At the beginning of November I was in a Kroger grocery store when I saw a man stocking the first turkeys for Thanksgiving. He had filled a cooler with store brand turkeys, but the other side of that cooler had only one turkey of a brand I have used many times in the past.
The store manager approached the man stocking and I caught bits of the conversation, like “don’t try to order more turkeys” and from the few other bits I heard I jumped to the conclusion that “oh my goodness, they won’t be getting more turkeys.” I had heard the online “news” rumblings about a turkey shortage, so of course I bought that one turkey of the brand I like, despite it being over 18 lbs., despite that this Thanksgiving it is only me and my two sons eating here, and despite the fact that I don’t much care for turkey, but I make it every Thanksgiving – because it’s “tradition.”
Of course, I should have waited, because within a couple days I saw many turkeys, especially smaller turkeys (the size I usually buy) in my local grocery stores, so I could have had my desired size and brand of turkey, if I had not reacted to hearing only bits of a conversation and my underlying concerns about a turkey shortage this year.
The larger question I asked myself was why on earth I make turkey every year for Thanksgiving. This is the first Thanksgiving without my husband and I suppose he was part of my sticking to “tradition” at holidays mind-set, although he truly didn’t care what I cooked for holiday meals. When we got married I wanted to create the picture perfect holidays, to include decorating the house and preparing “traditional” holiday meals. My husband often said he wasn’t much on turkey and he made comments like, “I’m glad we only have this once a year,” but for 40 years, without fail, I made turkey on Thanksgiving.
I can guarantee you that next Thanksgiving I’ll begin a new Thanksgiving “tradition” and turkey will be off the menu from here on in. Yes, obviously I shouldn’t have reacted to bits of an overheard conversation at Kroger, but the real question I should be pondering is why on earth I stuck to making turkey at Thanksgiving all these years, when ham was definitely more popular with my family, heck, even lasagna would have been more popular.
“Tradition” is overrated, but even more overrated are the images that can dominate our vision of trying to create memorable family holidays. The meals I remember most fondly aren’t big holiday spreads, it’s meals like one of the first few dates with my husband, where he took me to this nice Chinese restaurant that I remember. The dish I ordered had rather largish pieces of chicken, so I began cutting a piece of chicken and my fork slipped. A piece of that chicken flew across the table and landed in my husband’s lap. He smiled and said, “You’re the first person I’ve ever met who can shoot food across the table and drop it in someone else’s lap,” and then he started laughing hysterically.
With my kids some of the most memorable meals were the ones where things went completely awry. At one holiday meal I had made coconut cream pie and when I sliced into it somehow there was a poof sound and some of the filling exploded several inches up in the air – it was quite amazing actually. To this day I have no idea how that happened. My kids often mentioned that exploding coconut cream pie over the years.
In case, you’re wondering, I make ham for Christmas every year… and I already have a ham in the freezer… Perhaps, my new holiday “tradition” should be “let’s go out to eat!” That would be a huge change and it’s one I might really enjoy… but for now I’ve got this over 18 lbs. turkey thawed in the refrigerator and it’s a real struggle for me to be “thankful” for it, lol.
It seems like we’ve been living in this crazy pandemic era much longer than since March of 2020. Yesterday marked an ominous change in pandemic responses among Western countries, with Austria being the first to impose a COVID lockdown for unvaccinated people aged 12 and older. The new rule will force unvaccinated people to stay in their homes and only be able to leave for a few specified reasons and was to go into effect once ICU use reached 30% in the country. That this type of government coercion and power will expand to other countries and be parlayed to control people for other “crises,” like climate change, etc. seems pretty much certain. Whether some liberal governors in America attempt legislation like this seems highly likely too.
At this point it’s obvious Dr. Fauci and other top US health officials misrepresented and at times outright lied to the American people in pushing their preferred public policies on dealing with COVID-19 and we were inundated with “data” and assurances that we must “trust the science,” all while the “science” became more and more a power-grabbing tool in the hands of politicians. The lies range from Dr. Fauci lying back in the beginning urging people not to wear masks in public, to then switching to pushing not just mass masking, but once the vaccines rolled out, which was supposed to be the way out of the pandemic, he began pushing double-masking. All these twists and turns in our public health officials’ social mitigation approaches came with absolutely no new scientific research to back them. However, their social mitigation approaches almost all came with assurances that these approaches were being used in other countries and working well.
Austalia and New Zealand implemented some of the most stringent lockdown measures, under a highly controversial and failed Covid Zero policy, which both countries have since abandoned. However, the lingering negative social chaos can’t be erased with new legislation and the swipe of a pen.
It’s easy to say, “What’s the big deal, it’s only a mask?” or “Don’t you care about other people?” to minimize these rules, but the more disturbing aspect of these “it’s no big deal” rules is how those imposing the rules and the powerful elites selectively follow their own rules and have worked to divide Americans, even within families by stoking fear and selling “othering,” dividing the “good” people from the “bad” people.
It’s not just about masks; it’s about using fear to scare people into allowing government to grab more and more power. Then we come to the vaccines and as soon as another COVID wave started this past spring, Dr. Fauci led the messaging pitting the Vaccinated vs. the Unvaccinated, which resulted in a massive Democrat/mainstream media messaging effort to turn The Unvaccinated into the new Trump “Deplorables.” It was 100% about politics and 0% about public health.
It seems unlikely America will easily or quickly return to pre-Covid norms, especially with so many big business elites being eager to impose and implement even the most extreme COVID measures, but it doesn’t stop there. So many of them are also rushing to acquiesce to BLM/social justice demands too. Media-manufactured climate change hysteria will assuredly be propelled to advance more pushed government rules and mandates.
