Live 365 The freedoms we secured for you we hoped you'd always keep. The tyrants labored endlessly while your parents were asleep. Your freedom's gone, your courage lost. You're no more than a slave. In this, the land of the free and home of the brave. You buy permits to travel and permits to own a gun. Permits to start a business or to build a place for one. On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent. Although you have no voice in saying how the money is spent, your children must attend a school that doesn't educate, and your Christian values can't be taught according to the state. You read about the current news in a regulated press, and you pay a tax you do not owe to please the IRS. Your money is no longer made of silver nor of gold. You trade your wealth for paper so your life can be controlled. You pay for crimes that make our nation turn from God and shame. You've taken Satan's number. You've traded in your name. You've given government control to those who do you harm so they could burn down churches and seize the family farm. And keep our country deep in debt. Put men of God in jail. Harash your fellow countrymen while corrupted courts prevail. Your public servants don't uphold the solemn oaths they've sworn. And your daughters visit doctors, so their children won't be born. Your leaders send artillery and guns to foreign shores, and send your sons to slaughter fighting other people's wars. Can you regain the freedoms for which we fought and died? Or don't you have the courage or the faith to stand with pride? And are there no more values for which you'll fight to save? Or do you wish your children to live in fear and be a slave? Oh, sons of the Republic, arise, take a stand, defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the land, preserve our great Republic and each God given right, and pray to God to keep the torch of freedom burning bright. As I awoke, he vanished in the mist for whence he came. His words were true, we are not free, but we have ourselves to blame. For even now as tyrants trampled each God given right we only watch him tremble too afraid to stand and fight If he stood by your bedside a dream while you were asleep and wondered what remains of the freedoms he fought to keep What would be your answer if he called out from the grave is this still the land of the free? Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is the evening intelligence report. I'm Mark Carkey. And a butter knife. One day closer to victory for all of our brothers and sisters both on and behind the lines in occupied territories west, southeast, south, and north. Well ladies and gentlemen you were listening to us on... LibertyFreeRadio.4MG.com, AM and FM micro stations, CB base stations, and Ultra Net Technologies east and west of the Mississippi along with Alaska. We're on the Hallmark Network, eastern Seaboard, top of Maine, bottom of Florida, all across the arc of the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, then up to Nebraska, the big U! And then, waving to our friends across the Rockies, both north and south, all the way through to the left coast, slash the west, we then turn, spread across the plains, leap over the Mississippi land and the Smokies, slash the... Golden Spike territory where the restaurant crews, grandma teams, the OK teams, and the Ma Bell Grandma Consortium up there in Cleveland, Ohio and many other places to numerous dimensions doing their part to bring us a replacement for the internet along with the other systems. Well BK, it's been a beautiful fall day today. What's it like in your neck of the woods and what is this special day today, sir? Well, it's a rather comfortable shirt sleeve weather. It's clear. It's a mild wind. Quite pleasant out today. And it is 4 November 2011. It is Friday evening. It is the last hour of the day and of the week for the intelligence report. And that makes this Quartermaster's Corner. And that means that of course bullets to beans, Bibles to backpacks, you name it, all the B's, well also the A's through the C's in subject and category, whatever it is that is in the supply train, Quartermaster needs to deal with it. It can be a retreat where you have one person doing supply coordination or it can be a military formation in the field where we have to get all that material where it needs to be in proper quantities to the troops that need it and Everything in between there are variables too numerous to mention But we can get you the basics and get you going and BK. What have you got for us this evening, sir? Well, we've got a number of shopping type things, but we have a little bit of commentary to make before it gets to be too ancient. This last week was Halloween, and I have to say that the Halloween here was truly a pathetic display. Now... Part of that is the demographics of the neighborhood. The first wave of children are my age. I was one of them and therefore the follow-on waves are less pronounced. They are less concentrated in ages. A street a very short distance away from here puts on a bit of a show with a haunted house and things. So that certainly draws a fair number of people, but we totaled a grand total of seven trick-or-treaters here, which was, in my opinion, quite sad. I fielded four of them and heard of three others, the four of them arriving in two pair. There are two things I can say. One is that I attribute this primarily to local government action. The government school on the preceding Saturday obviously was running a Halloween party because the streets for several hundred yards were completely lined with parked cars and we saw the little monsters all trembling up towards the school. Now, whatever you think of Halloween and the Harvest Festival and all this kind of good stuff and costuming, etc. It ought to be done in the evening. I mean, a large part of Halloween is these kids running around in the evening. That is a massive portion of the whole ritual, the costumes and the loot and all this kind of good stuff. having a government run party of the most whitewashed and politically correct sort on a Saturday afternoon in blazing broad daylight is just just a Terrible performance. I am quite disgusted with that I mean they couldn't even have it in the evening after dark Boy Scout meetings at the high school were spookier than than what they were doing So I think that took a lot of the wind out of it And the other comment I have is that of my two groups, two out of two greeted me at the door with the salutation, Happy Halloween. I don't know where the heck they got that. There wasn't any of that silliness last year. There must have been a major politically correct propaganda effort this year. And I had to prompt