Billy DeCarlo, Project: Pioneer Podcast

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

There are waves of storms coming in the next few days. Lots of different types of storms, none of them good. Let’s talk about ways to prepare, and best practices for each.

It’s going to be hella cold (up to -6F without wind chill) here in pioneer-land this week, with a big snowstorm coming tomorrow (Sunday). We’re going into extreme mode—wrapping our covered wagon RV windows and that problematic outside above ground well riser pipe/spigot with Reflectix. We’re bringing our small propane tanks inside (not the big ones outside that we rely on—we’ll wrap those). Battening down the hatches! If you read our last post, you’ve learned about our big decision. But, that is later. This is now. Have you ever noticed that once you make decision to move on from something, you only see its hardship and flaws? It’s a thing we battle these days, especially with everything in general getting harder. Stay tuned for how we weather this storm in the next few days!

Tonight at 8pm eastern, there’s allegedly going to (finally) be a full-disclosure event in the UAP/UFO/Alien world. On the NewsNation network, Ross Coulthard will host a former US Special Forces operator who participated in the long-discussed (see my former posts) NHI (non-human intelligence) alien spacecraft recovery unit—complete with video. If it’s undeniably believable enough, it will be a profound revelation. Aliens exist. They’re here. What will people do? Freak out? Disregard? Meh? Don’t Look Up? What about God and religion? How does this change all that? We’ve seen soft disclosure over the past few years (the release of the fighter pilot audio/video) and the recent UAP/drone hysteria). But, there was still enough vagueness for skeptics to put their heads in the sand and poo-poo the whole thing. Could tonight change all that? Are they here to help us avoid the insane dystopian chaos we’re running headlong into with intentional purpose? Or, will tonight be yet another nothingburger? We’ll see in a few hours!

Then, if we manage to make it past the weekend to Monday, the pièce de résistance, the crowning of our first-ever man-child dictator king here in the United States. Let’s not forget, he promised several times, “dictator for a day.” After all the bended-knee pomp and circumstance, blatant sycophancy and toadyism on Monday, you should immediately see some attempt at dystopian raids to pull hard-working law-abiding residents of this country out of their safe haven churches, schools, and hospitals. This will infuriate other marginalized people and people who otherwise follow the teachings of their religion and care about others. Anarchists will rise up, protest violently and non-violently, and disrupt life in every way possible.

Of course, this is just to make the magas feel better. It’s theater. Quietly, on the down-low, authorizations will be signed to bring a massive flood of Indian and African H1B and H2B workers to actually take American jobs and exacerbate corporate profits, CEO compensation, and stock buybacks. So, apologies, Bubba, there will be a lot more dark-skinned people speaking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while you’re buying your scratch-offs and PBR.

All this could lead to enraged Bubba mass violence, akin to Jan 6.

There should also be some immediate (or very soon) executive orders that will make the realization of “what we done” quite impactful to the maga crowd. These changes will not make their lives better, in fact quite the opposite. Too late, he’s already in, the damage is done, Lucifer is out of the bottle. They’re gonna be big mad. There could be violence. I’m quite sure the inauguration itself wasn’t moved indoors so much due to the cold (what a bunch of “masculine energy” woosies!), but Trump’s terror at the many credible intel reports on long-range sniper assassination attempts. When that happens, it will happen indoors, a small gathering, by someone familiar, and at close range.

We’ll be in a much more dangerous place, as a country, because as of Monday, we’ll be cut off from critical intelligence from our partners around the world. Intelligence that could keep us from death or great harm. There’s no way the rest of the Five Eyes is going to continue to share that stuff with our new crew of drunk, corrupt, criminal, unintelligent, anti-democracy, and dictator-loving folks. No way. They’ll significantly water it down, if they help at all. We’ll be very exposed. Remember last time—a few days after taking office, Trump had Russia’s key people into the White House and leaked all kinds of extremely sensitive intelligence to them, which very much upset our allies that it put in danger. And that was just the first time out of many. Fun fact: he did keep our most sensitive military and nuclear secrets in the potty at his spy and cockroach-infested golf club. Don’t believe me? Read this recent Eurasian report of the top five risks the world faces in 2025.

Let’s cut to the chase, the good part. What should you do to prepare and protect yourself from all the above? Here are some best practices, so to speak.

Cold Weather: Take a walk around your house. Make sure nothing is connected to your outdoor hose spigots. Temporarily insulate any exposed basement windows. Drip your faucets before going to bed. Wrap your indoor pipes, keep them warm. Wrap or insulate any you can’t. Have safe ways to heat your indoors if the power is out for an extended period. Test all your carbon monoxide and fire detectors - like now. If your car battery is due for replacement, do it now.

Violence: Stay away from crowds for a while. Be gray, bland, boring. That “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Kamala” bumper sticker might feel good, but it could get you killed. Cook at home, order in, keep your eyes up (not on your phone!) at all times. Always position yourself near and be aware of emergency exits. Don’t engage in arguments, it’s not worth it, you won’t change anyone’s mind at this point, only their suffering will.

EMP/Power Strike/Outage: Regardless if it happens through extreme climate weather, a solar coronal mass ejection, an enemy starting their first strike with an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) bomb, or other, you should always visualize one thing:

The power suddenly goes out, and stays out. No heat, no internet, perhaps no cell coverage, no gas stations, no ATMs, no refrigerator, no cooking, no air conditioning. Are you ready for that? Do you have food? Do you have alternate ways to communicate with anyone in your immediate circle that you might be away from, at work or school? To get the latest important community news, weather, police, traffic, weather updates?

The best practices there are to mitigate all those exposures, using the ways I’ve discussed over and over in this pioneer journal. They are too many to list here, I’ve spent a year and a half documenting them and providing links.

Here’s a sample of our thinking on a deeper level. We worry that the incoming administration is already crapping on and insulting our world-wide allies and about to do a whole lot more. They’re pissed, and talking about retribution. Canada has mentioned cutting off the critical food and energy supplies to all of the northern US. What if the rest of the world decides to disavow the dollar standard, as they’ve threatened to? As well, the tariffs and other draconian and stupid things this administration is talking about crash the dollar? Your cash is trash, at that point.

We’ve already moved to cash and bonds, and out of the stock market. If the dollar crashes, we’re still screwed on that front. That’s why we started moving into crypto and (mostly) silver and gold coins. There are risks with those things, too. Crypto is imaginary money that could vaporize easily. It requires electricity and a network. When it’s viable, it’s a good means of doing business with folks who may have important (and illegal) resources. In the immediate aftermath of a stuff-hits-the-fan (SHTF) scenario, nobody will want gold or silver coins to barter/trade. They’ll want more important stuff like medical supplies, food, water, ammo, and information.

Even putting yourself out there to barter for things will be dangerous. You could get easily robbed/killed, negotiation over. It all boils down to making sure you have a good strong supply of all those things, that you are self-sufficient. If you can get past the initial phases of disaster or societal upheaval, you may then get to the stage where there’s enough rebuilt society or infrastructure to do bartering with initial, basic currencies such as gold or silver coins. Our hybrid move in the spring to fixed shelter plus RV will allow us to store up a ton more stuff and hunker down for longer, if possible.

Death: What if we don’t make it? What’s the best practice for that? I’ve documented my spiritual journey here before. I was a devout kid, then (mostly) an unbeliever in my very hard Farawayer days. I was always thinking it through, though. Analyzing. Re-reading. What makes sense? What checks off and explains the questions and concerns most accurately, as in Occam’s Razor? A profound reading was After, by Dr. Bruce Greyson, among other similar works, both pro and con that point of view.

You don’t have to join a club or cult to have faith. Think of what that word means—faith. What’s the down-side, compared to the upside? I’ve covered it all ad nauseum. My best practice here is to be good. To be intentional. That’s the key. We’re not perfect. We make mistakes. But if our heart is in the right place, if we’re trying hard, and course correcting, we may get a pass. If it’s not true, what’s the down side? You were a good person, and fondly remembered as an example of such to the people you leave behind? Be generous, help others with less, even in the little ways, each day. A few bucks to a local organization that supports homeless people, people (especially kids) with horrible health issues, abused animals, orphaned kids, whatever it is. C’mon now.

Example: At this point in writing this journal entry, I’m realizing that my references above to “Bubba” and “maga” are not something God/Buddha/Allah/Jesus would approve of or say. It sounds hateful. I should understand that those fellow spirits are the way they are for many reasons, some outside their control. Upbringing, their environment, their struggles in life, their minds being poisoned. They deserve love, pity, and help—even Trump. I won’t go back and change it, because it’s more evidence—I’m not perfect. I need to do better. We all do.

I’ve done a lot of work in the financial area. I can say unequivocally that the more money people have, the less they’re inclined to give. It’s an addictive sickness just like porn, gambling, drugs. You get too much, it feels too good, you only want more. It goes back to that concept that this short, blink-of-an-eye life here is just us swimming around in this placenta miasma womb as a proving ground, an “improving ground” to polish and hone our spirit, our goodness, to pass into another existence where there is nothing but that. We’ve been told this over and over in every form of religious text. This is an environment of temptation. Are you strong enough to resist and do the right thing?

Perhaps our visitors are coming here to tell us (not eat us). What if the ancient religious texts are an accounting of when they were last among us? Those Egyptians certainly didn’t have tools to precision cut and lift-fit massive pieces of granite, one of the hardest substances on Earth. Perhaps this sudden and massive influx of evil in our society is a leadup to a great battle, a great reset, as documented in the past (the flood, the plagues, the droughts, Sodom and Gomorrah). What we’re seeing does check all those boxes, it explains a lot. The Rapture and Second Coming are described as the final battle of God’s army versus the evil “Kings of the world.” Check. The sorting of the good and the evil souls. Which criteria do you fit? Are you loving, even when it’s difficult? Are you intentional? Helping those with less? Not hating those who are different?