The new Austrian COVID lockdown measures matter here in America, when you consider that from the beginning of this pandemic Dr. Fauci, US health officials and many elected officials borrowed all of their “social mitigation” efforts from foreign countries. At the end of October, Dr. Fauci was cheering Australia’s controversial lockdown measures:
“America’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, has praised Melbourne’s response to the coronavirus, saying he “wished” the US could adopt the same mentality.
In an interview hosted by the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne-based Doherty Institute, Fauci said Australia was “one of the countries that has done actually quite well” in handling the virus.
“I really wish that we could transplant that kind of mentality here,” he said. “Because masks in the United States have almost become a political statement.”
The amazing thing about Dr. Fauci’s lamentations about how everything pertaining to COVID has become so politicized is his stunning lack of self-awareness of his own starring role in politicizing COVID with his non-stop media COVID show, where he stars as The Expert. The problem isn’t only Dr. Fauci, it’s with all of us, because we live in a society ruled by “experts” and media-driven waves of fear hitting us from all directions. Back in the 1990s, I was disgusted with the Oprahization of America, where Oprah would hype some heretofore trivial issue as a pressing issue in America or she’d trot out another of her band of “experts” and America would all turn to said expert, like Dr. Phil, for instance, as the most trusted expert in that field. We’ve been swamped by so many experts being sold by politicians, celebrities, news media, and social media, that the Oprah influence seems rather quaint now.
The harder lesson-learned for me has been when the media or high-profile people, many whom I used to respect, came out and touted some revered federal government “public servant,” who turned out to be just another partisan political hack. It’s been very disillusioning, from hearing about the dedicated career professionals at the FBI, only to realize they were people like Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, to our revered intel officials and it turned out to be people like John Brennan, James Clapper or Alexander Vindman, I’m just automatically on guard now when I hear about any unassailable, apolitical public servants.
Even if COVID disappeared from being a major issue tomorrow, the corruption and expansion of government power-grabs it wrought will be eagerly used and abused with new crises (real and manufactured), so it’s best to keep an eyes wide open attitude to new efforts to infringe on our personal liberties and mass media demonization of those who dare to defend their rights every step of the way.
America’s only hope lies in ordinary Americans working hard in the nooks and crannies of America to try to strengthen their own families and rebuild some sense of community, not in trusting Washington to fix anything. It’s so easy to watch the news on TV or get online and in every direction news and social media is dominated by media-driven, spun up hot topics and drama trying to push us into fear or anger. The single best thing, I think each of us can do is take some time every day to step outside, look around and take some deep, calming breaths. Take some time to chat with family, friends and neighbors about ordinary life, not just what’s in the news. It’s challenging sometimes to be hopeful, but if we lose faith in our power to control our own hearts and minds, we’ve already ceded control to others. The media-driven fear-mongering can only influence you, if you let it.
There was something to be said for my childhood days of three major TV networks, news in only short spurts throughout the day and our own lives taking up more of our time, energy and thought than what we were looking at on our cell phones or electronic devices. I doubt most of us are ever going to revert back to that type of no-tech life, but I started taking more breaks from social media and the news. I still write my backwoods blog here, but have made an effort to spend less time on social media. I’ve gone back to some of my pre-internet interests and it’s been a nice change.
Just a couple weeks ago liberal media outlets were giving Christopher Steele airtime and trying to resurrect the Dems’ Trump-Russian Collusion narrative:
So, a couple weeks ago it was another liberal media effort to push the Dem narrative and cast doubt on special counsel, John Durham’s investigation again. There have been media reports that people inside the Clinton 2016 campaign have lawyered up. Here’s a tweet thread from Undercover Huber, who has covered the Trump-Russia Collusion story from the beginning:
Bonjour, the unroll you asked for: Special Counsel John Durham has now alleged in a federal indictment… https://t.co/HaNVCD5tK2 Talk to you soon. 🤖
The Clintons always evade being held accountable, no matter the scandal, but this is quite a development that some people inside the Clinton inner-circle are lawyering up. Aside from the Trump-Russia Collusion lies, another 2016 Clinton scandal that got brushed aside was Hillary’s email server scandal and her sending highly classified information via that unsecure home-brew server, while serving as Secretary of State during Obama’s first term. The FBI closed that investigation with no charges being filed, but it wasn’t the only Clinton investigation they closed. The Comey FBI also closed an investigation into Bill Clinton’s Foundation, alleging pay-to-play.
In 2018 there were reports that the FBI had quietly reopened investigations into the Clinton Foundation and pay-to-play. Durham supposedly has been looking into that closed Clinton Foundation investigation too.
Here’s the thing, I’m weird. I used to like reading government reports, which started as a kid, with my oldest sister, who is 8 years older than I am, giving me her hand-me-down books. The first government report I read was a paperback she gave me of The Warren Commission Report in my early teens.
In 2015, I stopped working at Walmart, because my husband’s health problems had worsened and he had advancing memory loss and dementia caused by normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). It was no longer safe for him to be home alone for hours. The NPH also caused mobility problems. He had a VP shunt in his brain to drain excess fluid and he could get around with a walker for a few years, but then it got worse and he was falling a lot. So, with the worsening memory loss and the increased falls I decided to stop working at my local Walmart and take care of him at home. I spent a lot of time online following politics and all the spin drama during the years since then. Anyway, I read through all of the FBI Notes as they were released.
I’ve always been wondering if the Clintons will ever be held accountable for any of the vast corruption they’ve been involved with, but even with Durham getting closer, I still doubt it. Some people in America really are above the law.