them. Gee, that's not the magic phrase I remember. Trick. And then they blurted out correctly and they kind of smiled like, you know, oh, okay, you know. We were told to do it this way, but here's a... old codger that remembers the ancient traditions from last year and so on and so forth. So they got their little payoff and skin area and conditioning. They got kitty treats. One, the whitewashing of the holiday by the local paid administrators and two, the apparent indirectly perceived but rather strongly perceived, apparent whitewashing of even the verbal greeting. I find quite pathetic. I consider this yet another attack upon our culture, whether you like that aspect of the culture or not, I know there's some people that don't like the whole idea of Halloween, but I do. But just one more affront and outrage against any American who remembers a tradition as ancient as a few years back. comments arguments etcetera no i agree as well when you start hearing a certain agenda i mean you can hear it as a pattern repeatedly here over and over and over again it's like wait a minute what's going on here there's gotta be somebody pumping something into the mechanism for this to happen sure enough uh... it'd be interesting to you know really debrief a little bit where'd you get the idea to do that were who who told you because you know that's really the You know the question, somebody came up with it as an agenda for whatever purpose, whatever reason. You know the nut cases on the other end, of course now they do have to have something to engineer and re-engineer constantly to claim that they have a job. I mean I understand that too. Yeah they have to tinker all the time but I really think that just whitewashing and Vanilla doughing everything is part of their attack. I mean, talk about making the world a boring and dismal place. Yeah, well, and that's actually something we've talked about for years. You know, it's the blas, which is exactly what you know. We can't be too offensive. Okay, well, what's offensive about trick-or-treat? Well, you might get tricked. Well, if every holiday gets watered down sufficiently, then why not be depressed and go on the pills? I mean, there's nothing to look forward to all year round. It's going to be blah tomorrow. It'll be blah next week. Oh, man. And you can hear that coming too, you know. Well, anyway, we didn't quite have that although again, I didn't see all I mean really the holiday the the the trick-or-treat holiday Didn't really jump out at us at all around the area here. I think in general everything is pretty well depressed without the socialists Well, actually because of the socialist but well, that's true. I wouldn't want to go traipsing down your road though I mean, that's that wouldn't be my happy hunting ground. I'd want to find a place where the houses were more densely Yeah, you gotta get to town to do that. That's pretty good. You got to be in town. Otherwise, it just doesn't quite work Well, I'll tell you what else you got first BK, go ahead. Okay, we have a number of things also in the news. Now this one is interesting and we will get to some quarter-master type topics in a few minutes, but one of the things that's coming up and is very very interesting. is that on November 9, we have talked about this, you've talked about this I'm sure, there will be a first ever national test of the emergency broadcast system, blah blah blah, which means that in mid-afternoon, for two or three minutes according to the story, television and radio, the one too many communications channels will be preempted by the feds and they will do their thing. Now those of us who grew up during the Cold War will remember this as a ritual. You know, this is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is just a test if there were really an emergency you would be told what to do, blah blah blah. Okay, what most of us don't realize is that until now That has always been a completely fake ritual. The way it's been done is that the television stations and the radio stations are told you have to do this a certain number of times per month and they just run a tape. There is absolutely nothing centrally controlled or broadcast or live about those traditional tests that have run to date. There are many hotlines from the Pentagon saying, you know, here's some new information or anything along those lines. It was just a tape they ran. to basically make people think that there is some sort of coordinated central communications mechanism. This time they're actually testing the preemption boxes. They have forced all the television and radio stations to insert a box into their signal chain that allows remote control, probably just a dial-up line, but it may be a voice over IP or whatever it is nowadays. to seize control of the outgoing stream and take it over. This will be the first only test of that. What's very, very interesting about this is not only that this is the first time they've really tried it, but the timing. Because there's another event that's happening just about that time. There is an asteroid known as AU-55. that is going to do a near-Earth approach on approximately November 9. And it's going to come within about 200,000 miles of the Earth. Bear in mind that the the moon is about 250,000 miles from the Earth, so it is actually skirting inside the orbital ring of the moon, it's coming that close. And they're quite certain it's not going to hit anything, but an object of that mass, skirting that close to two orbiting objects may induce some very small perturbations in the orbits of the moon and the earth around each other. They actually circle each other rather than one circling the other. And there is some speculation that, well, that might trigger off earthquakes that have been trying to happen or perhaps trigger some volcanoes that have been trying to happen. etc. Combine that with some concern about the Canary Islands if they have a big one that could cause a ripple that would do bad things to the east coast. Combine that with sightings that people have reported of unusual amounts of military traffic and over the last two or three months moving material around the east coast. There have been reports that mountain weather has been thoroughly stocked. This means the little vampire puppies have snapped their fingers and caused our money to be spent to provide them preps against whatever may occur. They, of course, have not advocated that we participate or provide for ourselves any preps. They have simply required behind the scenes that we provide them some, and they are quite concerned that they be provided in comfort and luxury and safety and so forth. So we have seen to that without seeing to ourselves in most