NEWS AND VIEWS

Nasrallah is loose upon the land in Lebanon and this does not bode well for his enemies. Those who have plotted against Nasrallah are going to catch hell. Naturally the fedgov is right in there with the worst of the plots. Ol' Bush is going to regret this little foray into country meddling. Nasrallah kicked Israel's ass a little less than two years ago and stands ready to go to war again. And the people love him. He does not bullshit around with foreigners and things of that order. He is a straight forward Shiite cleric who has a love of the people. I don't agree with every thing he does but I damn sure wouldn't fool with him and the Lebanese people. I would order all troops OUT of Lebanon but that ain't gonna happen. We must stand our guard of Israel and protect their genocide of Palestinians. Sick.

But I cannot do anything about this so I will continue to prepare for bad days ahead. And the bad days are coming. I love life and I love the people I
live with and I love the non-violent manner of survivalists. Ain't any decent preppers looking for trouble. They're just expecting it to be dumped upon them. The media hates us and the fedgov says nothing good about us. The media makes it's living selling the religion of consumerism. And religion is exactly what it is. The sacrament is oil. We are to consume as rapidly and as often as we can. BUY THIS! CONSUME THAT! EAT THIS! INSURE WITH THAT! MEDICATE WITH THIS! Enough, I say.

Survivalists represent a serious threat to the consumer based economy. If we are right in our assumptions, then the world is going to hell. If we are wrong then we won't have to buy a lot of shit for at least a year. Either way it happens the consumerist lose out. I love this game. Eat shit and die, evil muthas! I want to live a life of peace and freedom and health. I want to drink clean water and eat good food. I want to enjoy the company of my friends and all of our kids. Like that lyric from my mentor, "We're building barns and trading jams and jellies, and we're holding hands and the hands of all our kids." And we can get back to the original TV! One of the survivalist family recently called a campfire the original TV. I loved it. I am a man who has untold hours looking into a fire and watching the progression of colors. I love it toward the end of the fire when it has a lot of blue in it.

The economists always talk about "growth" as if that is the strategic indicator of our success in life. Who needs growth? We only need to build cabins and lodges to house out peole until we can get underground. If you go underground you only live on the outer edge of the hill so you can live in light and fresh air. Your storage and factories and hospitals will be further on under the hill. And further on will be where you go if the idiot people haters start the killing again. Gotta remember those folks. But life will be simple and secure.

What gets me about people living today is the belief that we can't make it without technology. My grandparents and great grandparents and further back in my past managed to make it without the benefits of modern technology. Damnedest thing I ever heard. To think that people could make it without Eli Lily! And a few of us might die. This is true. But the breeding stock will make the transition okay.

The food and the medicine are the big worries. Well, my Handmaiden is learning her herbs and so forth. She just picks what is local and she studies up on all of it. That is where our medicine is going to come from. That and the care of our own personal immune systems. If you haven't studied your immune system I suggest you get started. It is your first line of defense in warding off sickness.

The food is not that tough to deal with. Refrigerators are relatively new to the human family. But we ate meat for thousand of years. How did we do that? Well, we learned how to preserve it. We learned how to use salt to keep meat form rotting. We learned to cook meat to keep it from rotting. We learned to make jerky and pemmican and other things to keep meat from rotting. Making cheese prolonged the benefit of milk. So did butter. The Irish learned a few hundred years ago how to put butter in White Oak casks and keep it underground where it didn't spoil. I ain't got that recipe or I would share it with you. But I know that burying it kept the temperature down to where critters wouldn't muliply in the butter. And they salted that butter! Germs don't do so well in salt.

Now then. I am a Hardwood man by training and I know that the Irish peasants had to make their casks out of White Oak. Why did they use White Oak? Well, wood is made with minute veins running with the length of the tree. In White Oak these veins ar blocked by a growth called tylosis or tyloses. This is why White Oak is used to hold whiskey as it ages. The tylosis keeps the liquid from seeping out. You might have thought that White Oak was used for Whisky barrels because of the unique flavor is bestowed. Not true. It is used because the Whiskey wouldn't leak out! But this doesn't explain the use of the Irish using White Oak for storing butter. But maybe it does. Maybe the tylosis kept things from seeping INTO the butter from the ground. Helluva pile of thinkin' you did there Michael. Take another bow! Being truthfull, I have never entertained this thinking before in my life. Strictly out of thin air.

The size of your meal had a lot to do with what you ate. A full grown steer weighing 1000 to 1500 pounds would not be prctical for a family of four. You would lose most of the meat! Especially if you didn't have lots of salt. So you had to make do with smaller critters like chickens and ducks and geese and rabbits. Not hard to get all of one of them eaten totally. No waste. The big steer could wait until the whole village sat down to eat together, maybe with a neighboring village there to help out. Simple economics.

But these things can help you stay alive. So do it!

Michael

mboone@rtccom.net