News organizations are all a flutter at tenacious busy body Jean Hill’s successful campaign to ban bottled water from Concord, Massachusetts. What a victory for the Earth!

It’s also a death sentence for the people of Concord if disaster strikes.

No one can store all the water they need, but if you don’t have at least a couple of weeks worth of drinking water squared away you will die in the event of a long term disaster. You can live only three days without water, and having seen the government’s belated responses to Katrina and the Gulf oil spill should solidify in your mind that help after a large scale disruption or disaster is often more than three days away.

But what about tap water? Jean Hill has said there’s nothing wrong with drinking water out the faucet and I frankly concur. All you “but Fluoride controls minds!!!” people do bath in the same water you shun after all, or drink it in coffee and tea so obviously I’m not of the belief that there’s anything necessarily wrong with the water. It’s the deliver system that’s at play here.

Many preppers worry about nation wide grid outages in the event of an EMP or solar storm, or disruption of transportation in an oil crisis. In both these situations water will stop running or be unsafe to drink even if it does. Water stations use electricity, if the grid goes down the pumping stations go down too. Any disaster, natural or man made, that takes out electricity will stop water flowing to cities. People with wells and hand pumps may be fine, but people who live in a town where they have no stored water will be at the mercy of  the slow responding government.

But even if we talk about a situation where electricity is available but transportation is disrupted, like an oil shortage, clean water would be at risk. Your tap water is only safe to bath in because trucks deliver chemicals to pumping stations to make it safe. At best, the reservoir you’re town is getting water from is filled with old cars, discarded appliances and dead bodies. I recently republished a 2006 white paper from the American Trucking Association which maintains that if trucking was curtailed for just two weeks the entire nations water supply would be stressed, and after a month water would not be safe to use without boiling.

This sort of data is often used by the Jean Hills of the world to “prove” the need to do something, but if you’re thinking realistically what it means is that you need to be prepared to provide safe water for yourself and your family for drinking, but also for bathing, cooking and even flushing toilets (though that water doesn’t need to be clean) and watering your survival garden. Bottled water is the most economical and safest way for people to be prepared.

Filters are great now, and everyone should have some sort of low tech filtration system to treat water gathered from the wild or rain barrels in long term situations, but not having bottled water in the house, even if you don’t drink it, is irresponsible and short sighted.

I bring this up not because the madness in Concord matters to most of us, but because many cities are moving in this direction and many more people impose these sorts of bans on themselves and their families in order to “go green.” But what will these people do when the water’s been out for four days and FEMA still hasn’t showed up?

I store a few weeks worth of water in the form of flats purchased from Costco, which are rotated out because we happen to drink a lot of water. I also have gallon jugs filled with tap water and treated with bleach for bathing if the water stops, and scouted the area for streams where I can collect water to be treated. The Jean Hills of the world hope that when they need it water will just magically flow from a faucet, and her green pretensions are going to put everyone in Concord at risk if something happens.

h/t Zionist Anti-Communist

The actual title of this Telegraph piece is FTSE gains 100 on BP Spill Hopes, Optimism over U.S. Corporate Profits but my title works as well. First the BP “hope” that investors are supposedly buying into:

BP shares gained 2.9pc as investors awaited news that tests on a new cap would show the leak in the Gulf of Mexico has been brought under control after 12 weeks. The shares have rise nearly 13pc so far this week, buoyed by takeover talk and reports of assets sales.

In reality BP is done. The Obama administration will gut the company and BP will need to sell off most of itself to pay for the damages to the gulf. A cynical person might put forward that both America and England need BP to be worth more when it sells off it’s assets so maybe they have arraigned some market movement to milk every last dime out of them. But I’m a well known optimist.

The U.S. news is just as “good” for investors:

Banking shares were lifted by positive sentiment about US quarterly results after a bullish statement from Alcoa, the largest US aluminium producer, yesterday. JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America all report this week.

Barclays rose 4.2pc and RBS 3.85pc as Britain’s index of leading shares is heading for its sixth straight gain.

“What we have generally seen over the last few days are traders betting that the US earning season will be a fruitful one and are therefore cherry-picking stocks that to them may look cheap,” said Giles Watts, head of equities with City Index.

Alcoa lifted its outlook for global consumption of aluminium, which led to a rally among miners. Eurasian Natural Resources gained 3.3pc, and precious metals group Johnson Matthey, rose 3.6pc. Recent worries over a slowdown in Chinese demand were forgotten.

Did I say fairy dust? I meant wishful thinking. Anyone who thinks China can indefinitely float the world and pull us out of a depression should spend less time reading DNC press releases and more time looking at economic indicators. The same article that announces this ‘good news” (China needs aluminum …for what?  Bombers?) slips in a little unimportant nugget. Portugal just had their credit rating downgraded.

Oh, and economic powerhouse China has lost almost 2% as investors there sold off shares of property developers and lenders, the two industries supposedly powering China’s economic boom.

But the reality here is that investors are desperate and want good news. No one can believe that BP and U.S. corporations are really going to be doing well. It’s insane. Insane but instructive.

