Science, Liberty, and Emergency Preparedness

Anticipating that I’d have a little downtime while we were between houses and camping in the Ruby Mountains, I brought along The Science of Liberty, a book I’d picked up several years earlier at a BYU bookstore sale but never got around to reading.

The author, Timothy Ferris, examines how closely interrelated science and liberty truly are.  In this country, science, history, English, and math are all taught as entirely separate and unrelated subjects, except perhaps for a little overlap between science and math.  Ferris delves into the greatest scientific advances and achievements of the last 500 years.  When did they occur?  When people were the most free politically.  When they had freedom of the press, speech, assembly, and religion.  England, which established one of the world’s first parliaments, gave us Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle (father of chemistry), among countless others, while the US soon came to dominate the world in scientific research, and still does.

Now consider all the scientific advancements that came out of communist China, the Soviet Union (especially under Stalin and Khruschev), and Nazi Germany.  Of course, scientists who could read the tea leaves fled their respective countries, and that alone factored considerably in the brain drain and lack of scientific progress.  But science cannot advance without freedom of thought, expression, and association, and so it is stifled under totalitarian governments.  In nations at war, the ones without these freedoms—without the freedom to experiment, and without the freedom to examine and criticize those experiments—will ultimately be on the losing side. 

And finally, consider the political climate ruling science today, especially regarding homosexuals (and every other sexual perversion), family life, and race. Science is ethically neutral.  It shows how things are, not how they “ought” to be.  It’s about what works, and what works includes solid, traditional families and moral values, and real education.  Look at the dumbing down of public education.  Ridiculous elementary school math books don’t teach math facts; they want children to discuss how the feel.  Only blacks can take English classes at the University of Chicago?  We’re supposed to call mentally disturbed people who feel like they’re female, women, even though they’re biologically men?  It’s not going to work out well for us.

Freedom of speech (in our case, the internet) is also essential for advancement.  We’ve all heard the threats of censoring and shutting down the internet, so it may actually happen at some point.  However, let’s use it to our advantage while we can.

I like to experiment and try out theories.  And I think it’s important to share what does and doesn’t work, even though most readers will see that as a waste of time.  Some read of the failures, or even the successes, and ridicule.  That’s their right.  Mockery and ridicule do nothing to advance learning and discovery.  They are, however, the tools of the opposition.  Scientists report on their successes and their failures; they share so that others may learn.  The others might have a different idea of how to solve the problem.  Great scientists of the past had more failures than successes.  I am not great.   I will also have many more failures than successes.  The key, of course, as Edison remarked, is not to see these as failures, but merely as ways it doesn’t work.

I love being free to experiment and to share the results. 

Substituting coconut oil for butter in baking and cooking was a huge breakthrough in my opinion.  I don’t know how long that knowledge has been around, or who first discovered it.  I used that bit of knowledge to try coconut oil for butter in magic mix.  That was a huge breakthrough for me and food storage.  Phenomenal.  Great discovery.  So then I tried bean flour for regular flour in SOS mix.  That just didn’t work.  For me.  The way I was using it.  But I thought it important to share.  Someone else might come along and think of a different way to tweak the process so that it does work.  Who knows? 

During our time camping, we tried out some of the food that I had stored in the meal tins I wrote about nearly two years ago.  I had only rotated a few of the meals.  Some were two years old and had gone through two hot summers in the trailer.  They were probably going to be sketchy.  Some would say they should have just been thrown away.  But I wanted to check them out.  Here’s what I learned:

·       The shepherd’s pie meal was all good. 

·       The Parmesan cheese we stored for the spaghetti developed an off taste. 

·       Coconut oil that I put in a Ziploc bag and stored in the dark was totally rancid. 

·       The chocolate chip cookie dough mix (made with coconut oil) was very good.  Just had to add a little water. 

·       Instant oatmeal packets—store bought—were way better than I expected they would be. 

·       Some packaged cookies, piroulines with a crème filling, developed an off taste.  Just like the filling in Oreos goes bad.

·       The spaghetti wasn’t so happy for us because I eyeballed measurements for all the spices—and it was all too much.  And we didn’t add in any meat, which we sorely missed, and we aren’t sure we want to do it again without meat. 

You need to experiment as well.  You need to determine what works for you, your family, your climate, etc., and what does not.  If you are doing it before collapse, it is not a failure, but rather a learning opportunity.  After collapse, it may well be a failure when failures are less tolerated. 

Be free and experiment, and share your results, for better or worse, here and elsewhere.  It's how we all learn and become better prepared.

Links to related posts:

Coconut Oil for Butter in Magic Mix

Basic Food Storage--Coconut Oil

Meal Tins 

 10.01.20