ancona
Praying Mantis
Just a couple of days from Christmas, and the family is chilling out at the homestead on a nice Sunday morning. It's a bit chilly outside, but we're assured it will go up to seventy today and be up to seventy six or seven by Tuesday. I walked out on the front patio a bit ago and listened to the chorus of birds in the trees. There are probably ten or fifteen thousand birds in this immediate area, all of them feasting on Brazilian pepper berries and whatever else they can find. This time of year we have the fewest insects because our vacationing birds eat them all up, and believe me, that's just fine with us.
I finally built up the courage to make a trip to the mall yesterday, and was promptly reminded of exactly why I despise going there......especially during the Christmas holiday season. Feral children running all over the place unsupervised, malltarded powershoppers pushing their way around, oblivious shuffle alongs walking slowly contra-flow to other foot traffic and the inevitable, supremely obese people in their government supplied power scooters, sipping on a large fountain drink and shuffling along, beeping at people who don't move out of their way quickly enough. It was a surreal scene, one which belied the truth of our economy, one within which people were furiously spending money in the hopes that maybe it will make them happy for just a few more days.
Dystopia aside, It makes me feel hopeful when I read these boards and see so many folks ignoring the spend, spend, spend paradigm that has been designed for us by business interests, with their incessant advertisement and product placement subliminals. I feel thankful that so many people have been awakened to the reality of our current financial condition and the unsustainability of the same. Personal responsibility, preparedness, devotion to family and friends, and certainly, some level of personal spirituality are all admiral traits in their own right, but when chained together form the foundation of a survivor. The will to continue on must exist in your heart before any thought can be given to being prepared.
This Christmas, my clan is taking time to reflect on the prior year and all of the changes we have experienced, for good and for bad, and how we have learned from each experience. While we will never be able to know it all, we can always know more, and to embrace new ideas while learning past experience.
There is a movement afoot, albeit quietly at the moment, to paint those who would be prepared for a black swan as paranoid, crazy doomtards. This development is frightening to me since it takes something that was commonplace for many years after the Great Depression, and turns it in to something evil. Doomsday Preppers is but one of several productions I have watched recently attempting to paint us with a very broad brush, and in a negative light at that. However veiled, the subterfuge is recognizable to me for what it is. It feels too much like an agenda to suit me. I can see how having a country full of strong willed and strong minded, prepared citizens would be seen as a threat by this government. Those who are not dependent upon Uncle Sugar undermine their efforts to assuage any and all fears that everything is under control and GovCo has this thing on lock-down. These days, anyone with more than two guns and a box of ammo is considered to be in possession of an "arsenal" and a thousand rounds of ammo is called a "cache". A complicit and captured sycophantic media compounds this situation with their breathless diatribes against anyone daring to mount resistance to second amendment challenges by libtarded gun grabbers. Call me crazy, but when guns become illegal, I become an outlaw. It really is just as simple as that.
Our movement is spreading because it is elegantly simple and conveys a message of self reliance and our innate abilities to provide so many things for ourselves. Irrespective of any labels placed upon us by pro-nanny state adherents and their media pals, I will continue on this path of self reliance and will do so with the approval of Mrs. Ancona and Little Ancona. We have been able to subtly convince a number of folks to start raising their own chickens and to dig a garden. However small, and however simple they start out, each person or family that began a garden or built a coop has expanded every year since we began sharing our produce and eggs. We invite friends to the garden each season when it is blazing with veggies, hand them a small supermarket handbasket and say, "Go shopping"! It is absolutely amazing how excited they become and how animated their conversation gets. Each and every person we allow to "shop" the garden walks away with plans for their own garden.
One individual we know does a little thing with friends once or twice a month where they go out and do an urban foraging hike. Here in Florida there is a wealth of food right in front of us that simply falls to the ground and rots or is unrecognized by the hypnotized masses sitting in their living rooms stuffing frozen pizza down their maws. Oranges, sweet white and pink grapefruit, tangerines, tangelos, calamundans, cabbage palm, coconuts, onions, blackberries and rasberries, wild herbs and much more can be found within five hundred yards from my house. Surrounded by ponds, fish are plentiful right now and make a nice protein and fat addition to the abundant fruit and vegetables which can be found all across Florida nearly year 'round. I suspect that many places in the US provide a similar bounty of local foods.
All things considered, we are sailing in to the new year on some troubled waters and will face serious financial headwinds if the Congress cannot or will not resolve what really is a difficult situation. With the president locking horns with republican leadership in the house I cannot see how the fiscal cliff will be avoided. The changes faced next year by my firm and indeed by me are huge. There will be material impacts to both revenue streams that could mean structural negative impacts to our business model and my own income. While our increasing self reliance will certainly mute the monetary effects, I cannot reconcile with what I will be forced to do to my employees.