When Republicans controlled the House there were investigations into Hillary’s home-brew server, then later in 2016 Comey’s FBI released the FBI notes of all the interviews of the Clinton cronies and Hillary’s odd 4th of July weekend FBI interview at the FBI (that followed the Bill Clinton/Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting, where I believe he set the terms for Hillary’s FBI interview and closing that email investigation). I read all of those FBI notes and I had watched a lot of the House Oversight investigations too, because my husband liked the TV on Fox News 24/7. I wrote about those FBI Notes of the interviews in the Hillary email server investigation on my blog, but Sharyl Attkisson did a much more detailed list that was excellent. I can’t find it at the moment, but she listed every discrepancy and all the outright lies. I did locate her timeline on “Collusion against Trump here: https://sharylattkisson.com/2020/05/collusion-against-trump-timeline/. Btw, Sharyl Attkisson is fighting a case claiming her computer and devices were hacked while investigating Fast and Furious.
Between the House Oversight hearing and reading the FBI notes of the interviews, here’s the main point – Hillary never set up a home-brew server in her home. That private server was set up by Justin Cooper, Bill Clinton’s aide, who set it up for Bill Clinton and his Clinton Foundation work – Cooper testified to the House Oversight Committee about the initial server and it’s in his FBI interview testimony too. The decision to merge Hillary’s State Dept. email onto Bill Clinton’s personal foundation server in their home was made shortly after Obama was elected and Hillary was selected to be Sec. of State.
In January of 2009 (this was as Obama was ready to take office) a decision was made to upgrade Bill Clinton’s personal server in their home and Huma Abedin coordinated that upgrade, between Hillary’s 2008 campaign IT guy, Bryan Pagliano, and Bill Clinton’s aide, Justin Cooper. Bryan Pagliano was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify: House panel votes to hold Clinton tech aide Bryan Pagliano in contempt.
So, Hillary never set up a home-brew server. The Clintons decided on Hillary running her State Department emails on Bill Clinton’s private Clinton Foundation server in their home, right after Obama was elected in 2008.
That point seemed to have been missed, as everyone focused their outrage on Hillary’s careless and reckless handling of highly classified information, which even Comey acknowledged in his July 5, 2016 bizarre speech announcing the closing of the FBI email investigation… while Hillary was jetting away with President Obama to his first campaign appearance for Hillary’s 2016 run: Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Use of a Personal E-Mail System.
With the FBI investigating both Hillary’s careless and reckless handling of classified information on that private server in their home and the FBI simultaneously investigating Bill Clinton’s foundation for allegations of pay-to-play, you’d think since the FBI had the Clinton server some effort might have been used to try to investigate the server in the pay-to-play investigation too, but apparently, the FBI never connected the dots between the two Clinton investigations they had going on and that home-brew server being both Bill Clinton’ s private email server & Hillary’s State Dept. server. I have a high school education and I figured that one out, so why didn’t the premiere criminal investigators in the country?
Hillary eventually moved her emails to Platte River Networks, when she left the State Dept. and there was the whole controversy of a Platte River employee using BleachBit to wipe clean all the Clinton email files: Data firm gives FBI all backed-up Clinton emails.
Of course, there was also the Weiner laptop, to which Huma Abedin was saving all of Hillary’s State Department emails (totally unknown to her of course, because she would never lie.) She told the FBI she never knew anything about the Clintons’ private server until the news broke in 2015, but there she was orchestrating the server upgrade, between Cooper and Pagliano in 2009. I think Copper testified that Huma also managed the Clinton SCIFs inside their home in Chappaqua and their home in DC. One of those IT guys also testified Huma had an email account on the original Bill Clinton foundation server that was transferred to the upgraded server. Oh yeah, there was this too: Huma Abedin’s overlapping jobs renew focus on Clinton conflicts. Guess, computer fairies set up those State Dept. emails backing up onto the Weiner laptop.
Comey reopened the email investigation when the Weiner laptop with Hillary’s State Dept. emails on it hit the news, days before the election in 2016. Then Comey, under furious attack by Team Clinton and Dems, claimed some super-duper analysis of all those emails had been completed – nothing to see here and dear, sweet Huma, the woman managing Hillary Clinton’s affairs, orchestrating the private server upgrade and the SCIFS in both Clinton homes, had no clue all of Hillary’s State Dept, emails were being saved on the Weiner laptop… Makes perfect sense, right? I often feel like we’re in a total information analysis breakdown in this country – where spin has corroded every functioning brain cell of most of our news media and sadly it seems to have seeped into the FBI too.
I like to go back and read through old news stories to see what was reported initially, because as the fog of spin war deepens, all the spin obliterates a whole lot of details and facts from view. Funny thing was that way back in the beginning when the Clinton private server story first broke in 2015, it was reported: Clinton camp: Email ‘thumb drive is secure’. When the Hillary email server story first broke David Kendall, longtime Clinton crony and lawyer, assured all of Hillary’s emails were safe in his office as he negotiated turning them over to the FBI. In that initial media reporting there was mention of Kendall having a thumb drive with all the Hillary Clinton emails:
“The agency declined to detail steps made to protect the sensitive information in attorney David Kendall’s possession, but the issue is raising concern among Republicans on Capitol Hill who’ve criticized Clinton’s handling of the email controversy. The thumb drive has copies of emails Clinton kept on a private server while she served as secretary of state, a trove now known to contain classified documents.” – Clinton camp: Email ‘thumb drive is secure’.
I’ve often wondered what happened to that thumb drive and also since Kendall has been burying Bill Clinton scandals for decades and he saved Hillary emails to a thumb drive, did he also save Bill’s Clinton Foundation emails from that “dual-use” private server in their home too? Enquiring minds sure would love the answer to that question and I bet John Durham would find that of interest too.
Nothing to see here. Case closed.
Why do I follow the Clinton corruption so closely you might wonder – let’s just say even a nobody homemaker on social media can tick off the Clinton machine, which I found out during the Clinton impeachment.