Do you want to hear or see something beautiful and thought-provoking? Give fourteen minutes of your time to the below. You can even just listen to it while driving, walking, shopping, doing household stuff. It may change how you think, because it’s beautiful. The people with these stories, like this ER nurse, are everyday people with no history of trying to grift or lie to folks (I haven’t vetted this one yet, personally). They come from all around the world, identical stories, even those from indigenous places with no technology. If you like this, read or listen to After, as mentioned above.

Greed: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”—Matthew 16:26

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. Stay tuned! This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

I knew things had changed when, as we settled into the darkness of our pioneer wagon sleep cave for the night, Giavana suddenly raised up from her nest of pillows and smacked her hands together violently, scaring the bejesus out of half-asleep little Pia and me.

“What the heck was that about?” I asked.

“Spider,” she said calmly, getting up to wash her hands.

I sat in shock and awe as I watched her exit through the barn door toward the bathroom. A year and a half ago, when we started this pioneer life, the mere idea of a spider in close proximity would have sent my Italian former Playboy bunny city girl into hysterics.

It was an epiphany. Things have changed. There was further evidence the following weekend, as I went on a trip, leaving her behind in the covered wagon RV. It’s winter, and a damn cold January so far. While I was gone, a few typical malfunctions occurred. The furnace went out, and the water froze up. Incredibly, she dug in, troubleshot, and fixed both problems on her own. I guess she had to, survival and all that, but I was only a phone call away. She fended for herself, and I’m damn proud of that pioneer woman.

We’re working on survivalism, we’re preppers, and you need to become self-sufficient to survive. When the stuff hits the fan, you can’t simply call a repair person. You need to understand how electrical, plumbing, sewage, and other systems work at a fundamental level, and fix them yourself.

We’ve had some discussions lately, over cafe breakfasts and our favorite simple home-cooked dinner of chicken, onions, and peppers fried up in a pan of olive oil and wrapped in wheat tortillas with some excellent salsa.

If you go waaay back to Project: Pioneer #1 from August 2023, our original thesis for making this drastic change, selling all our stuff and moving into a small RV, had a few points such as:

* We were too spoiled in our big ol’ house with all that space we rarely used, filled with crap we rarely used, and yet paid to heat and air condition all year round.

* COVID and Trump v1 were wakeup calls. We saw a good chance another pandemic would occur, and perhaps Trump would return and this time achieve his lust to end our democracy and turn this country into a dystopian hellscape, perhaps start WWIII.

* A climate disaster or world war/nuclear strike would force us to flee, with no plan and no resources. Our home and land, a significant part of our overall net worth, could become worthless (or seized by an out of control autocratic government).

When I frequent the prepper communities, I see a lot of people reading the books, following the blogs, and piling up a lot of survival gear in their McMansions. If you’ve watched any of those reality shows where people are suddenly thrown into a dire survival situation, you’ll note that it’s a whole different ball game. You need practice.

So, we sold our house at market high, and moved into an apartment for a time as we sold off our things and formulated our plan. In August 2023 we pulled the trigger and moved into a (way too tiny) RV. A very simple, minimalist life, year-round. Dealing with extreme weather, predators, threatening and perhaps dangerous people out in the woods. We learned in our year and a half that we’re just fine in very, very close quarters (that’s amore!), and how to maintain our small covered wagon.

That box is checked, we feel. Our year-and-a-half-long special forces boot camp has served us well. We’re far more hardened than before. We feel we’re ready—far more ready than most, at least. I knew it the moment that spider bit the dust (although, I’m more of a catch and release type person—baby steps, Ms Giavana).

Along the way, my health has continued to decline. I had a heart procedure, causing Giavana to have to care for me here in our pioneer covered wagon. I didn’t like that, because I felt exposed. We were exposed. This life is hard enough. Now I’m due for two more surgeries this year, which will basically take away the use of my hands for most of the year, not good for pioneer life. I have a looming AAA (ascending aortic aneurysm) that could take me out in a moment’s notice.

And so, our decision. We’re keeping this beautiful rigged-out tiny home White House RV on standby, ready to hitch up and turn into our escape pod at a moment’s notice. This spring we’ll move into a quite small apartment, more tiny home living, but it will feel like palace for us. I’ll be near the hospital, crawling distance again. Good for survival. We’ll be able to store up far more food, water, and survival gear—a huge bonus. We’ll have access to our few remaining prized possessions—clothing, books, turntable/music again (those are in a very small storage unit), good for our mental health. They say a rolling stone gathers no moss. This will be around our tenth move in our years together, which don’t number much more than that, for reasons both known and likely unknown to us.

Make no mistake—we’re not bailing, we’re not quitting. We love this simple pioneer life. We love our cozy little home, which we are fully acclimated to. But, for all the reasons above and below, this is the more strategic decision. We can’t become complacent—we have to continue to explore and practice other aspects of what surviving in the future might entail. This move allows us to explore those other scenarios, and solves some pressing problems.

We’ll have options. If there’s a disaster, we’ll have strong shelter, perhaps enough to formulate a plan or just stay put. A fast, zero notice bug-out will entail taking our priority one items and stuffing them into the bed of Henrik the pickup truck, and bolting. A more dire and permanent looking scenario will entail the same, but hitching up the White House RV and bugging out. We like options. In any of those cases, we’ll be self-sufficient for quite some time, perhaps until help comes. Waiting for Godot, so to speak. We will be ready, because we practiced. We know this life.

I was always a bit concerned because we were exposed with our original phase. If a sudden disaster hit, such as an earthquake or tornado, and we had no time to leave, we’d have been in big trouble in this flimsy tin can. Now we have the best of both worlds in phase two. This is what concerns me about the homestead fixed-location preppers—if they’re forced out of their comfortable established hard-wired setup due to war conditions, climate disaster, or other, what’s Plan B? They’re kind of screwed—forced out into the open, the unknown, and very exposed.

So, the focus now goes to that new phase, along with our other priority one items—ham radio license and setup as well as learning indoor and outdoor small-space gardening, which we had zero room for in this RV life. We need to get to the shooting range more regularly. We will still be prepping, and from a perspective that will be much more relevant to many of you out there, so stay tuned! We already taught you all the RV stuff. But first, we have to make it through this cold unforgiving winter. Perhaps there are more lessons on the way. We also have a lot to look forward to. We’ve booked our trip out of the country to hopefully finalize our second citizenship—another escape-pod lever to pull in the coming dystopia. That one has been a lot of work and a long time coming. We like to have options.

In our current phase of pioneering, we’ve been pretty much fixed-location. We got to practice battening down the hatches, hitching up, and moving twice a year as we migrated between our summer and winter RV sites. Cool. But, we always had the luxury of connections to electric, water, and sewer. In this next phase, we’ll be practicing boondocking and dry-camping on some spring, summer, and fall trips. This will force us to rely on our solar setup and water collection systems, which will be excellent practice. This is the practice we’ve been missing out on. Everything needs to be practiced, because when the stuff hits the fan, mistakes can be deadly.

Make no mistake—hard times are coming, and probably pretty soon, as in about a week from now. The Trump regime is likely to take a wrecking ball to our country and world order. We were at the precipice of a strong future, keeping the peace and reversing climate damage, and we took the other option. These promised changes will make everything worse—the complete climate crises we’re seeing regularly, likely the promised war (will your kids/grandkids be drafted into the meat grinder to die for the billionaire class?), financial crisis, and more. The water is already boiling in our frog-pot—we’re already there. Just ask the people from California, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and countless other places who suddenly have no home. And that’s just in the past year or so.

Are you understanding yet? We’ve passed the tipping point, and we’re already there. The time is nigh (or rather, now). Prepare.

We went to the new Dylan biopic movie this week. It induced a slew of nostalgia and emotions. All that time ago, the young people of America and the rest of the world knew that we were damaging the earth, the climate, and heading for disaster. They knew the war was futile, wrong, and working-class American kids were being fed to slaughter in Viet Nam to feed the military-industrial money machine. It was a simple time, before we were all brainwashed to have our faces stuck in front of electronic devices for every aspect of our lives. I miss it.

Back then, there was the same imminent danger. When I was living in a military barracks at that time, my two roommates (a Black dude from Ohio and an actual Mexican (possibly illegal) immigrant), we knew the danger. We’d buy the latest album at the base exchange, come back to our tiny cinder-block room and crack the cellophane open, placing it on the turntable. (The simple and pure sound of that mechanical device, a stylus on vinyl, still can’t be beat with all our fancy digital crap.) Someone would produce a baggie and some rolling papers, we’d use the album cover to separate the seeds and stems from the weed, and roll a joint to share, still in our olive-drab fatigues. D would typically queue up some Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, I’d defer to Led Zeppelin or Allman Brothers, and our Latino friend would go with Santana. We were a mini United Nations of mutual respect for each other’s culture. We learned so much from one another.

The point is, it was an escape from the everyday imminent danger right outside our cell block. Fighter jets loaded with missiles screamed through the air 24/7, taking off and landing. We were on the border facing our enemy during the Cold War, and constantly jumping back to work when the air-raid sirens signaled an alert was occurring. The gopher-hole mounds that topped the Minuteman nuclear missile silos dotted a remote area called “the bomb dump” out on the horizon. When those bay doors swung open during the sirens, you knew it was serious business at hand. Maybe death.

Now, while war and attacks on our allies and neighbors are threatened by our President-elect, it feels just as dangerous. And we could have had it all. Yet, here we are again. We never learn.

The one possible positive outcome of the great reset that would follow a dystopian nuclear war or climate-ravaged planet (or both) would perhaps be a return to simplicity for future generations. It’s believed we’ve seen this movie before, as a species. There’s plenty of evidence that advanced civilizations predated us, thousands of years ago, but were wiped out by a significant event. Perhaps it’s that wheel of time I spoke about in my last post, turning and renewing. I’ve speculated that we ourselves, our spirits, exist in a cycle of death and rebirth in a new body, forming and growing spiritually until we’re polished enough to qualify for a utopian afterlife.

