useful with his or her hands – be sure to read this article on Woofers in High Country News.
Online checking
accounts offer a convenient and often rewarding way to bank. For those that pay
interest, online banks can generally beat traditional financial institutions
with higher rates because of lower costs. Online banks don’t need to maintain
an expensive network of branches, and they can pass that savings on to
consumers in the form of higher interest rates or other rewards. Read more at:
PayPal Sheds More Light
on 1099-K Tax Reporting
PayPal, like other payment services, has begun collecting
Taxpayer ID numbers from users to comply with new federal
regulation. Though it would not reveal what the trigger was for
collecting TINs, PayPal told EcommerceBytes under exactly which
circumstances it would submit 1099-K forms to the IRS.
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y11/m10/i19/s01
PayPal, like other payment services, has begun collecting
Taxpayer ID numbers from users to comply with new federal
regulation. Though it would not reveal what the trigger was for
collecting TINs, PayPal told EcommerceBytes under exactly which
circumstances it would submit 1099-K forms to the IRS.
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y11/m10/i19/s01
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...
Urban Survival
Guide
A lot of people
believe they can't make changes to move toward a more self-sufficient life when
they live in an urban area, but that's simply not true. There are plenty of
ways to become more self-sufficient, no matter where you live.
Every emergency situation
requires different skills to cope with the crisis. Being prepared is essential
to your survival. The following is the most basic urban survival skills that
every urban survivalist should know, and practice in order to be prepared for
survival.
Make a mini-greenhouse
for your window box by bending three or four lengths of coat hangers into U’s
and place the ends into the soil. Punch
small holes in a dry-cleaning bag and wrap it around the box prior to placing
it in the window.
The Nanny
State Updates…
Nearly all
large U.S. cities are either flat broke or they are on the way to being flat
broke. A new reality for many major
cities…Here’s one example.
The Detroit News wrote about this crisis....
The war to keep the lights on in Detroit is a serious
one. Thieves, antiquated equipment and a lack of funding have made it
impossible for city officials to catch up to the problem.
City officials estimate 15-20 percent of the 88,000
lights in the Motor City are not working, and they acknowledge that figure
could be as high as 50 percent in some neighborhoods.
But it is not just Detroit that is having a major
problem. Over in Highland Park, Michigan the majority of the street lights have been repossessed because the city was not keeping up with the
electricity bill.
In addition, according
to author Paul Osterman about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that
pay poverty-level wages.
When you try as hard
as you can and you still can't pay the bills, it is easy to end up hating life.
What some Americans
are going through is absolutely heart breaking. Just consider the following
story from a recent article on Fox News....
Damian Birkel, of Winston-Salem N.C., found himself in
similar circumstances. He was a marketing manager at Sarah Lee in the early
1990s when he was downsized. Since then, he has been laid off from three other
jobs, including one at a recruiting firm.
“I felt like I had ‘loser’ tattooed to my forehead,
and ‘will work for food’ tattooed to my chest,” he says.
The Parting Thought – What’s your level of misery?
U.S. "misery index” rises to highest since 1983
- An unofficial gauge
of human misery in the United States rose last month to a 28-year high as
Americans struggled with rising inflation and high unemployment.
The misery index --
which is simply the sum of the country's inflation and unemployment rates --
rose to 13.0, pushed up by higher price data the government reported on
Wednesday.
The data underscores
the extent that Americans continue to suffer even two years after a deep
recession ended, with a weak economic recovery imperiling President Barack
Obama's hopes of winning reelection next year.
Consumer prices rose
3.9 percent in the 12 months through September, the fastest pace in three
years.
Is it any wonder that confidence surveys are so depressed? And it’s not just the University of Michigan or the Conference Board measures, either. A just-released WSJ/NBC News poll found that more than 70% of the nation believes the US is “on the wrong track” (74% to be exact, versus 17% who think otherwise). In October 2008, at the height of the crisis, that number was 78%.
How’s your confidence
level with our politicians?
Yours for freedom, the Poor Man.
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