From the People Who Want to Nationalize Everything (else)

I'm sorry. I know this blog is austensibly about my plan to escape the grid, but occasionally I sneak in an example of why the grid is at such peril. Well, this falls in the latter category.


From the folks who have declared martial law over banks, the finance industry, the insurance industry, the auto industry, all employee compensation, and one sixth of the US economy bound up in health care... we got this letter yesterday:

Here is the important part:

If they can't keep track of the stuff that gets them money which they turn around and use against me to confiscate even more money... where does anyone think this is headed? "Yes, Mr. Smith, your liver transplant request filed three years ago is approved. We have the organ here somewhere, please be patient while it is being located."

Even Paranoia Needs A Little Time Off

Please follow the Smith Family Alaskan Adventure from Jun 19 - 28.

I was born and raised in Fairbanks, leaving there in 1970 to move to a much smaller state. I haven't been back since. Finally, after 39 years, I'm returning and bringing the Clark H Smith Family of Wife and Children with me.

Alaska is a very odd place (in the context of this blog). It is remote and rugged - and so are the people. If ever there were a state with an exceptionally high percentage of people capable of surviving when the grid goes down - it is Alaska. On the other hand, Alaska has almost exclusively been populated, cultivated, mined, bored, and processed for the sake of the grid! Gold in the late 1800s and oil in the late 1900s has kept Alaska from being a mere asterisk on the map. Wild people went to wild Alaska to extract from it the resources in highest demand by those living on the grid elsewhere.

I hope you'll stop by our live blog often and see what The Great Land is like in the early 2000s.

Fair Warning

In the turbulent 70s, I watched a dust up between two artifacts of the American media from the 40s and 50s. (These names may not even ring a distant bell today, but they were almost household names "back in the day".) NBC journalist Edwin Newman was interviewing the near-famous George (Georgie) Jessel (a sarcastic crank who made his bones being a smart-aleck bon vivant). Jessel kept cracking wise about the New York Times by referring to it as PRAVDA - the Russian communist apologist / newspaper. Newman, the last American major-media journalist with a shred of integrity, booted Jessel off the show for his slanderous remarks about such a revered American institution.

Times have changed. Now, the "The Gray Lady" (as the NYT is often lovingly called) is unapologetically pro-Marxist in its support for Obama and PRAVDA - once the most despised purveyor of godless communism - is warning the world of "the American descent into Marxism".

This humble little blog is about my paranoid flight to self-sufficient living for just such a time as the America is no longer a free republic. The article in PRAVDA, which you'd never hear in the New York Times, is fair warning. I may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean that we're not heading into deep difficulties.

You Have The Right… Until She Says You’re Wrong

You could also file this post under Mr. Crazy Has Friends (v4.0). I am not alone in reacting with abject paranoia to His Paleness’ latest presidential act. The nomination of Sonia Sortamediocre to the Supreme Court is going to cause yet another run on guns and ammo (just when I thought we were about to crawl out of the first run arising from 44’s election).

It turns out there is a very peculiar problem with the US Constitution. It turns out that the Bill of Rights only limits what the federal government can do, not what the states can do. I never thought about that. (Apparently I’m not the constitutional scholar I thought I was. Accordingly, through links in this post I’m referring the reader to several sources above this blog’s pay grade that illuminate on the subject.) But for the sake of the post, let me summarize the debate thus: There are two camps of thought on the subject of “incorporation”. One camp holds to incorporation because the 14th Amendment prohibits any state from “abridging” the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States” afforded in the Bill of Rights. The other camp asserts that the Bill of Rights applies only to federal citizenship and that states may (in effect) abridge those rights.

Judge Sottovoce is one of only three (out of 170) federal appellate court judges to rule that the Bill of Rights are not “incorporated” – may be abridged by states. In a landmark case (Maloney v. Cuomo), the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (in New York on which bench the named judge sits) decreed that … “the Second Amendment does not apply to the States and therefore impose[s] no limitations on New York’s ability to prohibit the possession”… of certain weapons (in this case nunchucks – you read that right). Going further, the court said, “It is settled law, however, that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right.”

Settled law? Here’s what the 14th Amendment actually says (in part): “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Now that is “settled law.

As previously suggested, the Leader of the Free World has declared war on Freedom itself and is now appointing judges to ensure that we lose what we do not defend. I suggest that you get yourself to a gun shop near you and drop some significant coin on a memento of a-time-soon-gone-by.

