Making Your Own Gunpowder for Fun and Fireworks

...all the ingredients for gunpowder are readily available side by side, no questions asked, in any garden center or home-improvement store. Charcoal is sold for grilling, and sulfur comes in bags that say “sulfur” in big letters (nice old ladies use it for dusting roses). But the key secret I never figured out back then is that most brands of stump remover are little more than pure saltpeter.


... I always ground the ingredients separately with a mortar and pestle and then mixed them gently without further grinding. This results in a powder that burns energetically but slowly: perfect, it turns out, for making sparkler cones. _PopSci

Making your own fireworks might be fun. Displaying your pyrotechnic skills would certainly impress family members, friends, and co-workers. If you decide to give it a try, be careful.

There may be other reasons for some people to learn to make gunpowder. Sales of guns and ammunition have been on the upswing in the US ever since it became apparent that Senator Obama was likely to become US President. That trend continues, and many gun aficiandos have complained about high prices and limited availability for many types of firearm and ammunition. Mr. Obama favours a stricter control of firearms, and holds the "bitter clingers to their guns" in high disdain.

The day may come in the US when a person will need to know how to fabricate his own weapons, and cook up his own gunpowder. Well, probably not. But if it ever happens, knowing how to build weapons and cook gunpowder and primer material might be a valuable commercial skill.

WARNING! Creating and igniting pyrotechnic mixtures of any kind, including gunpowder, is inherently dangerous and is illegal in some places. Harmless experimentation, especially by kids, can be taken very seriously by the authorities, so an adult must always be present and take full responsibility.
_PopSci

How to make smokeless gunpowder

Could You Restrict Outside Vehicular Access to Your Neighborhood?

During the recent multicultural events in London, a number of persons adopting a defensive posture against celebrants were overrun and killed by vehicles being driven by multicultural celebrants, who refused to be deterred. In such situations where there are too many multicultural partiers for ordinary law enforcement to contain, property owners and other non-celebrants must be able to somehow restrict vehicular access to outsiders. Otherwise they are apt to be overrun or burned out -- and thus become a statistic of the multicultural events in question.

The issue of how to restrict outsider access has been studied from a number of viewpoints. But for today we will just look at blocking access by conventional road vehicles.

This is a basic German vehicle barrier from WWII, simple and portable. It can be easily placed, but could also be moved out of the way if not fixed in the ground by some means. Such barriers could be placed in the evening according to a pre-arranged curfew, and removed at a designated time in early morning for outgoing commuters.

Welding Vehicle Barriers Together at US - Mexico Border
If separate simple vehicle barriers are welded together after placement, they are more effective against larger vehicles, and more difficult to move out of the way by intruders. These more permanent barriers would be appropriate to block rapid cross-country access along a property's flank, by nimble vehicles such as SUVs and motorcycles.

These are more sophisticated barriers which can be raised and lowered by electrical switch. They are also more expensive, and are likely to be totally ruined by one significant impact. Most useful over time as a deterrent.

Tirekiller
The "tire killer" barrier will destroy the rubber tires of an intruding vehicle, but may not actually stop the vehicle outside your perimeter if no other barriers are present. Be prepared to deal with anger issues on the part of the vehicle's driver.

Assortment of Vehicle Barrier Types

Passive vs. Active

Passive barriers can be used at entry points if traffic flow is restricted or rarely used. Passive barriers are normally used for perimeter protection.

Portability

What is involved if the barrier needs to be moved/repositioned? Some barriers are massive and heavy, requiring the use of heavy equipment for placement. Once placed, these barriers can only be moved by bringing in heavy lifting equipment, and cannot be quickly changed to allow access status for authorized vehicles. If portable, how easy is the barrier to carry, transport, stack, store, and put together/interlock? What is the time needed to deploy?

Width / Load Capacity

Are the appropriate widths available to fully protect while allowing passage of almost every type of vehicle?

...

Operation

Barriers can be operated manually, electrically, pneumatically, or hydraulically. Can the system operate individually and in groups? Is there a manual override? Can the system work in manual operation in the event of power failure? Barrier direction should be instantly reversible at any point in its cycle from the control station(s). _Vehicle Barrier Design

There are number of different designs for both permanent and temporary vehicle barriers, depending upon anticipated needs. We will not discuss defenses for tracked vehicles or very large vehicles such as "tank traps," and save such topics for another time. Likewise we will not discuss caltrops or other lightweight and portable improvised barriers, for obvious reasons. For me to discuss improvised items such as defensive lines of braced wooden sticks with points on their ends placed at grill level -- like pikes -- would perhaps be going over the line, so I will also omit discussion of such things.

