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.

Simple things, comprised of just a few working parts, are subject to more immediate and catastrophic failure. Complex things often fail more slowly—and in stages. They’re tough to bring down, often with fail-safe mechanisms and backups. When they do it’s often a result of a number of dominoes tipping over, breaking, then weakening others, which then fail in turn.

The disaster movies like to show things happening fast, because, well, they’ve only got a few hours to tell the story. In reality, it happens in slow motion, under our radar, as we’re seeing in real life. This is why we prepare, here in pioneer-land, and why you should too. Keep in mind, most prepping is simply to buy time. To survive in the below circumstances requires a different mindset—sustainable, minimal, self-sufficient pioneer living.

Think of our financial industry and system, which collapsed in the 2008-2009 crisis. The warning signs were there, but nobody did anything, because they were all making so much money. They correctly assumed the taxpayers would bail them out, and nobody would go to jail for that massive fraud on the working people. It’s strong incentive to rinse and repeat, no?

We’re currently seeing a slow collapse with much worse consequences. Our pioneer journey in this past few years has been all about the realization of those facts, and preparing for the inevitable.

There is nothing new under the sun. All resources are limited. Contrast this to our increasingly voracious consumption. We’re gutting the insides of this sphere we live on, faster and faster. Drilling the oil out of it, fracking (through massive underground explosions) the gas out of it. Strip-mining the mountains for precious minerals and metals. We’re pumping ever-more water from beneath the ground to deal with droughts.

Those resources are limited and our consumption is ever more voracious. A hollowed-out planet is not survivable. The oceans are so, so hot, and the massive ice sheets are melting—slowly. The sun gets hotter, droughts happen, farmers can no longer grow food. There’s no fuel for their farming equipment. Dominoes. I mean—what could possibly go wrong?

Yes, we have renewable energy sources like wind, sun, and water power. However, the means to use them requires building things to harness that energy. Building things requires metals and minerals, which are in ever-shorter supply. The richest place to find them is in the mountains of China. China just announced it will be hoarding those things, preventing their export. It’s no wonder. They see this coming.

We use those precious resources for our computer microprocessors, which are used for our defense, commerce, basically every aspect of our lives now. There is very strong evidence we are heading for the slow but eventual collapse of human society on this planet, likely in our lifetimes. And yes, it’s true we could otherwise have a sudden and catastrophic collapse due to nuclear war, CME/EMP/solar flare, meteor strike (again!), alien invasion, etc.

And that’s just the impending climate collapse. We also have a climate of societal and political change both here and around the world—a swing toward autocracy driven by the massive use of media to control minds. That tipping point was probably crossed when Trump won in November. It could easily lead to nuclear war.

Back to the financial aspect, greed is driven by the myth that “the stock market always goes up” over time. It does—until it just doesn’t. The next financial collapse could be a permanent one. World currencies are no longer backed by actual “things” like gold reserves. Like crypto currencies, “fiat” currencies are also somewhat imaginary now—money printed will-nilly. Crypto doesn’t seem to make any sense, yet it is exploding. The complexities of how financials work are now beyond most humans, so we’re at the mercy of those who do. (Narrator: Who also tend to be the most greedy and unethical among us. See: Trump, Donald and Musk, Elon).

Our air and oceans are limited resources, and we’ve been slowly poisoning both for a very long time. There are garbage patches in the ocean as large as countries. The water is filled with microplastics that are now abundant in the fish we eat, in the rain that turns eventually into our drinking water (and that of the animals we eat). The gas and oil usage have created huge emissions of greenhouse gases that deplete the ozone layer, making the sun stronger, melting those glaciers, causing floods and catastrophic weather, bleaching the coral and killing off marine species—dominoes. If those glaciers and ice sheets melt enough, we’ll see a sudden and catastrophic release of methane gas. Fun times that will be. We’ve blown past our warming “crisis points” of 1.5C and 2C. The current favorite pastime of billionaires—joyriding around in spaceships, is causing a huge amount of atmosphere, water, and food poisoning due to the spent rocket fuel sprayed into our air.

Out in space, we’ve (surprise!) polluted that environment with a massive amount of space junk (about 40,500 pieces flying around above us). It’s currently under the radar, but we’re very exposed to something called Kessler Syndrome—a chain reaction where one of these pieces collides with another, which then is thrown off its orbital path and collides with another, and so on. The result? An immediate and perhaps permanent loss of wifi, cellular/mobile phone communications, weather, medical devices, GPS navigation, and more. Think of the movie, Gravity, with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. Some satellites are actually space weapons to knock out other satellites, as Russia is threatening, which could cause this immediately. Scientists have been warning about it since 1978, but we continue unheeded with space pollution. Because, the money. And note that out of the 10,000 functional satellites we use for the above, most of them are now controlled by Musk, Elon. What could possibly go wrong?

As all this marches along, resources will become limited and in short supply. Food, clean water, money, fuel/energy, safe shelter, medicine, security. We’re currently playing musical chairs with all of it, rather than working on actual solutions. I’ve asked many times in this journal why people feel they need so much money. This answers the question. This is why. They will be able to afford the limited resources, and their survival will be assured. They know this.

Everyone else, at least those not prepared, will likely perish in a very slow and unpleasant way. Class warfare (more in this in a subsequent post) will occur as people begin to “eat the rich” out of desperation. Assassinations of greedy rich people occur (oh wait, they already have). The point is, none of this is a prediction. It’s all, unfortunately, factual and already happening right before our eyes. MAGA found out this week, the plan all along wasn’t to remove those dark-skinned foreign-language talking people that trigger them at the QuickieMart. It was to add more, far more, to take American jobs this time (unlike the ones coming across the Rio Grande). Why? Because they’ll work for half the price and twice as long to escape India and Africa. The H1B Visa has always been about cheap labor, indentured servitude, and more profit at the expense of actual American workers and families.

Nobody is coming to save us, because the people that have the resources to do so are busy making other plans. We comfort and placate ourselves with the delusion that the experts have it under control and will save us, just like in the movies. The truth is, the folks we think of, like the myth of Musk, are busy building ways to save themselves, through the accumulation of massive wealth an