So what is left?

     FBI director, James Comey quipped this week........“There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.” Let me ask you a question. So what's left for the "Troops" to protect? Our elections are rigged. Just ask Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul. Clearly the Democratic process is gone. The latest Wikileaks release shows that even our TVs are being used to spy on us. It shows that US citizens are being "Terminated" because of "Metadata." Who you might have had a phone conversation with, not even considering what the conversation might have been about, can get you executed. It doesn't matter whether you believe we should "Drill baby drill," or go solar. The fact that those who were protesting the Dakota Access pipeline were forcibly removed by military personnel, shows you no longer can petition for redress. You are not allowed to protest what the Government does. The Founding Fathers enacted Posse Comitatus to ensure the military can't be used against the citizens. (So much for that.) They're passing "Laws" that prevent us from knowing what's in our food. Try getting on a plane, and you'll soon find out that you can not travel within your own country without Government permission. Bend over and sing ♪ Moon River ♫!!!

A Cartel made up of banksters is manipulating what you're money is worth, within fifteen years, robots will take forty five percent of our jobs, and we've recently learned that your Kid's breakfast cereal is loaded with weed killers. We've learned that the Government gives diseases to our Army troops without them knowing, as an experiment to see what happens. The last President declared that he could execute citizens without a trial, and that's what he did. We know he killed at least six of us, including a sixteen year old boy. No judge, jury, reading of rights, or attorney. You're dead. "They must have had a reason" you say? That's not the point. (The latest Emperor in chief has left this in place.... Not a word..... The sound of crickets.)

Whom you marry is "Their" decision, and at "Their" whim. What our Kids are taught in schools, (math that makes no sense?), and what they can bring for lunch to school is being dictated to us. You cannot collect rainwater, raise a chicken, or have a child's kool-aid stand without permission. Try growing a vegetable garden in your own front yard, and eventually men with guns will come and destroy it. Take a natural medicine that doesn't profit the system, and you will be locked up. The penalty is greater than if you raped the teenager next door. You're not doing what you're told to do.

Those connected to the system, can commit open fraud, pollute entire oceans, steal from the public coffers, and do unspeakable things to our children in dark rooms. They've openly admitted, "We've tortured a few folks", and that a half million human beings were killed over an outright lie. No one is punished, move along, nothing to see here.... Watch a football game instead. Where's the outrage?

We were given a Bogey Man, the terrorist king to hate. Our youth died in his pursuit, over a dubious and supposed attack on our soil. We chased him for over a decade, and when it was politically expedient..... We were told he was dead. A great victory!!! Show us the body! Buried at sea? What a joke!!! We're so brainwashed, we had no outrage, forgot, played Pokeman instead. Oh, and the troops that supposedly killed him? They were "Disappeared" soon after. Dead men tell no tales.

If you're a Taxpayer, they've spent your future on pet projects, graft, and corruption. They borrowed it in your name. It was a loan based on a promise that you and I will pay it back. They throw the numbers around so nonchalantly that it's easy to ignore. Here's a wake up call. Your share is over one hundred and sixty thousand Dollars. Some people lent it to the Government, and you will be expected to pay it back..... One way or another.... Plus interest. In order for "Them" to stay in power, men will eventually come with guns to take it from you. Don't have it? They'll take what you have. Learn to live under a bridge!

Some men in suits, almost took down the whole facade. They gambled away the whole economy in their personal casino. When they screwed up, when they fraudulently took millions of people's homes they were given a pile of our cash to reward them. They should have gone to jail. Instead they got a big Christmas bonus, taken from you. Nothing to see here, forget about it, post a "Selfie" instead.

Back to my question. What's left??? Hate the Elephants? The Donkeys? Look away, take the blue pill? Remember this.....

Please stop wasting my time with candle heater memes!!!

     This seems to be a continual urban myth on the internet.  We've all seen pictures, and plans on how to build these supposed heaters with a flower pot, and candles.  The idea is that you can supposedly heat a room with this, as if the flower pot somehow magically makes a candle into a furnace.

You cannot break the simple laws of physics, no matter how many times the internet says you can!!!

     Here's the bottom line folks.... The standard residential furnace in America is rated in something called "BTU's".  A BTU is really called a "British Thermal Unit".  One BTU is the amount of energy it takes to heat one pound of water..... by one degree Fahrenheit.  Stay with me here, it takes 8.36 BTU's to heat one gallon of water one degree... It takes 1,036 BTU's to heat a 200 pound adult male human.. One degree (We are on average 65% water.)  Follow me so far???  An average Natural gas furnace for your home is rated at being able to burn 80 to 100 thousand BTUs per hour worth of gas (This can vary quite a bit depending on house size.)