Regardless, the idea is to discourage outside celebrants from bringing an unwelcome party into your neighborhood, by vehicle.

The police will not necessarily approve of citizens taking their own protection into their own hands -- certainly the UK police were unhappy with such efforts by Londoners. But it is best to remind the police that in the event of multicultural celebrations of the type experienced by London, that their duty lies in preventing violence against law-abiding citizens, not in preventing law-abiding citizens from protecting themselves. Somehow UK police seem to have forgotten that obvious point.

Backyard Molten Salt Reactors for Suburban Apocalypse

The suburbs may not seem to be the best place to survive an apocalypse, but some people think it can be done.

Who knows how everything will shake out when the world goes to hell, but the suburbs may be well positioned to thrive with fewer resources, as Brown points out. Suburbs are close enough to the city to be convenient and encourage community building, yet spread out enough to offer yards and substantial garden space. (Suburban soil is also usually less contaminated than urban soil.) The houses are large enough to accommodate multigenerational households and cottage industries, which some demographers predict as coming trends. _CityPaper

Popsci
But you and I know that to well and truly survive an apocalypse in the suburbs, you are going to need a lot of juice -- in more senses than one. You will need plenty of fluids, true. You will also need plenty of heat and electrical power to survive the winters and power air conditioners through the summer. In a third sense of the word "juice", you will need plenty of clout and respect. And what better way to gain the respect of one's extended neighbors, than to have your own functioning nuclear power plant in your backyard?

Consider the thorium molten salt reactor, pictured above:

The MSR design has two primary safety advantages. Its liquid fuel remains at much lower pressures than the solid fuel in light-water plants. This greatly decreases the likelihood of an accident, such as the hydrogen explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Further, in the event of a power outage, a frozen salt plug within the reactor melts and the liquid fuel passively drains into tanks where it solidifes, stopping the fission reaction. “The molten-salt reactor is walk-away safe,” Kutsch says. “If you just abandoned it, it had no power, and the end of the world came--a comet hit Earth--it would cool down and solidify by itself.”

Although an MSR could also run on uranium or plutonium, using the less-radioactive element thorium, with a little plutonium or uranium as a catalyst, has both economic and safety advantages. Thorium is four times as abundant as uranium and is easier to mine, in part because of its lower radioactivity. The domestic supply could serve the U.S.’s electricity needs for centuries. Thorium is also exponentially more efficient than uranium. “In a traditional reactor, you’re burning up only a half a percent to maybe 3 percent of the uranium,” Kutsch says. “In a molten-salt reactor, you’re burning 99 percent of the thorium.” The result: One pound of thorium yields as much power as 300 pounds of uranium--or 3.5 million pounds of coal.

Because of this efficiency, a thorium MSR would produce far less waste than today’s plants. Uranium-based waste will remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years. With thorium, it’s more like a few hundred. As well, raw thorium is not fissile in and of itself, so it is not easily weaponized. “It can’t be used as a bomb,” Kutsch says. “You could have 1,000 pounds in your basement, and nothing would happen.”

Without the need for large cooling towers, MSRs can be much smaller than typical light-water plants, both physically and in power capacity. _PS

And the advantages of the thorium molten salt reactor go on and on. Even many greenies are on board for thorium MSRs.

It is likely to be touch and go to get Obama's nuclear regulatory commission to license the safer, newer, cheaper nuclear plants, but nuclear engineer Kirk Sorensen has founded a company named Flibe, to build and market the devices. Even if he has to go to China to build the reactors, you can always have one smuggled into your country of choice and installed in your back yard under a small carnival tent -- to hide it from annoying satellites.

Remember, if you have a reactor like this, you will have all the juice you could possibly need. You could even build a giant dome over your entire neighborhood and give it the climate of Tahiti year-round, if you like. Tropical fruits taste quite good, particularly in the middle of typical apocalyptic mass food shortages.

But don't get cocky. Once residents of surrounding suburbs and neighboring cities catch on to the fact that you had the foresight to prepare for the apocalypse, they will want a large piece of what you have. That is where juice -- and knowing how to use it -- truly comes in handy.

More on this topic in a future posting.

Previously published at Al Fin Potpourri

Connect the Dots

More 8June11: It's even worse than you think

Gary Locke
International observers are seeing the growing outlines of a world without central leadership or guidance. The US seems unable to find its way out of its stagnant economic condition, and there is no other nation ready, able, and willing to step up to the plate.