I guess we'll wait and see.
All of that said, I want to wish everyone a happy and safe Christmas.
Sorry about the rant.
I finally built up the courage to make a trip to the mall yesterday, and was promptly reminded of exactly why I despise going there......especially during the Christmas holiday season. Feral children running all over the place unsupervised, malltarded powershoppers pushing their way around, oblivious shuffle alongs walking slowly contra-flow to other foot traffic and the inevitable, supremely obese people in their government supplied power scooters, sipping on a large fountain drink and shuffling along, beeping at people who don't move out of their way quickly enough. It was a surreal scene, one which belied the truth of our economy, one within which people were furiously spending money in the hopes that maybe it will make them happy for just a few more days.
Dystopia aside, It makes me feel hopeful when I read these boards and see so many folks ignoring the spend, spend, spend paradigm that has been designed for us by business interests, with their incessant advertisement and product placement subliminals. I feel thankful that so many people have been awakened to the reality of our current financial condition and the unsustainability of the same. Personal responsibility, preparedness, devotion to family and friends, and certainly, some level of personal spirituality are all admiral traits in their own right, but when chained together form the foundation of a survivor. The will to continue on must exist in your heart before any thought can be given to being prepared.
This Christmas, my clan is taking time to reflect on the prior year and all of the changes we have experienced, for good and for bad, and how we have learned from each experience. While we will never be able to know it all, we can always know more, and to embrace new ideas while learning past experience.
There is a movement afoot, albeit quietly at the moment, to paint those who would be prepared for a black swan as paranoid, crazy doomtards. This development is frightening to me since it takes something that was commonplace for many years after the Great Depression, and turns it in to something evil. Doomsday Preppers is but one of several productions I have watched recently attempting to paint us with a very broad brush, and in a negative light at that. However veiled, the subterfuge is recognizable to me for what it is. It feels too much like an agenda to suit me. I can see how having a country full of strong willed and strong minded, prepared citizens would be seen as a threat by this government. Those who are not dependent upon Uncle Sugar undermine their efforts to assuage any and all fears that everything is under control and GovCo has this thing on lock-down. These days, anyone with more than two guns and a box of ammo is considered to be in possession of an "arsenal" and a thousand rounds of ammo is called a "cache". A complicit and captured sycophantic media compounds this situation with their breathless diatribes against anyone daring to mount resistance to second amendment challenges by libtarded gun grabbers. Call me crazy, but when guns become illegal, I become an outlaw. It really is just as simple as that.
Our movement is spreading because it is elegantly simple and conveys a message of self reliance and our innate abilities to provide so many things for ourselves. Irrespective of any labels placed upon us by pro-nanny state adherents and their media pals, I will continue on this path of self reliance and will do so with the approval of Mrs. Ancona and Little Ancona. We have been able to subtly convince a number of folks to start raising their own chickens and to dig a garden. However small, and however simple they start out, each person or family that began a garden or built a coop has expanded every year since we began sharing our produce and eggs. We invite friends to the garden each season when it is blazing with veggies, hand them a small supermarket handbasket and say, "Go shopping"! It is absolutely amazing how excited they become and how animated their conversation gets. Each and every person we allow to "shop" the garden walks away with plans for their own garden.
One individual we know does a little thing with friends once or twice a month where they go out and do an urban foraging hike. Here in Florida there is a wealth of food right in front of us that simply falls to the ground and rots or is unrecognized by the hypnotized masses sitting in their living rooms stuffing frozen pizza down their maws. Oranges, sweet white and pink grapefruit, tangerines, tangelos, calamundans, cabbage palm, coconuts, onions, blackberries and rasberries, wild herbs and much more can be found within five hundred yards from my house. Surrounded by ponds, fish are plentiful right now and make a nice protein and fat addition to the abundant fruit and vegetables which can be found all across Florida nearly year 'round. I suspect that many places in the US provide a similar bounty of local foods.
All things considered, we are sailing in to the new year on some troubled waters and will face serious financial headwinds if the Congress cannot or will not resolve what really is a difficult situation. With the president locking horns with republican leadership in the house I cannot see how the fiscal cliff will be avoided. The changes faced next year by my firm and indeed by me are huge. There will be material impacts to both revenue streams that could mean structural negative impacts to our business model and my own income. While our increasing self reliance will certainly mute the monetary effects, I cannot reconcile with what I will be forced to do to my employees.
I guess we'll wait and see.
All of that said, I want to wish everyone a happy and safe Christmas.
Sorry about the rant.