By Dictator Hater for Corbett Report

As the days roll by, the news for the economy is not getting any better. It’s time to get serious about how we are going to survive in this crisis.

I know I talk a lot about food and the importance of storing it. And I will talk about it a lot more. Food is life itself and so is water. If you have never gone hungry, other than being on a diet, then you have no idea what you are in for, if it ever happens to you.

Hunger and thirst can drive people to do things they normally would never do. These two conditions have driven people to beg, to lie, cheat, steal and even kill. You can hardly blame them, when their very existence is threatened by the lack of life giving food or water. Just as a scuba diver can be pulled underwater by a drowning diving buddy, a hungry or thirsty person could easily cause harm to someone he knows who possesses what he needs to survive or allow his family to survive.

Once you’ve decided stocking up on food is the way to go, you need to set a goal that determines how far into the future you wish to secure your food supply and where to store it. Even if you don’t have much room, you can creatively store much food. Under the bed, in closets, behind couches and other furniture are spaces that can be used to store your goods. Securing your food supply should not be something you do out of fear of impeding doom. It is something that is positive and it is like insurance of sorts. When I was a kid, having a supply of food for winter was not only common, but necessary. It’s quite frightening to know that most people do not keep enough food in their homes to last for more than a few days, if that.

There are many rules involved when storing food. What I consider the number one rule is to keep your stash a secret as much as possible. Sure, it’s great to try to warn others to stock up, but in doing so, you are also letting them know that you are stocking up. It’s only natural to most of us to want to help others, but remember to exercise some caution when discussing this matter outside your home. There are going to be some people who laughed at your squirrelish ways and failed to prepare, but you can bet that if they didn’t prepare and the shit hits the fan, you and your stock of goodies will definitely be on their minds. This doesn’t mean that you have to turn hungry people away, but it does mean that you had better be prepared to protect what you have in the event food is scarce and the grocer’s shelves are empty. I am sure you can think up lots of ways on your own to do this, so I am not going to waste time in this article about that. The best thing to do when stockpiling is to keep a very low profile about it.

Stocking up on foods that you do not normally eat is not what you should be doing. Beans, rice and flour are what jumps into most people’s heads when they think about stocking up. Dry goods are a very necessary part of stockpiling foods that store over long periods of time, but there is a lot more to it than that. I am going to give you the short list of what should be in a good, balanced food stash. Everyone’s stash list should look somewhat different, if they are doing it right.

THE BASICS: Beans, lentils, white (not brown) rice, flour, sugar, salt, cooking oil, yeast, powdered whole eggs and powdered milk are a good solid basis for staple foods. All of these store well if packaged properly and kept at cool temperatures in a dark place. Flour is best kept frozen, it will last well beyond any date stamped on the package, at least two years longer in your freezer. Yeast is also best kept in a freezer and it should keep a good many years, but if in an original airtight package, it should last at least 2 years, if refrigerated, even longer. Sugar and salt, kept away from moisture and insects will keep indefinitely. Beans, lentils and rice need attention, too, though many people think you can just throw the bags somewhere and they’ll keep forever. This is not the case, even these items require some care. Store white rice for long term, brown rice only lasts about 6 months before it goes rancid. White rice, though not as nutritious as brown, will last a lot longer. These items should be removed from their original packaging and sealed in food grade buckets. Mylar bags should be used inside the buckets along with oxygen absorbers. With this method, you can keep these items in storage for many years, store non-fat powdered milk the same way. I recommend buying powdered eggs already prepacked for long-term storage due to the possible instability of this product. Store whole grains (in a bucket with mylar and oxygen absorbers) for extremely long-term stashes, but make sure that you own a grain mill and know how to use it. Also, educate yourself on the different types of wheat available, how they behave when using them to cook with and how to use them. It does no good to store unfamiliar foods that you do not know how to use. Probably the only thing worse than that, is not storing any food at all.

