Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

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Don’t despair—prepare.

We’ve been hard at work here in pioneer-land, prepping for the dystopia ahead as each day the clown show continues. Headline after headline announces the next ridiculously unqualified white dude “straight from central casting,” complete with good hair and a long resume of unethical, immoral, and criminal behavior nominated to run a vast, complex government agency that has direct impact on your lives. Welcome to Trump’s newest reality show.

Remember, Trump and Trump supporters are just a symptom of the problem. The real, actual problem is the rapid decline of ethics, compassion, and morality combined with the escalation of rampant excessive greed. It’s a species problem, but seems to be wildly more prevalent here in the USA. Runaway capitalism is the difference, it’s fuel on the fire in this country. Our beloved America got cancer when Citizens United was upheld by the Supreme Court, and now it’s metastasizing rapidly. That was when the firewall broke between big money and our democracy.

My thesis on our existence, God, and the afterlife holds that we’re placed in this environment of extreme temptation as a test of our spiritual growth and purity. If we’ve sufficiently evolved, we may then gain access to a more perfect existence beyond. What are those criteria? Every religious text lays them out, such as the Beatitudes. Be compassionate, be generous, be peaceful, be humble. Exactly the opposite of what we’re seeing in this majority cult, which is, instead, a walking embodiment of the seven deadly sins.

We watched the new Netflix Civil War era movie, “The Free State of Jones.” This is what we’re going back to, all that overt hatred and discrimination. All the promise of good things for working people that Kamala Harris embodied is lost. It seems we are going back, after all. It’s interesting to note one root cause of most of this has always been parents that are terrified their kids may start dating someone with a different skin color or religion, or perhaps that by allowing gay people to live their lives in the open, their kids may somehow become gay themselves. The fear of being embarrassed in their social circles far outweighs just loving their kids for who they are, and wanting them to be happy.

As a former IT security professional and ethical hacker, I still pay attention to that community. There are rumblings deep in geekland as the metadata from the election and details about the tech specifics come to light. Something seems very, very wrong there. I’m not about to claim fraud—we should never do that without absolute, concrete evidence. Otherwise, we’re as ignorant of the Trumpies. But, there’s clearly smoke and I’m hoping the best we have are hard at work on this. We should know as the state certification deadlines approach in the coming weeks.

Money Prepping Part II

In our last journal entry, we discussed money prepping and some of the steps we’ve already taken. That’s a tough one. If you try to research it, you get things like, “pay off your debt,” and “have a good emergency fund.” Great advice, but this potential rising economic collapse situation requires more. We talked about a few strategies we’re taking (that might not be right for you). Some of those are stocking up on actual cash (bank straps of $1, $5, $10, $20 bills), small-denomination silver coins (for trading/bartering), and larger denomination (small, lightweight) gold coins (for bigger asks, such as, “help me GTF outta this country…”).

The problem is, that kind of money is heavy and it’s not too secure to be holding a bunch of it during desperate times (makes you a target). Since then, we’ve done a crash course in crypto currencies. Yeah, I know—it’s imaginary money. But it has been useful in dire situations around the world. Useful for buying banned medicines, vaccines, information, and services—such as “help me GTF outta this country.” There’s a pretty good tutorial series at CoinBase.

Unlike bank accounts, crypto currency cannot be seized by rogue, greedy autocratic governments who might use an emergency powers declaration. These allow a leader to take over domestic communications and media, seize bank accounts, prevent people from leaving the country, deploy U.S. troops against citizens, stop those pesky elections from happening, and much more. If you can’t imagine a power-drunk lunatic like Trump cashing all those chips, well bless your heart. He’s recently stated he’ll invoke emergency powers as soon as he’s inaugurated. He’s long promised to be a dictator on day one. What’s being planned, right out in the open, is a massive amount of shock and awe moves following the inauguration that are designed to overwhelm Americans and force a psychological coping mechanism of turtling up into submission and acceptance. We’re already seeing people just shrug their shoulders in the face of this ongoing horror show.

You don’t want to put all your life savings in crypto currencies, of course. However, staking in for a small amount provides yet another option—more diversity. It’s a whole new world rife with ways to get taken by bad actors. Hence, our crash education. Secure cold wallets store access to your coins offline, disconnected from the grid. If you’re doing this from a prepping perspective you’re keeping those coins for an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass situation, not trading with them daily.

There are many different crypto coins. BitCoin is just one type, the “Kleenex” of crypto currency, but it’s currently expensive due to being the market leader. Ethereum is in second place, stable, established, and less expensive. Ethereum has an advantage in that it support smart contracts, such as, “you get half the money now, and the rest when I’m safely outta this country.” Ethereum has other advantages in that it’s much easier on the environment, safer, and executes transactions faster than BitCoin. Meme coins and those created as a “joke,” such as the DogeCoin Musk is pushing on Trump and the country, are far more volatile and risky.

We’re also looking at offshore bank accounts, although it’s still unclear whether they can be seized by a rogue US autocrat. Even if so, it’s another layer of protection that separates our money from this threat.

Fight or Flee?

We’re coming to accept, slowly, the dream that we’d be able to put the long national Trump nightmare in the past and go about enjoying what’s left of our lives, is gone. No catching up on the back reading list, enjoying hobbies and retirement. No forever-home log cabin by the water. Not in this country, at least. We have all this planning and preparation to do. We’re not some hair-on-fire lunatics. We’re being thoughtful, purposeful, and pragmatic. We like having options.

There’s always the chance this is all talk—hot air. Keep in mind that in the last administration, Trump tried to pull off every horrible thing he promised. He was only stopped in much of it because he had some adults around him in the