Tag Archives: government

Wednesday, June 17, 2015 · 12:10 AM

Yes, there’s “climate change”, its cooling

A. Sunspots 2015: Year of the decline
4 Jan 2015, Posted by azleader
Pasted from: https://informthepundits.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/sunspots-2015-year-of-the-decline/

Giant solar flare on October 27, 2014. Credit/NASA SDO spacecraft

Solar maximum has passed. What climate effects will come next?
Austin, January 4, 2015 – Solar maximum activity peaked in April 2014 at an exceptionally low 81.9 spots/day. Waning solar activity in 2015 will begin the long, inexorably journey towards solar minimum over the next half decade or so.

If solar physicists are correct, solar activity could be very low for several decades to come. How that will affect climate change is anyone’s guess, but low sunspot activity has already been identified by the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as one of the main causes for the 15+ year “hiatus” from atmospheric global warming.

Solar max arrived in April 2014. Credit/Steve Davidson-SILSO data, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels

The Royal Observatory of Belgium released December’s official monthly international sunspot numbers on January 1, 2015. Sunspots increased again in December, but the 13-month smoothed sunspot number that defines solar maximum declined for the 2nd month in a row. Given that solar maximum is a 13-month running average, no one knows maximum has been reached until at least seven months after the fact.

What does the downturn in solar activity mean for earth’s long-term climate change? One legitimate comparison of the current situation on the sun is to a cold period on earth called the Dalton Minimum. It happened 200 years ago.

Current solar activity is similar to the Dalton Minimum. Credit/Steve Davidson using SILSO data

There were three declining solar cycles leading into the Dalton Minimum, just like now. The third exceptionally weak cycle had a rare higher secondary peak than its first when the Dalton was reached, just like now.

That cycle was followed by a decline to zero spots. The period of zero spots lasted nearly two years before another weak cycle occurred. The match to current activity isn’t exact, but it’s eerily similar. There is modern supporting evidence that the sun will have an exceptionally weak cycle next time, just like the Dalton.

Sunspots are becoming harder to see and weaker. Credit/Dr. Leif Svalgaard Research Page

Umbral intensity is a measure of how black the center of the average sunspot is compared to its surroundings. An intensity of 1 means the sunspot is invisible. Sunspots have been fading away since the late 1990s. In the last 3-4 years, though, the fading has leveled off.

Umbral magnetic field is a measure of the strength of the average sunspot, measured in Gauss. The lower the number, the weaker the sunspot. Strong magnetic fields are what cause giant solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that dramatically affect earth. Sunspots cannot form with a field strength below 1,500 Gauss. In the last 3-4 years the decline in magnetic field strength has leveled off, too.

When this data was first published in 2011 it caused quite a stir among solar physicists. Some predicted sunspots would totally disappear after the current cycle ended. It doesn’t look like that will be the case after all. It looks like the next cycle, Cycle 25, will be another weak one, just like during the Dalton Minimum.

Reliable global temperature data does not extend further back than about 1850, fifty years after the Dalton. However, anecdotal evidence suggests there were very cold winter temperatures in the northern hemisphere during that time period.

The current sunspot cycle most closely matches Cycle 12, which peaked in 1883. That one is within reliable global temperature records.

The current solar cycle is best matched to Cycle 12. Credit/Steve Davidson using SILSO data

Both Cycle 12 and the current cycle have a rare secondary peak higher than the first. That has got to mean something.

According to IPCC data, the period of the 1880s to the early 1900s was characterized by a general decline in earth’s global atmospheric temperature.

1880-1910 cooling trend corresponds to low sunspot activity. Source/IPCC AR5 Report

Cycle 12 and the two cycles following it were exceptionally weak cycles leading into the early 1900s. It corresponded to declining global temperatures. Coincidence? Not likely.

Conclusions
Solar sunspot maximum was reached in April of 2014. That did not become known until recently because solar max is computed as a 13-month running average. You can’t know it has been reached until at least seven months after the fact. There have been two months of decline since then, so it is reasonably certain the maximum was finally reached. As it is, it was over two years later than originally predicted.

If the current cycle follows past solar behavior then 2015 will see a steep decline in solar activity as it progresses toward solar minimum in the next five years or so.
The current cycle (Cycle 24) has strong similarities to both the Dalton Minimum and Cycle 12 that peaked in 1883. Both time periods are associated with cold earth temperatures. Cycle 12 is more meaningful because it is supported by current United Nations IPCC data.
That being the case, it’s time to start thinking about breaking out the cold weather gear.
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B. New Ice Age to Begin in 2014
23 Feb 2012, IceAgeNow.info, By Robert
Pasted from: http://iceagenow.info/2012/02/ice-age-2014/

“Forecasters predict that a new ice age will begin soon,” says this article on russia-ic.com.

“Habibullo Abdusamatov, a scientist from the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences considers that the sharp drop in temperature will start on the Earth in 2014. “According to the scientist, our planet began to “get cold” in the 1990s. The new ice age will last at least two centuries, with its peak in 2055. “It is interesting, that the same date was chosen by the supporters of the theory of global warming. “The expected decrease in temperature may … become the fifth over the past nine centuries, reports Hydrometeorological Center of Russia. Experts call this phenomenon the “little ice age”, it was observed in the XII, XV, XVII, XIX centuries. This cyclicity makes the theory of upcoming cold weather in XXI century look like truth.” http://russia-ic.com/news/show/13717#.T0Q3Ms7rk9C Thanks to Thomas McHart, Stephanie Relfe for this link

Habibullo Abdussamatov is not just “a scientist.” Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov, astrophysicist, is head of the Russian segment of the International Space Station, and head of Space Research of the Sun Sector at the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences. I
’m inclined to take his forecasts seriously.
I’ve met Dr Abdussamatov, and posted other articles about him here: http://iceagenow.info/2010/05/new-little-ice-age-to-begin-in-2014/
And here: http://iceagenow.info/2011/11/russian-scientists-predict-100-years-cooling/

C. New Little Ice Age ‘to Begin in 2014′
20 May 2010,IceAgeNow.info, by Bob
Pasted from: http://iceagenow.info/2010/05/new-little-ice-age-to-begin-in-2014/

Russian scientist to alarmists: ‘Sun heats Earth!’ 20 May 10 – CHICAGO – Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia, predicts that a new “Little Ice Age” could begin in just four years.
I sat just ten feet away from Abdussamatov as he made this startling assertion at the Heartland Institute’s 4th International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago just two days ago.
Jerome R. Corsi from World Net Daily covered the proceedings exceedingly well, and I am quoting or paraphrasing him extensively here.
In a two-part video recorded at the conference by WND (link below), Abdussamatov explains that average annual sun activity has experienced an accelerated decrease since the 1990s.

Habibullo Abdussamatov Head of the Russian-Ukrainian project “Astrometria” on the Russian segment of the International Space Station, Abdussamatov’s theory is that “long-term variations in the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth are the main and principal reasons driving and defining the whole mechanism of climatic changes from the global warmings to the Little Ice Ages to the big glacial periods.”

In his speech, Abdussamatov took on advocates of the theory of man-caused warming who want to curtail our use of hydrocarbon fuels. He contended, instead, that a reasonable way to combat coming cooling trends would be “to maintain economic growth in order to adapt to the upcoming new Little Ice Age in the middle of the 21st century.”

Sun’s activity determines temperatures
Abdussamatov argues that total sun irradiance, or TSI, is the primary factor responsible for causing climate variations on Earth, not carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is “not guilty,” says Abdussamatov. “As for what lies ahead in the coming decades, it is not catastrophic warming, but a global, and very prolonged temperature drop.”

Abdussamatov pointed to the English astronomer Walter Maunder, who noticed that sunspots had been generally absent from 1645 to 1715. That period coincided with the middle and coldest part of the Little Ice Age (see article D, below), which began around 1650 and extended through 1850.

“There is now an unavoidable advance toward a global decrease, a deep temperature drop comparable to the Maunder minimum,” he wrote. “Already there are signs of the future deep temperature drop.”

“The observed global warming of the climate of the Earth is not caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gasses, but by extraordinarily high solar intensity that extended over virtually the entire past century.” “Future decrease in global temperature will occur even if anthropogenic ejection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere rises to record levels.

“The implementation of the Kyoto Protocol aimed to rescue the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off at least 150 years.”

I have the utmost respect for the courageous scientists who presented at this convention.

D. The Little Ice Age in Europe
Scott A. Mandia, Professor – Physical Sciences, S.C.C.C., Selden, NY
Excerpts pasted from: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html

Western Europe experienced a general cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460 and a very cold climate between 1560 and 1850 that brought dire consequences to its peoples. The colder weather impacted agriculture, health, economics, social strife, emigration, and even art and literature. Increased glaciation and storms also had a devastating effect on those that lived near glaciers and the sea.

Impact on Agriculture
Lamb (1966) points out that the growing season changed by 15 to 20 percent between the warmest and coldest times of the millennium. That is enough to affect almost any type of food production, especially crops highly adapted to use the full-season warm climatic periods. During the coldest times of the LIA, England’s growing season was shortened by one to two months compared to present day values. The availability of varieties of seed today that can withstand extreme cold or warmth, wetness or dryness, was not available in the past. Therefore, climate changes had a much greater impact on agricultural output in the past.

Fig. 16 and 17 show the price of wheat and rye, respectively, in various European countries during the LIA.

Figure 16: Prices of wheat expressed in Dutch guilders per 100 kg. in various countries vs. time. (Source: Lamb, 1995)

Western Europe experienced a general cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460 and a very cold climate between 1560 and 1850 that brought dire consequences to its peoples. The colder weather impacted agriculture, health, economics, social strife, emigration, and even art and literature. Increased glaciation and storms also had a devastating affect on those that lived near glaciers and the sea.

Impact on Health
The cooler climate during the LIA had a huge impact on the health of Europeans. As mentioned earlier, dearth and famine killed millions and poor nutrition decreased the stature of the Vikings in Greenland and Iceland.

Cool, wet summers led to outbreaks of an illness called St. Anthony’s Fire. Whole villages would suffer convulsions, hallucinations, gangrenous rotting of the extremities, and even death. Grain, if stored in cool, damp conditions, may develop a fungus known as ergot blight and also may ferment just enough to produce a drug similar to LSD. (In fact, some historians claim that the Salem, Massachusetts witch hysteria was the result of ergot blight.)

Malnutrition led to a weakened immunity to a variety of illnesses. In England, malnutrition aggravated an influenza epidemic of 1557-8 in which whole families died. In fact, during most of the 1550’s deaths outnumbered births (Lamb, 1995.) The Black Death (Bubonic Plague) was hastened by malnutrition all over Europe.

One might not expect a typically tropical disease such as malaria to be found during the LIA, but Reiter (2000) has shown that it was an important cause of illness and death in several parts of England. The English word for malaria was ague, a term that remained in common usage until the nineteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400) wrote in the Nun’s Priest Tale:

You are so very choleric of complexion. Beware the mounting sun and all dejection, Nor get yourself with sudden humours hot; For if you do, I dare well lay a groat That you shall have the tertian fever’s pain, Or some ague that may well be your bane.

In sixteenth century England, many marshlands were notorious for their ague-stricken populations. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) mentioned ague in eight of his plays. Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) died of ague in September 1658, which was one of the coldest years of the LIA.

Five indigenous species of mosquito are capable of transmitting malaria in England where they prefer the brackish water along river estuaries. The anaerobic bacterial flora of saline mud produces a strong sulfur odor that was widely believed to be the cause of agues in salt marsh areas (i.e. Shakespeare’s “unwholesome fens.”) The term malaria comes from the Italian term “mala aria” meaning “bad air.”

Impact on Economics
In addition to increasing grain prices and lower wine production, there were many examples of economic impact by the dramatic cooling of the climate. Due to famine, storms, and growth of glaciers ,many farmsteads were destroyed, which resulted in less tax revenues collected due to decreased value of the properties (Lamb, 1995.)

Cod fishing greatly decreased, especially for the Scottish fisherman, as the cod moved farther south. The cod fishery at the Faeroe Islands began to fail around 1615 and failed altogether for thirty years between 1675 and 1704 (Lamb, 1995.) In the Hohe Tauern mountains of the Austrian Alps, advancing glaciers closed the gold mines of the Archbishop of Salzburg who was one of the wealthiest dukes in the empire. The succession of two or three bad summers where the miners could not rely on work in the mines caused them to find employment elsewhere, which resulted in an abrupt end to the mining operations (Bryson, 1977.)

Not all of the economic impact was bad. The fertile fishing grounds of the present day Newfoundland Banks were thought to have been found by fisherman in the late 1400’s who were looking for the fish stocks that had deserted their former grounds as the result of the movement of colder waters from the north (Lamb, 1995.)

English fisherman benefited by the southern movement of herring normally found in the waters off Norway. This increase in deep-sea fishing helped to build the maritime population and strength of the country (Lamb, 1995.) The failure of crops in Norway between 1680 and 1720 was a prime reason for the great growth of merchant shipping there. Coastal farmers whose crops failed turned to selling their timber and to constructing ships in order to transport these timbers themselves (Lamb, 1995.)

Social Unrest
Conditions during the LIA led to many cases of social unrest. The winter of 1709 killed many people in France. Conditions were so bad, a priest in Angers, in west-central France, wrote: “The cold began on January 6, 1709, and lasted in all its rigor until the twenty-fourth. The crops that had been sewn were all completely destroyed…. Most of the hens had died of cold, as had the beasts in the stables. When any poultry did survive the cold, their combs were seen to freeze and fall off. Many birds, ducks, partidges, woodcock, and blackbirds died and were found on the roads and on the thick ice and frequent snow. Oaks, ashes, and other valley trees split with cold. Two thirds of the vines died…. No grape harvest was gathered at all in Anjou…. I myself did not get enough wine from my vineyard to fill a nutshell.” (Ladurie, 1971) In March the poor rioted in several cities to keep the merchants from selling what little wheat they had left.

The winter of 1739-40 was also a bad one. After that there was no spring and only a damp, cool summer which spoiled the wheat harvest. The poor rebelled and the governor of Liège told the rich to “fire into the middle of them. That’s the only way to disperse this riffraff, who want nothing but bread and loot.” (Ladurie, 1971)

Lamb (1995) reports the occurrence of cattle raids on the Lowlanders by Highlanders who were stressed by the deteriorating climate. In 1436, King James I of Scotland was murdered while hunting on the edge of the Highland region near Perth. The clan warfare grew so bad that it was decided that no place north of Edinburgh Castle was safe for the king so Edinburgh became the capital of the country.

In England, the effect of starvation and the poor condition of the country encouraged men to enlist during the War of the Roses (1455-1485.) As tillable land was converted to other uses such as sheep rearing, the landlords who organized the conversions became the focus of many hostilities.

One group in particular suffered from the poor conditions – people thought to be witches (Behringer, 1999.) Weather-making was thought to be among the traditional abilities of witches and during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many saw a great witch conspiracy. Extensive witch hunts took place during the most severe years of the LIA, as people looked for scapegoats to blame for their suffering.

One of history’s most notorious quotes might have been due in part to a rare extremely warm period during the LIA. In northern France in 1788, after an unusually bad winter, May, June, and July were excessively hot, which caused the grain to shrivel. On July 13, just at harvest time, a severe hailstorm (which typically occurs when there is very cold air aloft) destroyed what little crops were left. From that bad harvest of 1788 came the bread riots of 1789 which led to Marie Antoinette’s alleged remark “Let them eat cake,” and the storming of the Bastille.

Art and Literature
Writers and artists were also influenced by the great change in climate. In 1816, “the year without a summer,” many Europeans spent their summers around the fire. Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein, and Polidori, The Vampire. Both authors, together with Byron and Percy Shelley, were in Switzerland, near Lake Geneva where Byron said “We will each write a ghost story.” Percy Shelley also referred to a glacier in his poem “Mont Blanc” when he wrote “…and wall impregnable of beaming ice. The race of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling vanish…”

Neuberger (1970) studied more than 12,000 paintings in 41 art museums in the United States and eight European countries to test his hypothesis that paintings would accurately reveal the climate record. These paintings covered the period from 1400 to 1967. He categorized the blueness of the sky into a three-step scale consisting of pale blue, medium blue, and deep blue. Cloudiness was estimated according to the U.S. airways code: clear (less than 10 percent coverage), scattered (10 to 50 percent), broken (60 to 90 percent), and overcast (more than 90 percent cloud coverage.) In addition, the types of clouds were observed according to four families: high, middle, low, and convective (vertically-developed) clouds. Neuberger separated his data into three epochs. According to the data in Fig. 19 below, during the second epoch when the LIA was at its peak, cloudiness and darkness prevailed.

Figure 19: Epochal changes in various painting features. (Source: Neuberger, 1970)

Neuberger suggests that the similarities between the second and third epochs have more to do with a stylistic change in the third epoch to impressionism which produced hazy atmospheres and also to an increase in industrial pollution.

Frequency of Storms
Fig. 20 shows the number of reported severe sea floods per century in the North Sea region.

Figure 20: Number of reported sea floods per century in the North Sea region. (Source: Lamb, 1995)

During the LIA, there was a high frequency of storms. As the cooler air began to move southward, the polar jet stream strengthened and followed, which directed a higher number of storms into the region. At least four sea floods of the Dutch and German coasts in the thirteenth century were reported to have caused the loss of around 100,000 lives. Sea level was likely increased by the long-term ice melt during the MWP which compounded the flooding. Storms that caused greater than 100,000 deaths were also reported in 1421, 1446, and 1570. Additionally, large hailstorms that wiped out farmland and killed great numbers of livestock occurred over much of Europe due to the very cold air aloft during the warmer months. Due to severe erosion of coastline and high winds, great sand storms developed which destroyed farmlands and reshaped coastal land regions.

(News & Editorial/ Yes there’s “climate change”, it cooling)

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Wednesday, March 11, 2015 · 12:10 AM

Gettin’ by when supplies tighten

(Survival Manual/ 2. Social Issues/ Gettin’ by when supplies tighten)

A. Report: Farmers Hoarding Food To Protect Against Currency Collapse
29 Apr 2013, SHTFPlan.com, by Mac Slavo
Pasted from: http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/report-farmers-hoarding-food-to-protect-against-currency-collapse_04292013

Which asset is more secure than money in the bank?
The answer is simple.
It’s the asset that will still have value when the money or the bank collapse.

All over the world, when people have been faced with the prospect of having their savings wiped out or confiscated they have turned to hard assets – physical goods they could hold in their possession and trade if necessary – as protection.

Argentina, a country that is no stranger to economic hard times and hyperinflation, gives us a prime example of what becomes money when the system collapses.

At an inflation rate of 25%, while their currency loses significant purchasing power, Argentines have made a mad rush into gold, silver, and other tangible goods that retain their barterable value.

Like many Greeks, who have headed to the countryside to grow their own food in the midst of complete economic destruction, farmers in Argentina are hoarding the one tangible investment they know will not lose value, no matter what their currency does.

With world food demand on the rise, growers in the Pampas grain belt are filling their silos with soy rather than converting their crops into pesos, a currency that hit a new all-time low in informal trade this week.

Considering Argentina’s high inflation, clocked at about 25 percent by private economists, “money in the bank” is not as secure as storing soybeans next to their fields, many say.
“We are going to hang onto our soy. One can see higher prices ahead,” said Jose Plazibat, a partner with the firm of Bandurria and Plazibat Brothers, which farms more than 3,000 hectares near the town of Chacabuco in Buenos Aires province.

With their currency in meltdown and food demand around the world rising, these farmers understand where real value comes from.
1. Their food can’t be lost in the stock market.
2. It’s intrinsic worth cannot be vaporized in a banking collapse.
3. And they do not need to wait for anyone to deliver it to them, as they hold it in their personal possession.

Hoarding commodities – not the paper receipts that represent your ownership, but the actual physical good – is a powerful diversification strategy, and one that is a natural response to times of uncertainty and government run amok:

Argentina is going through the classic stages of economic collapse.

The government seized all pensions. They are destroying everything that gives the people incentive to be a society that emerges from the cooperation of everyone.

When government turns against its own people, even as the USA is currently doing, you end up with deflation insofar as the economy collapses and wages are not available, while hoarding emerges as does barter.
……….source: Martin Armstrong

This strategy of buying commodities at lower prices today to consume at higher prices tomorrow can be implemented on a micro-economic personal scale in your own home. Doing so, especially with health and nutrition considerations, will not only provide you with long-term cost savings as global currencies continue to lose purchasing power, but insulate you against the possibility of a rush for food in the event of an emergency or widespread economic instability.

Whether you choose to stock your long-term food pantry by going to a grocery store, grow your own food in your traditional or aquaponics garden, learn to preserve it yourself, or prefer to do your own food storage packing, the key is to develop a plan and implement it now.

The US dollar isn’t getting any stronger over the next 10 years.
But the rice, beans, wheat, and pasta you stockpile will still have the same exact intrinsic value a decade from now as they do today.

B. Bartering Supplies That You Haven’t Thought Of; And Some You Have!
29 Apr 2013, American Preppers Network, by Jalapeno Gal77
Pasted from: http://americanpreppersnetwork.com/2013/04/bartering-supplies-that-you-havent-thought-of-and-some-you-have.html
When I think of bartering supplies my mind automatically goes to a SHTF scenario. There are a lot of lists out there for such scenes, but ultimately what you choose to barter is up to you. Many people stock things like silver, gold, cigarettes or alcohol or coffee. While these can be great items, they are also expensive.

I will admit, stocking up on cigarettes, coffee and alcohol do go against my health and religious beliefs, but it doesn’t stop me from storing it. I would much rather barter an item that I will never use or need, than to barter precious items I do need. In the end, what you decide to spend money on is your choice.

Below is a list of items I feel would make good barter items if, and only if, I have enough extra to get away with it:
• Salt: We store a LOT of salt. It has multiple purposes and back in the day, people actually used salt as currency because it was considered such a high trade value and hard to find. Salt can/was used to preserve food and it helps to eliminate the season availability of certain foods and allowed long distance travel.
• Toilet paper: Take the cardboard out and put them in a large vacuum sealed bag storage bag.
• Kitty litter or dehydrated lime for sanitation or easy clean up of human waste in buckets. Can you imagine what someone would trade for this?
• Matches/lighters
• Bleach
• Sugar
• Feminine supplies
• Flu/Cold Medicine
• Allergy Medicine
• Antibiotics/ Pain killers / fever reducer
• Bar Soap
• Seeds
• Toothpaste/toothbrushes
• First aid bandages
• Hydrogen peroxide (You could trade this by the cup or half cup.)
• We store small bottles of alcohol for trade. We also have bigger bottles for refills if they want to bring it back for more.
• Coffee: We vacuum seal coffee in smaller portions with 1-2 coffee filters in each bag of coffee. We also have 2 percolators to prepare the coffee if the person has no way to do so.
• Cigarettes: We do not store these but many people use them as barter items.
• Pipe Tobacco: Vacuum seal it to keep it fresh longer
• Spices
• Ramon Noodles: Very cheap and if someone is hungry then this would be good trade value.
• Beans: We stock the 15 bean soup because it comes with a spice packet in the soup. You could trade these by the bag or by the cup depending on the size family they have or if it’s an individual.
• Razors
• Coats/Warm Clothing: We purchase used coats at goodwill and thrift stores. All different sizes but especially kids coats. These can be stored in large vacuum sealed storage bags and hardly take up any room.
• Small candles (or wax , wicks and wick tabs for making candles.)
• Chickens: Chickens produce meat and eggs, both of which people will want.
• Fly tape/mouse traps
• Pesticides
• gel, diapers, formula
• Socks/underwear
• Information on growing food or slaughtering animals. You could print off some easy instructions and place them in binders.
• Fish hooks, weights, fishing line, bait
• Glow sticks
• Laundry soap powder
• Measuring spoons

These are just a few ideas to help you get started. Notice, I did not put silver or gold on the list. While this is a great item to have, I believe that if we are in a grid down situation, not many people are going to barter for something they cannot eat or use to stay alive. Please don’t misunderstand me, it is alright to have these items for yourself, but for bartering, I just don’t feel it will be helpful in that area.

[Mr. Larry ideas:
_a) If you develop or buy a 12 volt battery bank (several deep cycle 12 volt batteries) and a couple hundred watts of PV panels (150-300 watts), solar charger, inverter, and a battery charger for AAA and AA rechargeable batteries, you would continue to use your personal electronics during a local disaster or SHTF event.
_b) Additionally, if you stock an extra 50 to 100 AA and AAA Sanyo Enloop batteries, you would be set to operate a local “rent and recharge” battery service, thereby developing a “for food” customer base during a grid down scenario; it would only take recharging the batteries of maybe a half dozen families batteries to provide a significant portion of your “daily bread” or for the accumulation of other barter/trade items/services.]
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C. 40 Items to Barter in a Post-Collapse World
28 Aug 2012, Backdoor Survival.com, by__
Excerpt pasted from: http://www.backdoorsurvival.com/41-items-to-barter/

There are a lot of different opinions as to what items will be best for barter in a post-collapse world where the underground economy may be the only viable economy for the passing of goods and services. That said, consider this a starting point as you begin to acquire goods for barter.

In no particular order, consider accumulating some of the following items for barter purposes. And keep in mind that in a post-collapse world, the items do not necessarily have to be new, but simply serviceable.

Water purification supplies including purification tabs and filters, household bleach.
Hand tools including hatchets, saws, machetes and general fix-it tools
Fire making supplies, including lighters, matches, flint fire steel
Sanitary supplies including toilet paper, feminine products and diapers
Disposable razors and razor blades
Fuel, any and all kinds (gas, diesel, propane, kerosene)
Prescription drugs, painkillers, and antibiotics
First aid remedies such as cough syrup, cortisone cream, boil-ese, calamine lotion and topical pain relievers
Spirits such as bourbon, rum, gin, and vodka
Coffee and tea (instant coffee is okay)
Solar battery charger and rechargeable batteries
Standard Batteries
Reading glasses
Paracord
Bags, including large garbage bags as well as smaller zip-close bags
Plastic sheeting
Duct tape
Tie Wraps
Heavy plastic sheets and tarps
Toiletries including toothpaste, dental floss soaps, shampoo (tip: save those small sized toiletries that are provided by hotels and motels)
Condoms
Latex or Nitrile gloves in a variety of sizes
Hard candy
Fishing supplies
Knives of various types including fixed blades, kitchen knives, and box cutters.
Condiments and Spices
Paperback books on a variety of subjects
Tobacco and cigarette rolling supplies
Amusements such as playing cards, crossword puzzle books, Sudoku
Pencils & paper
Pepper spray
Garden seeds
Flashlights
Vinegar and baking soda to use in DIY cleaning supplies
Empty spray bottles and squirt bottles
Hand pumps for both air and liquids
Mylar blankets and tents
Hand warmers
Sewing and mending supplies
Knitting or crochet needles and yarn

One thing you will notice that I have not included firearms or ammo and for good reason. In a post-collapse society, you might not know your barter partners well and may run the risk that they will use these items against you so that they can steal the rest of you stuff. One person’s opinion, anyway.

. .
C. 10 Forms of Currency if Paper Money Becomes Useless in Any Crisis.
18 Mar 2013, EmergencyHomesteader.com, by katalystman
Pasted from: http://www.emergencyhomesteader.com/10-forms-of-currency-if-paper-money-becomes-useless-in-any-crisis/

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Monday, October 27, 2014 · 12:05 AM

Pandemic preps: Don’t count on government agencies for protection or help

A. Homeland Security Isn’t Ready To Combat A Deadly Pandemic
9 Sep 2014, ThinkProgress, by Tara Culp-Ressler
Posted from: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/09/09/3564842/deadly-pandemic-dhs/

The Department of Homeland Security is “ill-prepared” to take the necessary steps to stem a future outbreak of a deadly disease — like a particularly dangerous strain of the flu, or even the continued spread of the Ebola virus — according to a federal audit released this week.

In 2006, Congress gave $47 million to DHS to take the necessary steps to prepare for a national medical crisis. So, for nearly a decade by now, the department has been stocking up on supplies like surgical masks, antiviral medications, and hand sanitizer. But that process hasn’t been undertaken in the most effective way. The audit discovered that many of those supplies are now totally useless because they’re either about to expire or because they’ve already surpassed their expiration date.

For instance, more than 80 percent of the department’s antiviral drugs will expire by the end of next year. Most of the hand sanitizer is already too old. A stockpile of about $5 million worth of antibiotics might not be effective because they’re being stored incorrectly. And because DHS hasn’t kept accurate records of its materials, employees don’t even know how to locate their emergency gear, like personal protective masks.

“As a result, the department has no assurance it has sufficient personal protective equipment and antiviral medical countermeasures for a pandemic response,” the report, which was prepared by the Office of the Inspector General, concludes.

DHS is specifically tasked with protecting the United States from external threats, including weather disasters and potential disruptions to the nation’s infrastructure. “A severe influenza pandemic presents a tremendous challenge, which may affect millions of Americans, cause significant illnesses and fatalities, and substantially disrupt our economic and social stability,” the report points out. “It is DHS’s responsibility to ensure it is adequately prepared to continue critical operations in the event of a pandemic.”

We already saw the firsthand consequences of that type of crisis during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak — popularly called “swine flu” — which killed more than 12,000 people. Experts anticipate similar health disasters in the future. For years, the public health community has been worried about an impending global flu pandemic, which is expected to be even more deadly than previous outbreaks of respiratory illnesses like SARS. [And now they have it, Enterovirus D68.–Mr Larry.]