Russia's corrupt leadership combined with its one-trick-pony economy simply cannot keep up with the emerging BRICs. Russia's shrinking core population is sick, and morally exhausted. The huge landmass of riches is growing harder to hold.

China's "economic miracle" is in reality a huge house of cards waiting to collapse. Inflation in China is just a tiny hint of the dangerous undercurrent of instability waiting to break into chaotic tumult.

Japan's recent earthquake and tsunami triggered severe economic and social upheaval, which on top of Japan's shrinking demographic promises continued economic problems for the island archipelago as a whole.

The third world is still the third world for many reasons, most of which are not politically correct to mention. It is important to understand that the population of much of the third world is several multiples of the natural carrying capacity of the regions -- without outside aid and assistance. If something happens to the world economy, the death toll in third world nations is apt to be distressingly high.

What about the erstwhile hegemon and superpower of the world, the US? Under President Obama, US economic prospects are looking worse and worse. Americans suspect that there is something wrong with the way that President Obama is handling the US economy. But with the dumbing down of schools and other dulling effects of demographic change on the US population, most Americans lack the ability to pinpoint exactly where Obama is going wrong, economically.

Stimulus after stimulus have failed to achieve anything other than to create an addiction among investors for more stimulus. As QE2 fades, investors look ahead to QE3 for another junky's fix.

Meanwhile, among the US more affluent, educated, and productive classes, birthrates are plummeting. This falling fertility not only reflects a greater affluence and hedonistic tendency, but it also reflects a certain lack of faith in national leadership and the future.

The visible human world is built on psychological whims and beliefs. If those whims and beliefs shift, the human world will shake. Your best bet is to pay attention to basics. Consider instituting triage as appropriate for your personal circumstances.

The financial contraction of 2008 was not a one-off event from which we are all recovering. Almost none of the fundamentals are getting better, and many are getting worse. As a result, 2008 was only a prelude to a worsening future, as long as the twin disasters of debt and demographics continue along their inexorable paths of destruction. Energy starvation due to faux environmentalism, and widespread indoctrination of lobotomising politically correct dogma via the educational system is not helping, either.

Making Your Own Survival Rations 1: Puffed Grain Cakes

Video courtesy of Popular Science
If you buy a machine to make your own puffed-grain cakes, you can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and more. But you can make a machine to do the job with spare junk around the shop. In these days of tighter budgets, it helps to know smart ways to trim the fat.

The science behind puffing is simple. Heating the moisture inside of a grain creates pressure and builds up steam, which is trapped by the grain’s hull or shell. When that hull suddenly fails, everything inside it expands in a blast, transforming the grains into a crispy, porous mass; the best example of this is popcorn. Some grains can fuse together, making a cake.

... We built a metal shell using a pipe, a rod and a plate to mount the pipe on, forming a bottom to clamp against, like a piston in a cylinder. Using vise grips, we put the shell over a butane burner, clamped it tightly, and then unclamped it to make it puff. At high temperatures, you have 10 to 20 seconds when the grains puff before they start to burn. We puffed millet, wild rice, sorghum, barley, and white and brown rice. We called the results “vise cakes.”

Our equation for the process looks roughly like this: 150 psi (pressure) and 480ºF (heat) x 12 seconds (time) + sudden release back to atmosphere = 1 vise cake.
Last year we built a rig to make mini vise cakes, which worked well, but it took a long time to produce a large quantity. So this time we increased the scale, creating a design that could make the cakes with a 2.5-inch diameter. All told, it cost us only $57. Our design requires at least four hands to operate, though why puff solo when you can puff in a group? Besides, you‘re saving a good million bucks or so off the price of a commercial machine. _PopSci

Al Fin survival nutritionists are working on something far more sophisticated which they are not allowed to talk about right now, but you can get the germ of an idea about the project here. No more about that, for now.

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?

"If it's the end of the world, what do you buy? Canned foods, guns and the generators," said Keith Springer, president of Capital Financial Advisory Services. "There are a huge number of people who feel this is the end of the world." _WSJ

WSJ

Investors seem to be investing for the coming doom-bama. Let's first look at the investments that are doing well. Then we will analyse the thinking behind the investing, and the wisdom of the thinking.

Amid the market tumult, a handful of stocks have seen their share prices ratchet up to record highs in recent weeks. And many of them are connected by a curious, if disconcerting, thread: Between them, they provide an investor with essentials for any respectable fallout shelter—makers of bottled water, canned goods, dehydrated broth, gas masks and auxiliary generators.

