comrade simba

http://www.comradesimba.com/blog

Thanks to jim for the cash to keep it alive!

Tired of spending 12 bucks a month on a web hosting site so the first leg of switching to free stuff is done.

www.comradesimba.wordpress.com

That’s the new blog page. Same format, no real spam, and free. Hey Jim, we’ll have to move you over there, too. I’ll email you the details.

Next is getting the compost message board onto a free host. Anybody have ideas? Lots of good stuff there that shouldn’t …just be tossed in the bin…

Comments requested, folks…

Spring.

Usually the shoes come off as a pagan alternative to Easter, but Christ rose pretty early this year. Stupid Moon… So the shoes came off today and boy is my life easier. I hate coming in and out of the house taking the shoes on and off because with all the shit and dirt around here the floor is a mess if I don’t. Every time the wife mops all I can think about is the three bucks a new sponge mop head goes for. Now the foot dunk bucket is outside the door and no more tracks.

I call what’s going on outside “tater rain”. Seems like at potato planting time all it does is rain rain, rain. The old timers (fictitious characters to which just about anything can be authoritatively attributed) say get the taters in before the peaches loose their blossoms. Here’s hoping for a late bloomer. No panic - they’ll get in when they get in. I’m just enjoying the redbuds in flower, the clover coming up, and the chickens laying 2 dozen egg a day.

Got 4 goats milking now. The wife has her creamer and cheese again. Cottage cheese for me and the pig gets the whey. Perfected the sourdough bread recipe and the starter gets fed everyday. Y’know… I got a lot of things to feed around here. Sourdough culture, the worms, chicken cat dog pig goats, and #1critter. Not to mention the huge new compost bins I made out of all that walnut lumber. It’s 8pm and I just finished milking the goats and checking the chickens. And folding the load of laundry. Made dinner, too. I claim “retired” when pressed for information regarding my employment status. I get the veiled deadbeat look when the fact that my wife teaches at the college is added to the mix. Hehehe, judge me from behind your 9 to 5 slave station… I’m eating good, no middle age pot belly…

And running around barefoot.

Jim Beam made a comment about 4 bucks a gallon gas this weekend. My belief has been that Suburbia begins to die at 4 bucks a gallon - the commute to work gets less and less cost effective on one hand, and how many beatings can “disposable income” take before consumers don’t have any money for consumption of all pumpkins plastic? The home equity ATM is closed, the credit cards are maxed out (to the point of people actually not charging stuff on them anymore) and now the gas tank is cutting into the family cell phone budget.

“4 bucks a gallon in Santa Barbara this week. For 87 octane.” - Maybe I’m reading an awful lot into those dozen words Jim posted, but I think the collective consciousness is turning about to where it can at least be aware that things are not as they once were. From there, the Great Leap to they ain’t gonna get no better isn’t that far away. I here people mention the price of gas in muted mumbled tones of vague fear - not the righteous indignation I’ve been hearing for a year or so. It’s hitting close to home, right in the wallet, from Pedro driving to the jobsite 30 miles away to Soccer Mom’s commute to her fashionable hairdresser 30 minutes away on the freeway. Maybe Dad says to hell with hanging the new ceiling fan today - don’t have the right screws and sure as hell isn’t going to burn 9 bucks worth of gas to go to the nearest Home Despot… pick them up tomorrow on the way home from work. (of course the new big box home improvement joint killed off the local hardware store down the street last year,,,)

Dunno, folks. The state highway that runs in front of our place doesn’t have a quarter of the traffic it used to on this bright sunshiny Sunday afternoon. Nobody’s moving around - got no money to go shopping is my guess. And the more times people stay home instead of taking a quick trip someplace the more realization sinks in that everything in their insta-cushy world is changing and it doesn’t look pretty. I know that there are tens of millions out there with absolutely unpayable levels of personal debt, upside down on a mortgage, behind on a car payment broke before payday in a job that depends upon continuing economic growth and a half hour commute.