If there’s anything to look forward to, perhaps that’s it—a simpler, more peaceful life. But first, we have to survive. Because, just like in the play, Godot isn’t coming. Nobody is coming to save us, so prepare yourselves, please.

You used to laugh aboutEverybody that was hanging outNow you don't talk so loudNow you don't seem so proudAbout having to be scrounging your next mealHow does it feel, how does it feel?To be without a homeLike a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the streetAnd now you're gonna have to get used to it

(this final verse for our MAGA friends…)Ain't it hard when you discovered thatHe really wasn't where it's atAfter he took from you everything he could steal?How does it feel? Ah how does it feel?To be on your own, with no direction homeLike a complete unknown, like a rolling stone—Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. Stay tuned! This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

A slow-moving stream turns a water wheel, which then powers the gristmill’s grinding stones to turn grain into flour. The wheel of time also turns, slowly, ambivalent to the follies of mankind. History rhymes, repeats, the same lessons having to be learned again and again, as they’re easily forgotten in the fog of memory.

Throughout history there are countless occasions of greed and power run amok, mostly through the deception of the working class by the ruling class. In a recent post, I mentioned the Secession of the Plebeians back in old Roman Empire times. In this country, the USA, we’ve seen several cycles of this.

In the 1700s, when British colonists had had enough of a greedy king back home, they held a Tea Party and bloody revolution for their freedom.

In the 1800s, when the decent people had had enough of the horrible human and financial abuses of slavery, they revolted, and we had a long and bloody civil war.

In the early 1900s, Upton Sinclair’s bloody exposé on worker conditions led to changes in workplace safety.

The gilded age of runaway capitalism and abuses from the 1870s to 1890s was exposed by a Mark Twain novel of that name. It featured prosperity for the wealthy and runaway corruption, exploitation and poverty for the working class. This culminated in the big stock market crash of 1929, the following depression, and resulted in reforms after workers rose up, held strikes, and formed unions. Those changes led to a balance in wealth/equality distribution, and a prosperous middle class where one non-college educated wage earner could provide a comfortable standard of living to a family while a spouse/partner kept the home and cared for the kids. Ironically, that was the true golden age of America the MAGAs visualize when they talk about making America “great again.” All except for those

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

of course. America was great then (except if you were a minority, gay, or female).

Then came Reagan and the return of monstrous, excessive greed. The Empire Strikes Back! The Social Security system was raided in Reagan’s Great Heist to pay for a big tax cut for the wealthy Got deja vu yet? Union busting took away worker power. Deregulation led to poor product safety and greater profits. Antitrust regulations were ignored to smash competition and create monopolies. The two Bush Presidents, as well as Trump v1, continued this march, resulting in several catastrophic economic periods that left the economy and middle class in shambles, to be rescued and rebuilt by Democratic Presidents each time. Nobody was ever held accountable for the countless lost homes and jobs from the 1999 Dot-Com Bust, 2008 Financial Crisis, corporate bailouts, the raping of the treasury with corrupt COVID-era PPP loans to politicians and the rich, the 2017 Tax Cuts for the Wealthy that cost us actual taxpayers (and our future generations) another $7 trillion. And they’re queuing up V2 to launch quite soon.

Four years ago yesterday the misled, gaslit working class rabble rose up and rioted because they were told their hero, an extremely corrupt lifelong con man with many bankruptcies under his belt, had actually won a free and fair election. He was that guy who was going to (finally) do something about…

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

A few months ago, they rose up again and re-elected him President, believing he would actually fulfill his promises this time, particularly the one about making their eggs cheaper and do something about…

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

Now that Trump is officially on the record, before even day one of his presidency, and it’s become clear that he won’t be doing any of that, the rabble is stirring again. Especially since he’s sided with his billionaire friends in regard to actually bringing in planeloads more of those

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

from India and Africa on H1B “indentured servitude” visas to take jobs from their white American kids. Trump and his billionaire pals love H1B and H2B workers and fill their businesses with those cheap-labor American-displacing workers. It’s very good for profit!

There’s a recent, excellent post by Thom Hartmann that puts this historical trend in context of predator and prey. I highly recommend you read it!

The above are examples throughout history of people being screwed over until they just can’t take it anymore. To get to the point of this post, that’s when the fun starts.

A guy fed up and in pain from being screwed over by massively profitable health insurance companies run by folks that make tens of millions of dollars (and use AI to reject claims) goes and kills a CEO. Now he’s a folk hero, with massive donations to his legal fund.

A US military veteran fed up about trying and trying to get ahead, being held back by his skin color, creed, and other factors, rents a pickup truck and mows down a crowd of people to make a statement.

A Trump-loving white military guy rents one of Musk’s crappy cyber trucks and blows it up in front of one of Trump’s crappy hotels. Why? Perhaps he heard that it had just come out that Trump wasn’t going to do nuthin’ about…

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

How bad will the class warfare get in a few weeks and beyond? That’s when we’ll turn the keys to our almost 250-year old democracy to a gaggle of the most corrupt, greedy, working-class hating folks on the planet.

How bad will it get when those tens of millions of Mr & Mrs Bubbas see that not only have their egg and gasoline prices doubled, but those…

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

have actually multiplied like rabbits due to H1B and H2B visas. And then, on top of that, the Musk-promised “time of pain” when they crash the stock market (to make big short bucks), driving massive layoffs. The Trump Bucks checks won’t be coming this time, kids.

The rest of us are already mad. We know the truth of what happened in the last administration—all the massive corruption, theft of taxpayer dollars, criming that went on. We know, because we haven’t been watching the gaslighting channels. Wait until the rest of ‘em figgers it out. Them folks is heavily armed. They might then start to take note:

That wall never got built, and Mexico didn’t pay for it. He never locked her up.

There never were any caravans of murdering, raping immigrants. No pets was ate.

COVID wasn’t a hoax. Never went away in spring. Countless Americans died from the lies.

The deficit wasn’t eliminated, as he promised, it was jacked bigly.

He didn’t bring back the coal industry, steel jobs, or those auto plants he said he’d save, or even that Foxconn plant he promised. There was no 4% GDP, as promised.

There was never a big, beautiful healthcare or infrastructure plan.

And worst of all, nuthin’ was ever done about them…

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

Wait until the part when they say they need to make big cuts to Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment/food benefits, and more in order to “get us out of trouble.” When they find out the lobbyists are responsible for newly exposed lies like how a glass of alcohol a day is good for you, when really it’s a contributor to cancer. When they figure out all the poisons put in their food to make their children addicted and sick, and even more with additional regulation slashing.

They’ll be mad when they realize that all along it wasn’t those people crawling across the Rio Grande River with only their kids and clothes on their back that was the problem. They were only coming for slave wages and jobs and to pay $70 billion in taxes for services we get to use, not them. They were coming for the jobs the billionaires were dangling. They spent their lives in hiding, not raping and murdering. They were really…

Dark skinned people are talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

But in reality, they’re more like Bubba’s family than the billionaires Bubba just put in charge of things. Just trying to survive, just trying to give their kids a better life. Bubba will sure be mad when he/she figures this out.

The rabble will realize they shouldn’t have focused on immigrant pay, they should have wondered why, not too long ago, CEO pay was 30 times average worker pay, now it’s 3000 times more. That’s why your stuff costs so much, bruh. That and stock buybacks, another fun capitalist greed tactic. See below.

How about when they realize it wasn’t the welfare queens they should have been condemning, but corporate welfare? Wait until they see that billionaire-led “efficiency” team ignoring these massive lobbyist-inspired corporate welfare giveaways while taking away their Social Security, healthcare, veteran’s benefits, and unemployment. Lookee there at that list below—$16 billion of your taxpayer money for a company that makes airplanes that fall from the sky and kill the taxpayers inside. Don’t even get me started on all that waste for rich donor ambassador appointments Trump is giving out like candy. Imagine that—uber fantastically rich folks getting the fanciest digs, meals, drinks, all over the world on your taxpayer dime. Will that waste be cancelled? How about the armies of Secret Service and staff being forced to stay at Trump properties at jacked up prices to watch him golf while he promised he’d be working (again)?

The Biden/Harris cabinet of about a dozen people had a total net worth of about $118 million. Trump’s partial cabinet is now at around $340 billion, and that doesn’t include our $500 billion real, shadow President, Leon (sic) Musk (who incidentally, was an actual illegal immigrant for a time, was named after a Nazi rocket scientist’s book character, and grew up in a very wealthy, racist Nazi-sympathizing family in good old South Africa). Anyway, it’s hilarious how Mr and Mrs Bubba thought these working-class hating rich folk were going to make their lives better, and get rid of them...

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

Good Lord, the ignorance. Wait until they find out the same dude is now pushing to kill the net neutrality law that prevents internet companies from spying on all your stuff without a warrant 24/7. Especially since he plans to make his satellite-based ISP the one and only monopoly for internet access. Then, if you say, call him a pasty white loser trust fund baby, he can cancel your life the way he cancels people now on his social media platform who disrespect his fragile man-child ego.

So, it will be no surprise when a whole lot of heavily armed pissed off folks rise up. By then, it will likely be martial law, suspension of elections, and use of our vast and powerful military and all that Musk technology (see: drones) against anyone who dares speak out. Anarchy will likely ensue. We’re already starting to see it, and Bubba has only just started to figure things out, how hard he/she got played. Then it will likely no longer be conservative vs liberal, Democrat vs Republican. It will be the plebes against the royalty, once again as the wheel turns.

When someone who came up from working class becomes successful, they sometimes then look down their nose at their former tribe (see: Vance, JD). Others might go the opposite route and help those they left behind. See the Henry Ford quote at the end of this piece. It seems we’ve put the former group in power, those who grew up rich and despise the working class, and those who “made it” and also despise the working class.

Again, we’re not calling for or advocating violence, although it tends to be inevitable in cases like this, as history has shown again and again (and again). We are fans of non-violent class warfare.

Here are some suggestions:

Patronize your local mom and pop small businesses, get off that Amazon crack. Log on now and cancel Prime. Should you really be paying more and more for Prime, especially since you’re now subjected to commercials on their content? We go local first and foremost. If that doesn’t work, we go Costco, a very good company who treats their workers well. If that doesn’t work, we tried the $49 Target Circle. It’s actually amazing—an ever growing Amazon-like online selection that ships free and fast and actually will deliver to you same day if it’s something stocked at the local store.

Do you need all those rip-off streaming services? Ever check the free (even live) content that comes with your TV or a high-definition antenna?

Is it worthwhile spending all that money on watching people do things (sports, entertainment) and contributing to their massively out-of-whack salaries? Ticket prices are massively jacked up, thanks to the Ticketmaster monopoly. Head to local minor league sports and local bands. It’s in many ways even better, and far less expensive.

Go to real local restaurants instead of those nasty chains.

We’ve turned the keys over to a group of the worst of us. A sex-abusing alcoholic misogynist in charge of our military. A conspiracy theorist science-denying brain-worm infested scam artist in charge of our health (actually, two scam artists in charge of our health). On and on, you can’t make this stuff up, it’s so bad. Inexperienced felons, criminals, drug abusers, pedophiles at the top of massive, critical government agencies.

These are people who have never gone grocery shopping, changed a flat tire (let alone a baby’s diaper), had to pay a bill, drive their own cars, or care for a child in charge of our lives. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? They never have to be around…

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

They’ve only ever been catered to, doted on, served. Behind their country club doors, while sipping very expensive scotch, they really do refer to “the rest of us” as losers sucking on the teat of government. All while they enjoy those massive subsidies and a pass at paying any actual taxes on their massive wealth and income.

The people actually voted for that, instead of someone who had just actively participated in rebuilding yet another Republican devastated economy and was promising help for working people in so many ways, from starting businesses to actual meaningful tax breaks for working people, to buying affordable homes, to making the wealthy pay their fair share. All that wasn’t enough, cuz there’s…

Dark skinned people talking funny languages down at the QuickieMart while I’m tryin’ to buy my scratch-offs and PBR.

And now, the price will be paid, and folks are going to be big mad.

To close, kudos if you figured out this post is a tip of the hat to the late Gil Scott-Heron. He was my old Farawayer buddy Damon’s hero. Heron wrote this piece to bring attention to the massive spending on the military-industrial complex and space program while so many were suffering here at home (especially marginalized communities) during the horrible economic period in the 1960s to 1970s.

A rat done bit my sister Nell.(with Whitey on the Moon)Her face and arms began to swell.(and Whitey's on the Moon)I can't pay no doctor bill.(but Whitey's on the Moon)Ten years from now I'll be paying still.(while Whitey's on the Moon)—Gil Scott-Heron

"Money doesn't change people, it only reveals them."—Henry Ford

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. Stay tuned! This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

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 and spacecraft to whisk them away to a nice, new, clean planet to ruin, while we all burn and drown. They get to deploy the only prepper bug-out that actually works under these circumstances—getting off the rock.

What are Giavana and I doing about it? We’re learning to grow our own food. We’re studying for a ham radio license as another way of communicating and gathering critical information. We’re exploring homesteads, eco villages, eco communities of like-minded people who believe in simple and sustainable living, both here in the US and abroad. We’re doing all the things we’ve been writing and teaching you about for the past few years. And you should, too.

Want to learn more about slow collapse? Please read this excellent post by The Honest Sorcerer.

One last word—we lost a truly great human being and former President over the weekend. His life should be a model for us to aspire to. He was good, kind, ethical, and honest. He spent his life, well into old age, helping others with less. He spent his entire life fighting against racism, for equality, peace, and human rights. He was also an Allman Brothers fan! Rest in peace, sir.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."—Charles Darwin

"Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception."—Carl Sagan

"Survival was my only hope, success my only revenge."—Patricia Cornwell

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. Stay tuned! This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

T’was the night before Christmas and a lifetime of those memories come flooding back. My childhood excitement, harried parents rushing around in last minute preparation, midnight mass, cookies and milk for Santa, sneaking peaks at Dad downstairs putting together presents he thinks I think Santa has brought. Will I ever get to sleep so the morning can come?

It’s the holiday season, religious holidays, specifically. Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, Bodhi Day. It’s not a time for talk of the things that stress us. We won’t be discussing politics, alien landings, pandemics, preparing, or the downfall of humanity today. Let’s focus on hope and giving thanks, and we’ll share with you a little of what our typical pioneer RV life is like, in case you should ever consider such folly. We’ll get back to that other stuff in our next post. There’s a world to save, after all.

Today begins like every other day. We rouse from the soft, warm blankets of the sleep cave, through the sliding barn door that leads to the main cabin area of our pioneer RV home. We crank the furnace up and coffee burbles as it readies for our cups. I pull my jeans off a bathroom hook and don them so Pia and I can take a walk outside in the bitter cold. The new snow covers the bleak greyness of dead things with a pristine white sheet. It’s too early for humans to wreck it with their big truck tires.

Back inside, after she’s devoured her healthy gourmet food, Pia hears me slide back the foil lid on my daily yogurt and steps up. She always gets to lick the underside of that foil clean. The news drones in the background and Giavana mutters and grumbles on the follies of mankind from somewhere inside her plush oversized robe.

Sometimes this tiny home reminds me of those forts we’d build long ago, out in the woods. Often they were just cardboard appliance boxes—tiny but a secret refuge from the horrors of the world outside. A place for quiet. A place for hiding. A place to not be criticized or judged. God and nature and church alone in the woods with the other animals, safe from the adults busy out there wrecking the world in their retched behaviors.

Yesterday it was below zero, and we woke to faucets that yielded no water. Something was frozen, somewhere. We went through a standard process of elimination, switching from the outside well water connection to the backup water tank in the RV underbelly. Bathroom plumbing needs to work early in the morning! That temporary solution worked, meaning our underneath tanks weren’t frozen, whew. Checking the app, we verified the temp down there is holding at 32F, despite it being much, much colder on the outside of the insulating foamboard. Elimination yielded that the vertical pipe coming up through the ground had frozen at the valve. I slid the tall rectangular foamboard cover off of it, grabbed Giavana’s rocket turbo hairdryer, turned it on max, and stuck it inside. A few minutes later, water gushed out, eureka, and now Giavana gets to buy a brand new hair dryer because that one is officially toast.

Today’s adventure came when I went to dump the tanks. Our connection to the ground sewer must have frozen and cracked, as water gushed onto the ground. This is why you always test with the grey water before dumping your black water. A very smelly crisis averted. I’ll wait until Sunday to fix that, when it will be at least tolerably cold.

Back to the warm inside again, I feel the soreness from my surgery a few weeks ago. The freezing cold to raging heat brings out the stiffness and itchiness, as I just had the stitches out yesterday. I had sat in the cardiologist office as he checked things over, making noises as he waved some gizmo over the site where the electronics now bulge out of my upper chest. My body is on Bluetooth, yay. I had thought this was the end of half my serious problems, leaving only the ascending aortic sudden-death bulging balloon aneurysm to fret about. Then he starts his own muttering to the assistant, pointing at the tablet and something disturbing, apparently. The big reveal is that there’s indication of new symptoms that the new device can’t help with, which could lead to stroke. There’s discussion of blood thinners. Great, more big pharma, which I’ve always avoided when possible.

Giavana can tell I’m upset when I arrive home. We go over the news. She goes into loving-comfort-nurse-wife mode, suggesting we bail now, in our second year of pioneer life, and go back to our luxury apartment with nice pool and fitness center and best of all, within crawling distance to a major hospital, emergency room, and medical center. She suggests we also book some winter time near Siesta Key, a nice warm vacation getaway to the beach, which she knows is more alluring, exciting, and comforting than those oxycontin pills they’ve been giving me. It’s Florida though, certainly a cesspool of humanity, at least politics and disease-wise. The warm sand and a day at the beach, relaxing, reading, listening to music, are my crack cocaine.

Did I say at the start we’d focus on being thankful? Despite that news, that’s where I go after I’m done sulking. Giavana has made me feel better with the possibility and hope of those things. She’s good at that, my lovely Giavana. I’m lucky to have her by my side. I’m lucky to have my kids and grandkids, to have and feel that love even when we’re apart. I’m lucky and thankful for the few but good friends I have and my very good life in these many decades on this crazy blue marble we all spin ‘round on—Spaceship Earth.

We’re planning a trip to Italy in March, to check out what life is like in a civilized country where basic healthcare is a human right and children aren’t gunned down at their desks in school in support of NRA profits. We’ll be looking at properties—small villas in the countryside or ecovillages. After living in the Red House and White House, it would feel like a mansion. We have trained ourselves well.

We should all be thankful for what we have, and remember there are so many with far, far less, living in strife and struggle. Giavana and I are blown away every day at the examples of people with immeasurable money who never seem to have enough, never spend much to help others, and aren’t really especially happy. Something very bad happens to people when they get to the point where they have too much money. I’ve seen it too many times to believe otherwise. Check out old Mr. Potter while you’re watching It’s A Wonderful Life on Christmas tomorrow. Prime example. There are exceptions, of course. Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife Mackenzie Scott has given away almost $20 billion to charities in the last few years. Ol’ Jeff just changed his residency from Washington state to Florida in order to save himself $1 billion in taxes and to avoid helping the state and country that gave him such wonderful opportunity, and avoid helping other taxpayers with far less.

