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Showing posts from March, 2008

The Wal-Mart Plan

I kinda ripped this idea off from the guys over at AR15.com. I just expanded on it a bit. What a lot of those guys do every time they go to Wal-Mart is buy a 550 round brick of .22lr. The idea is that for an extra $10 per shopping trip you'll end up with thousands of rounds of ammo in a pretty short amount of time (even though it is just .22) and you won't even notice how much it cost you. The reason that they shop at Wal-Mart is because the final total tends to be cheaper than at other stores. The first thing that you need to do before you can really use this method effectively is get to know where to go to get certain items. Every time I go to target I get a few cans of tomatoes and mushrooms. Their 28 oz cans of diced tomatoes are about $.50 cheaper than everywhere else ($.89 per can when I went to pick some up today). King Soopers probably has the cheapest meat department in the area. I've found that they have the biggest "manager's special" markdo

Mmm Sourdough

I'm a bread lover. I always want to be able to have it. One problem is that you need yeast to make it. So you're a few months into the latest and greatest disaster. You're running low on yeast or your yeast supply was ruined because the power grid is down and you couldn't keep it refrigerated. That's when you go back to baking bread the old fashioned way. Before you can start making sourdough you need to make a starter. It's basically a cultured vat of wild yeast. Start with a cup of whole wheat or unbleached flour and a cup of water. Mix it up and put it somewhere dry and dark. Every day pour half of it out and add half a cup of flour and half a cup of water. After a few days it will start to bubble. It should have a yeasty, doughy, sour smell to it. You'll also notice that a layer of liquid forms on top of it. Once it starts bubbling then you can start using it to make bread. Pour the starter into a mixing bowl with a cup of water and a cup

What our founding fathers missed

The US government is about as close to perfect as any world government comes. Our founding fathers drew from the lessons of the past to try to form a republic that would protect every individual citizen and put their rights first. Unfortunately the greed and unscrupulousness of ambitious people cannot be underestimated. Over the years people have found ways to work within the system to improve their own situation at the expense of others. Our founding fathers realized that the people that control the money supply control the economy which, in turn, allows them control of everything else in the system. They tried to put into place a system that would insure that our government would maintain complete control of our money supply. Almost 100 years ago Congress gave that power away to a panel of appointed bankers. Just look at where that got us. We gave up the gold standard because it limits the profits of the people at the very top of the totem pole. Basically the economy becom

War with Iran

It looks like George Bush effectively fired Admiral William Fallon, one of the highest ranking officials in Iraq and one of Bush's loudest voices of dissent. He didn't think that the Iraq war was a good idea. He doesn't think that war with Iran is a good idea. The end result? Bush doesn't want someone like that working for him. Here's the story. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/03/12/BL2008031201898.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Ignorance is bliss

Lately I've seen more and more people talking about how they sense something bad just around the corner. Obviously the news has a lot to do with that. The internet has changed the way that we receive our news. It's becoming more and more easily accessible and big stories are being distributed much more quickly. You don't have to pay for a newspaper subscription and read about it the next day or have the tv on at a certain time to find out what's going on these days. You just click a button on the internet and you can find out about what just happened five minutes ago. Also, people can take that news and run with it. You get to see people's thoughts and reactions to it real time. Stories are quickly and easily sensationalized. You have experts on both sides trying to break it down. It's easy to point to one expert's take on what's going on while completely ignoring another expert that's saying something completely different. Unfortunately,

One more thing to worry about

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,335186,00.html Apparently there's a super nova about to explode and it's close enough that it could affect us (or completely obliterate us if the conditions are juuuust right).

What I see unraveling

I've been seeing the gold standard pop up a lot lately. People preach about how we have to have sound money. We have to know that the money is there for it to be worth anything. For a few smart people this may be true. Unfortunately most people are dumb. If you give them a piece of paper and tell them "You can buy stuff with this" then they will go out and try to use it to buy stuff with. When they spend their entire lives getting stuff for the worthless paper then they perceive it as valuable. As long as everyone thinks that it's valuable then it's valuable. There are just a few things that our economy needs to really thrive. It's a consumer based economy so obviously the people have to have money to blow. They also have to be willing to spend their money. Once the consumers start to lose confidence then things go downhill. Cheap energy is also a necessity. As long as things like gas, food and water are cheap then we have plenty of leftover cash