They ain’t gonna make it. And they’re gonna be pissed. And pissed off people tend to use blame as an escape. Rather than allow the people to take up pitchforks against the bankers and politicians and icons of the corporate realm I’d bet TPTB will probably instigate a full scale war that actually fucks up our happy way of life. Those tens of millions will be waving the flag again, oblivious and patriots the lot, blaming the chinese, ruskies, or senegalese for the power being out and paper bags on all the gas pumps. My money is on a war with China. I figure there are high level negotiations going on between us and them about how to choreograph a major conflict and mutually pulverize both our economies back to pre bubble 1971 numbers. Maybe trade cities - Los Angeles for a major Chinese Port city. Nuke, nuke, declare an undeclared war and play the nuclear standoff game. The surplus chinese population goes back to their villages and starve, suburbia plants victory gardens and lines up and whips out their ration cards on Commodities Day. Flour, powdered eggs, milk, cheese and beans. “Honey! Canned Pears today!”

Okay, I’m getting a bit tinfoiled here, but I don’t know what else can roll this bloated nation back to reality. I sold a kid goat at the sale barn yesterday - a 2 1/2 week old billy that somebody’s children made them buy - hehehe drove the bidding up to rediculous levels. So I was talking to them after the sale and they asked what to feed it. I said “goat milk, it’s a baby goat”. They got that stupid look so I said “or milk replacer”. A little hope shown through, and they seemed like a nice couple so I offered to sell them a milking nanny that really isn’t producing enough per milking for me to bother with but would do fine for raising Herman the Kid. The guy said he didn’t have time to milk a goat, the wife said she’d just buy milk and the two girls with Ipods clipped to their head said ew, no way gross. I’d have sold that milking nanny at a loss to get a family started on the free cheese highway of food security but ya just can’t pull folks off of the teat of civilization. Herman will be a great pet until they tire of him, then some Mexican will get him for a song and put him on a spit at the next big wedding. Or perhaps the funeral feast for a son slaughtered while defending the Puddle in Iraq. And I try not to will ill upon the Ipod Girls, but it’s hard. I see corpses every time I go into town, so my best bet is to stay home as much as possible and plant spinach and peas.

Thanks for reading, now go plant something to eat, damnit. Take your power back people, take your power back.

I’m going to stop posting for now. I’m not sure whats going on out there but things are truly fuckobazzoo. Banks are stinking something awful, gas and gold are climbing fast, hell everything is going up on a weekly basis. A roll of fence wire goes up 5 bucks every time I go get one, and nails, fence staples, anything steel is climbing like I’ve never seen before.

The Shit Is Hitting The Fan.

I’ve got a few minutes a day to surf cryptogon, the life after the oil crash board, and a couple other sites for some updates on the world at large as it implodes but I need to be spending serious time gardening and finalizing preps for the collapse. I’ve blathered on a lot over the last year about how it’s all gonna come apart but I just got real quiet the other day when I felt like something out there snapped. Our society has been wound way too tight and I think something just snapped way up the food chain of the global elite. They’ve gathered all the wealth they can under the radar, got into position to suck up the rest when it all comes apart, and I believe they decided the time to pull the trigger is now.

The Shrub had that “busted” look on him when he was asked about reports and data that point to 4 buck a gallon gasoline before the summer driving season comes around. That total bullshit look as he said “oh, I haven’t heard about that” - those fuckers know whats up. They know it’s coming apart at the seams

I sold some gold to buy fencewire, posts, staples and nails the other day. Gold was 950 an ounce and today it’s 970. I’ll kick myself for unloading it in a month or so when it’s 1200, but that roll of wire will have gone from 97 bucks to 117. If it will even be available… Gold will go up faster than hard assets will - probably a 3 or 4 month lag time for prices to catch up. I also expect gold and silver to drop way below what they are today after an idiot spike, and since my hoard was acquired at 9 dollar silver and 450 gold after a spike and a 75% drop I’ll still be even.

When a chicken will bring 8 bucks at the sale barn (those chick in the post awhile back - sold them last week for $3.50 apiece!!!) rolls of chicken wire are better than shiny metal buried in the yard. I got 5 dairy goats getting ready to come into milk and at 4 bucks a gallon (today - next month it will be 4.50) fencing off that lush vetch pasture is gonna out perform the $20 St. Gaudins that I sold for 95% of spot melt price (cash - no taxes, no questions). And since time is money it’s costing a healthy chunk of change to be pecking away at comrade simba dot com when planting season is rolling around and a fucking head of lettuce is a buck and green onions are 1.29 a bunch. And nobody bitches about my eggs at 1.50 a dozen.