cases. So all of these things are coming together at the same time. Now, it may be that that asteroid will skirt through and vanish and we will perceive no uptick in earthquake or volcanic activity, etc. It may be that this test goes off without a hitch and has no further splash. It may very well be that the Israelis don't attack Iran at just about the same time. But all of these things are coming together right at the same sort of cusp and it's very interesting. which emphasizes the point that we have been making all along. There is no time like the present to get your preps in order. They are not going to give us any significant warning deliberately when something is in the works. I would say that for the next couple of weeks, our highest priority should probably be food. Very few of us have enough of that. The problem being that it's just plain expensive. So, you know, the rice isn't too bad. It's up about a dollar a sack at Costco today when I took a look at 17.50 for a 50-pound sack. One of the things I will point out is that a 25-pound sack was $9, which means you're paying only 50 cents more if you purchase two 25s instead of a 50. A 25 is much easier to carry around. Lots of smaller people can carry one that cannot lift a 50, and those of us who can lift and carry a 50 would rather carry 25s anyway. So the rice however is up about a dollar or so per 50 pounds from the last time I looked at just two or three weeks ago. The peanut butter has experienced, they announced a little while ago and this week they executed their price hike on that. The major name brands of highly processed peanut butter, never mind that you shouldn't be eating that, are up 20 to 40 percent at retail. and this is because the cost of the peanuts has doubled and then tripled. It does demonstrate the extreme multiplier between retail pricing and the wholesale material that goes into it, but 20 and 40 percent price hike in one jump is quite significant. Other goods have been going up. This is the market's method of incrementally revoking those materials from our world, removing them from our grass because we have only so many FRNs to go around and each of us tends on an ongoing basis to see fewer and fewer each month just as things deteriorate. So I would suggest that we really need to hustle on this and if nothing comes of all of this great we will have made a little bit of progress on our food. regiments and if something does come of it well you know you scooted in and out of the grocery store before the stampede began. So either way that is a plus plus. Another example of the prices I nipped into Aldi today and picked up a dozen cans of corned beef and little 12 ounce cans. They're over three dollars apiece now even at Aldi. and a dozen canisters of regular old iodized salt, and I dropped $50. If you can envision those relatively small armfuls of material and realize that is 50 FRNs nowadays, holy smokes. Certainly the entirety of a well-designed, well-balanced food storage program is a pile of money. But the only way we can approach that is to start chipping away at it, chip, chip, chip. So, you know, do it every week. I will spare us the rhetorical question because I've already made that point this evening. but we need to just keep chipping away, chipping away and keep an eye out for really unusual events. If they report a quake in the Canary Islands, don't wait for Fox News to explain to you why this is a big deal. Scoot down to your grocery store, grab what you want and get home before the rest of the stampede realizes what's going on, etc. comments, suggestions, questions, etc. One of the things about the peanut butter too is again look for bulk sites if you can find two things that I haven't seen very much of. Number one, the really large industrial containers. Now I know you still get them but what I've noticed is even at the jobber points like the GP, general purpose food stores, We're seeing about, I think it's a one or two pound, it's a two pound, it's got to be, about a two pound container, but nothing bigger. And they used to make industrial grade in two categories, large plastic, but the other one, which I really like, was like a big old MRE can. They used to put it in number 10 cans. And we probably need to do a search on that. The other question about this thing with the prices, my biggest question would be is perhaps, well, of course we know the devaluation of the currency, but The foreign peanuts coming in. This is something that remember they did an export on the peanuts, they started to promote them promote production overseas and they're hammering the American market too. So we need to look at that as you know, maybe they've done enough damage and certainly they've had a good peanut crop. I know that because we'd be keeping track of it. Well, they claim that they've had an unusually low peanut crop because of hot, dry weather in the southeast over the summer. Interesting, because the way I gauge that too, one of the things I guess we need to also check, and you might do this in your area too, BK, because where I usually get my peanuts for doing peanut butter or doing roasted peanuts, and this is the time of year when I buy them, is from the feed mill stores. Go to your local feed mill and ask them what a 50 or 100 pound bag of grade 2 peanuts, just raw peanuts, shelled, what they're running. And that'll give us a good judge on the spot market on the price per bushel. because typically again they have gone up. I mean it used to be I was buying a 50 pound bag for 17.50. They've gone up quite a bit more than that in terms of general cost. But remember you're getting the actual peanut if you're going to like go to, well you go to the health food stores. Come here locally we have Whole Foods. When you go into the produce section, the grocery section where the fresh vegetables are, they have a whole section there that fresh grinds peanuts to make peanut butter. Right, they, Trader Joe's and those outfits will have natural peanut butter, which is basically just ground peanuts, maybe a little bit of salt added. Exactly. That's the stuff that you have to stir with a metal rod to get it mixed. So you don't want to use a favorite wooden spoon because you may leave half of it behind and get in severe trouble with the mistress of the kitchen. Aside from that, it's been a long time since I was at the local feed mill that I know of, the one that's convenient to me. The one items, actually the only two peanut related items they had were salted in the shell or not in any way processed but also in the shell. So those are 50 pound sacks. And man, I just about gave myself arthritis crushing and shelling all of those guys. I should, next time I do