VEGETABLES AND FRUTS: These can be purchased at the grocer’s (for now) and cans are the cheapest. Make sure you always check the expiration dates when buying and only purchase the ones that expire latest. The canned goods I bought last week have best used by dates into the year 2011. It is important to keep an eye on these dates and use the oldest ones first. Don’t buy collard greens unless you like and eat them normally. That goes for everything else. Only buy what you and your family are used to, what you like and what is going to be eaten. Just because something is on sale, doesn’t mean it’s a good deal if it ends up expiring on your shelf once you get it home. You can also buy freeze dried fruits and veggies that are prepackaged and already in the proper packaging for long term storage. This is an expensive proposition, but even so, you should have some of these on hand if at all possible. And, last but certainly not least, grow a garden when weather permits to further supplement your food supply. If you know how to pressure or hot water bath can foods, then buy on sale and supplement your stores that way, also, it goes without saying, if you can grow enough food to can, you will be that much further ahead of the game.

MEAT: Don’t forget the meat, unless you are a vegetarian. Meat can be bought on sale and frozen, dried or canned at home. And you can buy dried or canned meat at the store. If you don’t like Spam and you will not eat it, don’t go out and buy a ton of it. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that Spam is one food that you will get tired of in a hurry if you eat it too often. My idea of meat useage during times of difficulty is more as a flavoring, using it as a condiment instead of slapping a 16 oz steak on someone’s plate as part of the main course. You will probably have less meat in your stash than anything else, so learn to make soups, casseroles and other dishes that use a minimal amount of meat products. Meat is available in meals ready to eat, but it is very expensive when purchased that way. My canned meat stash consists of Spam, corned beef, chicken, canned fish, vienna sausages and potted meat. Remember the expiration dates.

FAT: Though everyone in America seems to be deathly afraid of fat these days, it is an essential part of the human diet and can add much needed calories. Coconut oil stores best, vegetable oils have a best used by date and can go rancid. I buy cooking oil and use it, then replace it as I go. My coconut oil stays on the shelf and will not be used until absolutely necessary.

COMFORT FOODS: Jello, pudding, hard candies, soft drinks such as Koolaid and Tang should be a part of your food storage program. These types of foods and drinks keep boredom from taking over when eating completely out of your food stash. It’s the little things that help people keep their sanity in times of trouble. Don’t scrimp on the comfort foods, you will not regret it when that time comes.

When you are trying to develop your food stash, don’t buy all one thing in quantity one month, such as all rice, thinking you will get beans next month and veggies and fruits the next. Try and get a variety of foods into your stash as soon as you can. This is important for nutritional balance in the event you’re put into the position of having to live out of this stash sooner than you may have thought. If it turns out you still have time to continue building up your stash, then you can concentrate on quantities of one certain food at a time after that. The trick here is that we do not know exactly when we may be forced to live from our food stores. It could be next week, next month or five years from now.

Even if our economy was humming along just fine, storing food is still something we should all be doing. There are natural disasters that can occur, unexpected job loss, ill health and a myriad of other problems that can put us in a terrible financial bind without much or any notice. Food storage makes good sense, no matter what conditions we are facing. With unemployment becoming such a problem here in the United States, wouldn’t you feel a lot better if you knew you were not going to be looking at an empty cupboard while waiting for that unemployment check to arrive? If you have enough food to tide you over for a few months or even weeks, you will be thinking more clearly about other things of immediate importance than worrying about your and your family’s hunger. Taking hunger out of this equasion is of utmost importance.

By Dictator Hater for the Corbett Report.

Many of us have been waiting for “The Big One”. I’m not talking about earthquakes, I’m talking about the one big thing that will happen that shows us once and for all that we are slipping into fascism.

The problem with the big one is that there is no big one.

What we are seeing today in our government and rule making bodies is a descent toward something like Fascism but laced with Communism. It doesn’t matter what you call it, in the end you can’t tell one from the other.