Previous reports have found similar gaps in the country’s readiness to address potential public health disasters. An annual review from the Trust for America’s Health on whether we’re prepared to protect Americans from “diseases, disasters, and bioterrorism” has consistently found that too many states are cutting their public health budgets. States are also falling behind on initiatives to prepare for the impending health consequences of climate change. And a 2012 study found that, despite the 2009 swine flu outbreak, most U.S. schools haven’t improved their ability to respond to infectious diseases.

Congress has recently attempted to take some steps forward in this area. Last March, lawmakers approved and President Obama signed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act, or PAHPRA, which authorizes more funding for medical preparedness programs. PAHPRA is an update to the original 2006 legislation that first designated the $47 million in funding to the Department of Homeland Security.

In response the release of this week’s audit, a spokesperson for DHS said that the department was previously aware of the issues and has already begun taking steps to address them.
.

B. SHTF Medical: Basic Pandemic Preps
21 July 2014, The Rebel Prepper Network, by Rebel
Pasted from: http://www.therebelpreppernetwork.com/pandemic-preps1/

With the recent rise in global epidemics, including the flesh eating Ebola virus spreading from Africa to Italy, I was not surprised to receive messages asking if I could cover the subject of preparations to prevent exposure to a pandemic level threat. With the US/Mexican border crisis bringing thousands of disease carrying children in to the country and their relocation being kept from the general population the next Spanish flu may be closer than you think. In the last week (article written 7/21/14) there have been four confirmed cases of pneumonic plague in Colorado, this stands as a reminder that not all enemies are on two legs.

The fact is that viruses and bacteria have it out for us. Nature has developed many forms of transmission to spread disease; insects, birds, mammals, surface exposure, person to person, water borne, and the most frightening of all transmission, air borne. The mission is to multiply and when humans become the carriers then we become the battle field and the enemies secret weapon. Coughing, sneezing, mucus secretions, blood contact all aid in transfer of the illness.

If you are looking to survive a pandemic then your best bet for survival will be preventing yourself from becoming infected. This will mean a drastic change in your daily life once it is announced that the given illness (we will be using a flu for this article) has reached the epidemic level. Advanced preparation will save you from further risking exposure when the initial word goes out about what steps should be taken to help reduce chances contracting the illness.

The irony is that the CDC would put out a message to the general population to stay indoors, cover windows, avoid large groups of people and in response the vast majority of the general public would rush out to the stores for supplies exposing themselves to the conditions they should be avoiding.

Knowing that people will be the enemy in most pandemic situations you will stock up well before the CDC makes its panic inducing announcement.

1) First you need to stock up on duct tape and 3mm plastic sheeting for doors and windows. I recommend spending the extra money on gorilla brand tape and choosing clear sheeting rather than the “fogged” type or black, you will want to be able to see through your windows. Creating a barrier is your first line of defense. I recommend covering the interior and exterior of your windows, this will create a makeshift air seal. You should also have enough to quarantine members of your family showing symptoms for observation.

2) Latex or polypropylene gloves are another excellent item to stock up on, but touching your face will make your efforts pointless so it should be at all costs. If the illness is air born then there is a higher risk of transmission person to person via touch which is more likely.

3) Purchasing a quality gas mask, disposable 3M dust masks, or even a bandana coated in vapor rub will help filter the air if you have to leave the safety of your home. Make sure to change filters, dispose of used dust masks and sterilize bandanas after use.

4) Next you will want some way of sanitizing yourself and your home. Rubbing alcohol between 70% – 90% (hand sanitizer could also be used) and soap will help clean/disinfect you after venturing out of your home.

5) In a bad situation stripping down, sealing your clothing in a trash bag and showering in an outdoor shower before reentering the house will be an additional step for the cautious. Washing clothing in hot water should prevent the spread of infection. Keeping your home clean will be a daily chore, bleach and room temperature water should be used to wipe down all smooth surfaces in the home including counters, floors, door knobs, toilets and refrigerators.

6) Having basic medications is always a good idea. Things like cough drops, anti-inflammatory, fever reducers and the like may help you hang on a bit longer, especially if hospitals become over crowded. However in a true epidemic a vaccine will need to be produced or nature will just have to run its course. Remember that if you are stocking antibiotics they are useless against flu viruses, so do not waste them if you have them.

7) Bolster your food and water stocks, will keep you from having to leave your home unnecessarily. It can take quite some time for scientists to come up with a cure and at a minimum flu season is three months long. Knowing this I recommend having at least three months of food stored, not including what is in your pantry or fridge, if you are prepping for pandemic. You should also have a 3 month supply of multivitamins as well as an additional stock of vitamin C, D, E and calcium. When it comes to water I believe that four months would be the smart course of action using the two gallons per person per day, so 240 gallons. Why so much water? Staying hydrated while ill is imperative to healing as well as regulating body temperature. If you cannot store that much water then you will need to make sure you have a way to obtain, filter and purify large amounts on a regular basis.

Some diseases like plague are spread by blood sucking insects fleas, ticks and mosquitoes rather than contact with humans. In a dire situation you may be forced to choose between your families safety or your pets life. I am sure this will cause outrage to some people, but in all honesty there should be no second thought when it comes to your families well being.

Be warned that once you have made your preparations, especially those to your home, you have marked yourself to the outside world as target of possible resources. As always there will be those who did not take heed to the warning and will want to take what you have, putting you and your loved ones at risk. All the defensive safeguards in the world will not save you if someone infected busts your door down and comes in to contact with your family. You must be ready to stop all threats. Make sure you are justified in all life or death situations. Security cameras or even cell phone video could aid in you defense if you must take a life. Remember that after a WROL situation laws will return and you may be held accountable for any lives you take.

The information above is just a basic overview, if you would like more specific info let me know and I will do my best to get the information out. These points should go hand in hand with your everyday preps As always being prepared for the worst will not guarantee your survival, but anything you can do to increase your odds will not hurt. Having ways to pass the time will help from going stir crazy; playing cards, board games, art supplies are all useful tools that do not rely on electricity. As a Christian I believe that this rise in illness is just the beginning of the horsemen “Pestilence’s” run and more sickness is on its way. Having faith in something will help you deal with loss, regardless of your religious views I guarantee that in your darkest moment you will talk to something in the darkness about finding the light.

C. Why An Epic Food Crisis Will Follow A Pandemic
August 25, 2014, modernsurvivalblog.com, by Ken Jorgustin
Pasted from: http://modernsurvivalblog.com/pandemic/why-an-epic-food-crisis-will-follow-a-pandemic/

While the pandemic assaults the population, stores will shut down and a devastating food crisis will rapidly develop – starving millions – even those who have escaped the deadly grasp of the virus itself.

While the current Ebola virus rages in Africa, and although the mainstream media is keeping it mostly quiet, the problems there are mounting in ways which we should take notice – because one day, a pandemic will happen here…

As fear grips the population, many will stop doing their jobs as they begin to realize that their lives will literally be in grave risk while in proximity to others.

Given our ‘just in time’ (JIT) delivery systems – especially our food chains – grocery stores will rapidly deplete their food supplies (days, not weeks).

When the truckers stop delivering, when people stop showing up for work, it’s over. It will happen faster than you think.

Excerpts from a recent news report exemplifies what will happen – and what is happening right now in Africa as a result of the Ebola virus:

The first food source that disappeared from markets was “bush meat,” meat from forest animals. Other foods have become scarce as a side effect of efforts to keep the virus from spreading. Governments stopped people from moving from country to country, or even from one town to another, it stopped traders from delivering food to the markets. Imports are down. Ships are reluctant to dock in places affected by the epidemic. The Ebola came in at a time when farmers were ready to go to the field to work together, in groups, but people now have been advised to avoid such activities. Coming together in groups could spread the disease. So essential work is not happening. —--NPR.org, A Food Crisis Follows Africa’s Ebola Crisis

When you consider the follow-on effects of a deadly pandemic such as mandatory shut-down’s, the breakdown of ‘just in time’ delivery systems, people not showing up for work, coupled with the death toll itself, there will no doubt be a food crisis during and after a Pandemic.

You can prepare for a pandemic. You will need food storage.

For prepper’s, I’m ‘speaking to the choir’, but for any of you who might happen across this article who have not yet established at least a 3-month food storage, please consider it for your own life’s sake.

Set food storage goals. 3 weeks. 3 months. 6 months. 1 year. etc.

A deadly pandemic WILL happen here: 1) Given the 7 billion people on the planet, 2) given our modern world of global travel, 3) given the increase of drug-resistant strains, 4) given the tampering with biological weaponry, 5) given the reportedly careless activities at some of the world’s most dangerous biological labs, something is bound to happen one day.

The flu pandemic of 1918 infected half a billion people (that was way back then!) – before the days of world travel, etc. Don’t let your normalcy bias cloud your thinking…

(Survival Manual/ Prepper Articles/ Pandemic preps: don’t count on government agencies for protection or help)

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Monday, September 22, 2014 · 12:10 AM

Power out? Being prepped for the EMP

(Survival Manual/ Prepper articles/Power out? Being prepped for the EMP)

A. The Big Blackout: Why I’m Going Low-Tech to Prep for an EMP
30 July 2014, of The Organic Prepper Contributed by Daisy Luther*
Pasted from: http://www.theorganicprepper.ca/the-big-blackout-why-im-going-low-tech-to-prep-for-an-emp-07302014

* Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor. Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/TheOrganicPrepper?ref=hl) and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

This might be stating the obvious, but in the event of an EMP, things will not be the same, no matter how great your generator is.

Aaron Dykes of Truthstream Media wrote an excellent article about the extreme likelihood of a catastrophic event that could take out our power grid:

Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer is warning investors – and more broadly, lawmakers and leaders – about the potential destructive power of an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, which could be triggered by solar events or artificially, via blasts in the atmosphere.

According to Singer, research shows that no other incident, including a nuclear bomb, has the potential for such wide-scale devastation, coupled with the relative likelihood of occurring. While a nuke would primarily impact on the location of a such (such a city), an EMP could occur globally or across large-scale regions, wreaking havoc on the entire electric grid and devices…

…Government agencies, such as NASA and Homeland Security, have taken some preliminary steps towards preparing for an EMP attack – regardless of the potential for natural of man made causes – but the public at large remains cripplingly unaware of the dangers present to modern life, and its reliance on all things electronic, digital and, thus, transient. (Check out the rest of this MUST-READ article, ‘Catastrophic’: Hedge Fund Billionaire Paul Singer Warns of EMP, see below.)

We’ve all read many articles about the likelihood of grid failure. We’ve been warned again and again that it isn’t a matter of if, but when, it happens.

Because of this, a lot of people are preparing for a very different future. Folks are getting ready for the Big Blackout. The thing is, I am not sure everyone is thinking this through. Many people are spending buckets of money on preparations to try to keep their lives as similar as possible to how they are today. They’re investing in diesel generators and Faraday cages to protect their electronics. They are buying propane-fueled appliances. They’re stashing away fuel to run these gadgets.

Generators are not a practical investment for EMP preparation.
The problem with that method of preparation is, the fuel-generated lifestyle will only last for as long as you have…well…fuel. Very few of us have enough storage space or the proper facilities to store 5 years’ worth of fuel. If the power grid goes down in a catastrophic way, it’s going to take at least 5 years to get things up and running again, and that’s assuming things ever get up and running again in the way they are now.

That means that people are spending thousands of dollars investing in items that will only sustain their lifestyles for a brief period of time. Generators are not a long term solution unless you have renewable power. (More on that later). While a generator would be a blessing in a short-term emergency (think a week-long power outage due to a storm), for a permanent way of life they are completely impractical.

Furthermore, in the event of an EMP strike, if your generator is not protected, it may not work no matter how much fuel you have stored.

Maybe the fact that I’m not rolling in money is the reason I feel this way. Maybe people with lots of money to spare have ideas about how to keep their generators running forever. But for my personal situation, this is a preparation strategy that is completely impractical.

A low-tech lifestyle is the best way to prep for grid-down survival.
If money is an object in your preparedness endeavors, (and let’s face it, money is an object for most of us these days), then focus your dollars on preps that are sustainable without electrical power. Instead of trying to live the exact same life you are living right now, only fueled by an individual generator, look for low-tech solutions instead. This reminds me of people who stop eating gluten but still want to eat exactly like they have been eating their entire lives, only now with expensive gluten-free baked goods that cost 4 times the price of their wheat-filled counterparts. When things change dramatically, accept the change and adapt to it, instead of trying to maintain the illusion that everything is the same.

Whether you can get power from an outlet in the wall or not, the necessities of day-to-day life will remain the same:

Water
Shelter and Warmth
Food
Sanitation and Hygiene
Light

The ultimate preparedness goal should be to provide those necessities without any help from the power grid, generators, or fossil fuel. (LEARN MORE about planning for a long-term disaster, The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster: http://www.amazon.com/The-Preppers-Blueprint-Step-By-Step-Disaster/dp/1496092589/ref=as_sl_pc_ss_til?tag=theorgpre-20&linkCode=w01&linkId=&creativeASIN=1496092589)

When my youngest daughter and I lived in the North Woods of Canada, we lost power frequently throughout the year. Lots of folks in the area had generators that they would fire up when the power went out, and that was a viable solution, since gas stations were available and fuel was pretty much unlimited as long as you could afford to go get it. We were on a tight budget, however, and we adapted our situation to live without power during those outages. After the first couple of outages, we had worked out most of the bugs and we even began to look forward to our time without power – it was like a little vacation from the regular workday. As plugged in as our society is, power is not actually a necessity – it’s a luxury, and we can live without it as long as we are adaptable, creative, willing, and prepared.

Let’s look at some specific examples of low-tech ways to take care of our necessities. These ideas are just food for thought, based on my own preparedness plan – they may not be the solutions that will work best for you, but the goal here is to brainstorm your own situation and figure out how to live your life low-tech if the need occurs.

Off-grid Water

If you haven’t located water sources near your home, it’s time to break out the topographical maps of your area and find them! A low-tech water plan might include some or all of the following:

A manual pump for your well
Buckets and wheelbarrows for hauling water from a nearby source
Rain barrels for water harvesting (this is an inexpensive option with mixed reviews. See installation in progress, image below right): http://www.amazon.com/Etna-50-gallon-Portable-Rain-Barrel/dp/B007EM2YCE/ref=pd_sim_lg_5?ie=UTF8&refRID=0VPJMG4G54AENWFC59W3
A gravity-fed water filtration system (I have this one, Mr Larry): http://www.amazon.com/Royal-Berkey-Black-Filters-Fluoride/dp/B002R8ON3I/ref=pd_cp_hi_0
A water dispenser for convenient access to filtered water (Be sure to get one with the bottle on top so that it can be operated without electricity, and not one that uses an electric pump to pull the water up from the bottom)
Storage units for water such as cisterns or tanks
Portable water filter bottles for safe water when you are away from home (this one): http://www.amazon.com/LifeStraw-LSPHF017-Personal-Water-Filter/dp/B006QF3TW4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410075490&sr=8-1&keywords=water+straw+filter

Off-grid Shelter and Warmth

Homes these days aren’t built to function without a connection to the power grid. If you aren’t fortunate enough to live in an older home that was designed for off-grid living, look at some ways to take your home back a century or so. A secondary heating system is vital in most climates.