That Should Be Just Enough

I haven't flown since well before September 11, 2001. I understand things have changed since then. The end of June (2009), the Clark H Smith Family of Wife and Children are flying to Alaska. I don't know what I'm in for. But I got a sneek peek today when I visited a doctor about, well, you know, psoriatic arthritis.

My m.d. shall go un-named (not to protect his identity, but to keep from embarrassing him when I tell you that his nimrod assistant put a blood-pressure cuff on my "risk" (wrist - that's where the new-fangled contraption was designed to work, but I can't figure out why someone in a medical office can't pronounce "wrist")), but I can tell you his name is in the top 15 of most common US surnames. Since his office records concerning me were a complete jumble, we fell into a fascinating dialogue about the TSA, spyware, and what not to say to your US Senator.

It turns out Dr. Top15 had recently flown to Canada with ease, but upon his return, he was "way-laid". Turns out, an unsavory character with his same name, his same profession, and also sharing the same high-skill hobby with the good doctor had recently traveled between Canada and the US in the business of trafficing drugs or some other thou-shalt-not. So doc winds up on the TSA no-fly list (for reasons that will soon become obvious, I'm going to forsake my habit of creating hyperlinks to these latest keywords). He made a few low-level calls to see what could be done to get his good name cleared and free the Mounties to keep the real bad guys from flying. Finally, some one suggested doc call his senator.

Being a solid tax-paying citizen, doc rang up Capitol Dome and personally asked his senator what to do. Senator, who I hope never gets a case of psoriatic arthritis, told doc to file a request with the TSA "by email" which was the one route doc hadn't (yet) taken. The TSA promptly replied (via email) to doc that they would not be taking him off the list.

End of story? Not on your paranoid, first-thru-seventh amendment life.

Within a few weeks, doc noticed his computer was running slow and acting weird. Doc ran thru some low-level diagnostics and finally asked the nerd-next-door to check out his system. NND reported that doc had a peculularly vicious edition of spyware running on his computer a million miles an hour. What flavor spyware??? You guessed it, it was branded by the TSA. Apparently, when the TSA was kind enough to write back, a little-sumpin-sumpin was included with it and it installed when doc opened the email.

Doc called back the Senator that advised him to email the TSA in the first place. The senator now advised a) do not attempt to uninstall the trojan, and b) don't do anything on "that" computer other than absolutely benign activity - like emailing grandma. Your tax dollars at work for you.

Now, that's where the story ends. Lessons learned. 1) don't fly, 2) if you have to fly, get to the airport early, in plenty of time to be cavity searched, 3) take tons of paperwork, whatever proves you're not the other guy, take your mother if you can, 4) if you develop a problem, don't ask for help, 5) if you ask for help, the help you are going to get is going to be a much greater clusterbomb and a far more invasive clusterbomb than that cavity search you were trying to avoid in the first place. Oh, and 6) don't fly.

(Editor's Note 1: This entire post sounds like paranoid conjecture. It's not. At least it's not my paranoid conjecture. If you met or knew my doc, you'd agree that this frumpy little suburban rheumatologist is not given to flights of fancy, paranoid conjecture, or delusions of self-significance. It just ain't there. I have searched fairly diligently across the world wide web to see if there is another soul on the planet with a similar story. I can't find one (except this related un-credible comment (search for "spyware" on the page)). There may be more references the day after I post this, I don't know. I'd love to hear some comments on this topic. I'd love for some of my paranoid brethren to look into this - just be sure to do your research on your co-worker's computer or the public one in the orthodontists office.)

(Editor's Note 2: If there is even a shred of truth to the claims stated in this post, we're in for this much and a great deal more. There's an old conundrum about how much liberty you are willing to give up for the sake of safety. The answer is "just enough".)

A Call to Arms

I'm sorry to all for my low output lately. Spring has sprung and with all the birdies, bunnies, and blooms I've forgotten that we are in dire peril of losing our freedoms as independent people. I've gotten engaged in some interesting conversations lately. I was told a month ago that the US military / government has first dibs on the first three months of firearm production each year. That doesn't make any sense to me, but the guy who said it could gun me down from Indiana where he lives (and me here in Kansas) so I offer no stern rebuke. Governments work on contracts, not calendars. They buy a few hundred thousand rifles when they need them, not because it's Groundhog Day. On the other hand, this annual buy-up could explain in part why there is a world-wide (as if the French were buying anything) constipation in gun distribution.