Patara at Appalachia’s Homestead brought to my attention, that China is urging it’s people to start stocking up. I had seen mostly the political news on the VA governor’s race and hadn’t seen this. China has over a billion people to feed and is facing a sharp economic slowdown. It is absolutely a true news story. CNN link is right here: China is urging families to stock up on food as supply challenges multiply.
I have no confidence in our federal government to respond adequately to a major crisis, that’s the truth. This is an upfront warning. that this is going to be a politics post. The default response from our political leaders, in both parties, is to deploy the National Guard to deal with everything, whether it’s for Pelosi’s post-1/6 sideshow, where they had thousands of guardsmen at the Capitol for months to TX where the governor sent them to the border. Here’s a quote from NBCWashington on the NG extension at the Capitol in MARCH, two months after the 1/6 attack:
“Army leaders had also initially questioned whether the Capitol Police had exhausted all other options to fill the need, such as asking other federal law enforcement agencies to provide security. But officials said military leaders thought it was important to find ways to work out the details.
The threat was tied to the far-right conspiracy theory promoted by QAnon supporters that former President Donald Trump would rise again to power on March 4, the original presidential inauguration day. That day passed with no problems, but law enforcement has said threats to buildings and personnel remain.”
I’m frankly sick to death of hearing about QAnon threats and remain highly skeptical about who is generating the “QAnon conspiracy theories.” I’m not doubting there are dangerous right-wing extremists elements that are legitimate concerns. And there are people believing these crazy QAnon conspiracy theories, but why doesn’t the FBI ever tell us more about who these QAnon conspiracy theory generators are? This reminds me of the whole “alt-right” media hysteria, where the liberal media and Dems created this whole myth about how massive the alt-right threat was and how there were alt-right everywhere. And, even the FBI sells that line too.
If QAnon loons spreading conspiracy theories are such a threat, then why haven’t the QAnon content generators been identified and banned from social media? The big social media platforms have no problem banning other right-wing people they don’t like or want silenced or ordinary people spreading conspiracy theories, but not QAnon… And we’re also told QAnon is on the “dark web,’ yet the FBI can’t find out who’s behind it or stop any of these QAnon conspiracy theories? Instead, it’s these crazy stories like today, “QAnon supporters gather in downtown Dallas expecting JFK Jr. to reappear.”
The FBI has spent months tracking down every protester at the Capitol on 1/6 and yet they can’t figure out who is behind QAnon conspiracy theories?
I’m going to add this link to the much hyped August 2018 “Unite the Right Anniversary” in Washington, DC that had the media frothing for months. CNN reported, “Approximately two dozen white nationalists rallied in the nation’s capital on Sunday, one year after clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, left one person dead and elevated racial tensions in America.” Yep, two dozen, that’s it.
After that the liberal media didn’t have fainting spells about the “alt-right,” but it moved to other massive right-wing “threats.”
The Youngkin effort is par for the course with Dem false flag operations and dirty tricks, yet the mainstream media glides by them. Back in 2018 news broke (and was quickly breezed by) that Dem operatives, working with some powerful Silicon Valley execs, generated fake Russian bots that were supporting Roy Moore in the AL Senate race in 2017 and then Dem operatives put up this whole media hysteria about Moore was supported by Russia (similar to the whole Trump–Russia Collusion spin garbage). Dem operatives also initiated some Dry Alabama influence operation against Moore, and of course, there was the whole mainstream media underage women allegation spin effort too and frankly when Gloria Allred shows up, I dismiss it as another Dem spin theater effort. Roy Moore is a detestable bigot, so no one really cared about any of these corrupt Dem influence operations and dirty tricks. Of course, it’s important to look at who one of those big Silicon Valley execs involved in that fake Russian bot operation was. From the Washington Post, “Disinformation campaign targeting Roy Moore’s Senate bid may have violated law, Alabama attorney general says” :
“The looming threat of new state and federal investigations adds to the scrutiny facing those involved in the campaign to undermine support for Moore and bolster Jones. Project Birmingham appeared to broadly mirror some of the same tactics adopted by Russian operatives who spread social and political unrest on Facebook and Twitter during the 2016 presidential election. In Alabama, its backers even introduced fake evidence that automated Russian accounts, called bots, were supporting Moore in the race.”
“On Wednesday, internet billionaire Reid Hoffman apologized for giving money to a group, American Engagement Technologies, that allegedly had ties to Project Birmingham. The donation was $750,000, according to a person close to Hoffman. Hoffman said that he did not intend for the organization or its leader, a former aide to President Barack Obama, to put the money to use in spreading disinformation. Hoffman also pledged a full review of his portfolio of political investments, two years after he began spending millions of dollars to help elect more Democrats to office.”
“One participant in the project reportedly was Jonathon Morgan, the chief executive of New Knowledge, a firm that wrote a report – released by the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week – about Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election and its efforts to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.”
Got that – this Silicon Valley exec’s company was who the Senate Intelligence Committee relied on to write their report on Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election and then he was involved in a Dem false flag operation helping Dem operatives create fake Russian bots to smear Roy Moore in 2017… Still waiting on that investigation… It’s totally nuts.
I’ve been trying to analyze the Dems spin information war since the 1990s, when the Clintons initiated their “war room.” In 1998, I first dipped my toes into the world of social media, writing comments on the Excite message boards, and mocked the Clinton spinmeisters and highlighted their stupid spin word games on those message boards during the Clinton impeachment drama. Back then the Excite message boards was where the politicos and journos hung out. Today it’s Twitter.
I also believe Trump borrowed the Dems corrupt spin war model, so while many people, I know think Trump will save America, well, I doubt it. Trump cares about his rallies, which are just massive agitation propaganda efforts to incite people & raise money. Mainly though, Trump really wants to get back on Twitter or find a social media avenue to get back into the spin information war and owning media spin cycles. As for Repubs in Washington – they’re concerned about collecting big money from donors and power too, so I don’t expect Washington to save us. Plus they’re all hanging out on Twitter too. Trump cares about getting back on Twitter, all the journalists and politicians hang out at Twitter – and all they care about is how to “spin” everything. Spin equals the ability to drive and control public opinion in America.