that, should spend my time developing a shelling machine rather than doing it with my fingers. It would be easier on my fingers if I did that. Well, they don't. Yeah. I mean, well, you just do a few more and then do a few more. And pretty soon you realize you've been going for two hours and your fingers won't move anymore. You know, and you did 15 pounds or 20 pounds or something and the rest of the hundred pounds is still looking at you. Now one of the things here is remember you can get shelled grade two. They'll be, what they are is the alien peanuts. Instead of looking perfectly straight and all the same size, grade two are shelled. You're going to get a few, you know, blims. One are, like say, you can spot them very quickly. They'll be, you know, a little black husk or whatever, a little black pod. slash nut because all they are, well they're a bean actually, but they're easy to roast, they're easy to process however you want to process them, but if you want to make your own homemade peanut butter effect we've got two little peanut butter grinders here we've had for almost 20 years now, they're both little electric ones, they're nice little machines, but like you said the only thing is you're getting the real peanut butter. peanut butter they squeeze most the oils out then throw some other kind of grease in and that's what we call peanut butter right now yeah commercial stuff has sugars added as very bad oils added to it. If you read it, it'll be soy oil or it'll be canola oil or whatnot. It's because they pressed out the peanut oil and sold that separately to the restaurants because that holds up very, very well in the deep fryers. So they squeeze all that oil out. They replace it usually with the cheapest oil they can get, which is soy oil, and that's bad stuff. And then they mix in emulsifiers like lecithin to keep it from separating. Now I don't object particularly to lecithin as an emulsifier. That's one of those things that some people advocate taking in gel capsule form for a salubrious effect. But they're not using it because it's good for you. They're using it to make the product appear better in spite of the fact that they use these really nasty oils. So if you wanted to do the same thing, you could sweeten it. and you could add an emulsifier so you didn't have so many problems with it separating, but I would not recommend separating out the peanut oil and then putting really nasty oil in instead. That would not be something that somebody would actually do to themselves. Now another thing too is remember that you can roast the peanuts like we're talking about. One of the things that we do is you can flavor peanuts. A lot of guys, if you're going to be doing recon packs and you're going to pack up your own stuff to eat, from raw materials, again, the peanuts are cheapest to buy in bulk from the feed mill. And then if you've got a fireplace, like a wood burning stove or whatever, you just or you can use your oven either way. You can just take a cookie tray, spread out the peanuts, you can hit them with a number of different types of spray-on butters or whatever too, not the best choice but always an option. And then you can sprinkle cayenne pepper, you can do flavors, you can do honey roasted, whatever you want to do. You can make whatever you want them to be, you can even toffee them. But you know the important thing here is you know exactly when they were cooked you know exactly how they were processed and you know exactly to the date when they went in the bag so you're not going to have to worry about how old are these things. That's really a critical issue when it comes to long-term storage or when it comes to rations in the field. You know I mentioned these we'll touch on these lerps again from Freeze Dry Guy later on. But This is a quick and it's a it's a lot of protein. It's a lot of food. It fills you up I'll tell you I used to for recon rations I used to take the sea ration peanut butter sea ration cheese and all the combat cookies I could carry And for the most part, because the crackers, military crackers, are protein crackers on top of everything else, you pretty well covered most all the calories that you needed. And the other thing is it slowed down the system, by the way, too, a lot. Don't worry, the other food sped it up, and there's all kinds of other considerations with regard to illness in the field, so it kind of balances out sometimes, if you get Madrid. Well if you wanted to powder some of that peanut shell that would be the world's best fiber anyway right? Yeah here we go. In fact nothing would be wasted then. Well you know on that note, now this sounds weird but we go back to Civil War and post Civil War period, pretty much nothing was wasted. There were a lot of tricks to that that were used. and boiled peanuts are something you gotta remember that boiled peanuts everybody eats as a snack when you go down south you can find them still along the highways down in Georgia or Alabama and in northern Florida. Boiled peanuts? I don't really see the point because I like them not just fine. Exactly. Well again it's just another technique or technique to change things up when the only thing you're gonna have are what we have today, Goober Peas. What do we have tomorrow? Goober Peas. What do we have next week? Goober Peas. It is. How many ways can you make peanuts? That becomes the primary mission of the cook. So I'm sure that was a reason. That explains why people work on how do we dust Cajun spices all over peanuts. I don't consider them an improvement on the peanuts, but if I eat peanuts every day for months on end, I might consider them a change. Exactly. It's a way just to change it up. It's like Asian peanuts today and we will have Italian peanuts tomorrow. Now in in middle of all of these price rises and I was looking around I visited all these today I mentioned that and Just for grins. I checked the dairy section and I see that butter is still $2 a pound, which is a relative bargain Even at Costco and Sam's and such it's much more expensive than that I will remind people that Butter is a very useful thing to have not just for spreading on baked goods but for including in things. It is not the most durable oil as far as the basis for frying. But if, for instance, you deviate a little bit from the all organic, let's eat totally healthy doctrine and say set aside some of these mac and cheese kits that are commercially available, those generally call for a little bit of butter being added. If you set aside some pop corn. Well, there's nothing quite like drizzling butter on the popcorn and so on. There are a lot of uses for that. At $2 a pound, the stuff is still relatively affordable. And remember, we