     Alright, so the amount of energy it takes to heat a room depends on how well it's insulated, how many windows and doors there are, are the windows double pane etc..  If it's one degree colder outside than it is in your house, you will need a lot less energy to heat the room than if it's minus 20 outside.  These things are just common sense.  We're going to use an example of a small room with

A calculator for determining BTU loss in a small room.             

good insulation.  It's 20 degrees f outside, and we want it to be a comfy 70 degrees in our room. There are a lot of calculators for this on the internet to help contractors decide how big of a furnace to install when building houses.  I found one that tells us our little room will require almost 12,000 BTUs per hour to heat. with standard insulation.

     A candle creates both heat and light.  It does so by burning the wax that it's made of, and X amount of wax has X amount of energy available to be given off per ounce, or pound, etc., when you burn it.  This is a constant number, and a flower pot can't inject more BTUs into that wax.

A standard "Tea" candle when burned, will on average give off 600 BTUs per hour!!!!

     It's simple math folks.  It will take 20 candles burned up per hour to heat a small room, or 480 candles in a 24 hour period.  At 50 cents retail to buy a candle, you would spend $7,200.00 a month to heat a small room with candles!!!  This is the bottom line whether the candles have a flower pot on them, or the occupants of the room have a tin foil hat on their heads!!!

     

DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON WIND GENERATORS THAT DON'T WORK!

DO YOUR HOMEWORK BEFORE WASTING YOUR TIME.

     A good friend of mine shared an article with me of a DIY wind turbine this morning, that I've actually seen several times before.  I have to admit that I hadn't checked out the article before now, simply because by looking at the picture of this device it's easy to see that it has problems, and isn't really capable of supplying much energy for your homestead.  Every once and a while there is a posting of some kind of an energy producing or home heating device that "Makes the rounds" here on the internet with wild claims about it's energy production or use and people seem to believe these claims because well "Everything you see on the internet is true."  Right?

     The thing that we have to remember is that the simple laws of physics apply to these things, and without using our knowledge of these constants, we're wasting our valuable time on the Homestead on building devices that can't work.  Another of my perennial favorites, for example is the candle inside of two clay gardening pots.  I could do an entire blog post describing how these devices may

"Flower pot, candle heaters" won't heat a room!!!

make you "Feel" a little warmer because they can put off a little radiant heat to warm your body, but you can't heat a room with one..... End of story.  I've done all the calculations and trust me it would take so many of these heaters to warm a room that there wouldn't be enough space left for you to walk around.  A candle can produce less than 450 BTU's and that's it.

     The wind generator made from a car alternator that you've been seeing on your "Facebook feed" has a number of problems, that I'll try to explain (Warning there's some math involved, but I won't go into it, in detail so that you don't have to burn up any brain cells.  Otherwise if you haven't yet had your morning coffee, it could be fatal. :) )   The first glaring mistake with this wind generator is that the author uses an automotive "Fan Clutch" to connect the blades to the  alternator.  A fan clutch is designed to prevent the cooling fan on your vehicle from running and save on your fuel economy, when it's not needed,   There are generally two types... One spins all the time, but at 30 to 60% of the speed of the water pump on the vehicle, and the other works on a thermostat.  The thermostatic kind is disengaged until it's thermostat senses air coming off of the radiator at usually around 170 degrees Fahrenheit.  Obviously unless you live in an oven, this won't work.  The fan will spin, but not the alternator, or if the alternator is spinning, it's running pretty slowly.

     The other glaring problem with this design is that they are using the radiator fan for the "Rotor" of the wind generator.  Automotive engineers are a lot smarter than you and I are, and they spend a hell of a lot of time designing the parts of a vehicle.  Radiator fans are designed to serve a very specific purpose.... Efficiently grab air, and suck it through the radiator to cool the engine.  Sometimes they're even designed to imperceptibly flex at higher "RPM's in order to perform better at high speeds.  Unfortunately, they aren't designed for the opposite, or catching wind to collect energy from it.  In fact when you think about it... They're designed to live in a whole different little world than a wind generator.  They have the horsepower of a powerful engine available to them, sometimes even a big

The "Swept area" of
a wind turbine.

honking V8.  They may be spinning at tremendous "RPM's".  Even at idle, your car engine is running at 1100 RPM's, while a wind turbine might only ever reach a couple of hundred "Revs".
   