Waiting for the big one has paralysed many people into believing that until “it” happens, they have no right to protest or do anything about it. It makes us doubt ourselves and feelings of being unsure hold us back. What many people forget is that the courts in this country convict many of our fellow citizens with circumstantial evidence and in lesser courts, a preponderance of the evidence. There is no need for eyewitnesses in these types of convictions, just enough evidence to prove that if it goes moo, it’s a cow.

Instead of waiting for the big one, it is time to take a hard look at the circumstantial evidence and ponder it.

Our government has been corrupt ever since it came into existence. Any time someone has something, there is always someone out there trying to figure out a way to take it away so they can profit. Personal freedom is no exception Since the erosion began, centuries ago, we’ve been turned into servants to the state, our labor is exploited by the government and is used to back up the debts these criminals run up so high that Jack’s Beanstalk pales in comparison. Think about it, you are what the government uses to back their bonds. Your labor and your children’s labor in the future. We are nothing more than bond servants to them, allowing them to issue servant bonds to support their spending sprees, graft and corruption. Now if that doesn’t make you mad, I don’t know what will. What do you think “backed by the full faith and credit of the United States” means? The government bodies do nothing that produces a product or any form of profit, they are there to restrain the people.

The amount of nose thumbing at the people of the United States of America has been staggering as of late. Those of you who are quick to call Americans “Sheeple” would be served by taking a lesson in how much uproar there was during this last Bailout of Wall Street. But, no matter, the criminals in charge went ahead and gave away their Constitutional powers of the purse over to the Treasury in spite of all the uproar.

We are on the train tracks that lead to hell and the powers that be are stoking the steam engines with paper dollars as fast as they possibly can. If we can see where we are going, why can’t they? The answer is, they can and they are doing this on purpose.

Why in the world would anyone want to bring down the economy of the entire world, you may be asking yourself. If you look at the top dogs, they are not being brought down, they are being lifted to heights of wealth that to an average person are unimaginable. Money does not just simply disappear, it is transferred from one hand to the other. Speculation can cause markets like real estate to turn into a bubble, but the actual materials and labor it took to build the buildings sitting on the land is real. Then comes the supply and demand principals that in a normal market are supposed to dictate value further. The toxic loans and low interest rates fueled speculation and caused the housing bubble, the breakdown of our labor force through job losses and stagnant incomes is causing demand to slip. It is at this point where, if you have cash, you can buy up land and houses for less than it cost to build them. Now, ask yourself, just who is it that is sitting on all the cash?

One answer to this could be found in the end of day stock rallies we see happening so frequently, these are rallies that defy logic. There is no good news to drive them. Thus, one might ask, why are they happening? Is it due to stock market manipulations which allow certain people to bail out at the right moment so they do not suffer the same losses that those who are not in the know are unable to avoid? It is a known fact that the Plunge Protection Team and government intervention has been the backbone of the stock market all the way back to 9/11/01 and that this administration has interfered in the stock market more than any other in it’s history.

Cash is King right now. The question for these Kings who hold the cash is, where exactly is the bottom of the real estate market and when is it safe for them to invest their money and be sure they are buying up something that isn’t going to fall further? I almost (not really) pity the poor middle Kings because they still believe that the markets are operating under the old principals they’ve always been able to rely upon. These people will take a bath while trying to profit off other’s misery. They believe they are part of the elite segment of this country. The truth is, they are fodder for the big guys, just like the rest of us poor slobs who think we are middle class, this is evidenced by the losses of those who didn’t get the go ahead to bail while the stock market was up for those few hours.

Those puny middle guys who believe they are Cash Kings are in for a big surprise if they hold onto that cash too long. The plan is and has been all along to devalue the U.S. dollar and crash it into oblivion. Or should I say, it has been said that this is the plan?