A portfolio of the 18 companies that reached their peaks in the past month would be up about 24% this year, compared with the broader market's 4.5% decline, a sign some investors may be taking the prospects of financial Armageddon more seriously than one might think.

..."This is a very unusual economic cycle we're going through—we haven't been through anything like it in any of our lifetimes, and we don't know how it's going to play out," says Dorsey Farr, partner at Atlanta-based investment advisory French Wolf & Farr. "We don't see where this economy is going, and some of the potential outcomes are frightening."

... _WSJ

So, 18 months under the Obama - Pelosi regime, and we are looking at the end of the world. You can't blame an investor for bidding up precious metals, guns, ammunition, and disaster preparedness supplies. Investing in "bunker portfolio investments" is fine as long as the monetary system is working. What if the system collapses when your portfolio is at its peak? How do you convert your stocks to useful tradegoods and survival supplies at that point?

But what does a person do when he sees the end of the world coming? You can get some idea at Preparedness Pro and at The Prepper E-Book. The basics: stockpile food, water, medicines, fuels for heating and power generation, beef up security, have fallback and bugout plans, etc....

But almost all of those preparedness and survival plans are the equivalent of holding one's breath and ducking underwater, to avoid a temporary danger. How long can you hold your breath before coming back up. And when you do come up, what are you likely to find?

Even if you have a perfect fallback plan to a defensible location where you will be able to grow ample food and have an ample supply of potable water, what happens if you have a type 1 diabetic in your family -- or someone equally dependent upon high-tech medicines or supplies? What happens if it's your bad luck to be located one county over from a would-be Alexander the Great, neo-conqueror of the collapsed lands? Or if you get caught between blood-thirsty rival gangs each seeking to expand their territory?

More likely, you will try to tough it out in the suburbs or in an urban apartment or townhouse. Perhaps you have stored enough supplies to get through a 1 month crisis. How many others in your city will have thought to do the same? It will get very bad in the cities under such conditions, and a lot of the things that can burn, will burn.

There is strength in numbers, as long as they are the right numbers. If you decide to hole up on a University Campus with professors and staff, you will be dead before you understand where you went wrong. Your cohorts in disaster need to be competent in the real world. That leaves out intellectuals, bureaucrats, and a huge number of other drags on the productive sector -- who have only been able to survive due to the astounding productivity of the private sector market economies (until the leeches succeeded in killing the private sectors).

You had better start planning, looking around, polishing your skills, and making connections with people who have complementary skills. People can only hold their breath for a short time, but if they are on board a nuclear powered submarine or a inside a nuclear powered underwater habitat, they will not have to hold their breath at all, metaphorically speaking.

Making good investment decisions -- investing to match the mood of the markets -- can help a person to build and conserve assets. But markets do break down from time to time, when put under too much stress. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Bringing Up Children Who Can Deal With Risk

Things children should be encouraged to do:

1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
5. Break the DMCA
6. Drive a car

_Gever Tulley_quoted in openeducation.net
Tulley's TED Talk:

Modern society makes a fetish of safety and security. We can see many examples of how the compulsion for security is destroying the economies of western societies -- take public sector union pensions and benefits as an example of the unsustainability of hyper risk-aversion in adults. Tenure for public school teachers and college professors (higher education bubble) are other examples of the destructiveness and counter-productiveness of excessive clinging to security.

Raising children according to the risk-aversive mindset of modern western societies, is to raise children who will feel more comfortable staying home with their parents, rather than going out and making a life for himself. Such children are taught to be afraid of everything around them, and learn risk-aversion from their parents, teachers, and society at large.

But children must learn to take risks, because they are growing up in a world full of risk. They must learn to deal with hazards safely while still children, or they will turn to excessive risks such as drugs, drinking and driving, etc. or turn to excessive caution as a permanent attitude.

Training generations of children who are afraid to take risks, creates a huge risk all in itself. A risk-averse society will focus intently upon minimal and pseudo-risks which are close at hand, while ignoring much greater risks which may be developing just out of sight (or mind). The combination of risk aversion with political correctness multiplies the genuine risk by orders of magnitude -- because people are forbidden to discuss very real risks -- which are officially said not to exist, by the PC police.

And so after a few generations of risk averse children are raised to be afraid of their own shadows, but blind to real risks, your society is ripe for the fall. Most modern western children may very well fall within this category by now.