An antique oil heater can use lots of different oils and requires little effort for installation.
Have a woodstove installed
Clean your chimney and get your fireplace working
Set up an outdoor fireplace with large rocks to bring inside for radiant heat (this won’t get you super warm but it’s better than nothing)
Have a good supply of blankets, warm clothes, and cold-rated sleeping bags
Learn techniques to stay warm with less heat; see article at: http://www.theorganicprepper.ca/how-to-stay-warm-with-less-heat-2-12042012

Off-grid Food

Not only do you need access to food, but you also need a way to cook it and a way to keep your refrigerated and frozen items from spoiling.

Grow a garden and save your seeds
Have a greenhouse or extend your growing season with cold frames and hoop houses
Have a well-stocked pantry
Have supplies for off-grid canning (Jars, lids, outdoor burner) – and learn how to can without a kitchen
Learn ways to get by without refrigeration; see article at: http://apartmentprepper.com/can-you-live-without-a-refrigerator/
Outdoor cooking methods – this stove can be used with 3 different types of fuel: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FDKXN6/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000FDKXN6&linkCode=as2&tag=theorgpre-20&linkId=4W3C46CNMOSCPZQH
If you’re anything like me, have a French Press for off-grid coffee!
Make a solar cooker – learn how here: http://graywolfsurvival.com/2448/diy-solar-cooker/

Off-grid Sanitation and Hygiene

How will you keep clean and deal with human waste in the event of a long-term emergency?

If you are on a septic system, store water for flushing and have a collection system to save your used water in the future
If you are not on a septic system, devise a plan and get supplies for an outhouse or cat hole
Learn how to do your laundry off-grid (I use a janitor’s bucket for wringing out clothes – get the best quality you can afford – the cheap plastic ones will break when you use them for laundry)
Learn how to make your own cleaning products

Off-grid Lighting

The world is a scary place when it’s dark, and most of us have forgotten how dark true dark really is, due to light pollution and the proximity of neighbors. Here are some lighting solutions for an off grid world:

Solar garden lights – store them outside to be charged during the day and bring them in and put them in vases where they’re needed at night
Oil lamps – you can recycle used cooking oil or use rendered fat to power these – they give a brighter light and can be used for reading and close-work.
Candles – stock them and learn to make them
Solar powered flashlights: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ZJ04V8/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003ZJ04V8&linkCode=as2&tag=theorgpre-20&linkId=HQYTQXAAFJQQQYCY

Renewable power is practical power.

[Above photographs: Top 4 ea 130watt solar panels that supply electricity to a 12 volt battery bank composed of 4 Vmaxtanks AGM 125ah batteries. The system runs a 4.4 cu ft back up refrigerator and charges all of the household’s rechargeable batteries. Lower picture shows the type of common household items that can be charged from a 12 volt system, see Steven Harris website at: http://battery1234.com/ Mr Larry]

One exception to my no-generators rule is renewable power. If you can afford a solar set up for your home, then very little would change about your day-to-day life, aside from you being one of the few people with power. You don’t have to go totally solar to have power for a few important items. Assuming you have electronics in working order, they can be powered with solar, wind, or water.

Most of us can’t afford an entire set up but these are some options to consider:

Build a DIY portable solar recharging station – learn how to make it here: http://graywolfsurvival.com/2302/a-simple-prepper-camping-solar-acdc-powerbox/
Solar-powered systems for specific items – learn more here: http://readynutrition.com/resources/solar-powered-equipment-for-disaster-preparation_28032012/
Use wind power
Use water power

What will you do when the electrical power goes out?

Do you have plans in place for a long-term (or permanent) power outage? Are you planning to use generators and maintain your current lifestyle, or are you planning to go low-tech?

B. ‘Catastrophic’: Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer warns of EMP
30 July 2014, Truthstream Media, By Aaron Dykes
Pasted from: http://truthstreammedia.com/hedge-fund-billionaire-paul-singer-warns-of-emp/

Imminent: ‘Only a matter of time’ until entire electric grid destroyed by natural or man-made event…
Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer is warning investors – and more broadly, lawmakers and leaders – about the potential destructive power of an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, which could be triggered by solar events or artificially, via blasts in the atmosphere.

CNBC reported:
“(A natural EMP event) today would cause a massive disruption to the electric grid, possibly shutting it down entirely for months or longer, with unimaginable consequences,” Singer wrote. “Only two years ago, the sun let loose with a Carrington-magnitude burst, but the position of the earth at the time prevented the burst from hitting it. The chances of additional events of such magnitude may be far greater than most people think.”

“It would not cause any blast or radiation damage, but such an attack would have consequences even more catastrophic than a severe solar storm. It could not only bring down the grid, but also lay down a very intense, very fast pulse across the continent, damaging or destroying electronic switches, devices, computers and transformers across America,” the letter said.

Members of Congress and other officials based in Washington have previously conferred on the threats rendered by an EMP, with Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) – a senior figure in the House Homeland Security Committee – warning that “The Likelihood of a severe geo-magnetic event capable of crippling our electric grid is 100%.“

The Center for Security Policy, along with other officials, have similarly warned:

And experts forecast if such an attack were a success, it effectively could throw the U.S. back into an age of agriculture.

“Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity,” said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy.

Government agencies, such as NASA and Homeland Security, have taken some preliminary steps towards preparing for an EMP attack – regardless of the potential for natural or manmade causes – but the public at large remains cripplingly unaware of the dangers present to modern life, and its reliance on all things electronic, digital and, thus, transient.

We reported in August 2013 on then Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s claim that a collapse of the grid was an imminent ‘if not when’ scenario… unsettling, whatever one’s read on the looming government agendas at work.

What You Can Do: Preparing for the Worst
The prolific writer Michael Snyder, warning that an impending EMP event that could bring down the entire grid is “only a matter of time,” outlined some steps that individuals can take to prepare, protect their devices, and plan for adjustments to life off the grid, which could take months or even years to repair in some areas. See article at: http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/what-are-you-going-to-do-when-a-massive-emp-blast-fries-the-u-s-electrical-grid

In short, consider your own reliance on electronic banking, credit/debit cards, ATMs, heating, lights, Internet/TV/radio, phones, ATMs, gas/fuel, and government/commerce at large.

With this in mind, hedge your preparation for emergencies with as much physical currency, food, fuel, candles, water as you can reasonably store/save up, as one would for other emergencies.

Also, with some planning, you can create Faraday cages and bags to shield electronics (perhaps backup units and parts) from damage. You can convert such common objects as metal trash cans into safe storage areas, but it must be done in advance. See article at: https://4dtraveler.net/2012/03/08/faraday-cage/

Consider this source (and others) for further information: Getting Prepared for an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack or Severe Solar Storm, see at: http://www.futurescience.com/emp/emp-protection.html

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Monday, February 24, 2014 · 12:10 AM

EMP: A pie in the sky concept?

(News & Editorial/ EMP: A pie in the sky concept?)

A. Report: China building EMP weapons for use against U.S. carriers
Pasted from: http://www.china-defense-mashup.com/report-china-building-emp-weapons-for-use-against-us-carriers.html
2011-07-24 (China Military News cited from http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/21/beijing-develops-radiation-weapons/”>Washington Times and written by Bill Gertz) — China’s military is developing electromagnetic pulse weapons that Beijing plans to use against U.S. aircraft carriers in any future conflict over Taiwan, according to an intelligence report made public on Thursday.

Portions of a National Ground Intelligence Center study on the lethal effects of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and high-powered microwave (HPM) weapons revealed that the arms are part of China’s so-called “assassin’s mace” arsenal – weapons that allow a technologically inferior China to defeat U.S. military forces.

EMP weapons mimic the gamma-ray pulse caused by a nuclear blast that knocks out all electronics, including computers and automobiles, over wide areas. The phenomenon was discovered in 1962 after an aboveground nuclear test in the Pacific disabled electronics in Hawaii.

The declassified intelligence report, obtained by the private National Security Archive, provides details on China’s EMP weapons and plans for their use. Annual Pentagon reports on China’s military in the past made only passing references to the arms.

“For use against Taiwan, China could detonate at a much lower altitude (30 to 40 kilometers) … to confine the EMP effects to Taiwan and its immediate vicinity and minimize damage to electronics on the mainland,” the report said.

The report, produced in 2005 and once labeled “secret,” stated that Chinese military writings have discussed building low-yield EMP warheads, but “it is not known whether [the Chinese] have actually done so.”

The report said that in addition to EMP weapons, “any low-yield strategic nuclear warhead (or tactical nuclear warheads) could be used with similar effects.”

“The DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile has been mentioned as a platform for the EMP attack against Taiwan,” the report said.

According to the report, China’s electronic weapons are part of what are called “trump card” or “assassin’s mace” weapons that “are based on new technology that has been developed in high secrecy.”

“Trump card would be applicable if the Chinese have developed new low-yield, possibly enhanced, EMP warheads, while assassin’s mace would apply if older warheads are employed,” the report said.

According to the report, China conducted EMP tests on mice, rats, rabbits, dogs and monkeys that produced eye, brain, bone marrow and other organ injuries. It stated that “it is clear the real purpose of the Chinese medical experiments is to learn the potential human effects of exposure to powerful EMP and [high-powered microwave] radiation.”

The tests did not appear designed for “anti-personnel [radio frequency] weapons” because of the limited amounts of radiation used.

However, the report said another explanation is that the Chinese tests may have been research “intended primarily for torturing prisoners,” or the tests may have been conducted to determine safety or shielding standards for military personnel or weapons.

The medical research also appeared useful for China’s military in making sure that EMP weapons used against Taiwan and “any vulnerable U.S. [aircraft carrier] would not push the U.S. across the nuclear-response threshold,” the report said.

[And where else might EMP weapons be use, besides the US Fleet in Asia, our government and military think Washington might become a target, see below. Mr. Larry]

B. The Missile Defense Spectator
The Silent Threat
21 Dec 2012, spectator.org, Peter Hannaford
Pasted from: http://spectator.org/articles/34752/silent-threat

Riots over the Middle East and South Asia get everyone’s attention, but a clear and present danger to the United States homeland exists that virtually no one is talking about and for which we have no defense: missile attack.
A Russian military officials says the recent covert visit of one of their submarines to the Gulf of Mexico proves that they could, without difficulty, launch a missile high over the U.S. that could trigger the explosion of an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) bomb that would shut down virtually all electrical and electronic activity in a large swath of the nation. There would be no radiation, no deaths — “only” economic paralysis and chaos.
Add Iran and North Korea to the list of potential launchers of such a weapon.

While we have worked for months to develop missile defense capabilities in Europe to protect against a possible Iranian attack there, we have only tested such systems from bases in California and Alaska. Nothing is ready to deploy and given the threat of “sequestration” of large amounts of defense funds, that situation is unlikely to change.
While Congress and the Administration stew and stall over the sequestration issue, the danger is both clear and present and there is something we can do to protect the U.S. homeland from such attacks. It is called the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netter Sensor. That mouthful is shortened to JLENS.

The Army developed JLENS to detect, identify, track and engage multiple hostile targets, including low-flying cruise missiles, as well as those launched from submarines and merchant vessels. The threat is that such attacks might involve EMP, chemical or biological weapons.
JLENS is deceptively simple, consisting of two lighter-than-air ships that lift to 10,000 feet (or more) both a fire-control and surveillance radar from where they detect potentially hostile targets at ranges of more than 200 miles. It gives field commanders considerable advance warning of threats. The system was tested successfully last April at the Utah Test and Training Range, destroying a simulated hostile cruise missile with a Patriot missile.

Development of JLENS has involved an investment of $2 billion so far. The next step is to answer requests from combat commands for this system by testing it again in the field to fine-tune it. Congress appropriated $40.3 million for such a test; however, before it could be conducted, the Department of Defense asked Congress to allow these funds to be reprogrammed for other purposes, presumably including budget balancing in the face of sequestration.

Since its creation in the 1950s, the Committee on the Present Danger has focused on the changing nature of threats to the United States. With the potential threat to the U.S. homeland increasing daily, the Committee has written to the Secretary of Defense to urge him to withdraw the request to reprogram the funds so that development of JLENS can proceed. Its cost, in the greater scheme of things, is low when measured against the nature and growth of the threat to our homeland.

C. A Fleet of Blimps Will Soon Serve as a Missile Shield Over Washington
24 Jul 2013, Gizmodo.com, by Adam Clark Estes
Pasted from: http://gizmodo.com/a-fleet-of-blimps-will-soon-serve-as-a-missile-shield-o-885030187

A still-chilling consequence of post-9/11 America is that we remain all too aware of the fact that we could be attacked at any moment. And so with worst case scenarios in mind, the military is constantly upgrading our defense systems in increasingly creative ways. Washington DC is next in line. It’s getting blimps.

To call Raytheon’s JLENS system mere blimps, though, is doing the defense contractor a disservice. These house-sized flying spy fortresses can identify threats on the ground that even the most powerful land-based radar would miss. They can spot and track incoming cruise missiles, mine-laying ships, armed drones, or anything incoming from hundreds of miles away in 360-degrees and react in real-time. Perhaps most impressively, the JLENS system can stay in the air watching over a base or a city for up to 30 days, all day and all night, without needing to be resupplied or refueled. Obviously, this is preferable to the very expensive fleet of five spy plans that it would take to do the same work that the JLENS does with less than half the manpower.

Sometime in 2014, the Defense Department will deploy a pair of JLENS blimps over the Washington DC to watch over the nation’s capital. At 74-meters long, the aircraft aren’t exactly Goodyear blimp-sized, but they’re not inconspicuous either. The JLENS system is made up of two aerostats: One equipped with a fire control radar that provides targeting data and the other with a surveillance radar that can see in all directions. Floating at 10,000 feet above the ground, the JLENS system will also be able to see all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean.

The JLENS system is already on its way to the Washington DC area after having finished a successful test out in Utah. With over 100 soldiers trained on the system, the Army ran early user testing in a number of different complex scenarios. The next step is to transport the whole outfit to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where it will undergo an operational evaluation and eventually enter into active duty, so to speak.

It’s unclear exactly when the JLENS system should take flight, but it’s hard to see the downside in the arrangement until then. When all said and done, the Defense Department will be spending up to 700 percent less on the JLENS system than on spy planes, and will ostensibly get better protection. And who knows? They might be able to pitch in some aerial photography for Redskins games.