The Dem and media corruption is still vast. I am a nobody homemaker, recently widowed, and my blog currently has 135 followers. On Twitter I have 58 followers and I suspect most of them are bots or something. I pay for my WordPress account and continue to write, even though mostly I feel like I am a lone voice in the internet wilderness.
So, my concerns after watching this latest Dem spin smear effort, targeting parents at school board meetings, is that the labeling of Trump-supporters, Republicans, conservatives, and even now parents who dared complain about CRT was to smear them as “potential domestic terrorists.”
My stories about Desert Storm are true and I do believe staying calm and focused on doing everything you can to stock up and prepare your own family, as best you can, for the shortages and uncertainties ahead, is sound advice.
I am not trying to tell anyone to shut-up or what to say or not say – it’s a free country. Where I worry is that preppers might become the next Dem target, in a critical food storage crisis and that’s why staying calm and committed to helping each other and encouraging others to stock up can be a vital resource to help themselves and their families and neighborhood get through this crisis. I worry since the prepper community relies on liberal-owned social media platforms to share information.
I hope that some state governments start getting their heads out of their you know what and start addressing this looming crisis, but I suspect many of them are too busy with their Twitter spin battles too, to even come up with any plans. And my other fear is that the DC pols solution is to send in the NG and expect them to solve everything. Heck, I’m surprised they haven’t sent them to unload ships yet. The NG cannot possibly be the whole government solution to deal with a massive food shortage and mass panic. Here’s the other thing – if there’s mass panic and people clearing out stores – that gives the federal government and governors all the cover they need to take more drastic action and so these are the same people still trying to cling to all their COVID government overreach.
I’m not trying to alarm anyone, and this is just my opinion. I’m just saying that staying calm, especially in emergencies is crucial- it will help you get through any crisis. Staying focused on encouraging as many people you can to stock up is wonderful, as is sharing all the prepping and survival knowledge. It’s going to take people with all sorts of skills – not just a stocked pantry to get our country through a massive food shortage combined with another possible COVID wave, plus all the partisan political turmoil. I feel that some areas where there are lots more conservative people, it might be easier to rally people to work together in a crisis than in others. If you live in Chicago or St. Louis with that idiot mayor, who tweeted this, I feel sorry for you:
I don’t flinch when gunshots ring out; my son and I often fall asleep to a lullaby of gunshots.
Focusing on anger at people in your own family or circle will leave you and them totally alienated, but yeah, I understand urging family to stock up and not being heeded – after all, our “illustrious” CDC recommends a 3-day supply. Everyone in our government is too invested in their media spin war to come up with a plan. I have no idea how much food retail companies have or are holding back or how much various states and the federal government have in emergency food supplies. All I do know is the prepper community, even the most extreme ones, are way ahead of the game in a serious food shortage situation and the YouTube prepper community could be a truly valuable resource to each other and to millions of other unprepared people.
Every person who heeds your advice to start stocking up now is one less person in a dire crisis, if this shortage situation becomes much worse. No one person can solve this crisis by themselves – we’ll all have to put in our oars and row, but first and foremost is always – take care of yourself and your family first, so don’t get overwhelmed by the magnitude of all the bad things on the horizon – take it a step at a time with preparing.
Here’s a suggestion, in military lingo, if you’re up to double-time, by all means speed up your pace:-) If people have a 3-day supply, encourage them to shoot for 2 weeks or a month and then keep on going. By working together and staying calm, I believe grassroots America could be the vital resource that pulls America through a serious shortage crisis. A lot of political mayhem, mass panic and no calm, principled leadership to be found, here in America could be very bad. However, our country was founded by brave and fearless people, who faced adversity head-on, and I still remain hopeful that there are enough good and decent people, with that same American spirit to pull us through this.
Note: It’s 9:48 am, November 3, 2021 right now and I have been doing some editing on this blog post, because I wrote it last night and reading it this morning saw some small things I wanted to change and add.
Kevin and Sarah at Living Traditions Homestead offer some thoughts on “shortening the supply chain of getting food to your table,” beyond stores and growing your food. Wonderful ideas here:
They made me think of one of my favorite novels, My Antonia, by Willa Cather. Kevin and Sarah, like many of the modern homesteaders, are so different from the back to nature movement of the 70s, where the ones that came to my rural area were hippies, into communal living, and they gave me a jaded view of modern “homesteading.” Many of these new pioneers embrace debt-free living, they do a lot of research on gardening and farming and they try to build diversified income streams. Here’s a bit from a piece I wrote in 2012, but despite this old post, I hadn’t even thought of these ideas Kevin and Sarah offer:
Throughout the story, Jack’s grandmother exemplifies the indomitable American spirit and she’s a testament to planning not just to survive, but to live as comfortably as possible in an unforgiving environment. The Shimerdas, city-dwellers in their home country, fail to take responsibility for their own survival, necessitating good neighbors to prevent their demise. In one scene the grandmother packs a hamper to take to the Shimerdas, she offers this line:
‘Now, Jake,’ grandmother was saying, ‘if you can find that old rooster that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we’ll take him along. There’s no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda couldn’t have got hens from her neighbours last fall and had a hen-house going by now. I reckon she was confused and didn’t know where to begin. I’ve come strange to a new country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no matter what you don’t have.”
Before offering my opinion on why we should try to include as many people in our circle of support, especially family, friends and neighbors, rather than sit around planning who we’re going to shun in an emergency for failing to meet our prepper expectations, I want to clarify that when I suggested not getting worked up by viral videos & photos until you have more information, it wasn’t to suggest that all videos and photos are “fake news,” although many of them are dishonest partisan agitation propaganda (see examples like the Covington video or the Lincoln Project staging a fake white supremacists group at a Youngkin campaign event in VA a couple days ago), or they don’t provide enough information to help you make good decisions.
