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From SurvivalBlog.com

Introductory Note: I am not an employee of RWVA, Appleseed Project or any company I might mention in this article. I am however a volunteer Instructor in Training for Appleseed. I receive no remuneration for my service.

My introduction to the Appleseed Project was different, than for most SurvivalBlog .com readers.

I have had an avid interest in firearms from the time my uncle came to live with us during my high school years. Uncle Dick had several rifles, shotguns and pistols (of which I have since inherited). My first after school job was at a hardware store that just happened to have the largest gun display in our little town of 20,000.
I spent as much of my paycheck on firearms and ammunition as my parents would allow, while still saving for college and paying for my own personal expenses.
Early in 2010 I was thinking of how I could take a Ruger .22 rimfire Model 10/22 and make it look like an M1 Carbine. And so I did a web search on the phrase  “Ruger 10/22 M1 Carbine”.  I was surprised to see something pop up. It was E.A. Brown’s web site. They had a stock, sling and sights that would allow me to do exactly what I wanted to do.
But they also had in the description, a reference to the term “Liberty Training Rifle”. I had never…

plant it once and grow it for a lifetime. seed saving is fun and very rewarding!
Video Rating: 4 / 5

In 2008, in the midst of the global food crisis, we travelled to Haiti to look at the politics of rice – how such a fertile country became dependent on food aid. In the wake of this current disaster, that dependence is – initially – going to deepen. But as relief efforts slowly turn to plans for reconstruction, it is important to look back at the policies that brought Haiti to the brink in the first place, and the people who had their own vision of self-sufficiency all along. Avi Lewis talks about the US role in the development of Haiti with PJ Crowley, the spokesman at the US state department, and Emira Woods, the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and an expert on US foreign policy.

From The Economic Collapse

With each passing day, the banking crisis in Europe escalates.  European banks are having their credit ratings downgraded in waves, bond yields are soaring and billions of euros are being pulled out of banks all across the eurozone.  The situation in Europe is rapidly going from bad to worse.  It is almost like watching air being let out of a balloon.  The key to any financial system is confidence, and right now confidence in banks in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal is declining at an alarming rate.  When things hit the fan in Europe, it is going to be much safer to have your money in Swiss banks or German banks than in Greek banks, Spanish banks or Italian banks.  Millions of people in Europe are starting to realize that a “euro” is not necessarily always going to be a “euro” and they are starting to panic.  The Greek banking system is already on the verge of total collapse, and at this rate it is only a matter of time before we see some major Spanish and Italian banks start to fail.  In fact it has already been announced that the fourth largest bank in Spain, Bankia, will be getting bailed out by the Spanish government.  It is only a matter of time before we hear more announcements like this.  Right now, events are moving so quickly…

From Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

Courtesy of Google translate, please consider the following bleak reports from Spain.

Spanish Bank Debt With ECB Up 15.7% in April

El Confidencial reports The Spanish bank debt with the ECB increased by 15.7% in April

The debt of Spanish banks with the ECB shot up to 263.535 billion euros in April, that is 15.7% compared to 227.6 billion recorded in March, a new record, according to the Bank of Spain. This amount is outstanding entities resident in Spain still have yet to return to the European Central Bank as a result of the funding the agency has been granted previously.

The net financing granted in April by the Eurosystem to Spanish banks accounted for 68.8% of total Eurozone, which amounted to 382.712 billion euros. However, the gross amount of appeal does not collect the money that Spanish banks have borrowed from the ECB and have been redeposited in the body to receive a return of 0.25% a day.

The increasing difficulties of Spanish institutions to borrow from the interbank appreciate finding that the credit requested by Spanish banks headed by Mario Draghi school increased sixfold compared to that recorded in April 2011 (42.227 billion).

Surprise Vat Hike?

Hiking taxes in the middle of a recession is horrendous policy. Yet one should never underestimate the potential stupidity of bureaucrats.

El Economista reports The Government is preparing a surprise rise in VAT for up to three points by…

From The Market Ticker

From an opinion piece on Bloomberg:

The value at risk for equity exposure discussed above is based on J.P. Morgan’s RiskMetrics(TM) approach. Both value at risk methods utilize a one-day holding period and a 95% confidence level. Cross-commodity correlations are used as appropriate.

Read that.

It goes back to Enron, but it points out the problem, if you think about it.  Take a few seconds before you continue reading and see if you can figure it out.

Got it?

It’s right here: “Both value at risk methods utilize a one-day holding period and a 95% confidence level.”

What if you cannot exit your positions within one day, and there is a 5% chance that the model fails on any given day, or one day in 20 anyway?

In either case the entire exercise is a scam; neither of the boundary conditions is reasonable.  Not only is a 95% confidence interval ridiculously wide (this means that on average one business day a month will go wide of the mark!) predicating the performance on a one-day holding period when one cannot unwind the positions involved within a period of weeks or even months without adversely moving the market against you is knowingly using a bogus metric to produce your claimed “value” model.

But it gets worse: Statistical models are all about random distribution of events.  The problem with such models is that markets are, in the “tails”, not random at all. …

From Modern Survival Blog

image source: lowellsun.com

You may have run across this news report already today while scouring the news, but in case you haven’t, hear is a re-hash. In Massachusetts, state environmental police shut down an ice-cream stand run by Mark Duffy for 26 years at a dairy farm in Carlisle, a small town about 20 miles northwest of Boston.