What I’ll leave you with on this holiday eve is to ask you to take a moment from the bustle and stress of this week. Think about all you have to be thankful for. There are adults and children starving, living outside in the heat and cold, all around the world, and amazingly, here, in the richest country ever known in history we have our own citizens living under bridges and on sidewalks, in dire need of mental health help. (Narrator: Ol’ illegal immigrant Elon Musk’s net worth is now close to $500 billion, mostly thanks to government subsidies and bailouts). Billionaire and Trump pal Dan Pena just released the most horrific, cruel Christmas video (warning, NSFW, F-bombs). We’ll talk about class warfare in our next post.

People are spending the holidays with their kids in pediatric cancer wards, or worse in cemeteries visiting their loved ones. Be thankful for this life, and all you have. Talk to your kids about this when they’ve grown bored with all the new “stuff” after a few hours. Teach them compassion and giving, and maybe there’s hope their generation will learn to love one another.

As for Giavana, Pia, and I—our Christmas is a simple and humble one. One small gift and one thoughtful, lovingly inscribed card to each of us from the other. We wouldn’t have it any other way. Our gift is each other and this life, day after day after day. And, Pia got a very plush new bed, which she is also loving very much when she’s not snuggled up with us in the sleep cave.

“An awareness of one's mortality can lead you to wake up and live an authentic, meaningful life.”—Bernie Siegel

“A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream?”—Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Funny thing, watching gods realize they’ve been mortal all along.”—Pierce Brown

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. Stay tuned! This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

The old Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.” Actually, it’s a myth, but quite pertinent. Remember way back on December 21, 2012, when we were all sweating because that was the day the ancient Mayan calendar had indicated the world would end? Whew! Didn’t happen. We missed one detail though—we’ve fiddled with the calendar so much since the Mayan times, some math folks are arguing the actual predicted date is in December 2024. On top of that, we’ve got world events that are very similar to those described in the Bible’s Book of Revelations as leading up to the Battle of Armageddon (more on this later). Lastly, the increasingly hard to deny UAP invasion I’ve been hinting at in our last few posts.

People are losing it. Examples? Here’s one. A NJ woman on a forum discussing these drones was moved to expletives in her stress. So, another NJ woman told her to shut her #@^! filthy mouth. Jersey girls, gotta love them!

Remember that movie Slapshot with Paul Newman? Apparently the Hansen brothers have retired and become one of our only legit scientific resources to understand this. Meet the Tedesco brothers, twin scientists from Staten Island. They’re awesome and providing a legit take on these UAPs.

Things are a bit stressful out there. How does this all relate to our faith, and what exactly is going on? I have some theories. First, let’s do a fun exercise to get away for a while. Imagine this:

It’s announced that we’ve found a new planet that’s rich with all the resources we’re running short of and greatly value—lots of rare metals for semiconductors, minerals, natural substances. But, the new planet is filled with many species of life, which are harmless in that they just go about practicing the natural food chain and cycle of life, eating each other. There is also some “intelligent” life but it’s very primitive, with basic tools and weapons.

What would we do in this circumstance? We’d make regular forays—scientific expeditions, exploratory missions, mining and cargo operations to bring home the bounty. We’d probably want to stay off the radar of the primitives, lest they catch us off guard and hurt one of us or our craft. We wouldn’t want to upset the natural, ecological balance by messing up the food chain, as it might lead to the organic decay and destruction of the planet full of resources we so badly want and need. We’d keep going back again and again for a very long time, but certainly keep an eye on those rapidly evolving primitives and their weapons.

When the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the New World, the natives were in great fear and terror. They originally thought the mounted horsemen were one great beast with fantastic weapons. Same with the Native Americans that encountered the English and other Europeans with their thundering guns and cannons. Imagine those futuristic warriors if they suddenly encountered a brigade of modern special forces, with their tech from head to toe, flying machines and armored vehicles.

We’re the bomb (no pun intended), aren’t we? We like to think so. It’s a human condition, called arrogance. In 1899, the Commissioner of the US Patent Office suggested closing the department down because, “Everything has already been invented.”

Now that the stage has been set, here are my theories.

SPECIAL OFFER: Print these theories, take them to Starbucks, hand them to the barista along with $7 and you get a venti latte.

Theory One: Visitors

We are those crude, ignorant primitives on that rich planet. Our visitors have been here for a very long time. It’s been quite well documented over the years, in leaked intelligence, military, and other government documents, pictures and videos. The government has gone as far as subtly acknowledging this, along with official video and pictures. There are countless clear depictions of craft and visitors from ancient civilizations around the world. And architectures that they just weren’t capable of building.

It’s no longer up for debate. The visitors likely go about their business mostly undetected, but do get nervous now that the cavemen have nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet, and get ever closer to using them. The visitors have shown up in force during nuclear power plant accidents (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima). They’ve disrupted our nuclear weapons capabilities on many, many occasions.

Receipts? Read up on the 1964 Vandenburg Air Force Base Big Sur incident. Exactly a year ago, Langley Air Force Base in Virginia was swarmed with drones for over two weeks. Advanced F-22 fighters were grounded and moved away to other bases in a panic. It’s incredibly hard to believe this wasn’t a bigger deal.

So why not just tell us? As I said above, they have been, in a very slow and cautious manner. They are acclimating us to this reality. If they had a big dramatic press conference, like in the movies, it would likely be followed by mass panic, rioting, looting, suicide—just like in the movies. This way is better. Although, it feels like the visitors are forcing their hand. Perhaps they’re doing this by appearing as something friendly and known to us—using the red and green navigation lights that planes do. This is how we acclimate animals when we’re training them, right? Get them comfortable with us.

This knowledge is carefully held, even above Congress, the Gang of Eight, and the heads of our military branches. Organizations like Space Force and All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) were created simply to placate and misinform those voices in government and the populace and let the real players, like Immaculate Constellation, do their thing under cover.

And yes, many “sightings” are regular planes and helicopters—large, small, commercial, military. You can verify that with the FlightRadar24 app. But, many are obviously not. By government and law enforcement admission, these are far beyond our known technology. They cloak, maneuver at g-forces and speeds we’re just not capable of, have no thermal footprint, and use frequencies we can’t detect. They stay aloft far longer than any current battery technology would allow (it’s not internal combustion like our big military drones or they’d have heat signatures). This isn’t JetBlue, sorry, kids.

Fun Fact: There have been documented “drone” incidents like this since long before drones were invented on this planet. They’re not drones. They’re UAPs.

These do look like regular craft, aside from it perhaps being a familiar alien mirage. That fact is a bit off-putting to me when I consider the alien angle. Of course, the aircraft we have are shaped a certain way simply due to it being an efficient way to travel in our atmosphere. Visitors may simply be respecting our standards in order to avoid conflict.

The point is, they seem to get very nervous when we come close to blowing up our planet, the one they seem to need and treasure. There was the incident where schoolchildren had seen a craft land, and were approached by beings that communicated with them telepathically to respect the planet and go easy on the technology. There were really too many with identical stories to discount it. These visitors may see the impending takeover of our government by hateful, violent lunatics hell-bent on WWIII as not a good thing.

There are tons of “experts” with YouTube and social media accounts who are basically grifters or tin-foil hat brigade members. It’s hard to know who to believe. More sane and practical information comes from Ross Coulthard’s Reality Check show (on NewsNation’s channel), and people with credentials such as Lue Elizondo (who just published a new book, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs).

Theory Two: The Gov’mint

The government has never been shy about using the populace for experimentation. See: Tuskegee Experiments, Agent Orange, LSD experiments on servicemembers, and so much more. This could be something like that. There are videos of them spraying something that smells like ammonia or chlorine. That’s scary.

Perhaps it’s more of a social experiment. Overwhelm people so they’re already exhausted for the really big thing to come. Fear always makes the acceptance of authoritarianism easier. “Only I can fix it.” “Only I can keep you safe.” Yeah, Trump said that stuff. So did Hitler and others long before him. It’s a playbook, not a cookbook.

It’s quite possible that these are highly-classified drones that are searching, sweeping for something. Perhaps there’s a dirty bomb snuck in and they’re thinking it’s hidden in water. That would explain the focus on bodies of water. They wouldn’t alert us, as it would cause a mass panic and chaotic evacuation, and yes, rioting and looting. Maybe it’s a Republican special op, looking for the rest of Hillary’s emails and Hunter’s other laptop.

This government theory is tempting, other than these UAPs are also swarming our nuclear bases in the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nuclear sites, and have been for some time now. The only plausible way to explain that we have technology like this is that we’ve finally successfully reverse engineered the alien craft we’ve captured, as the Immaculate Constellation leaked documents and the 4chan leaker describe in detail. They describe attempts and failures, and very little success.

We’ve all learned one thing from Trump. If there’s a big scandal, just wait it out until something else even bigger happens, and people will move on and forget. Perhaps that’s what the government is hoping here, no matter which of these theories is true.

Theory Three: Foreign Actors

China and Iran have very smart people, lots of money, and incredible technology. It’s reported they’ve captured their own visitor craft and are similarly trying to reverse engineer the technology. Perhaps they have, and these things hovering above us are theirs, and we’re powerless to do anything about it. I don’t think Russia has the money, resources, or technology. If they did, we’d see this in Ukraine. Whomever is doing this, if they’re from this planet, it’s an incredibly expensive endeavor. Something very big is at stake.

The fact that we let that spy balloon cross the US in early 2023 didn’t seem to make sense. What if we’re one step ahead, knowing it was collecting information, and simply configured our stuff to give them a wealth of strategic bad info? Then it makes sense. We could have shot it down any time. We did at the end, to achieve the mission and satisfy the townsfolk. Maybe that’s what we’re doing now, if these are foreign actors.

Aliens and God

Perhaps it all fits. The existence of life outside our planet doesn’t mean there’s no God. I believe in a spiritual realm and a physical one. In my posts on spirituality and the afterlife, I explain in detail how I’ve come to my conclusions, after a lifetime of hard thinking, experience, and soul searching.

