Turning FRNs into goods

Should smart preppers (and others) be holding onto cash, or should we be turning that cash-- and even more so, the electronic "money" in bank accounts-- into hard goods? Goods we will need if money loses what little remaining value it has.

If I knew when/if hyperinflation will hit, the answer would be easy: Get stuff now.

I've done a little of that anyway. I'm hoping that doesn't turn out to be a mistake (at least I don't have credit cards to max out). If TSHTF I won't be needing that money to pay for those things, which I also won't be needing, anyway.

But I don't know when/if there will be hyperinflation, and I don't believe anyone who says they do know.

I'm still holding onto my crypto-- but an EMP would erase all that as effectively as the Feral Reserve has erased the value of dollars. And much faster. If I thought an EMP was likely, I'd be spending it.

I'm also hanging onto my metals (and I know I should be getting more). 

Speaking of metals, I've acquired more "liberty seeds" recently-- but not as many more as I'd like. I suppose I could convert those back into FRNs if I need to-- and soon, probably more than I paid.

What do you think? Are you preparing for hyperinflation, or do you think that's just a paranoid fantasy? Are you keeping "extra" cash and electronic bank funds or are you using them to get things you can actually use, no matter what happens?

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Control freaks I've encountered

There are those who feel the need to control others and those who don't. 

I'm one of those who don't. The limit of my desire to "control" others is simply to not allow them to control me. Otherwise, they can pretty much do what they want as far as I'm concerned. 

I think it partly explains the difference between government supremacists and the rest of us.

"Daylight Saving Time" fans are among the controllers. They aren't content to simply start work an hour earlier; they must force everyone else to pretend they aren't doing that. Reality is their enemy.

Another example was a boss I once had. I got tired of being the one non-manager who had to stay late nearly every night (up to 4 hours late some days), but I said it wouldn't bother me if I could start work later (since I'm not a morning person). He rejected this suggestion without even seeming to consider it. He said everyone "had to" start work at the same time (but not everyone had to leave work at the same time?). He couldn't explain why, though. Apparently, for some reason, only I had to stay at least an hour late every day. I soon put an end to that nonsense, but so much trouble could have been avoided if he'd simply done the reasonable thing I asked for. He couldn't because he "needed" to control me. This need to control also resulted in him going through the whole workforce in the area, and concluding that the reason he couldn't keep good employees was that everyone in town was lazy and worthless. He couldn't face the reality that he was the problem; he wanted to blame everyone else. He would have made a good bureaucrat or politician, I guess.

When you don't have an actual reason, you try to force others to do things your way. But this only exposes your weakness.

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Social media doing invisible damage

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for February 23, 2022)

Throughout history the older generation has thought the younger generations are weak, frivolous, and self-centered. Just as that older generation's elders thought the same of it, and so on to the beginnings of our species.

It's time to break the cycle with some reality.

Young people are not much different from generation to generation. You and I were just as foolish when we were young, as were our grandparents. Only the details of our foolishness differed. We grew up and found ways to be foolish mature people.

The problem isn't with the young people of any era, it's with the world they find themselves living in.

Growing up during war, famine, or a plague (a real one like the Black Death, not an overreaction like Covid) is going to affect the development of young people more than it affects the lives of the older generations. It's easier to damage a seedling than a mature tree.

The thing most damaging to youth today is the deceptively named plague of "social media". It's as bad as war or pestilence. But like famine or disease, there's no point in throwing blame; your energy is better spent helping the affected learn to live in spite of the trouble around them.

Most young people will overcome and go on. Many will not. Those most susceptible to the opinions of others are at a disadvantage, just as those too weak to hunt for food were at a disadvantage in hunter-gatherer societies.

If you saw someone in trouble, whether starving or injured, you'd help. Social media injury isn't always so obvious.

Symptoms of this damage-- also known as "wokeness"-- include identity problems, racism sold as "anti-racism", and a call for everyone to be exactly equal, not in rights, but in outcomes. This often results in a reliance on government to fix everything with legislation or by handing out money it doesn't have. It leaves scars as real as a missing limb, a bullet wound, or a head injury.

I was encouraged by the recent report of the four local teenagers who came to the aid of another young person who had been injured in an accident. Instead of just taking pictures of the scene and posting them to social media-- as has happened in other emergencies around the world-- they jumped into action and helped. In the end, we'll be fine because they'll be fine.

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"They're gonna take away our rights!"

No. They aren't.

They might violate your rights and make it more dangerous to exercise your rights, but no matter what legislation they impose, your rights remain unchanged. Forever.