[OK, so Washington DC has JLENS system protection, what about the rest of us? The following article discusses what personal-social-utility systems you normally depend on to live, that will be affected by an EMP strike on the USA, form the not protected northeast coast, southeast coast, Gulf coast, or entire west coast. An EEMP attack along any of these coasts would take out power almost half way across the country in a huge circle from the near space nuclear explosion. You won’t see it, you won’t hear it, the power will simply be gone. Mr Larry]

D. Rolling to a stop and living in the dark
28 May 2013, P.R.E.P. Personal Readiness Education Programs, by PREP
Pasted from: http://readygoprep.com/website/rolling-to-a-stop-and-living-in-the-dark/

Recently I saw some controversy about the book “One Second After” by William R. Forstchen. The opinion was that too many people were treating the book as gospel with respect to their prepping for a long-term power outage.

The book details an Electro-magnetic Pulse attack on the United States by an unknown entity. Actually none of the characters knows exactly why the power went out, but everything operated by electricity to include all vehicles and generators just stopped working. In the blink of an eye, everything rolled to a stop, including life, as we knew it.
This is not a book review

Although I regularly recommend the book as a primer to anyone curious or on the fence about prepping. The story does a great job of revealing how people may react when the lights go out, transportation stops, food disappears, medical supplies run out and help isn’t coming. Is it an extreme example? Maybe, maybe not, depends who you ask. But it is an emotional page-turner that might just draw you in and have you cursing, crying and cheering throughout. Either way, you may find yourself asking some questions about your level of preparedness. And that is a good thing.

So where is the controversy? It’s in our freedom to prepare anyway we wish. Prepping already gets a bad rap in general by the population at large. It’s been open season by TV and media for a while now. So why do we in the prepperverse feel the need to down on each other. Without pointing fingers, a couple of the biggest names in survival have criticized those who prefer to be self-reliant in a world without power.

There is every reason to be prepared for a long power outage. First, let’s define what long term may mean to you. An EMP is considered a high impact low frequency event. NASA had a page on its website that warned about the US East coast possibly being without power for 4-7 years after an EMP or severe solar weather event. That page has since been pulled but interestingly; they still have the urban survival page placeholder in the employee area of the site. But aside from an apocalyptic event, let’s consider events that have actually happened? Hurricanes Andrew or Katrina, Sendai Provence Japan after the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown. There was no power for months in affected areas. These are just a couple of actual examples of a time when 72 hours of supplies wasn’t even close to enough.

If the event is large enough, there may be nowhere to actually go. How about a possible earthquake on the New Madrid fault line that severs critical cross-country infrastructure? Is someone going to flip a breaker and shazaam, we have lights? No, it doesn’t work that way.

As our colleagues stated, there will always be someone to turn the power back on. But how long would a repair take after the grid is catastrophically damaged by Mother nature, physical attack or cyber terrorism?

Electricity is arguably the easiest area of survival to adjust to a life without. We have survived without power as a species until only recently. With that being said, it would be a major adjustment in our way of life until the lights come back on. Take a moment to reflect on how electricity has changed our world and how things would be when all the machines stop working.

In this world where everyone has an opinion and a website, you need to do what you must to extend your survival and comfort in times of crisis. Don’t be swayed by those who speak the loudest but haven’t actually lived what they preach. There may come a day when you are sitting in the dark, cursing, and can’t even tweet @ them that they were wrong and you regret listening to them.

So what can you do to mitigate the effects of a life without power?
We at P.R.E.P have taken the less than glamorous approach of actually attempting to identify threats to our safety and survival by performing a hazard analysis in all the areas we feel are important to our everyday life. One of those areas is electricity.

Take out some paper and ask yourself some questions. Once you have considered the potential problems of living without power, devise some solutions to lessen the impact of such an existence.

“Think about short and long-term periods at home, and then consider the impacts of distant places without power to really get a feel for what conditions you may be forced to endure.”

There are seven main areas of survival. How could a power outage affect you in a survival situation? What other problems can you identify?

Food:

Transportation from farmer through the food processing/delivery chain.
Refrigeration and preservation
Cooking and preparation
Will you be able to produce, preserve and prepare foods for safe consumption?

Water:

Municipal water systems inoperable
Sewers inoperable
Fire hydrants/extinguishing may not be available
Water quality, not safe to drink without treatment
Will you have water for the many needs of survival? Drinking, hygiene, medical, laundry, sanitation of surfaces, flushing, irrigation, animals?

Shelter:

Lighting, (candles are a major cause of house fires after a hurricane or power outage)
Appliances
Warmth
Cooling
Electric tools
Farm housing and animal care
Will your physical location be affected? Maintenance?

Safety / Health:

Medical machines
Drinking/hygiene/medical water quality concerns
Sanitation, cleaning/sewage
Medical supplies, pharmaceuticals
Access to care
Night visibility
What medical capabilities will be affected? Short/Long term?
Will you need medications?

Security:

Security systems may be down
Outdoor lighting inoperable
Automated systems offline
Will the outage affect your physical security plan?

Communication:

Computer systems down
Communication systems down. Ham, CB, data, voice, video
How will you communicate locally/distantly?

Energy:

Fuel may be unavailable for power generation and transportation at all levels
Nuclear power offline without cooling systems, even offline, the rods need to be cooled or they will meltdown
Grid may be down for extended period without replacement transformers. Power is needed to manufacture transformers. Some types take months to make and transport
Did the event damage your alternate energy equipment or plans?

In this case we will add transportation because it affects all the other areas of survival in some way. If there were an outage that disabled our mechanical way to move great distances, it would effectively shut down the economy on a grand scale, especially in this globalized and interconnected world.

The Moral of the story: Feel free to prepare as you see fit. Don’t let others make you feel foolish for thinking outside the box and having a contingency plan. Additionally, don’t be afraid to ask for help, this is all uncharted territory for a modern society.

Before leaving this post…You should know, it’s not just Washington DC that may be threatened, but our fleet, our allies, the lower 48. If enemy and potential enemy nations are planning to use their nuclear weapons specifically for an EMP attack, 1st World nations are not safe, continent wide destruction of electronic infrastructure could lead to 90% death rate within a year.

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Filed under News & Editorial

Tagged as crisis, ecology, EMP, energy, food, future, government, martial law, medical, precious metals, storage, war, water

Monday, January 20, 2014 · 12:10 AM

Senior citizen survival techniques

(Survival Manual/ Prepper articles/ Senior citizen survival techniques)

A. Survival of the Elderly and Disabled
19 Dec 2013, AmericanPreppersNetwork.com, by James C. Jones, EMT/CHCM
Pasted from: http://americanpreppersnetwork.com/2013/12/survival-elderly-disabled.html

The challenges of surviving a sustained catastrophic event for the elderly and the disabled are almost totally ignored by the “prepper” community. Survival recommendations and training are almost always directed at healthy, younger people who are at their maximum strength and health. Most preppers have or will have elderly parents or relations that may suffer from arthritis, heat disuse, COPD, and dementia at some point. My wife and I both lived in the inner city with disabled parents for decades. For us, evacuation was just out of the question. We were not going to abandon our responsibilities regardless of risk. A few years ago I participated in a FEMA sponsored workshop on community preparedness. We knew that there are people who need oxygen, chemotherapy, medications, dialysis and other treatments to survive more than a week or two. Even more are aged or crippled with MS and other diseases that prohibit them from accessing food and critical needs without aid. What we learned at that event was that there was little the emergency services could do for these folks under major disaster situations. It is estimated that the majority of those over 70 years of age and those who are functionally disabled or medically dependent will die within the first thirty-days of a full –scale national disaster. [This should be a fair warning and wake up call for us seniors…take steps to beat those odds and to help prepare your junior family members for what might come as a surprise event for them. Mr. Larry]

If you are among the elderly or disabled or anyone important to you is, you need to adjust your plans accordingly. If you have disabled parents, your whole survival plans are going to be limited and modified. Evacuation may be impossible. Rescue and defense may be the only option. Disabilities (yours or other) and handicaps will reduce your chances, but it does not mean that you are doomed. Realistic preparedness can provide a real chance for your survival regardless of conditions.

As we grow older (we all will) our capacity to carry loads for long distances is going to diminish. In addition to muscle loss we are more prone to illness and sensitive to temperature extremes. Heat diseases, COPD and arthritis may make any kind of “hiking” out of the question. If you are living alone or with an aged partner you have two options:

1) If you can move to a safer location away from the city and high populations do so.
2) have a plan to drive or be driven to a safer area well before situations get critical.

If these are not an option or unlikely, plan to shelter in place as best you can. That means having water, food, warmth, medications and self-protection that works for you in your conditions.
Fire is your biggest threat to in place survival. Can you use a fire extinguisher? You must have ways to escape a fire that works for you.
In the gravest extreme you still need to have some kind of evacuation pack. Even if you can only carry or drag 5 to 10 pounds it’s far better than nothing. A quart of water, medications, snacks, a flashlight a Space Blanket and a weapon will give you a big advantage.
If you can get a few hundred yards to some other shelter you have a chance. Some perfectly healthy people will die from unpreparedness and giving up. Some prepared and determined disabled folks will get through with a little luck and determination.

There are two classes of disability related to emergency situations. We have the cooperative, but disabled who will aid in their own care to whatever extent they can and the uncooperative who may have dementia, or are just in violent denial.

This last category is very difficult to help. They may fight your efforts and even sabotage your plans and equipment. Getting them to a care facility in advance is your best option, but keep in mind that many of these facilities were abandoned during hurricane Katrina and would be again. They have good plans for limited time and area disasters, but not for massive collapse events.
Otherwise, you are going to have to care for them as best you can while dealing with survival and defense priorities. The cooperative disabled may be able to aide significantly in their own preparations and survival actions depending on the extent of their problems. You must discuss these issues with them now.
Build up supplies of everything they need (as above) at their location and show them what to do. Give special attention to oxygen and critical medications they need. Have a plan to take them to safety or to your safe location ahead of an event. If possible make arrangements with neighbors for their care until you can get to them.

B. Prepping For Seniors
SurvivalBlog.com, by Retired Rev.
Pasted from: http://www.survivalblog.com/2013/06/prepping-for-seniors-by-retired-rev.html

I became aware of the need for prepping too late to have the advantages associated with youth. Seniors are already dealing with issues of declining physical prowess, declining health and a growing sense of mortality. To add prepping to the list of concerns seemed more than a bit overwhelming, but given the realities of our day, prepping slowly became an unavoidable necessity as I began to understand that the economic path on which our nation is traveling is clearly becoming unsustainable and is getting worse, not better.

There was also the additional concern – shared by preppers of any age – of convincing my dear wife that my fears were well-founded and that prepping was seriously necessary if we were to have a chance to survive TEOTWAWKI. So the first challenge to overcome when contemplating prepping as a senior is the same challenge as for younger preppers: Becoming convinced that there is serious trouble ahead that will likely destroy the support systems on which we have all become far too dependent.

For me, that reality began to come home to me as I watched the unfolding of the current administration’s agenda to abandon private enterprise as an economic model and move toward a more socialistic, European model. It still puzzles me that we can easily observe the disintegration of the economic well-being of European nations on our evening news broadcasts, and then decide to emulate them ourselves. Human nature is a strange thing! Regardless of the reasons, it became clear to me that there is no will to rectify the situation in Washington and that we are rushing pell-mell toward some sort of inevitable financial Armageddon. Therefore, the only reasonable path for me was to begin prepping in earnest despite my age of 66 years.

At first my wife was not open to the idea of prepping at all. Women don’t like their “nesting” instincts messed with and to assert that all that we have come to depend on (Social Security, pensions, health care systems, investments, and the like), might well come to an end in the reasonably near future, was and is very difficult for her to deal with. It was understandable. So, my initial efforts at raising her awareness consisted of providing a running commentary on the evening news. As things in Europe began to deteriorate into economic chaos, I would just point out that if we think that we are immune to such things here, we’d better think again! Then, when President Obama was re-elected for his second term, I turned to my wife and said, “Honey, I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable, but now we really do need to get serious about our prepping.” The economic mess that has been created was not going to be addressed by the Obama administration.

Reading was essential to my preparation for prepping. The first book that influenced me was 77 Days in September , by Ray Gorham. This was a tale of a man on a business trip to Houston whose plane crashed on take off due to an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the United States. It chronicled his trip walking home to northwest Montana, and was a primer to cultural breakdown. Additionally, I read James Wesley Rawles, Patriots, which served as a wealth of resources for prepping and was a whopping good story. I couldn’t get my wife to read either one because they were both just too scary, but they helped me get prepping into focus for my family and I.

Another influence in raising my awareness was information from a friend of mine who subscribes to Richard Maybury’s Early Warning Report (http://www.richardmaybury.com/). Mr. Maybury is a combination historian and economist whose writings are both eloquent and pointed respecting how history intersects with economics and whose writings were often the stuff of Ron Paul campaign speeches on the topics. The subscription to Maybury’s publication is a bit pricey, but worth the investment.

My wife was still not really on board (the contemplation of economic chaos was just too unpleasant to deal with for her), so I determined that I would begin prepping on my own simply because it is my responsibility to provide for my wife, (our daughter is grown and gone), whether or not she approved of my efforts and would willingly suffer whatever consequences may come from that.

As retired senior citizens, there are things to be considered in prepping that younger people don’t need to consider to the same degree. Living in the wilderness at a remote retreat simply isn’t as realistic an option for seniors no matter how tempting that choice may be. Health care needs especially come into play and the effort it takes for relocation to such locales is almost beyond our emotional and physical abilities. This was particularly complicated for us because after 40 years of married life, we had finally retired and moved to our retirement home in northern Colorado, near Fort Collins. We had often joked that the next box out of our house had better have one of us in it! So for us (and I believe for most senior citizens), prepping is a “bug in” proposition.

We have some things going for us in our location. We live in a small town of about 3,000 people. It is mostly a bedroom community for Fort Collins, Loveland, and Greeley, Colorado. Additionally, we are not next to I-25 but about several miles east of that major thoroughfare. We are about an hour north of Denver which is a cause for some concern, but are hopeful that most desperate refugees would turn west from I-25 toward Fort Collins rather than east toward the open prairies. Our community is likely small enough to get organized, but I don’t see that happening until the proverbial stuff hits the fan and they are forced to do so.

The problem with a bedroom community is that it doesn’t really see itself as a community to any great degree so it will be necessary to try to identify some like-minded folks prior to the collapse to form a cadre of leadership with which to offer our community some guidance whenever things “go south”. It will be a difficult place to defend as we sit out on the prairie with the usual mile section grids that come with that. Additionally, while some natural water sources are present, most are connected to irrigation canals, reservoirs, and the like, while the municipal water supply is connected to a water tower which requires electricity to pump water into it. Water is always a big issue when you live in the rain shadow of the Rockies. Therefore, I have begun to store water in larger quantities in house and garage.

With respect to food preparation, I have convinced my wife that having a year’s supply of food is just a practical thing to do if there is any chance that things could get rough – the Social Security and pension checks could stop coming, and the panic following an economic collapse might quickly empty the grocery store shelves. So I opted for a two-pronged approach.