If so, wise persons will want to know where children are still being raised to take responsibility and to rationally deal with risks. Just in case they may someday wish to re-locate themselves to a place with a more robust and less unstable societal infrastructure.

Becoming a risk-taker

Tinkering School

50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Children Do

Getting Serious About Your Survival Compound's Machines

When the infrastructure of society collapses, there will be no parts stores ready to ship your order by overnight FedEx or UPS. If you are serious about keeping your sophisticated machines running for perhaps a year or more without access to outside replacement parts, you will need a heavy duty -- although compact -- metal working facility. Here is a description of such a facility used by the military in the field, by special ops units.

U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) has adopted an old U.S. Army concept to create mobile workshops (MTCs or Mobile Technology Complex) that can fix exotic gear (which SOCOM has a lot of), modify their special gear, or even create something new. The MTC is a modified (with new some gear) version of the decade old U.S. Army MPH (Mobile Parts Hospital).

The MPH was developed when the army realized that the easiest way to get the many rarely requested, but vital, replacement parts to the troops, was to manufacture the parts in the combat zone. In short order, this led to the construction of a portable parts fabrication system, called MPH, that fit into a standard 8x8x20 foot shipping container. _StrategyPage

CleggHere is a description of such a unit made by Clegg Industries:

Three 8' x 8' x 20' custom designed facilities were built for the US Army to house a sophisticated, computer controlled manufacturing facility meeting stringent size, weight, and operational constraints; self - contained, air (C-130), ground (PLS/trailer) or rail transportable, easy to deploy and redeploy, controlled user friendly work environment.
Mobile Parts Hospital Special Features Include:

7-ton Mazak Lathe
Slide-out expandable room for extra work space
Two advanced computer CAD Workstations
High pressure independent high temperature air system
Leveling Jacks
Unique articulated flooring system
Unique heat diverter for desert operations
5 ton HVAC

Clegg Industries, Inc. Job # 233 _Clegg

Obviously there is much more equipment in the operating facility, but the description above gives you an idea of the basic platform for wartime. You will probably not require your mobile parts factory to be dropped in from a C-130, but if you expect your survival compound to run smoothly for up to a year or longer, you will need something at least as well equipped as what forward units of the military require.

This brings up an important human resource issue: You will want to be sure to have multiple persons in-compound who are skilled at various fabrication methods and machines -- including welding, milling, lathes, presses, etc. And you will want to stockpile your metal stock (and welding rods etc) in advance -- while you can shop for the best prices. You should also consider possible ways to refill your oxy-fuel tanks after depletion.

Long term survival is not just about food, water, medicines, shelter, fuel, power, trade goods, basic defense, livestock, etc. If you want to maintain the minimum of civilisation, you will need machines -- and the means to keep them operating efficiently. Parts, fluids, lubricants, fittings, adhesives, wiring, connectors, tubing, backups, piping, hoses, etc etc etc. It is not possible to think too deeply or broadly about what a survival compound or community may need.

Saving Life and Limb

In battlefield medicine it is necessary to triage casualties, and to make tradeoffs. First you decide who can be saved, given the time constraints and resources available. Then you decide how much of the person's body and function can be saved. You may need to sacrifice a limb or two to save a life. You may need to sacrifice a lung, a kidney, part of a liver, a bowel . . . even part of a brain -- to save a life.

We are close to the same point for economic decision making in western nations. For market economies, the markets make the hard choices. But we are so far from having market economies anymore -- the economies are so taken over by government functionaries -- that economic triage is happening in mirky back rooms, with the involvement of extremely shady and self-interested characters.

US economic news has been dismal ever since it became clear in the fall of 2008 that Mr. Obama was to become US President.

♦ Revised economic data that show the recent recession to have been the worst of the post-war years.

♦ The slowdown in economic activity in China.

♦ The absence of any long-term plan to rein in the deficit.

♦ The possibility of a “shock” to the world banking system if Greece defaults on its sovereign debt as seems increasingly likely, or if any one of our several states finally drown in their own red ink.

♦ The negative effect of the increase in health care, energy costs, and taxes, the latter planned by President Obama for year-end.

♦ The 2.6 percent decline in already-depressed pending home sales in June, despite record-low mortgage rates.

♦ The 1.2 percent decline in factory sales, indicating that the manufacturing recovery might be stalling.

♦ The pile up in inventories of durable goods.

♦ The widest trade deficit since October 2008.

♦ And, perhaps most important of all, the increasing number of workers unemployed for so long that their skills are atrophying, while economic growth no longer seems to produce very many jobs, causing two-thirds of Americans to believe that the economy has further to fall.