So, no matter what the Supreme Courtjesters do to the Second Amendment, your natural human right to own and to carry weaponry remains. That right doesn't exist because of the Second Amendment-- it exists because you were born human.

Sure, cops may murder you for exercising that right. Gun stores may not be able to sell you what you want. It may come to 3-D printer control and confiscation, or whatever evil legislation enforcers (a redundant phrase) choose to do in order to violate your natural rights.

It's the same with every other right you have. Whether it is popular or not. If it doesn't violate someone else's life, liberty, or property in a concrete way, then it is within your rights.

"They" can't take away your rights-- you only have to be scared into not exercising them. Be strong. They are wrong. They are the bad guys-- never forget that.

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"No guns" = "whites only"

Any argument for one works equally well for the other. 

Only libertarians can make an ethically consistent argument in favor of both, based on the property rights of the evil people who would post either sign.

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Moving the needle

As I was taking my daily walk, a woman stopped her car beside me and told me she really liked my latest column, and that she's "getting more like" me all the time.

That's great!

The only possibly bad thing is that she appeared to be in her 70s or 80s. Maybe that's not as bad as it seems-- who knows the influence she has on others.

Still, I'll take what I can get. 

Most of the time I feel like a voice in the wilderness. I've spent a lot of time in the wilderness and I know that there's almost nothing you can say in that situation to make any impact. Scream and shout and maybe you'll spook a deer and some birds, but you're not going to influence anyone.

But, just maybe, there are a few people listening after all.

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Without life, there is no liberty... but you won't miss it and won't care.
Without liberty, life is a hellscape.
That's why I value liberty more than life itself.

I want a quick and easy fix, too

If I could eradicate the scourge of political government ("the state") from the planet-- and from the human heart and mind-- with the quick and easy push of a button, I would push it. No hesitation.

I know a lot of people who wouldn't, for one reason or another. That's their choice, not mine.

Yes, I know it would cause terrible pain for a lot of people. So does pulling an abscessed tooth or setting a broken bone. I'd do it anyway because it is essential for long-term survival. Putting the pain off because you imagine it would be cruel will only make it worse when it finally has to be dealt with, which it will-- you're doing no one any favors by prolonging the disease.

But, there is no such button.

Instead, you are limited to the real world where you can either try to v*te yourself more liberty, fight the thugs of the state directly, or work around them. 

The first way, which most people hope is the "easy button", won't work. There's just no chance.
The second way will get you killed. Let someone else be a martyr.
The third way seems-- to me-- the only realistic option. I could be wrong, but it's what I strive to do. and what I try to encourage others to do. And, it's not easy or quick!

I acknowledge the existence of the state and its criminals ("politicians", legislation/rule enforcers, bureaucrats, agents, employees). Just like I acknowledge the existence of the mafia, freelance rapists, and other bad guys. 

What I don't do-- what I won't do-- is pretend the goons of the state are somehow less evil than the other criminal types. They are at least as evil-- probably more. They just hide it better behind a professional veil and rules they've made up to "legitimize" their crimes in the eyes of many of their victims. But their acts are no more legitimate than any other act of archation. 

You don't do yourself any favors by pretending otherwise. In fact, you need to let others see that you view those "officials" and their ilk as nothing more than gangsters or common criminals. Let your ethical behavior encourage others to give themselves permission to see the thugs of the state as they truly are. The emperor has no clothes-- and never did have any. Say it without shame.

As Etienne de la Boétie pointed out, "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."

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Government is NOT a "social institution"

Never confuse government for a social institution. It's not one and never has been.

I see people make this mistake pretty often. I blame schools and the media. If someone tells you a horse is a cow enough times, some number of people will begin to believe it. Others of us continue to recognize that there are FOUR lights and the emperor has no clothes. (Those mantras work pretty well against w0ke indoctrination and its compelled lies, too.)

At best, government is an anti-social institution. At worst, it's an extinction-level threat to all life and liberty. The difference depends on how strong the parallel society/ies, beyond government control, is/are.

If government refuses to be ignored or avoided, treat it like the error it is-- correct the mistake by deleting it. Society-- unless you'd call a plantation of slaves a society-- likely depends on the extinction of political government. It's soon going to be an either/or situation.

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The preps I'd get if money weren't an issue

This is a cross-post with my Casually Serious Prepping locals group.

As I've said recently, I feel pretty good about the condition of my preps. I've never been better positioned for the S to HTF, even though I don't think my location is ideal since there is no real outdoors (farmland doesn't count) within a couple hundred miles.
But if I had the money there are more things I'd get. 