The shortage crisis is real and it’s projected to get much worse. There is a global economic crisis.
The global economy system is very complex and I don’t even have a clue as to all the factors creating this crisis, but our government officials report the problem is serious and projected to worsen, as do all sorts of legitimate experts – so, yes the shortage crisis is real. The problem with relying on some viral video or shortage information from even trusted family or friends who live across the country from you or who you talk to on social media is what they are experiencing may not be what’s going on in your local grocery stores And here’s where having more information is what we really need, before rushing out to the store based on “did you see all those photos and videos online of empty shelves?” or “I heard on social media, blah, blah, blah.” So far there are some items that there’s been a widespread shortage – for instance hay, lumber or canning lids for home canners, etc. but for general grocery items, the availability can vary at online retailers, stores around the country and even within your own local area.
It seems to me we’re all going to have to take a little more time to shop strategically, if we’re going to locate the foods we want and try to find food items that keep us within our budgets, especially with inflation climbing. Staying calm as we all try to navigate through this crisis will help us not only weather this crisis, if you have kids it will help them adjust and adapt to these chaotic and uncertain times. You can not possibly assess and respond well to a protracted economic crisis, if you spend everyday getting angry at people who aren’t preparing as you think they should and running around every single minute in crisis mode. In fact, the more you react emotionally, the poorer your information analysis becomes. Plus, other emergencies can surely come along and we’ll have to deal with them too. Weather emergencies are pretty common, the COVID situation is still with us, there’s a lot of political turmoil, and even personal emergencies and the list goes on.
Showing a little grace and kindness to others will go way further than spending your time fuming about friends and family who aren’t preparing like you are, while still encouraging them to prepare.
Now to a few personal stories. In January of this year, my youngest daughter, son-in-law and infant grandson in TX experienced the grid failure during a winter storm. Naturally, I had been urging my daughter to prepare and when I warned about a power outage, she told me there was no need to worry about that, because the power lines are underground where she lives. I told her that didn’t mean the grid can’t go down.
So, when the power outage happened, naturally, I was upset that she had dismissed my concerns. I sent her a link from The Provident Prepper on how to survive a winter emergency and offered some ideas. In my mind, I was thinking, “Why didn’t she take my concerns seriously?” and of course, I was worried.
I was on the phone with one of my sisters in PA, who is retired from the Air Force and served in Afghanistan. I was telling her about this and she told me she had talked to my daughter too and she didn’t think my daughter ignored me and she told me she was sure that my daughter and her husband, both in their mid-30s, married over a decade, were going to do everything possible to keep the baby, their first child, safe.
So, I thought about it and I had to be honest with myself about my prepping – especially the stockpiling basics and trying to think about every what-if imaginable vs. my daughter and son-in-law’s emergency skills. On my side I like having lots of supplies, I did a lot of family support volunteer work when my husband was in the Army and I spent a few years as a Red Cross volunteer casework chair at an Army post we were at, providing emergency communications services and emergency assistance to soldiers and their families. I trained volunteer caseworkers, working alongside the paid Red Cross staff. So, okay, I had some experience, but here’s the thing, my daughter was in a Boy Scout Explorer group as a teenager, that met at a local fire company and she took state-certified fire-fighting training, to include extracting people from burning vehicles. Right out of high school she took an EMT course and she worked at a local hospital doing admissions at the ER. My son-in-law was in the Army when they got married. He served in Iraq as a combat medic.
The other truth is in a real SHTF situation they would both be much calmer in a crisis than I am, because I worry a lot. I’m better at something like handling Red Cross emergency communications or cooking food or baking cookies to help people rather than dealing with blood and guts stuff. They made a blanket tent, kept tabs on the temp. situation, in their house, talked to two friends in the area, who had gas heat still working, so they went to one of their friends. I had urged my daughter to decide before it got dark if they were going to go to one of their friends, to avoid traveling on icy roads in the dark and they did that.
I mentioned Desert Storm in a few posts and that’s because I learned a lot from that experience. The rumor mill among Army wives is something to behold, when the husbands are away on field training exercises, but having them actually deploy to war was surreal. That rumor mill, which you can get a smidgeon of a taste watching the social media drama, isn’t just benign, it can severely damage morale of troops, if they call their wives and start worrying. In the Army it’s part of commanders’ responsibilities to try to provide information to dispel rumors. Many of the wives who had a lot of problems were the ones who believed every rumor that circulated.
Before the ground war, a doctor from the Army hospital at Frankfurt called me to see if I could bring my youngest daughter, who was 3, down there for a non-emergency surgical procedure, that she was on a waiting list for. They were trying to utilize the empty operating rooms, while the hospital was preparing for potential casualties. I was having some car problems, so I asked the doctor if I could call back in a few hours and see if I could work out arrangements. The doctor wanted to do the procedure and keep my daughter overnight, so I had to find transportation to Frankfurt and someone to watch my other 3 kids overnight. A close friend told me she would pick-up my kids and keep them overnight and she lived in the housing area where the elementary school was located. She said she could take them to school and pick them up too.
A young wife of one of the soldiers in my husband’s company stopped by my house and she had a problem child young wife with her – one who was always worked up about something. I told them that I was trying to find transportation to Frankfurt and the one wife told me she could take me down to Frankfurt, but she had something going on and couldn’t pick me up the next day. The problem child wife immediately told me she could pick up my daughter and me in Frankfurt the next day. I asked her if she was sure and she told me she’d love to help. Just like that a problem wife solved my problem. I am grateful to this day.