All the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists of the past thirty or so years who have predicted these events are beginning to look a lot saner in today’s world. They were not wrong about what was going to happen, the only thing they’ve been wrong about is when. I doubt there are many of them, although exonnerated by these recent cataclysmic events, who are gloating and saying much along the lines of I told you so’s. What I see are these visionary’s trying to help people prepare and learn to do things in order to be more self sufficient in order to stave off hunger and abject poverty while that window of time is still open a crack.

The ones who are left with fistfuls of dead dollars are going to be in for the shock of their lives. They will discover that they are not “all that” anymore when dead broke, if they have allowed their money to define who they are. If you are one of them I doubt you are reading this article, after all, you know better than a poor dumb slob such as myself, that’s why you’re holding all that money and I am not.

So, cruising through the news the other day, I see that Bush and Lady Bush are going to move into an affluent community around Dallas, Texas. I remember thinking that what our soon to be ex-president deserves is not a cushy retirement (PLEASE let this guy live out his days in obscurity) but a jail cell for the rest of his life.

Watching the suits stand up on television and trying to tell us that they know best is truly a sight to behold these days, since their evilness is what got us here in the first place. Marie Antoinette comes to mind when I see them standing up their in their two thousand dollar suits and expensive leather shoes. Liar, Liar and damned Liar is another one.

The more they try to fix things the worse they get. Any doubt yet that they are not trying to fix things, other than to rig the game for those who are in on the biggest swindle in the history of the world? They must hurry and transfer those dollars to the right people before they crash the current monetary system. This way, they can invest into tangible assets for pennies on the dollar and the heirarchy will come out of this smelling like the proverbial rose.

I’m no prophet and I do not have a crystal ball, but I do know one thing. What cash I can get my hands on these days is invested in equipment that can benefit me in the future, where I don’t have to rely on others to do things for me. I am leaning new skills at every opportunity to help myself and my family in the event all of the dire predictions come to pass. Other money is used to create a food stash which is constantly being rotated.

I cannot begin to stress to you the importance of food independence. Get your house in order now. Even if you don’t have much money, you can still cut corners and buy an extra bag of beans or a small bag of rice to start a small stockpile. Don’t forget fruits and vegetables, if you are trying to make a food stash. Those who control the food are the ones who really have their fingers around the neck of humanity. No matter how much material goods or gold you may have, you cannot eat it. Gold is at some point only going to be as valuable as what it can buy. If food scarcity becomes so dire as to threaten life, people are not going to trade their food, even for gold.

How many more dangerous and poisoned products are we going to buy for the sake of cheapness?

Saving a few pounds or dollars now is a false economy, because of all of the jobs that we destroy at home when we buy imported products.

Every time you buy a Chinese product you are responsible for job losses at home, you are responsible for criminal working conditions and slave labour practices in that country and if you wear fur, you are responsible for the unimaginable suffering and the deaths of millions of cats and dogs, skinned alive for your vanity.

I dare you to watch this video. You will be shocked, you will be upset, you may be driven to tears of anger and frustration, of sorrow and pain. Any decent person would be. But unless you watch, you will never know the truth. Unless we are confronted with the consequences of our actions we’ll never change our behaviour.

So please watch the video, share the video, then never give even one more penny to China.

This gives a whole new meaning to the term sheeple.

Well here we are, the supposed most fortunate generation in history and yet we are facing the complete annihilation of our way of life.

We have been deceived, coerced, cajoled and forced into giving away our freedom and our future in pursuit of the tainted promises of a consumer utopia. “Buy, buy, buy, borrow, borrow, borrow. Look the other way while we ship all of the jobs overseas and ship back in all of the nasty, low quality junk that you must buy, buy, buy with the money that we got you to , borrow, borrow, borrow”.

Why did you have to borrow that money anyway? BECAUSE YOUR WAGES WEREN’T HIGH ENOUGH!!! BECAUSE THE GOOD JOBS HAD BEEN SHIPPED AWAY!!! Except you didn’t notice it right away because - that’s right - you were distracted by all the money you could borrow, borrow, borrow and all of the shiny stuff that you could buy, buy, buy and all of the plastic people on tv that you could watch, watch, watch. Yippee what fun.