have talked about this before, you can can that. So you're not dependent upon your fridge or your freezer to preserve store-bought butter. You can use canning jars and can that and preserve it so that it is dry goods just like anything else. Now, very, very briefly, The process for doing that is straightforward. You take your canning dryers, you run them through the dishwasher just like you do before any other canning operation, get them clean. then you put them in the oven you bake them at about 250 or so for at least a half an hour longer is fine what you're doing is you're sterilizing the glass okay meanwhile I'm assuming that you're using one pint jars here you're gonna nip over to the stove you're gonna start separating out all of these these sticks of butter and you will throw three and a half sticks into a saucepan and if you're really good you can keep three sauce pans running. If you're just starting you probably want to just do one or two and bring those up on a very low heat and get that melted and bring them up to simmer so that they are steaming and bubbling. And you leave them to bubble like that for a few minutes. What you're doing is you're not only killing any microorganisms in there But you're also driving off some of the water because people don't realize that butter actually contains a significant amount of water in it. And that's what the bad bugs like. Without water, they don't prosper no matter what the rest of the environment is. So you have heated up a little saucepan with three and a half sticks of butter. It won't quite fit four sticks one pound into a pint jar. So you go three and a half sticks. Heat them up, bubble them, let them run for a few minutes. You do not want it to scorch and turn brown, but you do want to let it bubble for a little bit. Then you will pull a jar out of the oven, careful with your mitts because that's going to be hot, hot, hot. You want to pull it out hot. You don't want to let it cool off and let bugs and things land on it. You will pour the contents of that saucepan in there and you will apply your canning lid, which has been simmering in a pot of water on another burner. and set it aside and wash rinse repeat until you've gone through the entirety of however much you purchased that day. When these have cooled almost to the point of gelling up, then you might want to give them a good thorough shake. Pretend that you are the pneumatic paint shaker at the hardware store. The idea there is to remix the milk solids with the clarified section and if you're using salted butter you'll realize when you look at it that man there's a lot of salt in there that is half inch or three-quarters of an inch of salt at the bottom of the jar and so you want to mix all that stuff up just before it sets. Don't bother shaking them while they're super hot it's just gonna separate right back out again. but wait until it's just barely about to solidify and then give it a thorough shaking and let it finish solidifying and remove the rings and you are done. So this is not a pressure canning operation. You don't need a canner or a pressure cooker or whatnot. You just need a stovetop, a couple of sauce pans, one for the lid, anywhere from one to three. For the butter, use your dishwasher for washing and your oven for sterilizing. and you can can butter adequate for use on popcorn in cooking, in mixing into these you know cheese items etc. Yeah you can one of our guys points out that you know you can you can make ghee if you want to that means separating out the milk salads and leaving the clarified liquid but you know you can do as you see fit. But either way, you can can butter and you do not need then a fridge or a freezer to preserve it. And as I have said before, if you've got fresh popped popcorn with butter and salt on it, how bad can things really be, right? After all, crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch, remember even if it is a secret weapon, I know how to get out of it. Eat your way out. Yeah, well even if you're watching the apocalypse if you got a nice bowl of hot popcorn well that makes it better Dude, we can relax and watch while we're munching man. I'm telling you look. It's like television only it's right out the picture window Like a sharp DVD players not running, but this is almost as good as clip corn click Well anyway take what on that note to there are a number of other options with regard to storage both the mutter like you said First of all you can can your own there is powdered butter out there That of course is another option. I don't see as many companies carrying it. It was perfected in the 90s. That's when you really saw it coming to its own. I still don't understand that because the whole point of butter the way I see it is the fat and if it's powdered it has to be either they have to have done something really nasty to the fat or they have to have removed it. Well actually we've got samples of that but I think I have a case. We might be able to send you a can to test out. We've used it just in experimental form because they made peach sized cans for samples. But the big thing is, like you said, popcorn. One of the things to remember is stuff to put on it. Remember, just like everything else, you can put garlic, you can put soy sauce, you can put a lot of other things on it if you gotta try and at least flavor it, maybe you don't have butter. There are other options, of course everybody uses margarine instead of butter. That's a cooks choice there and a matter what you have don't use margarine if you can avoid it The history of margarine is such that it was it was toxic to turkeys So they started feeding it to people right well the other thing remember originally it was a cheap axle grease That's the one thing everybody's got to remember it started out as a petroleum product for so to speak as a you know competitor and it was for us Yeah from that era when everybody was looking for alternate products and they were competing against petroleum But the the interesting thing is oleo or or whatever if you're gonna be doing the popcorn thing the other thing you remember guys popcorn does not Go bad with age The dryer? I think that you could probably lose sufficient moisture from it, but I've never heard of that happening, and that does lead us to another topic. Costco has jolly time popcorn in jugs. They're 12.5 pound jugs. I do not recall off the top of my head what they cost, but they seem to me to be not unreasonable, so I set aside a few. And with that in mind, and given that Mark has made the comment that none of the specialized strains involved in popcorn have been GMO'd, I had some difficulties adding those into the spreadsheet because all the data