As we have learned in other Biblical resets (flood, Sodom and Gomorra, etc), we may have simply exhausted God’s patience with this incubator experiment and need a reset. As a species, we certainly seem to have lost our way, the mass temptation toward the seven deadly sins now overwhelming and in such plain view. There are very few truly good people among us, especially in positions of leadership. With Trump’s election to lead the most powerful country on Earth, it seems to have reached a tipping point.

If you read and believe what the Bible (and other religious texts) say, we seem to be close to those ending times they prophesize. I mentioned the Mayan calendar at the start of this post. The Bible talks about the rise of the antichrist as someone who would receive a head injury and greatly mislead the populace. Check. It talks about the great war to kick things off, happening in the Middle East/Israel, with an invasion from what is now Russia. Check. There are so many signs. Trump checks all those antichrist boxes, as well as the Nostradamus and other prophets. Clearly a purely evil human being of Satanic proportions.

The Bible describes Armageddon in the Book of Revelations as the final battle between good and evil. It heralds the return of Jesus and the establishment of God’s Kingdom here on earth. It says the kings of the earth will fight against God’s forces. We certainly are moving to a situation where the earth is ruled by kings—dictators who are hell-bent on carving the planet up between them. This all may be inevitable.

Again, I see this existence as an incubator, a testing ground, where we are surrounded by temptations to test our goodness, our soul’s spiritual evolvement and evolution into a polished one, a good one, a loving one, deserving of being in a place where there is only goodness and love for eternity. God does not intervene, but he watches and judges. Nothing else makes sense to me.

What can we do? Simply be good. Be kind. Help others. Love, don’t hate. Do what all those religious texts tell us we need to do to gain happiness in eternity, see all our lost loved ones again. Follow the Commandments, the Beatitudes. The inner peace you’ll find, and newfound self-respect will be incredible. You’ll lose your fear of dying, of apocalypse, because you’ll know something better is coming.

Lead a simple life. You don’t need millions of dollars to be happy. In fact, it will probably make you less happy. Follow the financial advice in my other posts, read those books, and you’ll see how to get there. Spend your spare time doing things that are good for your soul—volunteering, yoga, meditation, music, reading, walks.

You don’t have to go to church, although it helps to find that community, if you can find one that’s not oriented around putting their hands in your pockets or on your kids. There are plenty of good, non-denominational churches like that. Yes, they need money to operate, and you should donate. What they don’t need is what Joel Osteen pays himself— a salary of $54,000,000, a custom garage with 20 stalls for his custom vehicles, including his favorite, a $270,000 Ferrari 458 Italia, not to mention his 70,000 square foot mansion. I worked for Oral Roberts, and saw this disgusting greed and financial rape of the flock first-hand. Find a good church, even if it’s only in your heart or under your own roof.

Our Take

I’m a skeptic but intensely analytic. From what I see so far, the only thing that checks all the boxes and makes sense is the visitor angle. I like to think they’re here to help. If they’re not, well, that’s why we intensely prepare. Now that our cabin dream is gone, we’re thinking more about heading inland to less populated areas. Whenever what is about to happen happens, it will likely be impossible to go anywhere. If we can’t, we have everything we need right here in our pioneer life. It’s pretty clear that if they wanted to hurt us, they are more than capable and likely already would have.

The deafening silence and ridiculous statements from Biden’s administration is very disappointing. Last time we saw him, he was ill. We have a secret dream he’ll step down, even just for a few weeks, and let Kamala be the 47th President. It feels like something is about to break in this whole UAP situation. Something is certainly about to break when Trump and his clown-car of morally and financially corrupt friends take over in a month.

On the pioneer side, I spent yesterday gingerly (still healing from surgery) repairing leaks in our underbelly insulation. It’s about to get big cold, and we can’t have any tanks freezing up. I feel much better that’s done. I’m also setting up the latest solar gear additions, and the cold is complicating that some.

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. Stay tuned!

It's been too hard livingBut I'm afraid to die'Cause I don't know what's up thereBeyond the skyIt's been a longA long time coming, but I knowA change gon' comeOh yes, it will

Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

Heyo! I’m still kicking—my surgery went well. A little sore, a bit worse for wear and tear but hopefully bought some time here, wherever it is we are. Good thing my good nurse Ms Giavana is in my life. She and little Pia are taking good care of me. I can’t use my left arm for much for six weeks, which sure makes everyday pioneer life more challenging!

That CEO getting shot was a sad but important bellwether for these times. In our last post, we mentioned the Secession of the Plebeians in the old Roman Empire. There are countless examples over history of greed and lust for power, combined with the stepping on the necks of everyday people, grows to a breaking point.

People get to the point in their daily struggles, see their beloved kids, parents harmed, maybe die, and just don’t give a damn anymore. There’s not much more dangerous than a vigilante human who cares not for consequence. It’s what my whole Vigilante Angels fiction trilogy was about—a dying ex-cop who has lost hope and is hell-bent to extract his pound of flesh before he goes to meet his maker.

We had a recent long battle with the same company, United Healthcare, about an expensive claim they rejected that was clearly within their guidelines for coverage. It was horrible—they just kept trying to blow us off and make us go away, hoping we’d give up. This is what happens in a country, the only one, where you allow making people’s sickness and dying a for-profit venture.

With all the dystopian harm that will come to people around the country when Trump comes in, based on his own promises, you’ll see a lot more of this sort of thing, unfortunately. It’s one thing to take the children away from parents who have just crossed the Rio Grande river with just the clothes on their backs. He’s promising to take away the parents and children of people who have only ever lived here, and are likely well entrenched in our culture of guns and violence.

The anarchists will rise, both the non-violent disruptor/occupier sects and the violent ones. Margaret Killjoy’s recent piece here on Substack, I Hope We All Make It was incredibly sad (even more so when listening to the dramatic audio voiceover). She herself hinted at coming out of legendary anarchist retirement.

Today’s young people have been through hell most of their lives, between school shooting terror and the trauma of COVID. Many are likely at that breaking point. They’re worried they’re growing into a broken and condemned world of increasing climate hell, not to mention not enjoying the freedoms that have traditionally been enjoyed by their own parents and grandparents. I don’t blame them for being angry about it.

This election was the first profound example of the danger of massive propaganda allowing to flourish, of the mind control that results. Most of our populace rooted in false belief, despite the evidence in front of their lying eyes and ears. Young people may completely revolt against all of it, disavowing the corporate social media that’s poisoning their minds.

All of this pain because a bunch of boomer snowflakes can’t tolerate being around people who don’t look like them, speak like them, love like them, worship like them. That’s essentially why we’re at where we’re at, with a lifelong con-man and wannabe dictator about to take the reins of our government, followed by his clown car of bizarre criminal sycophants.

Fun story. A beloved old-school corner store/delicatessen in the sleepy burgh near us just closed down. Now a vape shop is going in, and the old maga boomers are losing their stuff over it. “OMG, there goes the neighborhood, what trash!” Same folks with the barrage of tacky blow-up, flashing LED, projection, gaudy holiday “decorations” plastering their homes, and rusted pickup trucks up on blocks in the front yard.

Back to that CEO shooter. He’s reached cult hero status because so many average people have endured similar oppression by the billionaire class, and do every day in their struggles at work and home. So many have said, while seeing news reports of the ridiculous, insane CEO compensation, the penchant for not paying taxes, love of bragging about their wealth, and lust for more wealth, “I wish I could shoot that mfer…” Now somebody has. Apparently the CEO of Cartier’s jeweler/diamond company, worth $7.5 billion dollars, has said his biggest fear is “the poor rising up.”

Which brings me to my next subject—security theater. When I was a kid, I read a lot of scary science fiction from under the covers of my bed when I was supposed to be asleep. I think Mom knew, she was well aware that I couldn’t help but read anything I could find, cereal boxes, furniture tags that should not be cut off “under penalty of law,” etc. She’d check in late at night to find me with the sheets pulled up to my nose, wide-eyed in the darkness. Then she’d turn the light on, check under the bed, and bring in a special anti-monster spray and hit the closets and other hiding places with it to placate me. I still remember the first time, as an adult, someone used Aqua-Net hairspray around me. “That’s the monster spray!” Thanks, Mom. And, these sick b******s want to take kids away from their loving mothers. Careful—moms can shoot too.

The point is, the Aqua-Net was security theater—something useless that makes you feel safe. Most of the perceived security around us is simply for show—primarily to scare someone from doing something. In practice, it’s not anywhere near as effective as we dare to dream. You want examples, you say?

* If a simple 57-year old woman can sneak onto a transatlantic flight, how hard to you think it would be for someone with actual stealth skills, and with malintent?

* Nobody could stop 9/11. All those massive shiny new warehouses are an anarchist/terrorist dream. It’s almost impossible to stop a weaponized small drone.

* If a scrawny kid decides he wants to shoot a Presidential candidate (or anyone else), and actually does, how hard to you think it would be for someone with actual skills, despite all those impressive folks with the earpieces?

* They never caught the person who planted those bombs on January 6.

* They still haven’t caught the CEO shooter. You may have seen the video of the pathetic search of Central Park by NYPD, where dozens of cops leisurely sauntered on the sidewalks, occasionally poking a bush at double-overtime pay, idly chatting about WTF is going on with the Jets and Aaron Rodgers. No wonder they missed that backpack in plain sight for days. 99% of humans shouldn’t be trusted with work that requires diligence, full attention, and where lives are at stake. Not these days, anyway.

* Cops in schools, metal detectors, teachers with guns, and other “security precautions” haven’t stopped one school shooter with a military grade assault weapon, and never will.

* Too many in law enforcement just simply and sadly aren’t the best of us. Many of them are in the newly trained vigilante militias that have been forming up, allegedly to help with this immigrant roundup and enforce border security. Too many were participants in 1/6. Once a group has that kind of power, they typically get out of control with it. Trump’s dream. His own brownshirts.