I'd get much more ammo.
I'd get antibiotics packs for everyone in the household from JASE Medical.
I'd get more water containers, sturdy ones, the kind that can stack like bricks as well as a couple of water bobs.
I'd stock up on heritage seeds, even though I'm a terrible gardener. 
Even though I believe it's important to reduce dependence on electricity in anticipation of TEOTWAWKI scenarios, I'd still get a solar "generator" and solar panels to charge it.
I'd get a more secure, larger shed, and a sturdy privacy fence around my entire property.
I'd get locking gas caps, and harden my vehicles against EMPs.
I'd get more monetary metals and trade goods.

What would you get if money were less a factor?

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Legislation only creates more crime

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for February 16, 2022)

Legislation, which many people incorrectly call "law", doesn't reduce crime. It can't. In fact, each new bit of legislation creates at least one more crime-- often several more-- and many more criminals as a result. People who weren't criminals before are now, for doing things which weren't crimes yesterday, but which are now arbitrarily declared to be.

Every time anything is criminalized it creates new criminals. That's really the only thing it does. Anyone who doesn't understand this correlation shouldn't be in a position of power over the lives of others.

Murder doesn't need to be illegal for it to be a real crime. You would still have the right and the obligation to defend against murderers. The only thing accomplished by making murder illegal is to allow government to punish it at your expense; an unnecessary complication.

To seek to address crime with more legislation is actually going backward if your goal is to reduce crime. If the goal is to give the state more ways to punish people who don't do what the politicians wish they'd do, then I suppose it works. It's not productive, though.

If you want to fight crime you need to stop pretending something can be a crime even though it has no specific individual victim-- someone whose life, liberty, or property has been harmed intentionally by someone else. Mutually consensual acts don't create a victim and the state can't be a victim.

If there's such a thing as a drug crime, it involves someone misrepresenting their product. Maybe the weight or the purity are not as advertised, or it's stolen property. For that matter, drug prohibition enforcement is the biggest drug crime, since it attempts to punish mutually consensual trade.

There are plenty of other examples which show, again, that government legislation is the source of most crime.

If you're serious about reducing crime, abolish or simply ignore all the legislation responsible for creating it. Leave the people alone to live as they see fit as long as they violate no one else's rights. Let people defend themselves and their property without the risk of being victimized afterward by the state's legislation enforcement and prosecution gangs.

Crime is a problem. Making it a bigger problem than it naturally has to be is not smart but is counterproductive and antisocial. It's long past time to scale it back and start heading in the right direction for a change.

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Bidenflation

Bidenflation. OK, so it's a funny thought, but it's not quite correct. 

Obviously, it's also Trump's inflation. He started it with the first rounds of Covid "stimulus" bribes, after allowing Dr. Evil to demand the economy be destroyed. (But even he was only building on the crimes committed by government/the Federal Reserve since 1913, which make inflation inevitable.)

But then Biden doubled down and is now trying to blame it on Putin's war crimes (a redundant phrase).

Of course, whichever political criminal is in office when the problem becomes obvious is the one who generally gets most of the blame. That's Biden. And if Biden were to blame this on Trump it would allow the masses to think about that and maybe realize it is also Biden's fault for not reversing course. That would be bad for the Zombie-in-Chief.

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Your ancestors' bad choices don't obligate you

Just because our ancestors did something stupid (or evil) hundreds or thousands of years ago doesn't obligate us to perpetuate their mistake. Their bad choices don't need to lock us in.

Establishing political government was a stupid mistake-- yes, even establishing one with the US Constitution. 

Putting forth effort and money to continue to prop it up today, especially in the pro-government slanted way it is being propped up these past 160 years or so, compounds that mistake.

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Institutionalizing wrongness

Even when government tries to do something useful, they do it wrong.

The political criminals in DC have proposed getting rid of the stupid and deadly, twice-yearly clock re-setting. That's good... but the morons are proposing to stick with the worse clock setting: "Daylight saving" time.

Know what it doesn't do? Save any daylight. The daylight stays the same regardless of how badly you set your clocks. Smart, responsible people realize this fact and don't fiddle with other people's clocks.

By that (wildly incorrect) setting, the sun in this area will be at noon around 2PM during parts of the year.

I'm all for getting rid of the anachronistic superstitious practice of changing clock settings twice a year to beg the Sun for more daylight (even though it can't work). But not for imposing the less correct setting on everyone.

That's what you get when "morning people" get power. They always feel the need to force everyone to do things by their schedule. Instead of just opening their businesses an hour earlier, as would be honest, they want your clocks mis-set so it appears that they are opening (and closing) at a reasonable time. DST is a lie.

If they can do that, why can't we all just set our clocks to say the current "time" of 10AM is now 6AM? It makes exactly as much sense as what they propose to make permanent.

Who decided political criminals should have any say on setting clocks? It was a dumb mistake, whoever did it.

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Too dangerous to tolerate

Politics makes people stupid (and usually, also evil). 

Political government is, by definition, political. So, political government is stupid and makes people who "believe in it" stupid-- and often, makes them commit evil.

That's why so many of them support wars, politicians, and other rights violations and anti-liberty things.

Politics is too dangerous to have around.

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Hoist with his own petard?

There's a guy I know of who has been on crutches for a couple of months. He seems like a decent enough guy.

But... a relative of his lives near me and had to babysit his dogs for a few weeks a while back while he did some remodeling on his house. They are large, aggressive dogs, and I didn't enjoy having them near my house. 

They even escaped a few times and were a threat to people in the neighborhood.

I just overheard a conversation he was having with someone else about his crutches and it turns out he was injured a couple of months ago by being attacked in his front yard by his neighbor's aggressive dog.

I wonder if this experience taught him anything about the folly of owning large, aggressive dogs that are able to escape and run loose.

I wonder if he even sees the irony in his situation.

I hate to admit, but it made my sympathy shrink to a much smaller level.

It reminded me of the friend of mine who freaked out on me many years ago over my lack of respect for police, but then sheepishly admitted I was completely right after they kicked in his door and treated him like a criminal on a tip.

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Hard to deprogram cult of government

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for February 9, 2022)

There is room in this world for many different beliefs, even those which are wrong.

Beliefs are only truly incompatible when one of them includes the belief that it's OK to force others to believe one particular thing. Or, more accurately, to force others to pretend they believe, since belief can't be imposed. Any such belief discredits itself; no valid belief has to be forced on others.

I'm fine with the beliefs of others, even beliefs I think are crazy. It's only when those believers start trying to force their beliefs on me that I have a problem with them. If they push hard enough, I'm going to push back. This is why I write-- I'm pushing back against a dangerous belief.

The most universal belief today is the belief in the legitimacy of political government. Even local churches often fly a U.S. federal flag above their Christian flag, showing which belief system they prioritize. They aren't-- yet-- being forced to fly the federal flag outside their facilities; they choose to do so. I'm sure they can find excuses for their divided loyalties and upside-down priorities, but those excuses fall flat.

If government would respect those who don't believe in it, like more civilized religions do, I would have less of an issue with it and its faithful believers.

Fortunately, government still allows you to practice other beliefs, too, if they are compatible with a belief in government. How generous.

Imagine if another church decided you had to send it your tithes even if you belonged to a different denomination. Or if one declared you would be beaten and caged if you broke any of the rules it imposed on its members even if you belonged to a church which had no such rules.

Some churches have used government to do this; getting it to impose their rules on everyone through legislation. Using government in this way is just as wrong as using it to punish someone for their race or sex or eye color.

So, government is less a religion than a cult. Getting deprogrammed is difficult when almost everyone around you is a true believer. The main disagreement you'll normally find with the cult of government is those who wish someone else were its high priest. May as well rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Believe whatever crazy thing you want, but don't burn the lifeboats or block others from using them.

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"The Russians are coming!"

When I was a kid-- back around the time I began to realize that government was the enemy of everything I valued-- I stopped believing that Russians were the problem. Yes, the Soviet government was my enemy, because it was a government, but I knew Russian people were not the same thing as the Soviet government.

I never feared "The Russians".

I hoped they recognized the same was true about me.

If America got nuked, governments were to blame, not regular people.

I have slightly expanded that blame over the years to include people who imagine political government is somehow legitimate; government-supremacists. Their support empowers the political criminals, even if only by saying the "office" is legitimate even if the goon currently occupying it isn't. 

I assume that in every place around the world, there are a lot of people who know government is a problem, who don't support anything it does, and who don't fall for the propaganda. Those people I can befriend.

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Someday, the w0ke will be viewed with the same contempt as the Nazis are now. 

For some of us, that someday arrived 5 or 10 years ago.
I still don't support a military invasion to rout them from an area.

Site news

After careful consideration, and a mostly sleepless night, I've decided to take down KentForLiberty.com-- just that website. This blog will go on as usual, but there will be a LOT of broken links in posts written before today. I don't think the expense is justifiable anymore.

It feels like a loss, but I'll get over it. It's just time.

Plus, I have its pages mirrored at the top of this blog, so the information wouldn't disappear.

I'm going to see how much it costs to keep the domain name, though. 

Apparently, I can't cancel until after they charge me for the next month, as payment processing has already begun. But soon.

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