The worse news is that the bad news cited above is only the tip of the iceberg: The lethal out-of-sight 90 percent is a more dangerous threat to the good ship Robust Recovery.

Start with the state of the nation’s finances. The federal deficit remains untamed, at 10 percent of GDP, topping the decade’s pre-Obama high of 3.5 percent in 2004. Given the slowing of the recovery, a reasonable argument can be made that what is needed is continued spending, but only if combined with a medium-term plan for bringing the deficit under control. No such plan is on the horizon, in part because of the political paralysis produced by the impending congressional elections, and in part because “kicking the can down the road” – leaving every problem to the next generation of politicians – has become a durable feature of American political life.

The second longer-term problem is the Obama-created imbalance between the private sector that creates wealth and the public sector that depends on that wealth. A recent analysis by USA Today, based on government compensation data, shows that federal government employees earn, on average, twice as much as private sector workers. That’s a result of the recent stagnation in private sector compensation and a steady rise in the pay of public sector workers. This situation was exacerbated earlier this week when Congress decided to spend $26 billion to prevent lay-offs of teachers and other state employees, funded in part by higher taxes on U.S. corporations that do business overseas. Teacher lay-offs, of course, are used by politicians to attract sympathy and bail-out money, rather than fire less useful workers in their over-manned bureaucracies.

Then there is the perverse incentive created by a badly structured tax system. A small businessman in New Jersey took to the op ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to point out that it costs him $74,000 to pay an employee $59,000 per year, when taxes and benefits are factored in. But when the employee pays her taxes, she is left with only $44,000. So the gap between his cost of hiring and her incentive to work is substantial. Not a prescription for full employment.

_TWS

It has become clear that Mr. Obama and the Pelosi Congress are burdened by many obsessions when it comes to the domestic economy, the energy sector, and foreign affairs. One of their obsessions is reviving the dead ghosts of past manufacturing and manufacturing unions. But basing policies upon ideological obsessions and special interest paybacks can create problems.

When politicians pick winners and losers, they interfere in the natural economic process and invariably cause harm. If members of Congress believe they recognize profitable opportunities better than the market does, they should retire from Congress, start businesses and grow rich.

If they’re really successful, they might even be able to afford a great vacation in Spain. _Bloomberg

For Americans who value the US Constitution and basic freedoms of individual and group action, the upcoming US national elections present an opportunity for a re-calibration of government behaviour -- a turning back toward constitutional norms. But is that a realistic hope? Some American traditionalists are hopeful:

“The problems stem from allowing Congress to tax incomes from whatever source,” says Randy Barnett, professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. The 16th amendment represented “a major change in the federal government’s relationship to the people” and should be repealed.

...Efforts at tax simplification, such as the implementation of two flat rates (14 percent and 28 percent) and the elimination of many loopholes in 1986, tend to be short-lived.

Why? For the simple reason that Congress likes using the tax code to dispense favors. Lawmakers may disagree over whether political spending by corporations constitutes free speech (the Supreme Court says it does), but they let money speak to them loud and clear. We must stop them before they kill (the economy) again.

A constitutional amendment is probably the most difficult remedy, but also the most enduring. Congress can propose amendments to the Constitution on a two-thirds vote by both Houses and must call a constitutional convention on a petition from two-thirds of the state legislatures (Article 5).

The chances of lawmakers depriving themselves of their tax- favor status are about as good as their voting themselves out of office by enacting term limits. _Bloomberg

The author then suggests going the route of state legislatures to create a constitutional amendment which would hold the US Congress' feet to the fire, and enforce fiscal discipline and fairness. That is where a truly monumental battle of ideas could play out, if the anti-statist forces are disciplined and ingenious enough.

For it is abundantly clear that the US Congress, the US Executive, and probably the US Supreme Court along with the Federal Judiciary, are all corrupted beyond redemption -- without radical triage. Without an iron-clad constitutional guarantee of Congressional discipline, transparency, and fairness in budgeting, the truly grisly job of radical triage passes beyond the government into the nation at large.

The trigger for such radical triage may be a large scale power grid collapse, a massive and deadly epidemic, a natural disaster of epic scale, or simply the culmination of the ongoing descent into Idiocracy. The wealthiest and most prepared persons will remove themselves from danger if they can, keeping their escape routes open. Most of the rest will have to make compromises and sacrifices in order to survive. Triage is never pretty, and is often delayed too long.

It is time to consider your contingencies.