It’s this type of magical financial thinking that got us in trouble in the first place. Instead of common sense safe investing strategies people look to make quick bucks on market movements driven by herd mentality. That can work for a short time, but the wise investor now will be ignoring the herd and taking the steps he needs to top protect his wealth from the next crash that is coming this year.

The E.U. is incensed that credit rating agencies “didn’t do more” to warn people of Lehman Brother’s collapse, but at the same time are outraged that the same agencies correctly assessed the credit worthiness of Greece, Spain and other countries. The solution? An E.U. run credit rating commissariat that investors would be forced to trust were honestly rating their own credit worthiness:

No, really:

The big three credit ratings agencies were threatened yesterday with fines and the creation of a new state-backed competitor, only weeks after European leaders attacked them for exacerbating Greece’s problems with downgrades.

The agencies will be subject to a new European supervisory body with the power to hand out fines and suspensions under plans unveiled in Brussels.

Work on a rival centralised European credit agency is also being carried out by the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, its President, said.

The Commission’s plans were welcomed by Liberal MEPs but dismissed as heavy-handed by Conservatives, including John Redwood, who called on the bureaucrats to think again.

It’s almost funny. Almost. So how would this work? Get ready to see the greatest example of irony you will ever see:

The European Commission proposed that an already-planned central European Union regulatory body — the European Security Markets Authority — should take on oversight of the existing rating agencies when it is due to begin work in January 2011.

The new authority would register rating agencies in return for a fee and check that they meet EU rules showing careful research of their rating and no conflict of interest.

The authority will be able to fine individual national offices of rating agencies that cannot or will not justify their methodology, or stop them from issuing ratings temporarily, or even permanently in the worst cases.

If the E.U. starts overseeing the credit rating agencies investors should simply stop buying European debt, because there s no way you will be able to accurately gauge the risk involved. Now would be a good time to look through your portfolio and start planning an investment strategy that is Europe free.

A  post I wrote about how outrageous it was that scumbag, traitor Tom Metzger wasn’t set on fire in an A.T.F. raid the way the Feds did to those poor hippies in Waco has Tom and his groupies heading for the swooning couch and demanding that I stop hurling well-deserved insults at this anti-American cretin who is morally, and in one case legally, responsible for murders, rapes, and all the other assorted mayhem the pedophiles, rapists, and wife beaters who make up the White Supremacist movemen commit on a daily basis.

At some point this morning Tom Metzger left me this gem:

Tom Metzger said,

on April 5th, 2010 at 10:53 am

I have been called a lot of things but never pervert or pedophilel.If these great white hope has any proof of that ,i have one thousand in cash to see it. TT

Perhaps Tom has forgotten his many appearances on Hot Seat, the Wally George Show, which is the spiritual progenitor of Red Alerts. In the ten years conservative firebrand George had Metzger on his show he was called many things, including such delightful terms as “putrid idiot” and “racist pig.”

And of course Wally called him pervert many times. Wally referred to all neo-Nazis as racist perverts which would of course include Metzger. Unfortunately it’s hard to find the full works of this magnificent bastard but here’s a YouTube video of one of their encounters where George does indeed use the racist pervert epithet, as well as putrid idiot, racist pig, and accuse Metzger of getting off easy on what should have been a murder rap.

As you will see, Metzger loves being abused by conservatives, explaining why this was one of dozens of appearances on the Wally George show the racist pervert made. I think little Tommy is missing his metaphorical spankings and has correctly deduced that Red Alerts has always been in part an ode to Wally George conservatism, and like a latently homosexual moth to a leather clad biker with a flame motif on his vest, Metzger is flitting around Red Alerts hoping beyond hope to get a little more of the treatment he misses.

Part I:

Part II:

Like I said it’s too bad the Wally George show isn’t available on DVD, though you can read more about him in his own words. But what’s important here is that Tom and leather boys are just horrified that I call them perverts and pedophiles, something they claim has just never been done, but in fact it has happened frequently. Now I personally don’t need Metzger’s $1,000, and like all degenerates he’d welch anyway because he has no character, but just for the record, Tom Metzger has been publicly called pervert, pedophile, and worse for decades.

Here’s an exit question for Tom and company: if they aren’t a bunch of perverts and pedophiles, why do I know of at least three neo-Nazis who are in contact with teen girls (or what they think are teen girls) on the Internet right now?

I believe it was the very wise Mossad Ayoob who said, “When all you have is a hammer everything begins to look like a nail,” but I could be mistaken. Regardless of the authorship, Charles Johnson of LGF should probably ponder this parable and how it relates to a man whose main tactic in debate is to accuse his opponents of supporting Nazism.

Case in point. So desperate was Chuckles to find neo-Nazis at a Tea Party that he posted a plea for people to help him identify a flag he was “pretty sure” was a neo-Nazi flag but he needed a reference. The link he posted led to a picture of people carrying the Tennessee state flag.

Who knew Tennessee was founded by the Third Reich?

Sorry Charlie, yet again your desire for everyone to the right of you to literally be a Nazi has led to an embarrassing exposure of your ignorance. Most people learn from their mistakes but I’m sure you will be right back on the trail of all these phantom Nazis tomorrow. But maybe the “you’re a Nazi!” hammer isn’t serving you as well as you think.