that I could find on popcorn referred to the serving size as something like 8 grams 1 cup. So they're obviously talking about the popped stuff. Well, for my calculations, I wanted pounds of unpopped and then how much protein, fats and carbs were there. So I called up Jolly Time and sifted through their switchboard two or three people and eventually got to somebody who was willing to field a consumer call and had some data at their fingertips and got the appropriate numbers. And it turns out that actually not very much of the mass of the popcorn is lost during the popping. It went from something like 33 grams to 31 grams in popping. So it lost only two grams of water. So I could have used any number for the before figure or the serving size figure if I had wanted to would have been off by only a few percent. But I did get the actual data. But while I was talking, to the company, I decided to do a little bit of PR there and I said, well, I have heard that the very specific strains used in popcorn have not yet been GMO poisoned. Can you confirm or deny that? I don't see anything marked on your package about GMO. And they said, yes, that's correct. None of them are GMO. We don't have that on the packaging, but we assure you that there's absolutely no GMO in the popcorn. So even if you wanted to treat popcorn as just a hard and requiring grinding form of corn to make cornmeal or something like that, that would be one way of guaranteeing to yourself that you are not getting GMO material. And I imagine, of course, that popcorn is directly plantable. The seeds certainly look like they have not been treated in any way that would interfere with them, perhaps sprouting and growing more. I don't know if they're hybridized or not, but they're not GMO'd. The other comment I would make is that they probably don't have to field very many calls in a year in which people use the term GMO and the word poison in the same sentence before they get a strong impression that hey, maybe it would be a marketing advantage to us to actually label these things in this fashion or make sure that our products do tend to avoid the GMOs, etc. So anytime you are talking to a food processing company, I'd encourage people to make a point of slipping that into the conversation somewhere along the line. Acquaiting as an aside, GMO with poison and asking them about their products specifically probably doesn't take all that many people talking to them to cause them a certain amount of consternation. at HQ. Antagonism and in fact competition is still the correct word between the different growers. There's a whole private group, like I've said before, we had a grower here in Dexter. I didn't even know about him and I've lived here all my life and I eventually helped him plant a couple of his crops because we were doing pumpkins for the school and I found out he had so many acres of popcorn. And that was unique, it's like popcorn. It was like, oh yeah, and then the girl, the daughter of the guy that was growing the crops said, oh yeah, my dad's won awards and this and that and the other because they compete and they sell to the industry. And it's really interesting, it's like wine. It really is. So they really can't afford to hybridize it too much. Pretty much all the popcorn is viable. It wouldn't take much to experiment next year. Something to put on the shelf, ideas, to take some of the popcorn you are getting and put it in the field and see what it does. You know, run a little test batch, see how it sprouts. With regard to storage, and I will say something, and Ed knows, because we eat a lot of popcorn here, because we have tons of it that's in storage. The latest stuff that we've been popping is from 1992 and very in other words number 10 cans stored although I have others that were five gallon pale plastic stored using the co2 packing system Right, both of those are better than retail packaging. Oh, yeah. I repeat my opinion that anything that we put aside now is going to be used so soon. Long before. That we probably don't have to worry too much about these 10-year shelf life type issues. I think that we're going to be breaking into our preps inside a year. But that is, of course, purely speculation and I have routinely been way way ahead in my predictions once I see something as being inevitable I expect it to happen and the world seems to have a lot more inertia than I ever give it credit for things always take longer than I expect. Now keep in mind one of the things to tie in with this too is if we do traditional farming if we get into traditional crops Remember that some crops weren't produced every year because they knew what their storage cycle time was plus, remember, typically on a five acre, ten acre, or twenty acre farm, if you had machinery you were bigger, but still you had cycling of crops. In other words, you first of all had to rotate the crops in the fields and you also rotated by seasonal operation different crops and used them and then stored them accordingly. So one of the- Well yeah, if you didn't, if you were going to rotate, you know, multiple crops and you don't want to do a single acre at a time. So you may not want to do a three or four at once type rotation. You may want to do a, you know, two at once rotation or something along those lines. In many cases the crops, because they're long storage items, it's like red wheat. Red wheat's good for seven years. You don't want to run wheat in the field every year, so you run wheat, then you run corn, then you run rye to revitalize the field, or you'd run hemp, but we don't do that anymore. Then you go through the crop cycle into whatever, beans if you want to, and then go back into wheat, and then go wheat two or three years in a row actually. But the thing is that red wheat was long storage, white wheat is fast, quick, you know, quick use. Popcorn, because of its, because of the nature of its storage ability, the biggest thing with any of these in the past, and even today, is still, you know, vermin. You know, when you have a lot, how much can you store efficiently and how much can you protect from all the other things? You don't want to feed the livestock, they aren't yours. In other words, the rats or the mice or the birds. So how much can you store properly and effectively? and that's where only the cats get those guys. That's not the goal. That's the cat's job, but it's not the goal. With all of these systems that are out there I mean again the popcorn the important thing is it could sit on the shelf for a long period of time if you do produce it it doesn't mean you you Don't produce every year But let's say you wanted to make that it like one of the many niche crops in a redevelopment of agriculture of animal husbandry it's one of the things that could be done and be a side crop of three or four acres in a larger production type operation where you have 20 or 30 to work with and It would always sell It always moves. It's one of those things, it's like you said, people think about it in theaters, they think about it or they think about it even if we didn't have theaters. A lot of people would have that nostalgic niche there. Plus, hey, you're around a campfire, the Indians used popcorn. That's where it came from. Right, it's one of the most basic luxuries. It doesn't take very much to do it and it's very universal. There's almost nobody that doesn't like it, etc. And if they do, go without. I'll take yours. Not a problem. Another thing on that too again is different storage systems. Remember that in the past historically Crocs and Masonry guys, we can do better than that for the time being, but eventually we may have to go back in that direction. Not a big deal. Well, don't forget the venerable gallon glass jugs. Those are really terrific storage mechanism. Works great for popcorn. You don't have to worry about fishing it out. So even the jugs work just as well as the jars. Yes. In fact, what we do is I just keep restocking a number 10 can. I've got the 5 gallon and 10 gallon containers that are the popcorn holders and I only have to open them up once in a while, fill up the one can with the number 10 can. And it's a coffee can that's an antique by itself even though it's not that old. It's an original big lot can when they first opened up, what, 20 some years ago, 30 years ago now. So it's just kind of funny just to look at the label and go, hmm, is it really that old? It's been that long? So, there are a number of solutions. The big thing is the options because we're looking at variety. That's where, again, what BK brought up earlier here, guys, you have a method for keeping track of and inventorying your stock. Most everything that you have is going to have more than one purpose so you have to start thinking, well I'd use this for these things, then you don't think about what we're just talking about, like just casual entertainment foods, just to change things up. One thing to remember too is it used to be we had special days for doing this. It wasn't like, man, I got a feel good song, popcorn all the time. No, that's not how it works. Friday is DVD day because that's the day we can run the generator or crank up enough battery power so that we can run the DVD and maybe get a whole movie out. So, guess what, we're going to splurge, pop some popcorn, break out some of the storage butter, drip that on the popcorn, put some ocean salt or seasoned salt or whatever you want on it or fine theater salt, take your pick, whatever you store, that's up to you. And we can sit down and everybody's got something else to do for a little bit. Again, it's the way things used to be. Think about it. We used to go see a movie Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. You didn't go every day of the week and you didn't go. It wasn't a special occasion. We picked up a typically everybody had a certain day. That was the the event day. Sunday was the church day, of course the rest day. But you know, hey Saturday night go out there watch a movie or everybody sit down in front of the television Saturday night NBC at the movies. The Ten Commandments. Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. Posh made of popcorn. See how that works? So again, it creates a routine, which is the other part of very important to social life, is creating a routine. But you need to keep track of things first, and that's where you need the inventory sheets. If you have the inventory sheets, you're not going to run bare, and you're also going to pay attention to your recycle. What do you need to replenish? What do you need to restock? Very critical to the overall operation we're talking about here, even for something as simple as making sure you got popcorn. Go ahead, BK. Okay, we have one shopping item. I'll toss out an aside because I don't have time to discuss this other topic at length. Needless to say, if it is not a fraud, it is the most important technological breakthrough of the century. Anybody who wants to take a look at a website, pessn.com, that's papa eko, seara november.com. we'll see a report of a system which looks like cold fusion has been broken. These guys appear to have a cycle in which nickel and hydrogen combine to form copper and iron with a major surplus of heat. If that is true and it's not a fraud, then that alone would be enough to for the vampires to pull a ripcord because as soon as the peasants get wind of that and realize that oil will cease to be a problem they can tell the Middle East to stick it and you know go beat your wives and you know if that suits you but you know we won't have any of you and we don't need you anymore that will upset the established order tremendously so if that proves out to be real that could trigger the next mass politically manufactured cataclysm. If we haven't discussed it thoroughly in the next week, we'll discuss it next week on quartermasters. But meanwhile, one of our friends came up with a rather neat little shopping item. Geeks.com. G-E-E-K-S.com. is offering for $20 a wireless video surveillance system. It is a one channel system. It is called the Omni MicroCam wireless surveillance camera kit. And it consists of a camera with a transmitter built in. It's got a tail so that you can provide external power if you want or it'll take a 9 volt as a receiver. Then there's receiver outputs NTSC, so you can plug it into any regular television. Claims 150 foot transmit range without obstructions, which means that if you're going through walls or what have you, it will be less. It also is described as operating at 1.2 GHz, so that means it is not at the same frequency as your wireless stuff, but it is only one harmonic away, and it's exactly on the harmonic. So I don't know whether this will interfere with your regular wireless communications or not, your wireless B, G, or N. communications. If it does, that would be a major minus minus. I went searching on the net trying to find a service manual or owner's manual on this thing. I was not successful in that regard. What I was successful in was discovering that there are at least a dozen different vendors who are all offering the same thing at the same price right now. Now, I don't know whether Geeks is the lead seller on this, whether they are just one of many that is feeding orders to a fulfillment house. I don't know the structure of this deal, but it looks like this model is being remandered out all over the place. It is $20 for a