* Despite all our trillions of dollars invested in tech, military-industrial gear and personnel, intelligence, satellites, our top military and law enforcement people can only stand in front of the cameras and say they still don’t know what these SUV-sized craft are. You know, the ones that have been hovering over our most secure military/nuclear facilities for weeks with impunity.

“Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions,” you say. We’ve been doing that for over a year now. These are the reasons we sold our house and all our crap in order to become mobile and self-sufficient. It was a gamble, in case this exact thing happened. These are the reasons we have our own security/defense systems, food/water/energy stores, medical supplies, and more. We don’t want to scare you. This journal is a money-losing proposition, it’s not to make a click-bait buck. We are anonymous, not seeking fame or attention. We want you to survive, because if you’re the type of person reading this, you’re probably among the best of us. That’s who we’ll need for the rebuilding after this debacle to come has torn everything down.

And so, another pioneer day ends. We shut down our projects and head to the sleep cave to nestle under soft, warm blankets together, all side by side, ensuring we’re always touching, secure and happy that we’re all together. Something distracting is chosen for pre-sleep entertainment, and we three drift away into the ether of dreams together, peacefully. Little Pia snores, but that’s OK. Love means tolerance.

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. Next up I hope to get back to some ideas on spirituality, afterlife, and more positive, hopeful content. Stay tuned!

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage.

And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

Winter has descended on our pioneer home and I very much miss those days of summer festivals. We installed our thermal door flap before the harsh cold arrived. It’s a simple but wonderful tool to keep the heat in and cold out as we go about our business. The thing I love most about it is the Native American teepee vibe it gives to our pioneer RV home. I boycotted Thanksgiving again this year in honor of those victims of our massive genocide.

There are six of us families hunkered down on this hill for the winter. The mountain range looms behind us, a comfort. Bear and mountain lions have been spotted all around our perimeter recently; we can hear them at night. Pia is always on high alert during our early morning and nighttime walks in the dark. She does her business and trots back to the hut—”Let’s GTF inside, yo!” She hears and sees things we cannot. She knows danger is lurking at that forest tree line. Our pond and lake are frozen, and the beautiful shades of autumn are reduced to bare gray sticks, the scalp of an old man lying on the gurney, reaching, begging for just a little more life.

None of us neighbors know much about each other, the code is MYOB. We mostly keep to our cordial selves and find comfort in that no matter what anyone’s political ideology is, when the hard times hit, when the power is out, and snow is deep, we’ll help one another despite all that. It’s a comfort, hope for humanity.

We’ve posted a lot recently on prepping. We feel we’re as ready as we can be at this point—with still just a few minor touch-ups needed. Our big concerns have shifted from political violence (now that the Trumpies are placated; perhaps until they find out how badly they’ve screwed themselves…) to quickly evolving world war, the next looming pandemic, and yes, our new alien visitors. Not to mention sinkholes opening up and swallowing grandmas as we suck the oil and gas out of this balloon we live on.

Your Next Pandemic

Giavana is a registered nurse and works in clinical trials. She pays attention to the medical radar the way I pay attention to the military/intelligence side. There’s some crazy stuff growing in our round blue petri dish at the moment. There’s a mystery disease rapidly spreading and has already killed hundreds. We don’t know what it is.

These additional diseases are also growing and on the move: Monkey pox, Yellow Fever, Dengue Fever, H1N1 Bird Flu (now in dairy products, poultry, humans), polio detected in NYC waste water, measles on the rise, mumps, rubella, walking pneumonia, and whooping cough (450% increase in those last two recently). And we still have good old COVID-19 and flu. Winter is the worst time for this—the spread is fast as we all stay indoors, crammed into shopping centers and holiday gatherings. This is the worst possible time to elect and bring to power a group of low-IQ anti-science, anti-medicine clowns. RFK Jr went to Samoa when a measles outbreak started killing their children, and spread misinformation about the vaccine. Result: many more children died. “Dr” Oz spent his adult life ripping off people who just wanted help with his fake snake-oil remedies. Now those nuts will be in charge of your health; your kids’ health.

I’m dashing this post off today because tomorrow morning I go under the knife—work on the ticker. One of our prepping suggestions is to take care of any planned medical needs and procedures now. I’m practicing what I preach, although I don’t have much choice in the matter. Fortunately, I have a very beautiful and wonderful nurse and caretaker in Ms. Giavana and my raggedy ever-present source of comfort and love, Ms. Pia.

So, the question is—are you stocked on N95 masks? The products that we had such a hard time getting when COVID slammed us in a heartbeat just a few years ago? This includes all we’ve discussed in our last few posts, including and especially hygiene products, food, water, and medical supplies. Darwin is going to take his pound (tons) of flesh again, be prepared so you’re not among the victims.

Crypto Bros

I’ve been a crypto skeptic/naysayer but saw the light when I heard stories of those in dire circumstances using it to buy banned sources of medicine and transport. If you’re going to need that kind of underworld help as our nation descends into a TV-clown con man autocracy, you’ll need crypto to buy the goods and services you need.

As I said, we’re not betting the farm on this. Just enough to maybe accomplish some of those goals. We’re putting our feet in these digital waters. I have to say it’s been hilarious, as Giavana and I, old people, try to navigate and learn up on this tech. It reminds me very much of trying to teach the elders in our family tree what the internet is back in the 1990s.

“Put it in there!”

“Excuse me?”

“No, in the wallet. The crypto wallet.”

“The coins don’t go in there; just the private keys.”

“Where’s our coins?”

“In the blockchain.”

“WTF is that? Where my money at?”

Yeah, we now crypto bro and crypto babe. I think we have this down now. Step by step, day by day. It’s good to have options, and we’re being careful to take a conservative approach and every possible precaution.

Election Reflection

We still hold out hope that something will happen before the Jan 20 inauguration. The math and stats around a lot of the results is just completely bizarre. But, unlike the cult, no claiming anything without substantive proof. We’ll see.

Looking back though, what things might have made a difference? Kamala was incredible. We miss that joy and enthusiasm. Those planned policies to help everyday Americans, not billionaires. If these results are legit, this election was won on ignorance.

Our average adult reading level is 6th grade. The Trump demographic (if you don’t trust me, just go watch the rally footage and attendee interviews, not to mention J6 footage) is primarily uneducated, bigoted, boomer white folk (yes, and very rich folk). These are people who have zero to no knowledge of how inflation and basic economics work. No idea how our long-broken immigration and asylum laws work. How shipping out a massive portion of our low-end workforce, those construction and agricultural workers, would cripple our economy (8% of our GDP, gone, poof!) and the billions they pay in taxes for programs they’ll never get to use. How that effort alone, to round them up and ship them out, will cost us trillions more in debt to be paid by us, our kids, grandkids. Out of ignorance, MAGA drank up that Kool-Aid.

I think a series of dumbed-down, cartoonish Schoolhouse Rock type short ads that demonstrate these concepts would have been impactful. They didn’t need to have, shouldn’t have, anything about Trump or Harris or politics. Just the basics, graphically depicted, of how these things work and thus, how they were being played by the con, brainwashed by that massive propaganda effort on Fox and Twitter/X. Maybe, then, Mr & Mrs Bubbamaga would have understood. Maybe. Soon they will, though.

Before Trump, the ignorant among us elected a guy “I’d like to have a beer with,” George W. Bush. Like Trump, he struggled to get through school, born with a silver spoon, clearly low-IQ. Result? Thousands of our brave servicemembers dead in a war we entered based on lies by him and his handlers Cheney and Rumsfeld. A massive financial crisis that cost working families their homes and savings. An economy left in ruins. More massive debt for our country. Obama cleaned that mess up and left Trump a golden economy, which he also left in tatters, with hundreds of thousands of Americans dead unnecessarily on our own soil. $7 trillion in additional debt, $4 trillion of that due to the tax cuts for the rich he said would pay for themselves, and didn’t.

It will likely get bad. What can we do? In ancient Rome, when the wealth equality got out of control, the commoners (plebs, or plebeians) realized they had power in their numbers and rose up—The Secession of the Plebeians. They held boycotts, strikes, protests, disrupted traffic and the economy, refused to fight in the military, and left the cities and began to form their own self-sufficient communities. The impact was drastic. Rome’s enemies saw this weakness in their military and economy immediately, and Rome folded. This is the kind of non-violent anarchy we need, and we will see. You saw the immediate reaction when martial law was declared in South Korea yesterday.

As well, the Democrat party at large needs change. Some of these ancient politicians need to step aside in favor of more young, energetic replacements. Everyone loved Ruth Bader-Ginsburg but the reality is she enjoyed that limelight too long, “Oh, how cute the 90 year old lady doing exercise!” and refused to leave when she was clearly too old and ill. It was one of the first dominoes in this disaster. We saw that with Senator Feinstein, and see it in so many others (Pelosi, Nadler…). They enjoy the spotlight and access to insider trading to further enrich themselves. They all do it—both parties, and it’s disgusting. Make the left the party of the young intelligent, open-minded, compassionate. Back to the party of the working people, the commoners, the plebes.

All righty, folks. I’m getting myself all worked up, and the doc said to chill prior to this surgery! Time to hit send. If I don’t make it (being dramatic here, it’s routine surgery) remember my words—be kind, be generous, and I’ll see you on the other side, my brothers and sisters.

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. The clock is ticking. Stay tuned!

Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.”—David Bowie

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

Happy Thanksgiving from your pioneer friends me, Giavana, and Pia! I guess I shouldn’t have mused about, “What’s next, alien invasion?” It appears it may be on. Military bases around the world are clearly being monitored. More reason to prepare, and that’s what we’ve been all about since we started this pioneer journey. We’ve already covered prepping for personal safety and security, financial security (here, here, here, here and yes, my thinking has evolved on crypto!), and medical. Today we’ll cover food, water, energy. Good timing, as almost everything in the links in those posts is on sale for Black Friday (and likely will be for the holiday season and after, and perhaps ridiculously expensive after Trump comes in Jan 20 and introduces those tariffs). I’m tracking the UAP situation and may do a post on it (prepping for alien invasion?)