I’m going to drop yahoo as my web host and see if I can’t get the blog and message board onto a free host site. The 12 bucks a month needs to go to shovel and other tool handles. I got a bad feeling that I could get caught flat footed when the balloon goes up, and though I’m better off than 80% of the population at large I think the plan is for only 5% to survive the die off / kill off.

And so, guys and gals, no more new posts here. I’ll check the comments regularly and yak in there. The message board- http://www.csimba.com/compost/ -will stay up though I’m going to purge some shit in there. If I have anything to say I’ll post in the open forum.

The ground is dry enough to work today. It’s peas and onion time.

So long… and thanks for playing.

Power to the peoples, man, power to the peoples.

comrade simba

Earth First - 1 Clint Renner Logging - 0

The local sawmill burned to the ground last week. Now, since Clint is a common as cornbread, big hearted church going country folk without an enemy in the world I suspect this is the work of deep ecology eco-warriors. Fire lit up at 1:30 am on a Sunday night, and he said that it wasn’t localized and spread out - it torched up the whole perimeter at once. Not an insurance job, either - poor sob didn’t have any.

So I’m cleaning out and scavenging “unmarketable” lumber destined for the burn pile and some things began to strike me as way too fucked up. First, the guy who lives in the trailer house Clint hauled onto the property (to enhance security) woke up to the sound of fire trucks. The fucko bazzoo? He still lives in the trailer. I’da has his ass out in the yard tied up to a post making him watch me set fire to all his furniture and possessions. I’m a dick that way. Secondly, Trailer Guy has a dog cooped up in a tiny dog run. The logpile is between the dog and the sawmill. No barkie at things that go bump in the night. And lastly, I’m hauling out massive amounts of lumber, blocks of dried hardwood walnut, nice dried out slabs that didn’t get burned up in the burn pile but seasoned out for sure - And I notice that the trailer house has a 500 gallon propane tank hooked up to it!!! WTF?
Ya live next to a hardwood sawmill and burn propane to heat your house? Staggers the imagination…

So, here’s a couple of pics of my bonanza:

click for big pic

click for big pic

Yea, yea, the yards a mess. That’s Playland. The rest of the place is pretty spiffy. ‘Cuz everything gets dumped in playland.

So I have a huge supply of rough sawn walnut farm lumber. Building a house for Three Dollar Pig, and I’ll finish the huge 3 bin compost bin as soon as it quits goddamn raining - sheesh I hate February. I now have the lumber for all the gates I wanna make, pearlings and whalers for the greenhouse-to-be, nailers for the smoke house etc etc.

But I’d gladly give it all back if Clint’s sawmill could come back to life. Some thing just suck too bad for words. Torching a small family owned and operated sawmill ain’t gonna stop one damn tree from being cut down.

And here’s the bashed and crashed pickup of mine jus’ ‘cuz

click for big pic

239,000 miles and doesn’t use a drop of oil. And when an idiot hit me the insurance totaled it out for a thousand bucks and I bought the salvage for 150. Two hours with a rubber mallet beating out the dents and a 10 dollar junkyard headlight bucket and good to go. I can’t remember how the bumper got fucked up though, and I don’t even drink any more…

http://www.rainbowbody.net/Finalempire/FEchap5.htm“Empire culture and the industrial system are inherently centralizing and simplifying forces. When the Green Revolution moves into a country it must have large acreages so that it can achieve “economies of scale,” meaning simply that within the mass production system it is cheaper, on a per unit basis, to produce a large amount of one item, than it is to produce only one of those items. This means that self-supporting, subsistence agriculture families in the area must move to the periphery, attempt to farm the hillsides and gain occasional labor on the new industrial farm. This means that the hold of the colonial elite grows stronger on the population that is no longer self-sufficient. This means also that the hold of the international political/financial system grows on the colonial elite. Either large loans or opening the country up to the transnational corporations are necessary to start the industrial agricultural system because the factors of production must be shipped in, the trucks, the seed, the irrigation works, the fertilizers and the other components. Because of the huge capital investments needed for industrial agriculture, the chances are good that the country will ultimately be forced into the hands of the international bankers for loans. When the system is well established and the indigenous population is heavily in debt, (in the tradition of the more advanced First World farmers), then the international banking system will send in teams of bankers to administer the government’s economic planning and will promote austerity measures that milk the population for interest money to send to the imperial capitals. As the farm system centralizes and the profit making industrial farmer takes more land, homelessness increases. The phenomena of cities exploding as people are forced out of the countryside is a familiar one in industrial societies. This trend is now particularly serious in the Third World where there is a low level of industrial infrastructure in urban areas. As the “labor saving” machinery is brought in, unemployment increases and people are forced to work at a lower wage under worse conditions. As the production of food increases with the industrial system, the people grow hungrier because much of the food is now in the international system. The food is grown for export to bring in hard currencies to repay loans, purchase manufacturing equipment for the industrial centers and consumer items for the colonial elite- not to buy food for the poor. A major point must be emphasized, the calculation of how much food a country grows has nothing to do with how well fed the people of that country are. The important question in the industrial system is how much money people have to buy food. The international flow of protein goes to the First World countries; they have the money to bid for the food.”

And I thought the 50 cent one I saw a couple of weeks ago was ridiculous. WTF is going on? A chump head of cabbage was a buck fifty. Onions 88 cents a pound, with wheat selling for 20 bucks a bushel. So it’s no great mystery to me why the american diet is primarily high fructose corn syrup.

They are killing off the population. All the “petroleum people” raised and fed by the corporations. Consumer = poison repository. By air, land and sea. Our houses and buildings are toxic chipboard and vinyl constructs, our clothing made by slave labor, our work is tab A into slot B, and leisure activity means putting more debt on the credit card.

I gave the neighbors 8 tomato seedlings today so they don’t spend 88 cents apiece at Vole-Mart come spring for some hybrid “what Monsanto wants you to grow” (and buy again next year) tomato. I’ll give them pepper plants next week. I don’t want to have to get into the education realm with them - why you should shit in a bucket and rip out the garbage disposal since I gave you some fucking chickens. I better provide them with the natural pesticide I use sparingly so they don’t have a giant Seven Dust party and finish off the rest of the bees. Here’s hyssop and thyme for your cabbage plants. No need to spray. People whose kids say yuk to fresh goats milk even when it’s free. What the hell, they get free milk from the food stamp program anyway. Trucked in. Refrigerator storage. Plastic carton. Lousy working conditions for the cows, broke farmers, bored, listless dairy plant workers just going through the motions all for the sake of Hiland Dairy stockholders sittin’ pretty. The only possible improvement would be to find a way to exploit some third worlders.

It’s all shit. Goats piss on their bedding when they get up in the morning. Soaks down during the day and the nitrogen activates with the straw starting the compost process - heat generates, goats get warmth at night. Humans shit, flush it “away” with drinking water, douse it with chlorine and dump it in the creek for the town downstream to pipe into their potable water lines. Stupid stupid stupid. How many times did the toilet flush during the town council meeting about the dire water shortage?

In you go folks, this way to the soylent green hopper.

I don’t golf, boat, or have a fascination with video games so I tend to spend stupid amounts of money of goofy shit like $375 incubators…

R-Com 20 incubator, holds 18 chicken eggs and I get 95% hatch rates. Turns them every hour, maintains temp within 1 degree, and humidity stays where you want it to be. Just fill it up with water once a week and hope the power doesn’t go out. On day 18 turn off the egg turner and two or three days later everybody starts popping out. Then I put the chicks in a big cat litter box under a light bulb in the kitchen for a couple of days before moving them into the basement in winter, or the chicken side of the barn in summer.

The little chick on the left popped out 3 minutes before I snapped the pic. The one on the right is a couple of hours old. The egg on the upper right is the one that didn’t hatch. The egg was full of runny goo and no sign of a developing embryo so I guess it wasn’t fertile.

Here’s the math - $2.25 in eggs, $2.00 electricity, $4.00 in gas to the sale barn where the chicks bring in 2 bucks apiece - $27 after commission. Profit= $18.75. That’s 3 sacks of corn for the mamas and the papas. And happiness is a bunch of little peepers in the kitchen…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-cor1uZ2AM

And I feel bad when I don’t get the chickens corn chops by 7am…

I’m not a card carrying member of PETA, or a militant vegetarian. But I will never ever order up a chicken sandwich when eating out again. I’ll take the salad bar or something.