Category: Current Events & Politics

Letter Re: Dealing With Local Building Inspectors

Mr. Rawles, [To follow up on TANSTAAFL’s letter,] I have worked for several engineering firms as a GIS technician, then manager. Counties will advertise when they will be re-flying parts or all of the county. Most county engineers, auditor, or Property Valuation Administrator (PVA) offices will tell you what the schedule for mapping is out a couple of years (usually the department in charge of tax assessments). A give away that it is happening is when you see large X’s painted in intersections with a metal spike sunk in the middle of the X (these are control points), with survey …


The Meme of Crushroom: A Key Retreat Architecture Element

One bit of retreat architecture that I’ve often recommended to my consulting clients who are designing (or retrofitting) retreats is the inclusion of a protruding entryway foyer, that I call a crushroom. Passing this advice along to you gives me the chance to employ one of my horrible puns: The Meme of Crushroom. A crushroom is a controllable confined space, typically an entry foyer, that can be covered with small arms fire or subjected to irritant or obscurant smoke or sprays. The outer door (or barred gate) to the crushroom is normally left open, but has a spring loaded self …


Letter Re: Feedback on The American Empire is Bankrupt

JWR: I was puzzled by the piece by Chris Hedges (The American Empire is Bankrupt, from truthdig.com) that you linked to in Friday’s SurvivalBlog. There are two huge, crucial, inestimable, incredibly fundamental flaws in Hedges’ article: * One is his assessment of the primary cause of the American national bankruptcy, * The second is his conclusions as to who will be causing the greatest social disruption in our nation as that bankruptcy starts impacting our daily lives. First, the fundamental causes of the American bankruptcy. Hedges quotes heavily from an article from & interview by The Financial Times’ Michael Hudson. …


U.S. Dollar: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, by Axel Merk

Russian President Medvedev suggests the dollar is on its way out; Russian Finance minister Kudrin says there is no substitute for the dollar. The Chinese see a need to diversify out of the dollar; the Japanese say their trust in the dollar is unshakable. Let’s look at this puzzle and make some sense of it. It’s usually more productive to look at what policy makers do rather than what they say. Having said that, this time around, the talk also speaks volumes. Notably, world leaders have expressed their concern about the U.S. dollar and a need to diversify, to reduce …


A Derivatives Market Meltdown: “We Apologize for the Inconvenience”

The collapse of the Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) market underscored the enormous overhang of the larger over-the-counter derivatives contracts market. This is far from over, folks! For example, we have not yet to seen a full-blown Credit Default Swap (CDS) market implosion. I have been warning blog readers about CDS instruments since 2005. And even though our politics are diametrically opposed, I was not surprised to see George Soros recently chime in on the subject. Derivative instruments are essentially unregulated and they measure in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. The counterparty risk is enormous, yet the derivatives market is …


Welcome to the Savage World of the Year 2009

“Welcome to the savage world of the year 2009”. That was the tag line of the 1992 sci-fi film Freejack , starring Emilio Estevez. Do you remember it? The movie that featured Cadillac Gage V100 wheeled APCs painted in bright colors? My old friend All-Grace-No-Slack-Really-Reformed Kris just reminded me about this movie. Kris noted: “It was a bit corny but it had some good scenes and characters such as Amanda Plummer as the gun-toting nun.” This film provides an insight on what futurists then thought 2009 would be like, as well as a retrospective on life in 1992. Let’s look …



Letter Re: A Ship’s Belated Flu Quarantine as an Object Lesson

Hi Jim, Here is a bit about the progress of Swine Flu in Australia with this article about a quarantined luxury cruise ship. We now have a cruise ship, the P & O Pacific Dawn, being quarantined at Willis Island on the Great Barrier Reef – with 2000 people on board. Yesterday the ship was photographed flying the yellow quarantine flag! Our “brilliant” state health departments let 20 infected people disembark at Sydney and they [then] flew throughout Australia . [Some background:] 13 of these people turned up at the Robina Hospital at the Gold Coast and the staff at …




Letter Re: FDA Restricts Over the Counter Sales of Bulk-Size Hemostatic Supplies

Sir; I try to keep a gun shot trauma kit with my shooting range supplies; when I was ordering some new medical supplies from North American Rescue I was informed that the public can no longer purchase Quikclot ACS+ or any other such hemostatic from them. The operator proceeded to tell me that the [U.S.] Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began regulating these products mid-May because “they go inside the human body.” I was able to order some of my other products in the “scrape and light cut” size” but none of the larger quantity hemostatics. Perhaps some other SurvivalBlog …



Mexican Flu Update:

Kudos to KAF for sending this piece: Researchers: Swine Flu Genes Swirled for Decades Undetected Emergency Preparedness Exercises Held at Banks Swine Flu Spreads in Australia Some Older People May Be Immune to Swine Flu Swine Flu Extends to Tokyo; 11,000 Cases Worldwide 56 Hospitalized with Swine Flu in NYC Dr. Niman’s World Flu Tracking Map


Letter Re: Any Widespread Flu Will Overwhelm America’s Emergency Medical Services

Dear Mr. Rawles, As an avid SurvivalBlog reader since ’05, I’ve got to say, the quality of your blog continues to go up and up. Just when I think I can’t possibly absorb anything more, new posts appear that make me think, plan, and act. Upon your blog’s advice, I have begun taking an EMT class at a local college to expand my medical knowledge base. What the Paramedic teacher said today in class gave me the chills. We were discussing all manner of diseases and then he touched on H1N1, the Swine Flu and its possible affects upon the …