Mobile preppers (pioneers) have a much bigger challenge when it comes to food, water, and energy. Most of this stuff is heavy!

Water

If your goal is to harm or kill people, consider that 90% of people rely on the public water systems. Those are fed by reservoirs that are big bodies of water right out in the open. They’re a huge target for any enemy to attack. So, how to stock up? Sure, you can freeze-dry food, but there’s no freeze-drying water. Within 72 hours without water, humans are extremely dehydrated. This breeds desperation, the mind plays tricks, and people resort to drinking bad water filled with bacteria and die from that. Many of our troops in Afghanistan learned this lesson the hard way.

We keep a rack under our White House pioneer RV loaded with 5-gallon containers of water. We use this small device to pop on top and create a nice compact, portable fountain. We also keep some smaller 3L jugs on hand. In a bug-out situation, we likely wouldn’t be able to carry all that weight. We have too many other heavy things further up the priority list (ammo, solar gear, generator, us). Humans require about a gallon of water a day, minimum, just for drinking. Don’t forget your fur babies! Three gallons is the minimum when you include sanitation, cooking, etc. If you have freeze-dried food, you need water.

The small Lifestraws are a great solution—we have a bunch. You can literally stick them in a pond or lake or puddle and safely drink through them in almost all circumstances. Next up the chain is a collection system that can be used to filter rainwater or other sources. This larger one is the best bet. Having these lightweight solutions means you can skip carrying too much heavy water and utilize any you find in a new location. We also keep purification tablets in our bug-out gear. I’m not a fan of the systems that attach to guttering. Those gutters are filthy, and likely introducing an abundance of aluminum, rust, or plastic. Sure, it should be filtered out, but still. Food-grade collection barrels are a good way to keep stock on hand if you have space. As an extra precaution, you can boil your water if you have sufficient heat/energy to use for that. Here’s a video on a budget DIY water collection system.

If you have a pool, congratulations! It’s a wonderful emergency water supply. You can use products like the PortaWell to immediately convert it to safe water, and it’s already way cleaner than pond or lake water (I hope!). It’s another reason I converted my pool to salt rather than chlorine sanitation, back when I had a house with a pool. If it’s an inground pool, when it’s empty you can always use it for hidden shelter (assuming you have a robust cover), if not just waiting for rain to fill it back up. Perhaps shallow end for hiding, deep end for water.

If you live in a fixed location, you might have a well. Don’t be overconfident. During this recent severe drought around the US, wells started running dry. As well (sorry for the pun), they can easily be contaminated. (Have you had yours tested lately?). Keep a good stock of backup water and rotate through it.

Food

We need to exceed 1,000 calories a day, on average, before we hit starvation mode. You should shoot to double that number. Don’t just look at calories, though. You need a diversity of good nutrients and vitamins to stay healthy and alert. Beans and rice alone won’t cut it—your body will revolt at trying to continually process those dense foods. Costco-sized bags of these items, if not stored properly, will likely develop worms or go bad in other ways over time.

Cases of canned foods like chili and stew are great, but again, heavy. The water is already in there. It’s good to have a few cases on hand, but use them regularly to rotate/cycle through them, always storing so the oldest bought is next up to consume, to avoid expiration dates (which are generally suggestions in my humble opinion!) We also keep stores of protein bars on hand for quick energy.

Costco has a great selection of emergency freeze-dried food kits. We buy our other bulk goods there. Military Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) kits come with everything you need, including a heat source to warm food. Some are surplus, and that’s fine, they have an over five-year shelf life. Make sure you sample anything you buy. Sure, by complacent normal-life standards they might not be the best. But when you hit starvation/survival mode, you’ll be surprised how heavenly delicious they are.

Our kit includes a compact kitchen mess kit complete with a Jetboil stove. The small Jetboil cannisters are a great compact, efficient source of heat and can be bought at any local outdoor store. They were quite popular with our troops in Afghanistan, for good reason.

We have a good prepper seed kit for the long haul, if growing is possible (see: nuclear or solar radiation). Like water, your food will only last so long. It’s good to practice gardening now, so you know the rigors of doing it right and keeping animals (and humans) away from your crop. As well, you should consider a good, compact fishing kit, perhaps some traps or snares for game. Our personal security post covered guns and ammo, and they can be used for non-humans, too. A few chickens can be a great source of eggs, and perhaps protein.

Energy

If you’ve been following us, you know we’ve been concerned about this aspect of survival prepping. Yes, even though we live in a completely self-sufficient pioneer covered wagon RV! We have a gasoline/propane duel-fuel generator, but again, fuel is heavy and these are noisy (even the “quiet” ones). Noise attracts unwanted attention, especially if others have no power. It could be deadly. Fuel will be hard to come by in the worst circumstances (gas stations do require energy to pump gas, if they have any).

For those reasons, we’ve been feeling exposed and concerned. No energy, no survival, not for long, anyway. We did a ton of research, first starting with ways to solar outfit our RV, which is the usual route people take. But, we started thinking, what if we have to bug out without the White House? What if we someday get that dream log cabin and sell the White House, or simply upgrade it? So, the research turned to more practical solutions to address those concerns. We went with this Jackery kit (way cheaper now with Black Friday, ugh) and then added another expansion battery and two more 200w folding panels, along with some extension cables. These work incredibly well and the Jackery support team are amazing. As long as that old black hole sun is burning, we have energy, power for life. Whew.

We have a smaller folding solar charging blanket for some smaller uses. I’m also exploring comms, as in getting my ham radio technician’s license and a home rig plus some portable radios. We do have hand-crank weather/emergency radios (with solar recharging) and longer-range walkie talkies for now.

As always, keep the essential books handy, both in hardcopy and stored locally on a laptop or even better, extremely small and lightweight Kindle that can be read in daylight. Remember, download the books to the device so they’re on there and ready when there’s no wifi. These make great holiday gifts, and can save lives in so many different circumstances.

Survival Medicine Handbook

Prepper’s Long-Term Survival Guide

SAS Survival Handbook

The Prepper’s Blueprint

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more and make more concrete decisions. The clock is ticking. Stay tuned!

"All things are ready, if our mind be so."—William Shakespeare

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”—Carl Sagan

“Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.”—Peter Benchley

"Private-sector preparedness is not a luxury; it is a cost of doing business in the post-9/11 world. It is ignored at a tremendous potential cost in lives, money and national security."—The 9/11 Commission Report

"As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity."—Diane Ackerman

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

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.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

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 White House, and in Congress. That won’t be the case this time. He has experience, and only worse people around him. And even then, he managed to run up an additional $7 trillion in debt and kill hundreds of thousands of beloved Americans unnecessarily on our own soil. Among all the other drama, scandal, and constant fiascos. We were lucky we only had one crisis during that four years. There are many looming this time.

It’s not just about the election, although Harris would have begun the process to move our country to a happier one, such as, well, the rest of the developed world where you aren’t forced to work yourself into poor health and health care is a right, not a for-profit monster. The seminal piece is Kirsten Powers’ The Way We Live in the US is Not Normal. It’s free, please read it! Consider how much worse it will be for your kids and grandkids if this path continues in the US. You love them, right?

Our second citizenship is almost done. I had predicted that other countries would recognize the value of attracting the educated “good” Americans who voted for Harris. It’s already happening, with countries like Italy offering homes for $1 just to attract our wealth and spending. We’re planning a trip, perhaps around the inauguration. Sure, they’re tiny fixer-uppers. But, it’s a foothold, a roof and four walls to escape to if necessary. A place for our kids and grandkids to escape to, if necessary. We have elderly moms who need our help from time to time, so that’s a factor pushing us to stay. It’s a conundrum. Every single expat we talk to, most of whom left the first time Trump got elected, is deliriously happy. Just like the rest of the developed world.

Part of us, being Americans, makes us want to stay and fight. The problem is, this isn’t some small minority that’s taken over American (or, about to). Apparently, if the election results hold true, this is America. It’s been lost. We hit that tipping point when our ignorance and lack of education overwhelms reason, education, and goodness. It’s a result of massive propaganda networks like Rush Limbaugh, Fox, and Twitter, all run by billionaires. It’s happened in every dynasty in history, and at 248 years, we’ve been long overdue.

So, as stated, we’re working hard to ensure we have options. We can hitch up the White House and hit Canada or Mexico, if they’re accepting refugees for asylum. We can hotfoot it to Europe. If the second citizenship isn’t done by then, we can finish it there. Buying an inexpensive property would probably help. We’re preparing to be mobile, here inside the US, if necessary in the interim or permanently. There are already pioneer RV communities of like-minded individuals forming, and we’re tracking those as well. Lots rent and sell inexpensively.

While we’re still here, we participate in overt organizations like indivisible.org and citizen.org that are fighting back. There will be covert organizations (the resistance), you can bet on that, who will take far more drastic measures. It’s probably going to get very ugly, especially when the ignoramuses who voted for Trump start to realize and experience directly just what they voted for. We may see revolt happen in the blue states. the Governors are already banding together. Don’t be surprised to see, at some point, red state national guards attacking blue states. This kind of horror, in his name, is what excites Trump very much. See: January 6. He doesn’t care how many die, are maimed for life, or go to prison. It’s good ratings for his new reality show.

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more and make more concrete decisions. The clock is ticking.

Next up, we’ll take you through prepping for food/water and energy. Stay tuned!

“Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!”—Bob Marley

“No level of border security, no wall, doubling the size of the border patrol, all these things will not stop the illegal migration from countries as long as a 7-year-old is desperate enough to flee on her own and travel the entire length of Mexico because of the poverty and the violence in her country.”—Jeh Johnson

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe