My Pantry
I hit a nerve the other day when I suggested that people buy from Amazon when things get bad. As one of our readers put it:
“It’s good that people are starting small businesses and Amazon is a way to get eyeballs on your products, but I still say it’s better to support the brick and mortar in your own town. . .”
Yes, but. . .
In a few months, food may become even more scarce. The “brick and mortar” shops are closing. However, I will continue to shop at the little, family-owned, Mexican grocery when I am able, and, happily, I live within a mile of The Fresh Market. I’m willing to spend some money there because they carry higher-end, organic stuff. (On Thursday, most things are on sale. I can get a roasted chicken, two sides, and 12 corn muffins (a meal for 4+) for $12, which more than makes up for the difference in overall cost. (And George loves leftovers! [He added that.]) https://www.thefreshmarket.com/
I must have some idea of what I am doing because we live on the salary of a part-time pharmacist. We are the Tulsa waystation for the St. James-New Studion Monastery in Piedmont which is about an hour and a half away. We serve as sort of a bed and breakfast for various visitors, which includes clergy, monastics, and assorted pilgrims going to and fro’. I used my inheritance to purchase a McMansion (by a single woman’s standards), sight unseen, to do precisely this and have never regretted a single moment.
Fortunately, George supported my vision, as I continue to support his vision with the blog.
We’ve been blessed in this country because the shelves have never been empty. “Sparse” is the word I would use to describe them now and when we see an empty shelf we panic. Food shortages not only exist, they’re purportedly going to get worse. I fervently believe we are going to come out of all this, but it’s going to be a challenging few months.
Why Use Amazon?
1. Because of who they are, they are the least likely to succumb to hard times. They will adapt and find a way to capitalize on it to protect their multi-billion dollar business. (Amazon’s net worth as of October 14, 2021, was $1,671.18B!!!)
2. Amazon sells through high-end, local grocery stores: in other words healthy food. Substantially better for you than the food at fast-food chains where people will be lining up to offset the deficits in their pantries.
3. If you buy into Prime, $119 will buy you one whole year of food and delivery. I’m not talking about the food in special containers guaranteed to provide 2000 calories a day for 4 people. (They show perfectly stacked pancakes with whipped cream and a cherry on the label but I suspect the stuff in those steel canisters will look more like mush after 3 months.) No one says a word about the taste. No “5-star ratings.” Nor do they guarantee that the 2000 calories per day come from more than just carbs and sugar.
4. While your local grocery store is dependent upon third parties to deliver to their stores, Amazon is not. It has its own delivery trucks and established routes.
5. Amazon has no fixed quantities so you can order as much as you want when it comes to items like beans, rice, and yes, toilet paper. Unlike stores that have to ensure an adequate inventory for their customers, Amazon will likely have it in stock or find a seller who does.
Amazon was probably not set up for customers like me. I’ll buy a small scrunchy (ask your wives) from Amazon and pay $1 (if that). Because I am a Prime member, I can get free delivery the next day and this is the good part: It costs Amazon a lot more to process and deliver my item than the item costs in the first place. So yes, I will buy from them as I chip away at their bottom line.
Our astute reader concludes with the following:
“. . . only buy from Amazon or other big online retailers if you truly need something you can’t get anywhere else.”
Yes, and that would include food. People truly need food.
Well before too long you’re only going to be allowed to buy from Amazon with your QR code Vaccinated Status! passport. That’s part of what this is all about, the planned destruction of our American businesses to steer people towards becoming wholly dependent on government-subsidized mega-monopolies like Amazon, Facebook, WalMart, etc. etc. thanks to the digital passport system that is coming, and yes, you all know it is coming. The idea of using Amazon’s services to “chip away at their bottom line” is extreme delusion, as in the long run, they don’t care about profit, but about making people dependent, as I said, on them for things they “can’t get anywhere else.” Or maybe we can stage a revolution by getting millions of people to buy scrunchies from Amazon over and over in order to bankrupt them? Hmmm. Who knew that overthrowing the New World Order could be so fun and easy.
Most places charge just under $20 to ship something so if I pay a dollar and Amazon pays the rest, I’m chipping away at their bottom line. Today. If you’re at the point where you don’t shop at Walmart, Target, Kroger, and Cost Co and avoid the fast-food chains by growing your own food and hunting your own meat, more power to you.
” If you’re at the point where you don’t shop at Walmart, Target, Kroger, and Cost Co and avoid the fast-food chains by growing your own food and hunting your own meat, more power to you.”
Everybody who hasn’t taken the “vaccines,” or at least not willingly to take never ending booster “vaccines” to stay current as “fully vaxed,” better be working on becoming as food independent as possible. Everyday, the call for putting the un-vaxed into concentration camps, or as Noam Chomsky recently came out in favor of, locking them in their own homes and literally starving them until they submit slowly grows:
https://seedp29xb.bitchute.com/ldVrtT5BwSJ0/hXhQT6QSsb4.mp4
Food Rising Mini-Farm Grow Boxes:
https://www.brighteon.com/fa335ce7-ae6e-445f-8454-837e5c83cc2f
https://www.brighteon.com/6fe44030-2b29-4c85-9a73-61f9f92cc679
RE” . . .or as Noam Chomsky recently came out in favor of, locking them in their own homes and literally starving them until they submit slowly grows”
Who are these people? This is the last thing I would expect Chomsky to say.
I downloaded the other stuff. It seems really easy for beginners like me! I was going to buy the JP Tower. Have you or anyone else had any experience with this? https://www.pinterest.com/galina1/tower-garden-by-juice-plus/
My family lives in an urban metropolitan city environment, and almost our entire backyard is raised garden beds. Cheap to build, easy to maintain, and we grow stuff year round through use of hoop covers made of frost cloth and pvc piping. We grow, can, dry, jam, freeze, and consume many varieties of: potatoes, beans, green beans, lettuce, kale, cabbage, onions, leeks, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, radishes, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, melons, celery, broccoli, not to mention culinary herbs and medicinal herbs. We have an apple tree, plum tree, and two lemon trees. We started this endeavor ten years ago, with dedicating our garden to Sts. Fiacre and Barsanupius. We relied on our local master gardener group for a lot of help and advice. Some years it flourishes, others we have misses due to weather. It takes time and planning, but I cannot tell you the peace of mind it provides us. You don’t need much space to make this happen. One of our neighbors loves juicing and grows all her veggies in pots, and has an abundance of celery, kale, lettuce, and lemons growing on her patios in pots. Food Security is on my family’s top priority list, right up there under Salvation and the Church.
This is all very encouraging, Christine!
“Who are these people? This is the last thing I would expect Chomsky to say.”
Some would say that that he’s an academic gatekeeper, or someone designed to provide credible sounding dissent, up to a point, so as to win the trust of many, so that when he doesn’t ask questions on bigger issues, the many think there’s nothing there to see.
The idea exists because of Chomsky’s stance as an apparent anarcho-syndicalist, who also supports the Federal Reserve, as well as his defence of the popular narrative around the JFK assassination and 9/11. Despite there really being a lot more than what the MSM will say on these hugely important topics, which someone of Chomsky’s intelligence couldn’t have failed to see, he continues to say what any normie journalist would say – the holes in his arguments being beneath him.
Then there’s also the fact that a lot his left leaning tendencies, in general, are questionable.
But who really knows?
I think you did a pretty good job of summing it up, Steve. – So is this the strategy now? To confuse everyone into thinking these people (like the Pope and whistleblower) are speaking up on our behalf?
In other words, if this FB whistleblower is successful in getting FB’s hand slapped, it will force FB to start pushing more of their own agenda which made FB rich in the first place.
I can just hear it: “Gee, we’re sorry we haven’t done a very good job suppressing the truth as we promised in the past, but we promise to do better. We’ll make every effort to push our agenda (you know, the safe one) and only our agenda, so Mr. Pope and Ms. Whistleblower won’t confuse us with those crazy conspirators on the other side. We’re going to do a better job on our end and suppress the truth entirely and, of course, we’ll make even more money doing it.
On 60 Minutes, Ms. Haugen went on to say, “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on fewer ads, and they’ll make less money.” So in the interest of meeting the needs of the planet, FB will need to push the safe stuff and skip plain ‘ole honesty, altogether.
I wonder what she thinks would happen if FB were forced to abandon the safe stuff altogether? I could be wrong, but I think people would spend even more time on the site, clicking away, so FB would make more, not less, money.
Clever to have a whistleblower pop up in your company who turns you in for doing something you wanted to do in the first place. If nominal penalties were to ensue, FB could make more money without losing face to their lefty friends. Makes me wonder if FB put her up to it. (Of course, they did.)
“So is this the strategy now? To confuse everyone into thinking these people (like the Pope and whistleblower) are speaking up on our behalf?”
It’s certainly a mine field in the jungle. Or to re-work the words of St Anthony the Great, upon him seeing the extent of the web of deception laid by the devil, “who can be trusted?”
I’m of course not saying that there’s no good in the world, or that God doesn’t always allow for the the truth to be known as well. It’s just that the problem of controlled opposition is a real one.
I saw the clips of Chomsky also. He sounds like an atheist who has realized he’s living on borrowed time, he is terrified of the oblivion he believes is coming, and he’s willing to throw all his libertine ideology away if it means he can keep breathing. (Not unlike some of our hierarchs, sadly!)
I hope he finds Christ. I can’t imagine coming to the end of my life and without the hope in a merciful God who loves mankind.