More recently, I was asking a charming old coot who runs the register in Bass Pro Shop's gun department where my 5000 rounds of 9mm ammo was (ordered (now backordered) online). For his protection, I won't name him (and because he instantly became THE charter member of the CHS PLAN B fan club), but he said that the first three month's of each year's ammo production is federalized. That makes a little more sense since bullets are a consumable that (until recently) one would assume the go'ment would place on a regular order. I reckon the boys in camo could go through as much ammo in three months as the rest of the gun toting world would go through in nine.

It also harmonizes with another reality. On the first Tuesday of NOvember (sic), enough acorn-inebriated votes pulled the left lever and got all the change they asked for - unfortunately, so did the rest of us. Until that very moment, the US had just enough guns and bullets to get us through Christmas. However, seeing the ghetto graffiti on the wall, sane second-amendmentists got out their neon orange credit cards and hit their favorite wilderness outfitters like there was no tomorrow... which there may not be if the next 1100 days continue like BHO's first 100 days. Guns and bullets are hard to find - especially bullets. WalMart (which accounts for almost one fifth Remington's total revenue) stays sold out of ammo. Bass Pro and Cabela's get in "regular shipments", but the quantity is consumed faster than crab legs at a Chinese buffet. The Hussein2 run on ammo synchronizes with the annual federal conscription of ammo production. Right now, the Second Amendment only gives us the right to bare arms... I just made that up.

My embedded Bear Arms agent at Bass Pro (on a solid tip from his ammo co rep) assures me that the shelves will be normally stocked by mid-summer. Factory trucks will be headed to the suburbs once again and all the "buy 'em cheap, stack 'em deep" crowd probably will have spent their five year allocation of ammo funds. The rest of us can get out our little plastic money chips with pictures of our cats on them and start buying ammo like there was no ten-years-from-now. Everything will be fine then.

This IS Kansas For Crying Out Loud!

Thursday night, May 7, 2009 was as Plan A a night as can be described. The Clark H Smith Family of Wife and Children had just settled in at 8pm CDT to watch the penultimate episode of The Office - Season 5. After 45 seconds of the opening scene, our local weather dweeb, Gary Lezak (KSHB Action Weather Plus), burst onto my huge flat screen to spend the next 30 minutes flagellating himself with the dire peril which was an ominous looking hook cloud formation in the immediate vicinity of Lock Springs, Mo which is 12 miles south of Nowheresville. His 3D graphics were excelled only by the endless recitation of warning to unpopulated intersections such as Sempsel and Spring Hill that the phantom residents there should move to the lowest level of their structure and to the center thereof. (We wound up watching Ace of Cakes instead - a program that cares neither about weather porn, eminent civil danger... or viewership for that matter.)

The Smith Family level of irritation over the situation was palpable and immeasurable - betraying a level of self-indulgence possible only in our Plan A world. Our Plan A world affords us the new and unique ability to spot tornadoes before they strike (anywhere significant) and even before they actually form (hence the lust for "hook clouds". Owning such previously God-restricted ability, we are clearly over-disposed to using it, whether the alarm has any value or merit. Lacking any sane metric for when to actually provide meaningful weather warnings, those meteorological scalawags down to the TV station foist their alarm willynilly. We're at the brink of technology become irrelevant by overuse. (Anyone ever heard of the little boy who cried "Wolf!"?)

What's the Plan B point of this (or am I just wedging in this rant for the sake of taking a shot at Gary Lezak - not counting the 400 emails I sent him while he droned on about hook clouds and root cellars)? In the future, after SHTF and TEOTWAWKI has passed, I won't have any more clue about weather than "red sky at morning". A hook cloud can form over the north 40 or northern Canada and it won't make any difference to me. In Plan B world, all weather, like politics will be local. How will this affect the quality of my life? Obviously, I won't have Gary and his Nano-Doppler(TM) 4Warn(TM) SkyCast(TM) TerrorGraphics(TM) BlockWatch(TM) HailYes(TM) ESPrediction(TM) services to jack up my blood pressure. When the storm comes, I'll do what people did for millenia - hunker down and wait.

I've lived in Tornado Alley (as designated by the US Dept of In-Case-of-Emergency-You're-On-Your-Own) for the last 40 years. I've never been within 50 statute miles of a (alleged) tornado strike. I'm not trying to make this all about me (just in case any of my readers know someone who lived in Greensburg KS). I'm observing that we overindulge ourselves with information simply because we have it. It is the "having it" that seems to make it important. The question is, "lacking it" what will the difference be? My guess these thunderclouds of information will matter very, very little. In Plan B world, what matters is what happens to me and my ability to survive. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying...