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“No this is not a drill” warns Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Arends as he lays out his reasons why he believes Americans need to start stockpiling food. Thankfully, hunkering down in the face on an impending apocalypse is not the reason, rather, Arends says stockpiling food will make a shrewd investment:

If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you’ll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.

Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year. And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They’re all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

Sounds pretty fucking stupid to me, but of course I’m one of those people who keeps food to actually EAT, not as an investment.

The thing about living in California, which is by far the best state in the whole WERLD, is that you pay for the privilege in a litany of ways, from home prices, to taxes, to the price of gas. In fact, the California town of Gorda, a coastal hamlet situated on Highway 1 south of San Francisco, holds the distinction of having the most expensive gas in the United States, at $5.40 for a gallon of premium:

Tourists couldn’t believe what they were seeing, NBC11 reported. Many said they would never pay that much for a gallon of gas. Others said they had no choice. The gas station’s owner said one customer told him to go to hell and another said he should be shot for charging that much for gas.

The reason the gas costs so much is because the town gets all its power from a generator and they use the extra profits from the pumps help pay that bill. The other reason is that they can. They’re the only game in town.

“If you’re out in the desert without water and you want a jug of water and they charge you 30 bucks for a jug of water, I wouldn’t feel sorry for you. Look before you leap, right? said gas station attendant James Willman.

Besides, people bitching about $5 gas should try going to fucking Netherlands, where last week a gallon of premium came in at $9.14.