     I said before that I wouldn't go into the math but if you wan't to have another cup of Java, and play with numbers here are some formulas.  The "Swept area" of a wind turbine or the circle that you wouldn't want to stick your private parts into while it's spinning... Is calculated by using this formula... πr².  The amount of energy you can get from a swept area at a given wind speed is calculated by using P= p x A x V³.  (π is "Pi" or 3.1415, R is the radius of your blades, P is total watts available, p is density of the air which is about 1.225 kg/m³ at sea level, A is the swept area, and V is the velocity of the wind.)  If you don't want to do all the math, here's an online calculator... http://www.ajdesigner.com/phpwindpower/wind_generator_power.php If you drink lot's of coffee, maybe have an energy drink, and suck down some espresso, spending a bunch of time with the math.... Some interesting stuff begins to show up!  "Swept area" is important!  If you increase the size of a wind turbine from say 9 feet in diameter by just one foot, the swept area increases by over 23%!!! What this means is that you just can't get much power from little blades (Typical radiator fans?)  If you double the wind speed, you get a whopping 8 times more power!  Here's a chart of the watts you could snag from different wind speeds, using different diameters that I captured from http://otherpower.com/ for you.  Notice that with a 4 foot diameter blade (Big honking semi-truck radiator fan,) you would only get 60 watts from a 14 mile per hour wind.  To make matters worse, there are lots of inefficiencies, so  you can only expect about a third of the total energy available from the wind.  Bottom line... The best you can get from a radiator fan on a fairly windy day, is about 20 watts!

     Another problem with our car alternator wind turbine is that alternators are designed to work at high RPM's.  I built a little generator out of one connected to a lawn mower engine a couple of years ago, and one glaring thing that I found out is that the little lawn mower engine has to be going wide open in order for the alternator to produce much power.  You can't get that much in terms of rpm's out of a wind turbine.  

  So there's a lot to consider when thinking about harnessing wind energy for your homestead!  Begin by understanding that you have to have a pretty big 'Swept area" to get any useful power.  Blades have to be designed to specifically "Capture" wind energy, not "Push" air at the end of a V8 engine.  Don't be fooled by manufacturers claims of high wattage from small wind generators (They're telling you about hurricane force winds.)  You have to have a large bladed wind turbine, on a high tower, with a generator designed for a wind turbine to get any useful energy on your homestead!  If you want to build your own wind generator, a good place to "School yourself" is at the Otherpower web site ( http://otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.html) It's put up by a bunch of guys who've done a heck of a lot of experimenting with wind power..... I hope I've helped you here with your "Wind power efforts" on your homestead!!!

      

BUILD A SOLAR STOCK TANK HEATER TO SAVE MONEY AND BE MORE SELF SUFFICIENT

     Here we go as "Old Man Winter" rears his ugly head again!  A blast of cold air is sweeping across the Nation!!!  Soon on the Homestead we'll be slogging buckets of water out to our chickens, goats, cattle, and other stock.  We'll be dealing with frozen garden hoses, chipping ice out of stock tanks, and running extension cords out to those expensive stock tank heaters.  A standard stock tank heater can suck up as much as 1500 watts, and cost hundreds of Dollars over the course of a Winter!!!  They sure aren't very self sufficient, and putting in enough solar panel capacity to run one would break the bank.  The most efficient way to use solar power is to directly convert it to heat, so it makes sense to heat the water in your stock tank directly from the Sun's rays.  Did you know that on average every square yard of America gets 1,825 kilowatt hours worth of energy from the Sun in a years time? The challenge is to efficiently convert that energy into something we can use.  Here on my little homestead I've started constructing a "Rainwater (Snow) collecting solar heated stock tank" for my milk goats.  They're simple to build, and don't have to break the bank as far as materials go.


HERE'S A LINK TO THE BASIC DESIGN FOR YOU TO BUILD YOUR OWN SOLAR HEATED STOCK TANK!

TURN MANURE AND FOOD SCRAPS INTO GENERATOR FUEL.

     One of the most promising "Appropriate Technologies" is called a "Methane Digester."  You can turn manure, and kitchen scraps into methane gas, which can be used to run a generator, or in a gas cooking stove!!!  Here's how to make one for your homestead!

HOW TO MAKE A METHANE DIGESTER

You can learn more about this subject in my book... "Making Gas for Preppers, without eating beans"!!!

Cast Iron "Dutch Babies" for Breakfast!!!