I can’t imagine starting life without Him. How do people get through life without God?
Very well said. At this point in my life, I’m eternally grateful to God that I’ve lived long enough to see the error of my misspent youth and the nonsense (i.e. neoconservatism) that I believed it.
This reminds me of something I read about Solzhenitsyn, as a young man he wrote “I would have died for Lenin”. Boy did he ever thank the Lord because he lived long enough to become a believer.
Yeah, well Chomsky is an anarchist, but he is also a binational Zionist and spent time in his younger years on an anarchist kibbutz. His ideal for the state there is de facto internally segregated yet lacking a government. He also played some defense / ran interference for the SOI. He is also an MIT professor, and seemingly connected to the Establishment based.
There are insightful articles criticizing Chomsky from a Left perspective.
There is much information about Chomsky as a SOI Lobby gatekeeper:
https://www.natsummit.org/transcripts/jeffrey_blankfort.htm
What’s SOI?
The modern State of Israel AKA Israeli State, as opposed to Biblical Israel. The name Israel can confuse Americans to roughly identify Biblical Israel with the modern SOI, whereas Palestinian. Christians and Pal. Muslims of Jewish descent can claim Jewish heritage too. Imagine if in modern English we called the RC Church “the Church.” It’s also like how calling the CP the Ecumenical Patriarch can confuse people to think that the CP is the Patriarch for the ecumenical, universal, or entire Orthodox Church. I clearly remember Abp. Elpidophoros using hthe name Ecumenical in the term EP this way.
Thank you!
Jeff Blankfort in particular has spoken about Chomsky being a gatekeeper for the Left on the SOI. Ie. Chomsky does a good job getting air time in public and academic circles for abuses by the SOI, but on the other hand, he gatekeepers by restricting the topics that get criticized and how far the criticism goes. So for example one thing that he gatekeeps on is the domestic US SOI Lobby. He presents the US and US business and government circles as the main force behind the SOI’s abuses and as the main benefactor for the SOI. IOW he presents the SOI as the US guard dog or Western outpost in the Middle East. While Chomsky’s thesis could be true, it is also debatable. For example, the US incurs resentment among Arabs due to this patronage. Meanwhile, he denies or strongly downplays the role of the SOI Lobby in the US, denies analogies between Apartheid and the SOI, opposes BDS, etc. It’s not clear why he does this because he must know better, and because he is seemingly pretty outspoken and sincere on Israeli abuses.
The best analogy that comes to mind would be someone who is outspoken against the Armenian genocide but who “runs interference” for the Turkish lobby in the US or Turkish establishment. For example, a Turkish movie about the genocide came out several years ago showing the genocide as real, but without showing it as a planned slaughter. As I recall, there were 2 movies that came out on the topic simultaneously. One was called The Promise, whereas the second movie presented a more Turkish-apologetic movie.
Another example of this kind of mixed moral opposition – Apologetic establishment defense could be how there is a decent amount of mainstream news about GOARCH’s missing millions, but how the CP and CP establishment don’t get criticized to the same extent.
The Right Wing has “gatekeeping” for Israel/the SOI too. For instance, Right wing Protestants (eg. Evangelicals) have traditionally been happy to criticize Jews in religious terms, from the pharisees up to today, but in many Evangelical circles the SOI is a sacred cow whereby all blame for the SOI’s ongoing Isr.-Pal. conflict is to be placed on the “Mooslims.”
Thank you for this information
On the part of our good hosts, there most certainly is a profound misunderstanding of what exactly is at stake, regarding encouraging participation with the oligopolies of the global control grid (amazon is sending over 3,000 satellites up this decade, and many of them enable oppressive forms of surveillance). To do so is a means to incrementally build your own prison. Yet with their faith in Christ, and this community of faithful brethren, they shall in due time realize the truth of the situation and what skills are necessarily required to obtain success. Cultivating direct relationships with tradespeople and farmers is a better option. the “freedom cell” movement is a better option. Anything thats not an oligopoly and connected to black rock/vanguard/rockefeller family is advantageous.
You’re conflating power with money. Although the two usually correlate, the purpose of power is not money. The purpose is power for its own sake.
As for Prime, while I understand the delivery thing, their video streaming service is AIDS.
Can you elucidate on that plz?
Scott,
I’m not sure why you have received no response to this, but it is, of course, free DELIVERY, (not free groceries) that a Prime membership provides. I think the point, for whatever its worth, was that lots of small grocery orders cost Amazon far more than their profit on the grocery products delivered.
Thanks Brian. I wondered if I was missing out on something…
Sorry, Scott! Didn’t mean to ignore you. Yes, the cost of delivery will be alleviated
Sorry, Scott. Didn’t see your question.
Thanks, Brian. 🙂