But then the credit/fun tap got turned off and the rest is history, or rather history in the making.

Don’t you remember when not so long ago one income would support a family?

Look at the state of our youngsters. Many people are scared of groups/gangs of children. How did so many go off the rails? Why are so many dumber than dirt?

Where were the parents when they should have been instilling values into them?

Both working to make ends meet and hoping that the children processing factories (schools), would turn out an acceptable product at the end. How can anyone hope to counter the low standards of public education when they are working all day and then distracted by 1001 other things in their time off.

Do people even connect the dots here I wonder. Maybe not, if they did they wouldn’t send their kids off to be so thoroughly disserviced. Would you keep returning your car to a shop that routinely screwed up the job? No. But you send your kids to institutions that do just that. Look at all of the money that goes into the education system and they still don’t get it right. Ah but they do get it right. The system is doing what the slave masters want it to do.

The system is doing what it was designed to do. Turn out cogs. We think it’s a failing system because we don’t understand the purpose of the system. We are told that it’s all about education, and we fall for it, then we are puzzled because the education doesn’t seem to be working properly. The promise of education is just a smoke screen to lull you into sending your children off to an institution where they will be mashed up and remolded into cogs. Inquisitive, lively, individuals go in and sullen, boring, clones come out. We are easier for the slave drivers to  manage that way. Some children do well in spite of their education, but a honest look at the degenerate state of our society reveals the true picture. How can a one size fits all system do anything other than fail individuals.

John Taylor Gatto can fill you in on the details if you care to read about them.

Just in case any crazy parents take it into their heads that they could do a better job of educating their children themselves, you’ve got states and countries outlawing the practise. Even though the majority of home ed children run rings around their schooled counterparts academically, can think for themselves, are better at problem solving and due to the time spent around caring adults (who aren’t being paid to be with them, it’s a labor of love and it makes a difference), don’t turn out to be the kind of youths that grown ups are scared of!!

i’ll get back on topic now.

Our economies here in the West were just a house of cards waiting to crash down. The people that pushed this consumerism/globalism drug on us have made their money, they are sitting pretty, while we fret and worry about putting food on the table and keeping a roof over our heads.

They and their brought and paid for politicians (yeah your vote really is worthless in this world), will do nothing to fix this. You are mad if you sit around thinking they they even intend to fix this. Take your obama tinted glasses off, he won’t save you, he doesn’t want to save you.

He won’t even put voters minds at rest by proving that he is eligable to hold the office of president.

Do you think a “small” thing like his eligibilty doesn’t matter? The people spoke, right? Wrong, dead wrong.

If he is not eligable to hold office, every law passed, every penny spent, every judge appointed, every deal struck, will be invalid. Plus what happens when some foreign country who does hold the goods on Obama decides it’s time to blackmail the pres and have him do their bidding? He needs to show his documentation. If he is legit then so be it.  If he stood for president illegally and knew it, then do you really want a fraudster in charge from the get go?

England has an unelected Prime Minister right now. I wonder at the true legality of everything that has passed into law in the UK since he took office.

We are entering the worst economic period in modern history. We are entering a time of deprivation when people have record levels of debt and no idea how to fend for themselves. You can thank the school system for that last part. The school system that teaches you to be a cog in a machine. What happens when the machine gets broken, or get’s taken away or the feul runs out? You are just a useless cog with no other function.

You only have to look at the growing unemployment lines for the proof of that. Unable to find work in the machine, the cogs are on the scrapheap.

Well you know what, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can come through this econmic wreckage but we have to think and act outside the box.

Hankering for yesterday and things to go back to how they were were last year won’t work. Why would we want to go back a system that has always been set on self destruct anyway? Yes, there is comfort in what we know and are familiar with, but it’s only temporary.

