Prepared Society's Chicken Forum

Prepared Society, which is a emergency preparation and survival forum, asked me to notify readers about their new chicken forum for people who are keeping chickens.

I am not currently keeping chickens, although two other members of my survival team are. I have enjoyed eggs from their efforts and during a collapse fresh eggs are great food as well as a barter item. 

I do however have a pre-made chicken hootch still in the box as well as some other materials on hand so if I have enough time when the warning signs for the collapse are imminient, or if survival team members arrive at my site, I can house and raise the chickens.

Here is the link to Prepared Society's Chicken Forum

U.S. and World On Edge of Collapse

The bandwagon is getting more crowded week by week as financial experts joint the chorus on an
impending world and U.S. financial collapse.   Paul Krugman and Chris Martenson are among
prominent analysts.

The latest is the former co-manager of the GLG Global Macro Fund, Raoul Pal,  who believes  that a
global banking collapse and massive defaults will bring about “the biggest economic shock the world
has ever seen” — and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

China, for one nation is trying to make the U.S. dollar collapse.  They are buying not only the world's
gold. but the gold mines as well, to prop up their currency, the Yuan.   Their attempt to corner the
world's gold market is to weaken, then replace the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.   The
dollar has been weakening abruptly since 2010.  And not only China is wanting the dollar to collapse,
the U.S. gives refuge to George Soros who is also actively seeking the U.S. dollar's demise.  Figure out that crap?!?  

If the Dollar ceases being the world's reserve currency, the demand for dollars would evaporate leaving
a glut in dollars and therefore the value or buying power would plummet resulting in high inflation
or hyper-inflation.  You think food and gas prices are high now?

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, funded and/or financially supported largely by
leftist/liberal groups such as Open Society Institute (now called the Open Society Foundation), Media
Matters, The Tides Foundation, Alliance for Global Justice, Adbusters Media Foundation, will be an ant
hill compared to the mountain of protests and civil unrest is the dollar collapses leaving well over a hundred million people living hand to mouth,....and being really pissed about it. 

Adding to the gloom is the National debt.  If countries continue dumping or accelerating the getting rid of
U.S. treasury notes then the dollar devalues and the interest payments alone on the $16 trillion dollar
debt could go from just under $500 billion annually to over $1 Trillion.  If this happens, the dollar will
automatically cease being the world's reserve currency and inflation/hyper-inflation will happen.   You
can bet on it.  If you are reading this site, you probably already are betting on it.     

Is The Army To Be Used for Domestic Enforcement?

This was written by Joe Wolverton in The New American, titled "Use Army for Domestic Enforcement"

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) proposes that the U.S. Army be used to plan, command, and
carry out (with the help of civilian law enforcement) domestic police missions. So says a story appearing in the May/June issue of the influential organization’s official journal, Foreign Affairs.

The article lacks a single reference to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits such actions.  In an article penned by Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Raymond T. Odierno, the CFR would see the Army used to address “challenges in the United States itself” in order to keep the homeland safe from domestic disasters, including terrorist attacks.

Odierno writes:
Where appropriate we will also dedicate active-duty forces, especially those with niche skills and equipment, to provide civilian officials with a robust set of reliable and rapid response options.

That’s right. Should the sheriff suspect that a particular citizen in his county poses a threat to security and feels he doesn’t have the proper “skills and equipment” to deal with the situation, he can just call out the U.S. Army and bring a “rapid response” force that is robust enough to eliminate the problem.

These are not the musings of an unknown academic written in an obscure journal of little importance.  These are the black-and-white plans for “building a flexible force” as laid out by the man in charge and published for all the world to read by the people who may have put him there.

In order to justify this new (and illegal) mission for the Army, General Odierno points to three “major changes” that have precipitated the re-tasking of the troops: First, “declining budgets due to the country’s worsened fiscal situation; second, “a shift in emphasis to the Asia-Pacific region; and third, a “broadening of focus from counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and training of partners to shaping the strategic environment, preventing the outbreak of dangerous regional conflicts, and improving the army’s readiness to respond in force to a range of complex contingencies worldwide.”

There are so many things wrong with every one of these points that each deserves its own article focused solely on its deconstruction. Unfortunately, there is only so much space and each of these considerations has one critical flaw in common: no constitutional authority for any of it.

Start with the woeful economic state of American affairs. Odierno lists this first among his unholy trinity of reasons the army must “transition” from its traditional role to one with a wider domestic and international scope.

Perhaps it has escaped General Odierno’s attention, but the decline of America’s economic fortunes may be in some significant part tied to the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that siphon about $13 billion per month from the U.S. Treasury. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, estimates are that Congress has approved a total of $1.283 trillion in military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care spread over three operations: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) Afghanistan and other counter terror operations; Operation Noble Eagle (ONE), providing enhanced security at military bases; and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).

There is a certain macabre irony to the claim by a military leader that his troops are forced to adapt to
stringent budget considerations partially brought about by the use of his troops as the tip of America’s
sword of empire.

General Odierno’s third “major change” is the need to use the Army to solve complex international
conflicts. Again, these conflicts and the solutions to them are made more complex by the fact that there
is not a single syllable in the Constitution that grants the President or Congress the authority to deploy
American armed forces to work out the world’s difficult dilemmas.

On this point, regarding the rules to govern the creation and governing of a federal army, the Constitution says very little. In Article I, Section 8, Congress is authorized to “raise and support Armies” and to “make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.” That’s it.

That paucity of information has been magnified by the Council on Foreign Relations and their members in positions of power to include the use of the Army in ways and means that would seem unimaginable even to the most martial of our Founding Fathers.

One of the unconstitutional missions advocated by Odierno and the CFR is the use of the U.S. Army as
“a critical guarantor of stability in the Asia-Pacific region.” This is one of the many new “assigned missions” promoted by Odierno in his Foreign Affairs article.

This echoes the pronouncement by his Commander-in-Chief made in Australia last November:
This is the future we seek for the Asia-Pacific — security, prosperity and dignity for all. That’s what we stand for. That’s who we are. That’s the future we will pursue in partnership with allies and friends and
with every element of American power.

That is to say, General Odierno and President Obama believe that deterring aggression against our
allies in Asia and the Pacific trumps any constitutional stricture on the appropriate use of the Army.

There is nothing it seems that will stand in the way of our Army being placed at the disposal of foreign
princes and presidents, provided they appreciate their resulting status as satraps of the American
Emperor.

Not to worry; other provinces of the emerging American empire are accounted for in the Odierno/CFR
plan.

“The posture of the U.S. military in the Middle East is critical to maintaining regional stability there,” writes Odierno, again without any noticeable sense of irony.

Is the general privy to some reports of stability in the Middle East kept secret from the rest of us? There is no end to the media’s reminders of the instability in the Middle East. In fact, it is this very unsettled
foundation upon which the need for ongoing American military presence there is built.

In other words, the Middle East is stable because of the Army, the Middle East will remain stable only so long as the Army remains on permanent patrol, and if we were to completely abandon our posts, the region would devolve into outright — instability. Thus is the quality of the reasoning demonstrated by those with command and control of the armed forces of the United States.

One of the timeliest tenets of the Odierno/CFR proposal is the integration of “cyberspace capabilities into our tactical and operational units.” According to an article published last Friday in the New York Times:

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

For the CFR it seems the message from the Obama administration is ask and ye shall receive.  Lest there remain any doubt as to America’s resolve, Odierno wants our nation’s enemies (foreign and domestic) to understand that we are not afraid to “compel capitulation.” Should those “potential adversaries” be American, moreover, Odierno promises that the Army will “be ready to decisively achieve American ends, whatever they may be.”

Finally, we will, Odierno declares, demonstrate “our country’s commitment to global security.”  Sadly, Americans know this too well, as there are rows and rows of white headstones and flag-draped coffins already demonstrating the seriousness of that commitment.

Apocalypse Fairly Soon?

Apocalypse Fairly Soon? That is the title of an article posted on the New York Times by Paul Krugman. Krugman writes about the possible fall of Euro, beginning in Greece, then making its way through the other financially unstable countries. This impacts in the U.S. as Europe holds a alot of our debt and our banks are holding European debt as well.

Krugman’s article: Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.

This doesn’t have to happen; the euro (or at least most of it) could still be saved. But this will require that European leaders, especially in Germany and at the European Central Bank, start acting very differently from the way they’ve acted these past few years. They need to stop moralizing and deal with reality; they need to stop temporizing and, for once, get ahead of the curve. I wish I could say that I was optimistic. The story so far:

When the euro came into existence, there was a great wave of optimism in Europe — and that, it turned out, was the worst thing that could have happened. Money poured into Spain and other nations, which were now seen as safe investments; this flood of capital fueled huge housing bubbles and huge trade deficits. Then, with the financial crisis of 2008, the flood dried up, causing severe slumps in the very nations that had boomed before. At that point, Europe’s lack of political union became a severe liability.

Florida and Spain both had housing bubbles, but when Florida’s bubble burst, retirees could still count on getting their Social Security and Medicare checks from Washington. Spain receives no comparable support. So the burst bubble turned into a fiscal crisis, too. Europe’s answer has been austerity: savage spending cuts in an attempt to reassure bond markets. Yet as any sensible economist could have told you (and we did, we did), these cuts deepened the depression in Europe’s troubled economies, which both further undermined investor confidence and led to growing political instability.

And now comes the moment of truth. Greece is, for the moment, the focal point. Voters who are understandably angry at policies that have produced 22 percent unemployment — more than 50 percent among the young — turned on the parties enforcing those policies. And because the entire Greek political establishment was, in effect, bullied into endorsing a doomed economic orthodoxy, the result of voter revulsion has been rising power for extremists.

Even if the polls are wrong and the governing coalition somehow ekes out a majority in the next round of voting, this game is basically up: Greece won’t, can’t pursue the policies that Germany and the European Central Bank are demanding. So now what? Right now, Greece is experiencing what’s being called a “bank jog” — a somewhat slow-motion bank run, as more and more depositors pull out their cash in anticipation of a possible Greek exit from the euro.

Europe’s central bank is, in effect, financing this bank run by lending Greece the necessary euros; if and (probably) when the central bank decides it can lend no more, Greece will be forced to abandon the euro and issue its own currency again. This demonstration that the euro is, in fact, reversible would lead, in turn, to runs on Spanish and Italian banks.

Once again the European Central Bank would have to choose whether to provide open-ended financing; if it were to say no, the euro as a whole would blow up. Yet financing isn’t enough. Italy and, in particular, Spain must be offered hope — an economic environment in which they have some reasonable prospect of emerging from austerity and depression. Realistically, the only way to provide such an environment would be for the central bank to drop its obsession with price stability, to accept and indeed encourage several years of 3 percent or 4 percent inflation in Europe (and more than that in Germany).

Both the central bankers and the Germans hate this idea, but it’s the only plausible way the euro might be saved. For the past two-and-a-half years, European leaders have responded to crisis with half-measures that buy time, yet they have made no use of that time.

Now time has run out. So will Europe finally rise to the occasion? Let’s hope so — and not just because a euro breakup would have negative ripple effects throughout the world. For the biggest costs of European policy failure would probably be political. Think of it this way: Failure of the euro would amount to a huge defeat for the broader European project, the attempt to bring peace, prosperity and democracy to a continent with a terrible history. It would also have much the same effect that the failure of austerity is having in Greece, discrediting the political mainstream and empowering extremists.

All of us, then, have a big stake in European success — yet it’s up to the Europeans themselves to deliver that success. The whole world is waiting to see whether they’re up to the task. What can U.S. preppers do to protect themselves? The same thing we have been doing. Stock food for the possibility/probability of inflated food prices and diminished supply, and, protect against inflation/hyper-inflationary prices and/or bank runs/reduced monetary supply by having some cash on hand, and ensuring that we have some precious metals (gold and silver).