So here’s another reality check about my stockpiling extra food and supplies, not to mention my mountain of craft and needlework supplies. I don’t have stuff stacked up like in one of those episodes of Hoarders, but invariably my closets and cupboards are full and I continually cart extra stuff and stick it in the garage. When my youngest daughter was a teenager, as the older kids left home, I turned the smallest bedroom into my craft/sewing room and the whole room was more like an overstuffed closet. My youngest daughter many times went in there and organized everything, labeled containers, and cleaned it so there were clear work surfaces while I was at work. She couldn’t stand my clutter. She did the same thing with my cupboards and pantry and she tossed canned goods past the best buy date, which I don’t do, then she organized everything. She’s also helped me clean out the garage two or three times when she’s been home visiting, so I am trying to do better at organizing.
One time, many years ago, I had an Indian meal moth situation in my kitchen and ordered moth traps from amazon. My daughter helped me clean out all of my cupboards. One really useful thing I learned watching a lot of YouTube videos was about proper food storage, which prompted me to start using the foodsaver my youngest daughter had given me years before and that I had tried once and put away. I use mylar bags with oxygen absorbers now too. No lie, yesterday she sent me a text message with info about McCormick spices in the can are at least 25 years old and she wrote, “You probably have some of these.” LOL. I don’t actually, I had read that a few years ago and found a few cans in the back of my spice cupboard and tossed them.
My youngest daughter is never going to stockpile groceries like I do – and I understand her point of view, even if I think it’s wiser to have a large stockpile of food, water and supplies. I tell my youngest daughter that she’s just like my mother, who ruthlessly purged unused stuff around our house… and lectured me that I was turning into a packrat, just like my grandmother. It skips generations in my family, I think.
And finally, here’s the thing, most emergencies you encounter are around your home and community, even most car accidents happen close to home. Your desired prepper friends, who meet your prepping standards, likely won’t be around you, but your family, friends and neighbors will. And that’s the number one reason that especially in an emergency you should do your best to work together. Several times I’ve seen flood news stories over the years from the Midwest, where there are people who lost their homes to a flood, working in a nearby town filling sandbags and trying to help other people save their homes. I remember a young man telling a reporter that there was nothing they could do about their home, so they decided to try to help people in the next town. That’s the kind of emergency response attitude, I think would serve us better than all this fuming about people who aren’t prepping like we think they should. And of course, it’s good to continue to encourage people to prepare and try to provide accurate and helpful information too.
In a few recent posts I took a dim view of this pretty prevalent mind-set in the online prepper community about weeding out the “undesirables” among friends, family, acquaintances and figuring out who are the people you are going to help and trust in a crisis or SHTF emergency. I like Sensible Prepper’s channel and even he had some suggestions about putting together a group of like-minded people – like interview carefully if you’re putting together a group that’s going to form up when SHTF. This weeding out undesirables and finding “like-minded” people was like a warning light going off in my head.
This very same idea has been circulating among the right-wing echo-chamber for years and it’s one of the worst ideas for Americans to embrace. I remembered writing about an effort that some grifter was selling on Glenn Beck’s show back in 2013. That man was selling his oasis of liberty as some community they were setting up in Idaho that was ostensibly based on finding people united by their belief in patriotism, liberty, pride in American exceptionalism and preparedness. Beck gave this con man a platform on his show, despite knowing this man had a criminal record for extortion and this oasis in Idaho existed only on a website – the planners didn’t even have property in Idaho. They were carefully selecting residents for their new community, The Citadel, on Skype interviews and then collecting an application fee, plus $50 a month to raise money to buy property. The most perfect con was this guy was playing conservatives dangling that this new vetted community was going to set up a firearms factory as a means for the community to generate jobs and income.
George Washington is my favorite founding father. Beck, like most of these right-wing media talking heads, has gotten rich playing to our conservative values, patriotism, and even more to right-wing Americans’ fears of the left’s culture war for decades and yes, I have been alarmed about the left’s culture war my entire adult life too. After that show I stopped subscribing to Beck’s online show and I began to be much more questioning about what exactly these big right-wing personalities are selling, but since I hate to part with books, I still have my copy of Beck’s “Being George Washington.”
I had been listening to Rush Limbaugh from the early 90s. I had agreed with many of the ideas the Tea Party was promoting and as right-wing media started elevating a growing crowd of “celebrities” I listened to them and too uncritically bought into a lot of the ideas they were selling, because we’ve been trained to buy into the red vs. blue politics in America and if you’re conservative, so much of the liberal agenda is an affront to all the values you hold dear. Here’s the hard truth – much of the right-wing media echo-chamber is just a huge grift – selling merchandise, books, the big shows, like O’Reilly and Beck used to do and now Trump has turned his “rallies” into his trademark. For the record, I voted for Trump in 2020, out of complete dread of Democrats controlling Congress and the White House, even though I believe he’s a total con man and was just running the largest reality TV show from the White House, at least his administration was pushing many policies I agreed with… and even more that, at least he wasn’t Joe Biden.
It was easy for me to see the left-wing media culture war craziness. I mean being told I must now accept that men dressing like women are really women or being told we’re supposed to refer to pregnant women as “birthing persons,” had me telling my family that I don’t want to hear anything about this insane alphabet gender politics on the left and um, sorry, I can tell you where to shove your “pronouns.” And of course, watching new radical racial politics where white people, even little kids, are commanded to denounce their “white privilege,” left me wondering if America was now embracing Maoist struggle sessions, which were a form of public-shaming and torture that Mao used to enforce conformity. It took a lot longer for me to recognize the right-wing culture war craziness.