full camera, transmitter, and receiver set, also with a wall wart for each to provide external power. I did find on one site on Amazon, there was a a single user review which said, well let's see, the 9 volt battery that was included was dead on arrival, it took me a while to figure that out, but other than that it does work okay, I thought the camera could have been better quality, I'll try a more expensive one next time, but for the price it's not bad. What I derive from that is if the 9 volt battery that's included in the package is old enough to have died the true death in the package, that means this is a very much old stock. It's set on the shelf for a while. It's been in a warehouse someplace. From the photographs, it looks as if the build cost is higher than the $20 they're offering this at. So it looks like it's actually substantial, maybe a little older technology on the pickup, but everything else looks as if it's fabricated fairly well. The other thing to be concerned about, they don't say so, that's why I was looking for a manual. It does not appear as if this is tunable, so I do not think that you can operate two of these in the same area. I don't think there's any way to tell them to operate on slightly different frequencies so that you could have one location and a second location. I think this is a single unit in a given broadcast area. All of that being said, it looks like a very useful device. You're not going to be reading any license plates with it. But I think this is more than satisfactory to determine if somebody is sneaking up the Arroyo behind your house or whether there are critters in the garden or what have you. What exactly is going on in the North 40, that sort of thing. and given that this is apparently a new old stock surplus in operation somebody has dumped these on the market there's no telling how long they will be available it would be interesting if any of our friends picks one up and gives us a hands-on review I would highly recommend this just for test come on guys $20 for a complete compressed system ready to roll Yeah, these different vendors will have different shipping cost policies. So if you know that multiple different people are offering them, just google for omni micro cam wireless surveillance camera kit. and you'll get at least a dozen hits on that and you can find somebody who's got zero shipping or buy two of them get free shipping or something along those lines. It looks like a good package. One of our friends called this to my attention and I thought I would run this up on the air. I hope he's already ordered one if he's going to because we might help clean them out. Now remember the other thing about that is $19 postage paid and usually if you buy more than one like if you buy three or more you got to check to see what they say about this but usually they even give you a little better price. At the very least it's a helmet cam. You can mount it as a gun cam. What I would use for a television, let's say if you wanted to use this as a quick portable unit, I buy them all the time for 50 cents to $2 or get them for free, the five inch black and white or color televisions. And in fact the ones I just picked up use the same fixture jack in the rear that's on that unit. So wow. This would really be cool and that everything a plug and play right now and it's dog cheap I mean you could afford to throw it away at $20 you'll abandon it you wouldn't even have to worry me be like oh my god I gotta save my no I don't But right now now bear in mind that if this is old The camera pickup will not be likely as good as the ones we are accustomed to nowadays with all of the cell phones and so on but if it does transmit an image and You know the image is good enough to tell whether Somebody is moving out there or whether there are critters in the garden or what have you this egg may serve a purpose. You watch a trail you can't watch the area you can't see now can be observed while you're using your eyes and ears for the rest of the battlefield or an area of control for security purposes. This is priceless. Each person could move one and four points of the compass. They would not interfere with each other because of their range limitation and you could deploy these things in a number of different ways where they'd be positive. At the very least personal again personal extension of your eyes. Okay. one of our guys in chat says that he had one and was not at all impressed that the tuner drifted and so on like that so uh... nobody go out there by twenty of these things i don't don't assume expect pick one up maybe he got a bad one maybe yours will be better uh... it will be interesting to see the are being remanded for a reason certainly they are you know there's a big lump of them uh... maybe they didn't sell thought very well initially but it would be interesting uh... to get a uh... a second sample and an opinion on that. As far as it just being like video to a standard receiver if you're picking up one of the old TVs like dad was talking about. I'd be willing to guarantee that this is an all analog device. Yeah, it would not be that big of a deal to you know adjust the monitor a little bit for better picture. Just think of this as 100% throw away. In other words, like you said, if it can tell me that that's a man silhouette out there and I'll guarantee it'll do a little better than that. I don't need to be able to count the freckles on his nose, I just need to confirm the uniform he's wearing. or if it tells you that there's a deer out there, how much deer can you buy for $20 versus this guy? Exactly. So it may have paid for itself once if it spots one deer for you and you pop out the back door and bag it. Now, for the person who had it, we're going to be losing time here on the... we're going to be gone here in a minute, but one of the things to consider, guys... We're already past that. Yeah, we got to take off. Ah, is whether or not it has IR potential. What its IR pickup is. Something else we need to look at. Well, BK, we covered a lot of good stuff here tonight. Guys, remember, popcorn! Yes, we gotta have it. And again, we can pick up all of the other information. You can come back on the archives here on the program tonight so you can follow through. BK, anything else before we go, please? No time. God bless the Republic. Death to the New World Order. We shall prevail, ladies and gentlemen. The Empire is on the run. We and our popcorn are on the march both day and night. Yep, we may not have nothing too fancy, but at least we got something to eat. The other ones are still boiling their shoes. Oh well. Thank you, BK. And it works really badly with synthetic shoes. They'll try anyway. Bye bye.