The armed environmental police told Duffy that he had not obtained proper permits for recent improvements he made to the stand, and were forced to shut it down. Not only did they shut it down, but they guarded the popular ice-cream stand and physically turned away all of the would-be patrons at the popular spot during sunny Mothers Day weekend. Apparently a posted notice was not enough… they had to put up an authoritative presence (show).

“I’m here and the purpose of having me here is to improve the facility and operate a commercial dairy farm,” said Duffy, 57, who lives on the farm with his wife. “I make improvements every single day and have for 26 years.”

“There are 13 high-school and college students who work at the stand who are now without jobs,” said Duffy.

Duffy offers guided barn tours at the farm from May to October. The building improvements in question were made to create an area to show an instructional video produced by the Massachusetts dairy industry, said Duffy.

Edward Lambert, commissioner of the Department of Conservation and Recreation, said…

From Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

On Sunday, May 06, 2012 I gave an Exclusive Interview to the “Daily Bell” with Anthony Wile that I would like to share with my readers.

The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Mish Shedlock.

Introduction: Mike “Mish” Shedlock blogs at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, for which he has won awards from the New York Times, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, CNBC and Strategist News. Mish is
a contributing “professor” blogger at the economic and financial
education site Minyanville and offers podcasts every Thursday on
HoweStreet. He’s a registered investment advisor representative for
SitkaPacific. He says that unlike many free-market “Austrians,” he
emphasizes credit impacts and deflationary trends within larger
business-cycle manifestations. When not writing about economics, Mike
enjoys photography; 80 of his photos have become magazine and book
covers.

Daily Bell: Give us some background.

Mish Shedlock: My background is actually in computer
programming and engineering. I worked for banks for 20 years primarily
as a computer analyst working on the technical end of applications. I
was an assistant vice president for Harris Bank for most of that time.
AVP was as high a position as technicians could get. When Bank of
Montreal bought out Harris, I left to become a consultant.
Shortly after 9/11, contracts dried up and I was out of work for
three years with literally no income. When…

From Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

On Sunday, May 06, 2012 I gave an Exclusive Interview to the “Daily Bell” with Anthony Wile that I would like to share with my readers.

The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Mish Shedlock.

Introduction: Mike “Mish” Shedlock blogs at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, for which he has won awards from the New York Times, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, CNBC and Strategist News. Mish is
a contributing “professor” blogger at the economic and financial
education site Minyanville and offers podcasts every Thursday on
HoweStreet. He’s a registered investment advisor representative for
SitkaPacific. He says that unlike many free-market “Austrians,” he
emphasizes credit impacts and deflationary trends within larger
business-cycle manifestations. When not writing about economics, Mike
enjoys photography; 80 of his photos have become magazine and book
covers.

Daily Bell: Give us some background.

Mish Shedlock: My background is actually in computer
programming and engineering. I worked for banks for 20 years primarily
as a computer analyst working on the technical end of applications. I
was an assistant vice president for Harris Bank for most of that time.
AVP was as high a position as technicians could get. When Bank of
Montreal bought out Harris, I left to become a consultant.
Shortly after 9/11, contracts dried up and I was out of work for
three years with literally no income. When…

From The Market Ticker

Oh oh….

The survey’s broadest measure of manufacturing conditions, the diffusion index of current activity, fell from a reading of 8.5 in April to -5.8 in May (see Chart 1).

That be a negative print, and comes after I warned last month that the softening was something to pay close attention to.

New orders, unfilled orders, delivery times, prices received, number of employees and workweek all went negative.  The latter two are especially bad with the employee count collapsing from a strongly positive number.

The market reaction is amusing — after a big dump the dollar has plunged, presumably on the premise that The Fed will shortly be along with QE3

Here’s the problem with such a “tonic” — it’s destructive.  Very destructive, as I’ve previously noted repeatedly over the years, because GDP = ((M + C) * V).

That is, Money and Credit (summed) times velocity (the number of times each turns over) must equal GDP, since GDP is what’s bought.

If you “print money” (e.g. QE) then the value of everyone’s units of credit and money are diminished, and they need more of them to buy a unit of GDP.

That is, the “tonic” for the stock market comes with an ever-increasing cost in the actual economic state of everyone in the economy.  The “gains” you thus have are short-lived and ephemeral, not real, since ultimately people must buy goods and services with earnings, not promises…

From What if IT is today? – A Survivalist’s Blog

We’ve been preparing for the chickens to hatch on Saturday.  That’s three weeks and everything tells me that it takes 21 days to hatch chickens.  Well, someone forgot to tell that to the chickens.  Yesterday we had three hatch, at 18 days, and today there are at least five more shells that have little pecks on them.  Those chicks are trying to escape as well! 

If you remember, the ducklings couldn’t read a calendar either.  They were supposed to arrive at 28 days and showed up at 32.  Along with the chicks we have 10 ducklings – two older ducklings (3 weeks) that are outside in the extra coop, six ducklings in a trough inside that are a week old, two ducklings are with their mother in the garden.  The other duck is still sitting on her nest.  I’m expecting them to hatch sometime this week.  We will probably take most of her ducklings and leave her with just a couple, like we did with the other duck. 

It’s good that I learned from the ducklings that they don’t always come when predicted.  I kept more of an eye on them than I normally would.  I also raised the humidity a bit by spraying the eggs with a spray bottle of water twice a day now that they are in their resting position and not being turned.  While the books say to let the eggs be for…