We need to move forward, we need to kick out the slave masters - yes the corporations are slave masters and we are still their slaves, our chains are called pay checks and the overseers are the endless government bureacracies that dictate every move that we may or may not make.

No one person or group will come along to save you. If you want to be free of the chains, you have to break them yourself.

As I have written before, we don’t need their junk food, infected with preservatives and pesticides and who knows what else. We can grow what we need on a local basis. A small town in England is doing just that.

If you have lost your job, get together with some others and figure out how you can create your own work by producing food.

The money is generated in your local economy and it stays in your local economy. It isn’t being sucked away by foreign corporations and shareholders looking for profit. You get some money in your pocket to spend in other local outlets, so they don’t go out of business.

If car ownership is out of reach now, or if those monthly payments are crippling you, why not start a community car share scheme? 4 families could use  2 vehicles, so instead of finding the money to buy 4 cars, and pay 4 lots of tax and insurance and maintenece, you are only paying for 2. This won’t work if you have to commute miles for work but if your activities are more locally based it can work out just fine.

Around here we often borrow one anothers vehicles if one of us has a car out of action and we give rides to people who don’t have a car at all.  A car scheme would just be a formal extension of that.

About to be evicted? Don’t end up on the street. Ask around, find someone who will rent to you (if you still have income) without credit checks. Find someone who needs help around the place and see if you can move in and supply that help in return for a place to stay.  House sit.  Move back in with family.  Squat a bank owned property.  See if your church can help. If you have even one person who claims to be your friend, then you should never be homeless.

Would you stand by and watch someone you care about, go and live in a tent, on a piece of waste ground?

Fair weather friends are good for just that, the good times. When the going gets toughs the fickle f**k off. I hope your friends are made of stronger stuff.

For further insight and ideas I suggest reading this article Anti-Consumerism and The Alternate Economy.

It’s full of simple ideas to help get jobs back, for example, don’t use your ATM card, insist on withdrawing cash inside with the help of a living, breathing bank teller. How much extra profit did the banks make once they had conditioned us to use plastic and pay for the privalage? One losusy machine costs a lot less then a bunch of employees who need living wages and expect to receive health benefits and pension contributions.

Help keep jobs. Use services that are provided by people. It might be your job that is saved.

We did sit back and let this happen, so did our parents generation. If we sit back and let this continue we will be despised by all generations who follow us. We are custodians of liberty and we are losing it fast.

Look at England. Papers please will soon be as common a phrase on the streets of England as it was on the Streets of East Germany. Laws that were embraced by a terrified public subjected to false flag attacks are now used on innocent newspaper delivery boys. These anti terror laws are used to spy on the public. It’s the same deal with the patriot Act. That was written long before 9/11 and congress were not even given time to read the thousands of pages before they had to vote on it.

How did all of this happen? How did we get so swindled like this? BECAUSE we weren’t paying attention. We were too busy shopping for crap, thinking about crap and watching more crap on TV. Talking about sports and celebrities, instead of scrutinizing our laws and our lawmakers. We trusted the media the tell us the truth, but the media are just establishment mouthpieces. That is why they didn’t report the truth about the economy for years, that is why they are now accelerating the decline by filling their pages with doom laden predictions. They can’t wait to tell us how bad it really is now, because a frightened populace will meekly accept the next bunch of draconian measures that the slave masters spew out. Just like we all accepted the anti terror measures after their false flag attacks which have in fact been directed towards spying on us and controlling us.

Are we waking up yet to our responsibilites? Don’t sit back and take it. The only way to fight back is to develop alternate systems. They are expecting either a tired and weakened populace to either roll over and comply with their plans or a desparate populace to get violent. Violence will be met with violence, so don’t go down that road, it’s pointless. Why do you think they have developed sound and heat weapons? They are expecting trouble at home that’s why. How about the active duty troops being redeployed within the US?