In another blog post I’ll try to step away from the partisan politics and talk about this idea of picking the people who you will help in an emergency and why I don’t believe finding “like-minded” people who are prepping like you are and to the level you think makes them worthy and weeding out the undesirable non-prepping people would really work well in an actual real world crisis. It might lead to you excluding people at a time when pulling as many people together as possible really will help your chances of survival. I believe in working to include as many people as possible, even ones who don’t meet my preparedness standards – especially in a crisis.
This blog post is going to be about prepping, in a roundabout way. Years ago I took an interest in kumihimo when I worked at Walmart as the department manager of the fabrics and crafts department. Around stores you often see merchandise, mostly impulse purchase items, hanging from plastic strips, which we called clip strips. We had a clip strip of small, round foam kumihimo looms, that cost a few dollars. I kept looking at these looms, because I knew nothing about kumihimo. So of course I bought one, because who can pass up learning another craft or needlework technique, right?
There are crafters who make beautiful beaded kumihimo jewelry, but with my ever-growing list of crafts and needlework hobbies, I just learned how to do a few different braids, using various types of embroidery floss and yarn. I haven’t really gotten into kumihimo, but I’m glad I learned a few simple braids. Please excuse my terrible photography, but here’s the foam kumihimo loom with a few of the braids I made.
In my last blog post Sensible Prepper mentioned how it’s good to have how-to books, in case of, for instance, the power goes out or the internet’s down. He also mentioned how it’s good to have cordage, like paracord.
Cordage has been something that’s interested me for years. When I make small counted cross stitch projects, often I need to make a hanger out of embroidery floss to hang the finished piece and the most common finishing instruction is to use a technique of twisting 6-strand embroidery floss, which I’ve done for over 40 years, but then I saw a needleworker online recommend a cordmaker, that looks similar to a fishing reel. You can make yards of twisted cord in only a few minutes. I bought a cord maker, but haven’t used it yet. I will use it eventually, because I have several cross-stitched Christmas ornaments done and need to finish them into ornaments and they’ll need hangers.
Both the cheap foam kumihimo loom and this cord maker could be useful at making rope and cordage for more utilitarian purposes, I think, if you couldn’t buy any at the store. Even if you don’t have a ton of craft and needlework supplies like me, it’s simple to take apart a piece of old clothes, like a sweater and reuse that yarn or to even cut thin strips out of all sorts of materials – like an old bed sheet or t-shirt or even try cutting strips from black trash bags and making cordage in a pinch.
If you are a prepper and you don’t watch Townsends, I highly recommend their YouTube channel. They do a lot of 18th century cooking there, but so much more than that, as they explore early American life. They built a cabin, they have someone who does blacksmith work like they would have in 18th century America – to include making their own nails. A few years ago they had a guest, Dan from Coalcracker Bushcraft, which is located in the Appalachian Mountains of PA and part of the Appalachian Trail runs through the Pocono Mountains, not far from my childhood home. Dan showed how to make cordage from tree bark using a simple twisting technique:
One of my favorite YouTube homesteaders is Patara at Appalachia’s Homestead. She’s feisty and opinionated like me, so even when I disagree with her about something, I know her heart’s in the right place from watching a lot of her other videos. She did a video a few days ago with her husband, James, who is very quiet, but in this video he talked more. They both came up with their own general category type lists of prepper supplies to think about having and I found it interesting how different their lists were. James thinks outside the box. He’s like me, with his “well, I could take this and repurpose it to do X, Y, Z type thinking.” At minute 16:52, James lists twine and string and I was sitting here, going, “YES!” Patara’s facial expression cracked me up, but hey, I’m on Team James with the twine and string, but I’d add ropes, fishing line, various strength threads and needles, like having curved needles to repair heavier materials and leather needles. A pack of homecraft or home repair needles is a good thing to have or several, because often when working using heavier materials, I’ve had to use pliers to pull the needle through and I’ve had needles break.
A lot of preppers have mentioned acquiring reference and how-to books. I’ve got a whole bunch, even an old Yankee Magazine book on olden days stuff, that explains everything from how to make your own paint from scratch to how to manage a small woodlot. With cordage in mind, years ago I picked up this book on knots and ropework, thinking it would be good to learn some of these knots sometime.
Learning as many skills as you can really matters as much as stockpiling supplies, I think. A few years ago I came across this interesting effort by some crafty people to cut plastic shopping bags in strips and turn them into “plarn,” a plastic yarn of sorts, which they make into mats to donate to homeless people.
Back in the 1970s, my great-grandmother saw some crochet project in her Workbasket magazine, using plastic bread wrappers to crochet rugs, so this “plarn” sleeping mat idea isn’t new. I remember those bread wrapper rugs, because everyone in the family was saving bread wrappers for her to crochet those rugs and also, because I found the rugs fascinating and my mother was not impressed with them, lol.
Before I end this long string (or yarn)… there’s a bad pun there, about cordage, I’m going to add this link to a YouTube channel devoted to rag rugs. Erin Halvorsen is absolutely the queen of rag rugs and has loads of information and tutorials on her channel of how to create your strips for various rag rugs to step-by-step instructions on how to make the rugs. Erin has loads of videos preserving many unusual and old-fashioned techniques. In this video she makes a unique twine rag rug, where she shows you how to make the twine, using a similar twisting technique as the cordage from bark that Coalcracker Bushcraft used in the Townsends video, then she crochets the rug together:
I hope I’ve “tied” together all of these interesting ways with creating and using cordage and I hope that more people start learning to “shop” their home first before rushing out to buy more prepper supplies.
I’m just going to start sharing videos and links that I think offer useful prepping information without writing a whole lot. Learning to be prepared is way more important right now, I believe, than at any time in my life. There are so many major serious events going on in America and the world – from extreme partisan divides here to global crises that could impact us. There are people in the prepper community with way more knowledge than me and many of them offer calm, practical information. In this video, Sensible Prepper and his guest offer a ton of basic prepping advice:
libertybelle diaries 