1) First, there was the purchase of some long-term foods that stored essentially longer than I am likely to stay alive. Here I examined the “Mormon Four”: wheat, honey/sugar, dry milk, and salt. These were basic staples that may not be all that tasty, would keep us alive and I wouldn’t need to worry about expiration dates except for the dry milk. There are some local grain elevators near us who sell wheat in bulk, but the grain has not been thoroughly cleaned and my wife wasn’t very excited about that. So the best source I could find for nice, clean wheat for the price was at http://www.store.lds.org. I am not a Mormon, but I do recognize that these folks likely know more about food storage than just about anyone out there. So 600 lbs. of wheat was ordered (hard red, and hard white) and stored away for safekeeping. Likewise, a hand grain mill was ordered. It will give you a workout, but it nicely converts wheat to useable flour. I purchased a Wonder Mill Jr., grain mill from http://www.onlygrainmills.com, and it works just fine. Additionally, quantities of salt, sugar/honey, and dry milk were purchased and stored in the usual white buckets, but since my wife can’t open the usual plastic lids on the buckets, I opted for splurging on some gamma lids that seal nicely, but unscrew for easy access. Arthritis takes it’s toll!

2) The second prong of my food preps involved the purchasing of food items from Sam’s Club, and the local grocery stores with emphasis being given to acquiring a year’s supply of such goods and using them on a first purchased, first eaten rotational basis. We built some storage closets in our basement, installed shelving, and stocked them full of goods paying attention, whenever possible, to finding items with extended expiration dates.

We have also planted three raised gardens in our back yard to produce as much produce on our own as we can and have purchased long-term, heritage seeds to keep for the future.

The next real life senior concern to be addressed was prescription drugs. Both my wife and I are on cholesterol statin drugs, and blood pressure medication as are nearly every elderly couple I know. What to do about that? Here I want to carefully evaluate how seriously we need these medications and seek to acquire a surplus of them. If possible I hope to convince my doctor to prescribe a year’s supply of these medications. If he refuses, then it is my plan to see how much of the medications I can take and still not see a significant jump in either my cholesterol “score” or my blood pressure. Perhaps I can take the meds every other day or every third day instead of daily and save the rest. Failing to succeed in those efforts means that when things get serious and no further prescriptions can be obtained, then I will take whatever prescription medications I have and cut them in half. Then I will take half of those cut in half, and cut them in half again. The object is to wean myself off of them gradually rather than take them as prescribed and then stop cold turkey. Blood pressure medications and cholesterol drugs are preventative meds, thus, it simply may become necessary to let things play out as they will if they become unavailable.

In addition to medications, the elderly need to consider establishing a circle of friends and/or family who live in close proximity. Eventually, us old folks get so old that we just can’t get things done on our own. I’ve walked through these things with my own parents so I know what I am speaking about first hand. Aging is simply one of the most challenging aspects of life and there is no such thing as the “Golden Years”. Death does not scare me nor does it frighten my wife. We are Christian people (I am a retired Lutheran pastor), and we know exactly where we are headed when we die and frankly can’t wait to make the trip! What doesn’t excite us is the process of dying. If we end up in a situation in which the usual artificial supports (medications, hospitals, doctors, and such) are not available, we know that we will die sooner rather than later. If that is the case, then so be it! The cadre of family and/or friends nearby is simply what people have always done in the past to care for those who can’t care for themselves until they go home to be with the Lord.

Older people are not just a drag on others, however. We have an array of skills, knowledge, and understanding of an age when electronics didn’t even exist, when we burned our own trash in the back yard, and by and large took care of ourselves and others without the government having much to say about it. Those are precisely the skills that communities that are cooperating in surviving need to know. Additionally, there is a difference between being older and being decrepit. I am old, not decrepit. I can work a full day, shoot straight, and think clearly. Until the day comes when such things are no longer possible for me, then I can be a productive member of any survival community.

With preppers of every age, however, I hope and pray daily that all of this preparation isn’t needed. However, I will continue to be ready just in case it is.

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Filed under Prepper articles, Survival Manual

Tagged as crisis, ecology, EMP, famine, future, government, medical

Monday, November 25, 2013 · 12:10 AM

Personal documents

(Manual/ Prepper Articles/ Personal documents)

A. How to Create an In-Case-of-Emergency Everything Document to Keep Your Loved Ones Informed if Worst Comes to Worst
30 June 2011, lifehacker.com, by Melanie Pinola
Pasted from: http://lifehacker.com/5817021/in-case-of-emergency-how-to-organize-your-important-records-in-a-master-information-kit
If you were hit by a bus today or were otherwise incapacitated, would your loved ones be able to quickly locate your important information or know how to handle your affairs? Many of us have a great handle on our finances, but our record keeping systems might not be obvious to family members or friends who might need immediate access to them in times of emergency. Here’s a step-by-step guide to organizing your vital information so it can be conveniently and safely accessed when needed.

The Goal: A Master Document or Folder with All Your Important Information
Perhaps the easiest method for creating a centralized document or set of files would be creating a Google Spreadsheet that you could share with your family and friends and keep updated regularly. We’ve created a basic Master Information Kit template just for this purpose, see above and copy from: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AurQ-1EcaNVWdERYNFoyazJLYXpqSGRvN1lxeE1Gb2c&authkey=CIW485gI&hl=en_US&authkey=CIW485gI#gid=0.
pdocs info kit

[Master Information Kit template]

The spreadsheet includes prompts for the information below, but you can customize it for your particular needs. To use the template for yourself, in Google Docs go to File > Make a copy… to save it to your Google account (make sure your version of the document’s sharing settings go back to the default “Private”).

Update: Due to high traffic to the template, Google Docs is only showing it in list view, making it impossible to copy. This zipped file has downloadable versions in PDF, XLS, and ODS formats. You can still import these into your Google Docs account.

There are really only a few steps to setting this organizer up: gathering your records, securely sharing them, and keeping them updated. Follow along and you’ll have your kit set up in no time—and a little extra peace of mind.

Step 1: Gather Your Vital Records to Keep in the Master Information Kit
The most important personal records:
First, there are a few documents that you obviously should keep in a secured location (a fire safe or safe deposit box):

Social Security card
Birth certificate
Passport
Any other official, hard-to-replace documents
Scan these items so you can have a digital record of them as well. If you encrypt the digital files, e.g., with one of our favorite encryption tools TrueCrypt, and you can even upload them to Google Docs and share the files with your loved ones (make a note of them in the spreadsheet). See encryption file discussion at: http://lifehacker.com/5679777/best-file-encryption-tool-truecrypt

You’ll also want to add to your emergency records kit:

Contact information: Both your contact information and your emergency contacts’ info. This includes your nearest relatives, your will executor(s), and employers.
Will and medical directives: Add a copy of your will/living trust and medical letter of instructions (keep the originals with your legal representative). You can upload a PDF file to Google Docs for this purpose.
Insurance: Homeowners, auto, medical, life, disability, and other insurance agents/brokers contact info and policy numbers
Financial accounts: Bank, investment, and credit card/loan accounts information, including institution names, phone numbers, and account numbers
Health records: Immunization records, allergies, dietary restrictions, medications, medical/surgical treatments
Pet information: Description of each pet, vet contact information, and any important medical notes
Property: Car information, home purchase papers/deeds, and other home inventory items.

Again, adjust for your relevant information. Our Master Information Kit spreadsheet includes individual sheets for most of these pieces of information, so just make a copy of the sheet (File > Make a Copy) and start filling it out, in section at a time.

Step 2: Export Your Accounts Information
Account Passwords: For login information to important accounts, it’s best not to store your logins in an online document like this. Instead you can export your logins from password managers like Keepass, LastPass, or 1Password to a CSV file and then encrypt it so it can be shared securely. Our spreadsheet template includes a sheet specifically for describing your method of storing these files—the location of your vital documents, and any passwords needed to locate them.

Step 3: Share Your Master Information Kit and Vital Documents
The Google Docs spreadsheet is easy to share. Once you’ve filled out your version of the spreadsheet, click on the Share button and you can email people who you want to be able to view or edit the document. (Think people who you’d also consider emergency contacts.)

For your encrypted files, like the logins mentioned above, you could upload them in Google Docs, store on an encrypted USB thumb drive, or use something like Dropbox. Give the recipients your encryption password but for security reasons, only let them write down a hint to the password. E.g., vacation spot 2010 + pet bday + myfavoritesinger’smiddlename. Also, if you use Dropbox, make sure you encrypt sensitive information first. An encrypted zip file seems an ideal solution.

Step 4. Regularly Update Your Everything Document
You’ll need to update your files/master records book when you update your accounts.
Like setting up an emergency plan or a 72-hour emergency kit, this master information kit will need to be reevaluated regularly—consider doing so at least yearly (e.g., at tax time, when you’re already looking at all your accounts) or, better yet, quarterly.

Set up a reminder on your calendar so you won’t forget. When you get your reminder, don’t wait—just quickly look over the items in your document and if anything has changed, update it. If not, you’ve only lost a couple of minutes of your day toward a very good end.

More Resources for Creating a Master Information Kit
If you’re a Quicken user, for example, you may have access to Emergency Records Organizer built into the program, which can compile your emergency documents for you, based on the info you put in Quicken. It should be in the “Property & Debt” menu or you might find the program under your Quicken folder under Program Files.

Erik Dewey’s free Big Book of Everything is a very thorough organizer for all your affairs, with placeholders for you to record your bank accounts, insurance policies, tax records, and more. The 44-page Big Book of Everything is available in PDF or Excel format. See and download from: http://www.erikdewey.com/bigbook.htm

There are also a few personal documents organizers in dead-tree version, like For the Record with the same purpose, in case you want pre-printed book. See at: http://www.amazon.com/Record-Personal-Facts-Document-Organizer/dp/1589850580/?ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309395730&sr=1-7&tag=gmgamzn-20

Our Master Information Kit template (listed above) is a simplified version for the most essential information and with an eye towards sharing on Google Docs (or downloading and saving).

Whichever method you choose, having all your vital information in one easily accessible place can be comforting, for both you and your loved ones.

B. Why you should pack a Survival Flash Drive
Survival Cache.com,
Pasted from: http://survivalcache.com/survival-flash-drive/

When we think of survival scenarios we don’t often think of packing important documents: Drivers License, Handgun Carry Permit, Passport etc. However, I think this is a bad idea, and here’s why you should pack a survival flash drive in your Bug Out Bag.

Consider Your Odds
First, the chances of you finding yourself in a regional survival situation, such as Katrina or Haiti, are much greater than an end of the world scenario.
So let’s assume you were in an area-wide situation, had to bug out, and all of your stuff that’s not on your back got destroyed.

Fear the Bureaucrats
So you made it out, but with all your stuff gone you might not have any of your important documents with you. While that doesn’t really seem important compared to your life, the years worth of red tape and bureaucratic paperwork that we call a government doesn’t care. In fact, at that point you are a non-person.

How do they know you are who you say you are? You have no proof of identification and a terrorist attack just destroyed your city. How do we know you aren’t the terrorist? (After all you had an escape plan prepared)
While this may sound ridiculous, given the nature of our government these days it’s really not that farfetched.

Survival Flash Drive
To prepare for a localized survival scenario in which you will eventually have to re-enter regular society make it much easier on yourself and back-up your most important documents ahead of time.

All you have to do is buy a cheap USB flash drive, (or a waterproof one) scan all of your important documents, and store them on your flash drive in your Bug Out Bag. Bug Out and you’ve brought your all important “life on paper” with you. You can also keep this USB in a element proof bag like a Loksak Bag.

*Don’t go buy a scanner if you don’t have one, just take the stuff to Kinkos or Office Max and have them scan it all for you.

** Warning: Modern Copy Machine and Scanners have an internal Hard Drive that keep a digital copy of everything they scan. All it takes is one malicious worker at the store to steal your identity. If at all possible find a private copy machine and scanner.

What to put on your Flash Drive

Driver’s License
Handgun Carry Permit
Passport
Bank Account Documents
Birth Certificate
Social Security Card
Insurance Information
Marriage Certificate
All of the above for all Children
Important Family Pictures

Be extremely careful keeping up with your Survival Flash drive, back in the regular world that is your identity.

C. The Most Critical Survival Tool
10 Feb 2011, Bug Out Bag Quest, by Lee
Pasted from; http://www.bugoutbagquest.com/2011/02/most-critical-survival-tool.html

I’m often asked by readers: “What’s the most valuable survival tool?” At the risk of offending many people, I’ll share my answer with all of you: It’s not a gun, or a knife, or a way to start a fire, or any of the other macho answers – it’s an iPhone. An iPhone (or similarly featured smart phone) is the only tool that is useful in every type of emergency or survival scenario:

1. Car in the ditch? Call for help.
2. General emergency? Contact your family.
3. Bugout situation? Let your family know your plans.
4. On foot in a bugout situation in unfamiliar territory? Use the phone’s GPS and maps.
5. Want to carry critical personal documents? Store them encrypted in the phone.
6. Need to document what’s happening around you? Use the phone’s HD movie or still camera.
7. Need to be rescued from an unknown location and have cell signal? Take a picture of your surroundings and mail it, complete with geotag.
8. Need your survival library? You can carry 10,000 books with you.
9. Want all this and more for very light weight? You got it – the iPhone is basically a computer that you can put in your pocket.
10. Worried about running out of juice? No problem – the phone can quickly charge from AC, DC, or solar, and will hold a charge on standby for days.

This phone can satisfy all of your communication needs except for a grid-down situation. It can store all of your documents. It can navigate. It is sturdy. It gets my vote as the most valuable survival tool because it is the most versatile survival tool.

D. Replacing Your Important Papers
5 November 2013, Fema.gov, Release Number: NR-084
Pasted from: http://www.fema.gov/news-release/2013/11/05/replacing-your-important-papers

DENVER – Not only were Colorado homes damaged by the recent severe storms, flooding, landslides or mudslides, but many survivors also lost valuable personal documents. The documents include everything from Social Security cards to driver licenses to credit cards.

The following is a partial list of ways to get duplicates of destroyed or missing documents:

Birth and Death Certificates – Birth and death certificates can be replaced by visiting your county vital records office or on line http://go.usa.gov/DFbw

Marriage Certificates – The online link for replacement of marriage certificates is http://go.usa.gov/DFbw

Marriage Dissolutions (divorces) – The online link for divorce decree replacements is http://go.usa.gov/DFbw

Adoption Decrees – The Colorado District Courts link for adoption records – if the adoption was finalized in Colorado – is http://go.usa.gov/DFbw

Immigration Documents – Contact your county office or the site below for citizenship, immigration, permanent resident card (green card), employment authorization, re-entry permit and more. uscis.gov

Driver Licenses – Visit any Colorado driver license office with acceptable identification and proof of address. Fee required.

Vehicle Registration, License Tab or Title – Contact your county motor vehicle office. You will need proof of insurance and Colorado vehicle emissions. Fees administered by county. http://tinyurl.com/m2hchyh

Passport – Complete form DS-64 from http://tinyurl.com/ld6z28k

Military Records – Request Standard Form 180 (SF-180) from any office of the Veterans Administration, American Legion, VFW or Red Cross, or download from http://tinyurl.com/lnu2pmt

Mortgage Papers – Contact your lending institution

Property Deeds – Contact the recorder’s office in the county where the property is located

Insurance Policies – Contact the insurance company for replacement papers

Social Security Card – Go to a Social Security Administration office. You also can request a copy of your Social Security statement online http://www.ssa.gov

Transcript of Your Tax Return – Call nearest Treasury Department office, IRS office or 800-829-3646; request form 4506. To find your local IRS office, go to http://tinyurl.com/mvk5dvu

Savings Bonds/Notes – Complete Form PDF 1048 (Claim for Lost, Stolen or Destroyed U.S. Savings Bonds); available by calling 304-480-6112 or at http://www.treasurydirect.gov/forms/sav1048.pdf

Credit Cards – American Express, 800-528-4800; Discover, 800-347-2683; MasterCard, 800-622-7747; Visa, 800-847-2911

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Tagged as crisis, disaster, emergency, government, storage, war

Thursday, November 14, 2013 · 12:10 AM

Post Collapse: Eyewitness 2

(Survival Manual/ Prepper articles/ Post Collapse: Eyewitness 2)

This Is What Crisis Feels Like: A Personal Story: “It All Changed. Literally Within A Day…”
12 June 2013, SHTFplan.com, by Simon Black
Originally published by Simon Black at Sovereign Man.
Pasted from: http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/this-is-what-crisis-feels-like-a-personal-story-it-all-changed-literally-within-a-day_06122013

If you’re one of the 1,000+ subscribers who has take the trip down to Chile, you might have had the pleasure of meeting Marco, my right-hand man in Chile.
One of the great things about Marco is that he intuitively understands our Sovereign Man philosophy. Because he lived through it.
You see, Marco is originally from Argentina. And he has some extraordinary stories about what it’s like to live through a sovereign default and currency collapse.

From Marco:
“On December 1, 2001, Argentina’s economy was in trouble. Unemployment was high, debt was high, and recession had taken hold. But life was somewhat ‘normal’.

Basic services still functioned. And no one had to really worry about… food. Or water. Then it all changed. Literally within a day.

On December 2nd, our bankrupt government imposed measures that essentially froze everyone’s bank accounts. You can just imagine– one day having access to your funds, and the next day being completely cut off.

Within a matter of days, people were out in the streets doing battle with the police. The government soon defaulted on its debt, and the currency went into freefall.

I was doing some post-graduate work in Boston at the time. As a foreigner in the US, I wasn’t really able to work… so I was living on a tight budget from my savings.

Yet, overnight, I went from being able to pay my rent and living expenses to being completely cut off from my funds. I had nothing.

But when I spoke to my family back in Argentina, I realized that they had it even worse.

Everything became scarce. The electricity went out all the time. Even food on the grocery store shelves ran low. You would eat what you had available at home.

And in a way, food became a medium of exchange. Within just a few days, people went from having confidence in their currency to not trusting it at all. No one wanted to accept paper money anymore, especially for something as valuable as food.

And if they did, it would be at 2-3 times the normal price. With all of this unfolding, I flew back down to see my family.

My father called me and said he had stashed his life savings in US dollar cash in a bank safety deposit box. He needed my help getting it out.

When we arrived to the bank, there were thousands of people in the streets rioting. The police were there in paramilitary gear. It was so tense, we had to bribe someone just to get inside the bank.

Fortunately we were able to get access to the box. But… we had to walk 3 or 4 blocks to the car. It was half panic, half adrenaline rush walking past an angry crowd with my father’s life savings shoved down our pants.

Looking back, this was crazy. But at the time, it was the only way. Then came the even harder part– getting it out of the country.

We had friends who would take rowboats full of cash to neighboring Uruguay. But this was incredibly risky.

At the time, the only legitimate way to get money out of the country was buying ADRs (Argentine public companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange). And the only reason we were even able to do this was because we had the contacts.

But we got killed on the fees. The commission alone was 20%, and then, of course, the stocks we purchased took a dive.

So my father ended up losing about half of his savings trying to get it out of the country at the wrong time.

What’s funny is that we eventually ended up suing the government. They had destroyed everyone’s life savings, and even seized pensions as well.

The government dragged out the legal process for years, almost a decade. They were hoping that all the retirees who were suing them would simply die off, and the problem would go away.

Eventually, we won the case (along with thousands of others). But the judge gave the government a ‘suspended sentence’. So, no penalty.

There are so many more stories to tell about this… and fortunately I can laugh about it all now. But at the time, it was beyond stressful.

The best way I can describe it is despair. And this is really the worst emotion you can have. Because when you’re in a state of despair, you’re hopeless. It’s a terrible position to be in.

Life becomes hell because you do not know whether you are going to be able to put food on the table the next day.

And in such a state of despair, you’re not in a position to make good decisions. It’s all about survival.

Of course, we kept thinking, “why didn’t we see this coming? Why didn’t we do something sooner?”

If only we had moved some money out of the country before, or taken steps to safeguard his pension, life would have turned out much differently.

It’s like that old saying– better to be a year (or decade) too early than a day too late. Because one should never underestimate the speed with which things can unravel.

B. Why Most Disaster preparedness Experts have No Clue what the Hello They’re Talking About!
8 Aug 2013, OffGridSurvival.com, Posted by: Rob Richardson
Pasted from: http://offgridsurvival.com/disasterpreparednessexperts/

Emergency Preparedness Planners Are not Planning on Saving you during a Disaster!
I’ve talked to a number of these people over the years, and two thing always become glaringly obvious. First, these people usually despise anyone outside their Ivy League discussion groups – especially anyone who calls themselves a prepper. Second, they have no idea how to help people become better prepared, and many of them have no idea how to respond to an actual emergency.

Let’s briefly deal with the first point, because I believe they’re behavior is a huge problem – one that is likely to cost many lives.

Do Preppers deserve a bad rap?
It really depends on how you look at the situation. While I’ve been very critical of shows like Doomsday Preppers, I have met some of these people, and a lot of them are actually incredibly knowledgeable. Yes, some are only on these shows to exploit they’re 15 minutes of fame, but there are a great number of people who call themselves preppers that could be incredibly useful to the general public.

The problem comes in how the media, and shows like Doomsday Preppers, have chosen to portray these people. Instead of highlighting them in a way that can help better prepare the public, we often only here the word prepping when it’s tied to some psychopath who just killed a bunch of people.

Sadly, and something that leads me into my second point, is the fact that these “preppers” often have more practical knowledge than the emergency preparedness experts our government pays to do this for a living.

Emergency Preparedness… or just Useless Government Bureaucracy?
I’ve been to a number of emergency preparedness conferences and expos, and the one thing that bothers me the most, is how clueless most of these people are. While most of our first responders have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing, the bureaucrats – and the idiots who run agencies like FEMA – seem to have more interest in how they look than they do in saving the public from disasters.

Case and Point: Last year I attended an emergency preparedness summit that literally surprised the hell out of me. I went hoping to get a better idea of how emergency preparedness people plan for disasters, what I came away with was anything but helpful.

Conference after conference was devoted to things like social media, how to respond to the media, and how to basically cover their asses once they screwed something up. Hour after hour was devoted to discussions on how to respond to the media when things didn’t go as planned.

These people were literally reviewing case studies of all the times they screwed things up, and then talking about how they could have better handled the media backlash. I couldn’t believe it; instead of reviewing these screw ups, and then figuring out how to prevent them, they instead choose to figure out how they could better respond to media criticism. Government at its finest!

You are the only First Responder you can really count on!
A couple days ago, I wrote about my experience of watching someone get sucked under the water while attempting to swim across a cove I was fishing near. This experience, along with my experience at a number of emergency preparedness expos, has solidified my belief that you need to be your own first responder.

Whether it’s being prepared for future disasters, or being prepared to defend your home from intruders, the only person you can really count on is yourself. In most disasters timing is everything, and you simply cannot rely solely on emergency responders to keep you safe. You must be prepared to deal with emergency situations yourself, even if that’s just keeping things stable until emergency responders can respond.

You are the First Responder during an Emergency, and you need to keep that in mind going forward. It’s your responsibility to do everything you can to learn the skills, and the techniques you need to survive in an emergency situation.

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Filed under Prepper articles, Survival Manual

Tagged as crisis, depression, economy, food, future, government, investing, storage

Monday, November 11, 2013 · 12:10 AM

Post Collapse: Eyewitness 1

(Survival Manual/ Prepper articles/ Post Collapse: Eyewitness 1)

A. Real Life Account of Post-Collapse Argentina: Life in Post-Collapse Argentina, Oct. 2005
10 Feb 2013, Tech Prepper, originally Fernando Ferfal Aguirre author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” (see an image of book’s cover below)
Pasted from: http://www.techprepper.com/general/a-real-life-account-of-post-collapse-argentina/

The following is an account of a student in Argentina during their economic collapse (source: RapidTrends.com via @ShelfRelianceOH). This is the closest thing I’ve read to a “been there done that” guide to surviving TEOTWAWK (The End of the World As We Know It).

“My brother visited Argentina a few weeks ago. He’s been living in Spain for a few years now. Within the first week, he got sick, some kind of strong flu, even though the climate isn’t that cold and he took care of himself. Without a doubt he got sick because there are lots of new viruses in my country that can’t be found in 1st world countries. The misery and famine lead us to a situation where, even though you have food, shelter and health care, most others don’t, and therefore they get sick and spread the diseases all over the region.

What got me started on this post is the fact that I actually saw this coming, and posted on the subject here at Frugal’s, [frugalsquirrels.com] months before the new viruses spread over the country and the news started talking about this new health emergency, which proves that talking, thinking and sharing ideas with like-minded people (you guys), does help me to see things coming and prepare for them with enough time. So I started thinking about several issues, what I learned (either the hard way or thanks to this forum) after all these years of living in a collapsed country that is trying to get out an economical disaster and everything that comes along with it. Though my English is limited, I hope I’m able to transmit the main ideas and concepts, giving you a better image of what you may have to deal with some day, if the economy collapses in your country. Here is what I have so far:

URBAN OR COUNTRY?
Someone once asked me how did those that live in the country fare. If they were better off than city dwellers. As always there are no simple answers. Wish I could say country good, city bad, but I can’t, because if I have to be completely honest, and I intend to be so, there are some issues that have to be analyzed, especially security. Of course those that live in the country and have some land and animals were better prepared food-wise. No need to have several acres full of crops. A few fruit trees, some animals, such as chickens, cows and rabbits, and a small orchard were enough to be light years ahead of those in the cities. Chickens, eggs and rabbits would provide the proteins, a cow or two for milk and cheese, some vegetables and fruit plants covered the vegetable diet, some eggs or a rabbit could be traded for flour to make bread and pasta or sugar and salt.

Of course that there are exceptions, for example, some provinces up north have a desert climate, and it almost never rains. It is almost impossible to live off the land, and animals require food and water you have to buy. Those guys had it bad; no wonder the northern provinces suffer the most in my country. Those that live in cities, well they have to manage as they can. Since food prices went up about 200%-300%. People would cut expenses wherever they could so they could buy food. Some ate whatever they could; they hunted birds or ate street dogs and cats, others starved. When it comes to food, cities suck in a crisis. It is usually the lack of food or the impossibility to acquire it that starts the rioting and looting when TSHTF.

When it comes to security things get even more complicated. Forget about shooting those that mean you harm from 300 yards away with your MBR [main battle rifle]. Leave that notion to armchair commandos and 12 year old kids that pretend to be grown ups on the internet.

Some facts:

Those that want to harm you/steal from you don’t come with a pirate flag waving over their heads.
Neither do they start shooting at you 200 yards away.
They won’t come riding loud bikes or dressed with their orange, convict just escaped from prison jump suits, so that you can identify them the better. Nor do they all wear chains around their necks and leather jackets. If I had a dollar for each time a person that got robbed told me “They looked like NORMAL people, dressed better than we are”, honestly, I would have enough money for a nice gun. There are exceptions, but don’t expect them to dress like in the movies.
A man with a wife and two or three kids can’t set up a watch. I don’t care if you are SEAL, SWAT or John Freaking Rambo, no 6th sense is going to tell you that there is a guy pointing a gun at your back when you are trying to fix the water pump that just broke, or carrying a big heavy bag of dried beans you bought that morning.

The best alarm system anyone can have on a farm are dogs. But dogs can get killed and poisoned. A friend of mine had all four dogs poisoned on his farm one night, they all died. After all these years I learned that even though the person that lives out in the country is safer when it comes to small time robberies, that same person is more exposed to extremely violent home robberies. Criminals know that they are isolated and their feeling of invulnerability is boosted. When they assault a country home or farm, they will usually stay there for hours or days torturing the owners. I heard it all: women and children getting raped, people tied to the beds and tortured with electricity, beatings, burned with acetylene torches. Big cities aren’t much safer for the survivalist that decides to stay in the city. He will have to face express kidnappings, robberies, and pretty much risking getting shot for what’s in his pockets or even his clothes.

So, where to go? The concrete jungle is dangerous and so is living away from it all, on your own. The solution is to stay away from the cities but in groups, either by living in a small town-community or sub division, or if you have friends or family that think as you do, form your own small community. Some may think that having neighbors within “shouting” distance means losing your privacy and freedom, but it’s a price that you have to pay if you want to have someone to help you if you ever need it. To those that believe that they will never need help from anyone because they will always have their rifle at hand, checking the horizon with their scope every five minutes and a first aid kit on their back packs at all times…. Grow up.

SERVICES
What ever sort of scenario you are dealing with, services are more than likely to either suffer in quality or disappear all together. Think ahead of time; analyze possible SHTF scenarios and which service should be affected by it in your area. Think about the most likely scenario but also think outside the box. What’s more likely? A tornado? But a terrorist attack isn’t as crazy as you though it would be a few years ago, is it?

Also analyze the consequences of those services going down. If there is no power then you need to do something about all that meat you have in the fridge, you can dry it or can it. Think about the supplies you would need for these tasks before you actually need them. You have a complete guide on how to prepare the meat on you computer… how will you get it out of there if there is no power? Print everything that you consider important.

WATER
No one can last too long without water. The urban survivalist may find that the water is of poor quality, in which case he can make good use of a water filter, or that there is no water available at all. When this happens, a large city were millions live will run out of bottled water within minutes. In my case, tap water isn’t very good. I can see black little particles and some other stuff that looks like dead algae. Taste isn’t that bad. Not good but I know that there are parts of the country where it is much worse. To be honest, a high percentage of the country has no potable water at all.

If you can build a well, do so, set it as your top of the list priority as a survivalist.
Water comes before firearms, medicines and even food. Save as much water as you can. Use plastic bottles, refill soda bottles and place them in a cool place, preferably inside a black garbage bag to protect it from sun light. The water will pick some plastic taste after a few months, but water that tastes a little like plastic is far way better than no water at all. What ever the kind of SHTF scenario you are dealing with, water will suffer.

