Somebody has to go first!
You!
No, you!
Oh, okay.....
This is a ramble that i wrote for Ruppert's blog a couple weeks ago, but never found the right place to post.

Hi, Mike!
A belated welcome back to the blogosphere. I stumbled upon your new site just the other day, two years late - silly me.

Your view of 9/11/01 clicked with me, painfully but cleanly shifting my paradigm - irrevocably, so it seems. I worked for years as a technical specialist for a government contractor, and I knew from my purely engineering viewpoint that the official story was simply not credible. The only thing that I find incredible now is how unwilling we as a people are to reexamine our deeply flawed past - the stories, the assumptions, the whole mythos.

So I’m not optimistic about our ability to “pull together” in hard times or some such nonsense when our cultural teachings revolve around rugged individualism and never admitting defeat. You might even say that my skepticism and distaste for the local groups like Portland Peak Oil is a reflection of that very sin: The rejection of their community, no matter how imperfect, will ultimately prove fatal to Americana. But that doesn’t mean that I’m paralyzed into inaction.

My partner and I took a deep breath and made the big step a year ago, leaving our professional Silicon Valley jobs for the outskirts of Portland. Now we own a junior acre a mile from the MAX train line, with our own well in a wonderfully secure neighborhood. This year focussed on construction projects that I’m not going to describe in detail, and next Spring will see new life brought to our gardens - She gets chickens, I get beehives.

In the meantime, we’re hedging bets in every possible direction - including the off chance that the equity markets will recover! It’s painful but prudent to watch some bets go South, if for no other reason than to remind me of the cost of hubris and simple human fallibility.

If anyone would like to bet that the NYSE is going to continue functioning for awhile, I recommend SRS and FXP as good buys - leveraged inverse ETF’s that trade intraday like stocks but go up when their target indexes go down - that’s commercial real estate for SRS, and the FTSE/Xinhua exchanges for FXP. After all, it does appear that for the next few years at least, I’m going to have to come up with regular old cash to pay my property tax and gas bill.

But I can see that the prices of physical assets are becoming uncoupled from their paper proxies, and nowhere is that clearer than in gold and silver Eagles. Because of the specific advice given in From The Wilderness (and backed up by my professional financial advisor), I bought those coin reserves years ago, when gold and silver were cheap and readily available. Then I moved on to firearms and ammunition. I’m a pacifist and a vegan, but I also believe in self defense, and well-maintained firearms never decrease in value. Still, I wouldn’t recommend buying guns to anybody unless they had a pile of cash that needed diversifying.

I like 22LR ammo because it’s rugged and pocket-proof, universally useful, and most importantly, it can’t be reloaded. Kept cool and dry, it will outlast our children's golden years. But you can’t eat ammo, and the neighborhood squirrels won’t survive the first hungry Winter, so I’m also buying plenty of food in conventional forms.

The containers are as important as the food, and are often more expensive than the food they contain. I just invested in a secure “container” facility to keep a large amount of conventional stores cool and dark and dry. I’m not camping, and this isn’t a “bug-out bag,” so the cost and general nastiness of freeze-dried food just ain’t worth it. In fact, I can foresee a time several years from now when a can of tuna will be a standard barter unit, just like a round of .22 ammo. And it also pays to look around your Sam’s Club for the things that you and everybody else likes which come from far away, like chocolate, coffee, sugar, batteries....

Ah, batteries. Is it better to go with lots of cheaper NiMH cells of a single size, and standardize your applications, or should one diversify into super-expensive, long-life lithium batteries of many sizes? You know, I decided on AA, and that’s that. No more CR123’s, no 9V, and the only D cells I’m still stuck with are those in my electric-assist bicycle. I buy from www.all-battery.com, and get their cheap but effective Tenergy AA’s by the hundreds. Of course their self-discharge rate is a little higher than Eneloops, but they cost less than half as much! Just remember to keep your NiMH’s charged, topping them off every few months, whether you use them or not.

I expect that power will become intermittent (a la Baghdad or Karachi) long before the lights go out permanently, so I have backup power that can hold out for a couple weeks at most. I also have a small solar array that will charge my laptop or 20 AA cells at a time, but for much of the year sunny days are rare here in Cascadia. That’s why I’d like to find a manual generator to interface with a bike, just for battery charging. There’s one electric bike that’s already set up to do it: The Bionx uses regenerative braking like a Prius, but alas, it’s made in Quebec and so is ridiculously overpriced. ;-) So I plan on using low-drain AA devices, like LED headlamps as an excellent example, and having plenty of extras for replacements or trading.

I’m also buying vitamins, more than I could possibly need, because the children of tomorrow will really benefit from a simple daily pill to supplement their plain and sparse diets. I can imagine a time when the people on my block gather to fill their water jugs at my well, each pedaling to pump their own, while the kids line up for free vitamins, courtesy of the resident cranky old coot.

Here’s another wild flyer of an idea: After our first try at a homemade cold frame turned out so well, we ended up buying a few thousand square feet of greenhouse film. It may only last four years in direct sunlight, but it will wait for decades in storage until we need it. This climate allows us to grow greens for much of the year, as long as we protect them from the night frosts.

And how about music? When the DVD’s aren’t spinning and the house is lit only by the fire, we can pierce the loneliness by sharing the old songs we knew from our youth. I play hand drums too, which are a great way to draw people in, get them charged up and moving, and give up their inhibitions to the tribal rhythms.

I’m sure there are other small but important things that I’ve forgotten to mention, things that are cheap and store well, like salt, toothbrushes, peppercorns, band-aids, Tagamet, lighters, mustard, needles and thread. We’ve deliberately decided against storing booze and cigs, although they may be worth their weight in gold to the desperate. That alone is reason enough to not keep them, if home invasion becomes as much of a threat here as it has in South Africa.

So here’s how I imagine the future of currency: twenty .22 rounds for a NiMH AA; four AA’s for a can of solid white tuna; fifteen cans of tuna for a silver Eagle; and forty silver Eagles for a gold Eagle. I think that works out to 20X4X15X40= 48,000 rounds of .22 for a gold Eagle. At today’s prices of nearly a thousand bucks for an Eagle, that’s two cents per .22 round - sounds about right, for the near term anyway. Two generations down the road, those .22's might be all that matters.

I can't imagine a linear, controlled descent from our western techno-perch - That's not how I read history. And that's why I'm planning on us all losing our technological base in the coming decades, or at very least never building out those dozens of nuke plants and solar farms that we'd need to stay the course.

Maybe it'll all last long enough to see me into my seventies with hot water and clean sheets. Pretty selfish, I know, but all individual survival is, by definition.