Don’t fall into their traps. If enough of us turn away from this consumer fantasy and get down to some hard work we can throw a spanner in their works.  It’s down to us, this is the oly window we have left. As that lying dog, Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of England said “the peices are in flux”.  Yes they are, but if we let them fall as planned then it’s really game over for us.

So carpe diem (seize the day), our future is down to us.

Did you know that McDonalds is now the second largest merchant vendor for credit card use?

What does that tell us about the state of the economy? It tells us that people don’t even have the cash to buy a burger and fries!

What is going to happen if the proposed cuts in lines of credit take place? The talk is of credit card companies slashing lines of credit by two thirds.

Credit card spending is shooting for the moon as consumers, (wait, strike that . We are more than consumers, we are living, breathing, feeling people), as people are forced to put most of their expenditures onto plastic.

Credit card balances have risen more in the last 10 weeks than they did in the last 10 months combined and now the plan is to pull over 2 trillion dollars of credit lines.

What this means is that the rug is going to be pulled out from under you. The safety net that you were relying on to to see you through any rough times will be gone.

What will you do if you lose your job and your available credit is somewhere near zero?

This system that we played so happily in, for so long - I can buy what I want, yes I can, cus I got money from the plastic man! -  is now squeezing us hard. The shocks are coming hard and fast and no end, no relief is in sight.

This is the time to plan how you are going to survive this catastrophe. Those of us who saw the writing on the wall some time ago, have been storing food and buying equipment to enable us to become more self sufficient. Instead of watching tv or wandering around the mall with plastic in hand, we’ve been learning how to grow food and figuring out how to cut our expenses to the bone.

I’m not going to be standing in line, waiting for food to feed my children. I’ve got some land and we can (with a lot of work) provide sustenance. I’ve got trees growing that will be cut for firewood for the woodstove, when our current 3 year supply runs out and you can bet that I’ll be planting some more too.

We’re building an enclosure for the chickens that we are getting next week, our neighbor is giving us a rooster, that is meat and eggs covered.  Right after Christmas we will plant seeds in starter pots so that they are ready for planting out in early February.

We lost some fruit and nut trees to the seizure of some of our land for road construction, so we need to replant those, the apple, peach and plum trees will take a couple of years to start producing, the almond trees will take 5 or 6. Luckily we planted 10 more almond trees from seed 4 years ago so they will hopefully produce soon but they won’t produce anywhere near the quantities that we got from the old trees, for many years .

We are thinking about getting a couple of goats, we should get them, they will give us milk (and butter and cheese), they will eat weeds and save us a lot of mowing, especially on steep banks which have to be cut with a trimmer.

I’ve got my solar water heating (mostly) sorted out.

My point in describing my plans to you is this. Don’t wait for some politician to come to the rescue, don’t wait for the bankers (funny how that rhymes with w….) to turn the credit taps on again (not going to happen). Don’t react. ACT.

If you don’t have any land, band together with your neighbors and start a community garden or farm, you can provide food for yourselves and sell surplus to the rest of your community. Sell for less than the big stores and you’ll be doing everyone a favour. Get some chickens and goats, maybe a pig or 10 on there too.

If local ordinances give you trouble, then get them overturned.  You are the people that local government is meant to serve. Your needs should shape the policies. Government serves you, you don’t serve it!

Get the issue on the agenda of the next town/city council meeting and get the rules changed. While you’re at it, if you are persecuted by the no line drying rule, get that vanity serving rule thrown out too.  Who cares if some uptight snobs think washing lines look untidy. Those rules belong to the era of cheap electricity (which is over), to a time when most of us didn’t know or didn’t care about the pollution that our daily activities unleashed. Well we know now and I hope enough of us care.

Don’t end up in a food line where you will be part of the problem, get active now and be part of the solution.

How will you feel when your kids are hungry and your credit card gets declined at YukDonalds?

What will you do to put food on the table?

Will you try and take what doesn’t belong to you from people who worked hard to get their act together?

Don’t go down that road because people who have been preparing certainly did not forget to stock up on measures to defend themselves and their property.