     Been seeing these a lot online lately... Thought I'd give it a try!!!

Yum!!!

Self sufficiency through a "Permaculture Food Forest"

     Imagine setting aside an area of your Homestead, that's full of hundreds of different kinds of food producing, and medicinal plants that grow all on their own.  You don't have to till it, you don't have to weed it, no watering, or planting... All you have to do is harvest, and enjoy!!!    

      Farming on historic European farms often consisted of "Paddocks" surrounded by what were called "Hedge Rows".  A strip of natural wild land surrounding the farmed areas, which provided benefits to the farmers operation that were so diverse, and  subtle, that we are only just beginning to understand the scope of them.  Here in the US., there were even wild fence rows surrounding the farm fields until quite recently.  

     With the "Modern" emphasis on mono-culture farming, and the drive to squeeze every penny's worth of profit from the land, many of these natural areas have been cleared in order to plant every square foot possible with "Cash" crops (Something called "Fence row to Fence row farming."  What's interesting is that these natural areas used to flourish without tilling, fertilizer, planting, or any other interventions from farmers.  Learning how these areas, and natural forests work... How they grew all on their own, can be a big part of a modern Homesteader's plan to become more self sufficient!!!  

     There's something called a "Permaculture Food Forest".  It involves learning how to "Tweek" the natural processes in a forest, or even a hedge row around your homestead areas, to produce food for your family.  A forest... That's made of trees and plants that produce food!!!  You can actually design and plant it so that once planted,you don't have to do anything except harvest tremendous amounts of food and medicinal plants every year.  Once established it will grow, all on it's own, without much effort on your part, for decades.  If you're concerned about people stealing your food from your fields, this "Food Forest" is can also be camouflaged so that it doesn't  look like a garden, or food plot.  Do I have your attention yet????

     I've actually begun planting just such a natural forest like "Hedge Row" around a half acre of our own little homestead here in Iowa.  

     I'd already harvested a lot from the area in this picture (On the right) including a pile of tomatoes from three heirloom tomato plants, but you can get a sense of just how much food can be grown in a small space.  (A 14 foot diameter circle).  When I'm finished, I'll have a border made up of seventeen of these circular "Polycultures" around the outside of my yard.  A "Polyculture" is a permaculture gardening term for a grouping of plants that compliment each other.  Call it "Companion planting on steroids".   For example, in the photo, you'll notice Comfrey, a fantastic medicinal herb in it's own right.  Comfrey is also known as a "Nutrient miner", it has a tap root that can go as deep as fifteen feet!  The comfrey plant brings up minerals, and other nutrients from deep underground and stores them in it's leaves.  As the leaves later decompose, they release those nutrients into the top soil.  I planted annual bush beans among the other plants, because they have the ability to produce nitrogen in their roots, an essential fertilizer for other plans.  The strawberries, will eventually create a dense low canopy over the soil shading out any young weeds preventing them from growing.  Daylillies, besides actually having edible parts, will attract beneficial predator insects when blooming, to eat the "Bad bugs".  Onions deter mice from chewing the bark off of young trees, Lupins attract beneficial insects and also create nitrogen.  The list is endless!

     The idea here is to look at each plant, understanding how it grows, and make it "Multi-task" as much as possible.  Looking at how plants interact with each other in a natural forest, and trying to mimic that interaction with edible plants.  In the Forest, there are a    multitude of plant layers, all interacting, and supporting each other.  Permaculture Food forests usually concentrate on just seven of these layers.  When planning my "Food Forest Hedgerow", I tried to look at these seven layers, and plan for the interactions between them.    

     It also turns out that there are hundreds of perennial edible vegetables!!! With some research, you can plant a forest garden that either re-grows, or re-seeds itself every year.  It can be drought resistant, requiring no fertilizer, and literally care for itself.  It's possible to make a Forest Garden fairly attractive, but the more structured it is, the more work it will require.  You can also design one so that it's more haphazard, looking like a natural forest.  I designed what I planted, to fit in more, so that my neighbors aren't too upset, but if "Food Crime" increases in my area, I can let it go more wild... Hiding in plain site!!!  There are very few people indeed, who know how to dig up "Jerusalem Artichokes" for their tasty tubers underground.  Hardly anyone will recognize  "Good King Henry" as a perennial spinach.  No one in my neighborhood will understand how to use the leaves of a "Stevia" plant as a sugar substitute.  The list goes on, and on!     If you have any space at all I hope you'll do some internet research on "Food Forest Gardens", and consider planting one yourself!!!