In my case the economical crash created problems with the water company, that reduces the maintenance and quality in order to reduce costs and keep their income in spite of the high prices they have to pay for supplies and equipment, most of which comes from abroad, and after the 2001 crash, costs 3 times more. As always, the little guy gets to pay for it. Same would go for floods or chemical or biological attacks. Water requires delicate care and it will suffer when TSHTF in one way or another. In this case, when you still have tap water, a quality filter is in order, as well as a pump if you can have one. A manual pump would be ideal as well if possible. Estimate that you need a approximately a gallon per person per day. Try to have at least two-four weeks worth of water. More would be preferable.

POWER
I spent WAY to much time without power for my own taste. Power has always been a problem in my country, even before the 2001 crisis. The real problem starts when you spend more than just a few hours without light. Just after the SHTF in 2001 half the country went without power for 3 days. Buenos Aires was one big dark grave. People got caught on elevators, food rots; hospitals that only had a few hours worth of fuel for their generators ran out of power. Without power, days get to be a lot shorter. Once the sun sets there is not much you can do. I read under candle light and flashlight light and your head starts to hurt after a while. You can work around the house a little bit but only as long as you don’t need power tools. Crime also increases once the lights go out, so whenever you have to go somewhere in a black out, carry the flashlight on one hand and a handgun on the other.

Summarizing, being in a city without light turn to be depressing after a while. I spent my share of nights, alone, listening to the radio, eating canned food and cleaning my guns under the light of my LED head lamp. Then I got married, had a son, and found out that when you have loved ones around you black outs are not as bad. The point is that family helps morale on these situations.
A note on flashlights. Have two or three head LED lights. They are not expensive and are worth their weight in gold. A powerful flashlight is necessary, something like a big Maglite or better yet a SureFire, especially when you have to check your property for intruders. But for more mundane stuff like preparing food, going to the toilet or doing stuff around the house, the LED headlamp is priceless. Try washing the dishes on the dark while holding a 60 lumen flashlight on one hand and you’ll know what I mean. LEDs also have the advantage of lasting for almost an entire week of continuous use and the light bulb lasts forever. Rechargeable batteries are a must or else you’ll end up broke if lights go out often. Have a healthy amount of spare quality batteries and try to standardize as much as you can. I have 12 Samsung NM 2500Mh AA and 8 AAA 800mh for the headlamps. I use D cell plastic adaptors in order to use AA batteries on my 3 D cell Maglite. This turned out to work quite well, better than I expected. I also keep about 2 or 3 packs of regular, Duracell batteries just in case. These are supposed to expire around 2012, so I can forget about them until I need them. Rechargeable NM batteries have the disadvantage of loosing power after a period of time, so keep regular batteries as well and check the rechargeable ones every once in a while.

After all these years of problems with power, what two items I would love to have?

The obvious. A generator. I carried my fridge food to my parent’s house way to many times on the past. Too bad I can’t afford one right now.
A battery charger that has both solar panel and a small crank. They are not available here. I saw that they are relatively inexpensive in the USA. Do yourself a favor and get one or two of these. Even if they don’t charge as well as regular ones, I’m sure it will put out enough power to charge batteries for LED lamps at least.

GAS (Propane and natural gas)
Gas has decreased in quality as well, there is little gas. Try to have an electric oven in case you have to do without it. If both electricity and gas go down, one of those camping stoves can work as well, if you keep a good supply of gas cans. The ones that work with liquid fuel seem to be better on the long run, since they can use different types of fuel. You can only store a limited amount of compressed gas and once you ran out of it, you are on your own if stores are closed of they sold them out. Anyway, a city that goes without gas and light for more than two weeks is a death trap, get out of there before it’s too late.

A DIFFERENT MENTALITY
I was watching the People & Art channel with my wife the other night. It was a show where they film a couple for a given period of time and some people vote on who is the one with the worst habits, the one they find more annoying. We were in our bed, and this is when I usually fall asleep but since the guy was a firearms police instructor I was interested and managed to stay awake. At one point the guy’s wife said that she found annoying that her husband spent 500 dollars a month on beauty products for himself. 500 USD on facial cream, special shampoo and conditioner, as well as having his nails polished! If you are that guy and happen to be reading this, or if you know him, I’m sorry, but what an idiot!! “500 USD, that’s a small generator or a gun and a few boxes of ammo” I told my wife. “That’s two months worth of food” she said. We were each thinking of a practical use for that money, the money this guy was practically throwing away. Once the SHTF, money is no longer measured in money, but you start seeing it as the necessary goods it can buy. Stuff like food, medicine, gas, or the private medical service bill. To me, spending 500 dollars on beauty products, and to make it worse, on a guy? That’s simply not acceptable. The way I see it, someone with that mentality can’t survive a week without a credit card, no use in even considering a SHTF scenario.

And this guy is a firearms instructor?… probably the kind of guy that will say that a handgun is only used to fight his way to his rifle… and his facial night cream…
Once you experience the lack of stuff you took for granted, like food , medicines, your set of priorities change all of a sudden. For example, I had two wisdom teeth removed last year. On both occasions I was prescribed with antibiotics and strong Ibuprofen for the pain. I took the antibiotics (though I did buy two boxes with the same prescription just to keep one box just in case) but I didn’t use the Ibuprofen, I added it to my pile of medicines. Why? Because medicines are not always available and I’m not sure if they will be available in the future. Sure, it hurt like hell, but pain alone isn’t going to kill you, so I sucked it up. Good for building up character if you ask me.

Make sacrifices so as to ensure a better future, that’s the mentality you should have if you want to be prepared. There’s stuff that is “nice to have” that has to be sacrificed to get the indispensable stuff. There’s stuff that is not “basic need stuff” but it’s also important in one way or another. My wife goes to the hairdresser once every month or two. It’s not life or death, but it does make her feel better and it boosts her morale.

I buy a game for the Xbox or a movie to watch with my wife every once in awhile, just to relax. 7 or 10 dollars a month are not going to burn a hole in my pocket. Addictions such as alcohol, drugs or even cigarettes should be avoided by the survivalist. They are bad for your health; cost a lot of money that could be much better spent, and create an addiction to something that may not be available in the future. Who will have to tolerate your grouchy mood when your brand of smokes is no longer imported after TSHTF?

PART II: URBAN SURVIVAL

GRAY/BLACK MARKET
Once the SHTF the black/gray market will take no time to appear all around you.
In my country, gray markets were even accepted in the end. At first it was all about trading skills or craft products for food. Districts and towns would form their own barter markets, and created their own tickets, similar to money, that was used to trade.
This didn’t last long. Those tickets were easy to make on your home computer, there was no control and eventually people went back to paper money.

These markets were usually placed on warehouses or empty land, and were managed by some wise guy and a few thugs or hired security. Anyone can go rent a kiosk inside these markets for about 50-100 pesos (about 20-30 dollars) a day and sell his goods and services. Peace within these markets is usually respected… lets just say that these managers don’t call the police if someone tries anything funny, like stealing, fighting or taking advantage of women. That’s not good for their business and anyone that tries to mess with their business finds out how much pain the human body can actually experience or gets a free ticket to meet the Lord. Sometimes even uniformed cops manage security on these markets, for a small fee of course. As always, you still have to be careful. They may still try to pick your pockets or even attack you once you leave the market. Once you leave the market, you are on your own, as always.

These markets evolved and now a lot of different products are available. Today I visited my local market, a warehouse that is fairly well set up and cleanly managed. They had problems for selling stolen merchandise and fake brand name clothes a few days ago.

What can be found at the local markets? Mostly food and clothing. Some have more variety than others but cheese, canned food, spices, honey, eggs, fruits, vegetables, beer, wine and cured meat are generally available, same as bakery products and pasta. These are less expensive than those found at supermarkets. Fresh fish is sometimes available but not always, people don’t trust many products that need refrigeration, and they get those at supermarkets instead.

Clothes are also popular and you can find copies of brand name clothes, imitations, or even original stolen new clothes, the same goes for shoes and sneakers. Children clothes, underwear, socks, sheets and towels are all very popular. Some sell toys, but they are always China made, mostly poor quality though there are some few exceptions. Others sell tools, also made in China can be found as well, but they are of poor quality. Some offer their services and repair stuff or offer work as handyman.

You would be amazed of the junk that these guys manage to fix: TVs, CD players, Power tools, etc. They even manage to solder the small integrated circuits boards sometimes. Give one of these guys a screw driver and a bar of chocolate and he will fix a nuclear submarine.

After food and clothes, the 3rd most popular item has to be CDs and DVDs, movies, music, play station 2 and Xbox games, programs, it all ends up there just one or two days after the official release in USA. Seems that they have a guy hidden under Bill Gate’s desk or something. Anyway, almost everything can be found there, and if you want, you can ask around, talk to the right guy and buy illegal stuff like drugs or black market guns and ammo. The quality of the drugs is questionable, of course, and a lot of addicts die from the mixtures these guys sell.

Guns are mostly FN High Powers, Surplus 1911s and Colt .45s, Sistemas, and old Colt Detective revolvers in 38 special that found their way from police and military armories into the black market. Condition isn’t very good but if you have money you’ll be amazed of what you can end up with. Everything that is used by the military and police, including SMGs a, Browning 50 BMG Machine guns, and even frag grenades, is available in the black market, if the customer has the amount of money and a little patience, of course. The big guns may take a while, but the handguns and grenades are readily available.

GOLD!!
Someone hit me in the head please because I messed up about the gold issue.
Everyone wants to buy gold! “I buy gold. Pay cash” signs are everywhere, even on TV! I can’t believe I’m that silly! I just didn’t relate it to what I read here because they deal with junk gold, like jewelry, either stolen or sold because they needed the money, not the gold coins that you guys talk about. No one pays for the true value of the stuff, so big WARNING! Sign on people that are buying gold coins. Since it is impossible to determine the true mineral percentage of gold, small shops and dealers will pay for it as regular jewelry gold. What I would do if I were you: Besides gold coins, buy a lot of small gold rings and other jewelry. They should be less expensive than gold coins, and if the SHTF bad, you won’t be losing money, selling premium quality gold coins for the price of junk gold. If I could travel back in time, I’d buy a small bag of gold rings. Small time thieves will snatch gold chains right out of your neck and sell them at these small dealers found everywhere. This is VERY common at train stations, subways and other crowded areas.

So, my advice, if you are preparing for a small economical crisis, gold coins make sense. You will keep the value of the stuff and be able to sell it for its actual cost to gold dealers or maybe other survivalists that know the true value of them. In my case, gold coins would have been an excellent investment, saving me from losing money when the local economy crashed. Even though things are bad, I can go to a bank down town and get paid for what a gold coin is truly worth, same goes for pure silver. But where I live, in my local area small time dealers will only pay you the value of junk gold, no matter what kind of gold you have. So, I’d have to say that if TSHTF bad, gold jewelry is a better trade item than gold coins.
.

PART III: GUNS, AMMO AND OTHER GEAR

After TSHTF in 2001, only the most narrow minded, brain washed, butterfly IQ level idiots believed that the police would protect them from the crime wave that followed the collapse of our economy. A lot of people that could have been considered antigun before, ran to the gun shops, seeking advice on how to defend themselves and their families. They would buy a 38 revolver, a box of ammo, and leave it in the closet, probably believing that it would magically protect them from intruders.

Oh, maybe you don’t think that firearms are really necessary or your beliefs do not allow you to buy a tool designed to kill people. So you probably ask yourself, is a gun really necessary when TSHTF? Will it truly make a difference? Having gone through a SHTF scenario myself, total economical collapse in the year 2001, and still dealing with the consequences, 5 years later, I feel I can answer that question. YES, you need a gun, pepper spray, a machete, a battle axe, club with a rusty nail sticking out of it, or whatever weapon you can get hold of.
A LOT has been written on survival weapons. Everyone that is into armed survival has his or her own idea of the ideal gun battery. Some more oriented to a hunting point of view, others only as self defense means and others consider a little of both, and look for general purpose weapons. Talking about guns, there is one special subject I want to rectify, and it’s the point on what’s the primary weapon for the survivalist, specially a urban survivalist that has to function in a society, yes, even after the SHTF.

The primary defensive weapon for the survivalist is his HANDGUN. It’s the weapon that stays with him when he is doing his business around town of working on the field. The survivalist IS NOT a soldier, even though you are a soldier or you once were the meanest mother on the battlefield, your home town is not a battlefield and it won’t be, even if the SHTF. A LOT of water has to go under the bridge until the situation gets to a point where you can calmly walk down the street with a rifle on your shoulder. People, if you are interested in real world SHTF situation and you want to prepare for the real deal, then understand that this isn’t black or white. You wake up one day and listen on the radio that the economy collapsed and that the stock market closed indefinitely. What do you do? You still have to go to the office/work/whatever. Kiss the wife good bye and walk to the office with your AR across your back, or across your chest, Israeli style, ready to shoot? You won’t get far. Someone will shoot you or throw you in jail, or in a mental institution.

What I’m trying to explain, is that it’s ok to prepare for China invading your country, Germans and UN or Martians. That is the extreme, least likely worst case scenario.
There is an infinity spectrum of gray between the black and white. White being your average normal day and black being total TEOTWAWKI, lizard men invading the planet.
Rifles do have a place in the survivalist’s arsenal, and a very important one. But you have to understand that 90% of the time, the handgun will be the weapon you have available when you need one. You can’t compare to a trooper in Iraq that has his weapon with him at all times. I ask you how many soldiers do you know that keep wearing camouflage and toting their M4s around town when they return home?

What works for war does not work for the survivalist, especially the urban survivalist.
Even if you live in a retreat far from town, you have to work, don’t you? Or do you have employees that take care of all your mundane tasks, leaving you all day to keep watch with your rifle ready? A soldier is part of a huge machine; HIS job is to carry that rifle, while others take care of other needs. A survivalist, one that is not part of a large survivalist group, has no one to cover for him.

When a new guy looks for advice on what to get for defense, some will recommend a rifle or shotgun as a first defensive weapon.

Let’s say race riots start in this guy’s city. He still has to go to work every day. What is he supposed to do? Shove his pump shotgun in his pocket? A handgun, even though less powerful, can be used for home defense AND go with you wherever you need to go. If the place floods, he can still hop into an evacuation boat without leaving his weapon behind. I’m sure no rescue team will pick you if you are carrying a long arm. They’ll ask you to leave it behind for sure. What if your government, realizing that TSHTF and that they lost control of the events, bans all firearms indefinitely? Don’t know about you, but if things are that bad, I’d like to be armed. You can hide a handgun under a jacket. You can’t hide a long arm under your clothes.
I think it was Clint Smith who said that the handgun is only to be used to fight his way to his rifle. Man! That sounds “macho”. I’d love to see him walking into Walmart with his tactical M4, taking the subway, visiting the doctor or going to the bank. “Over here Mr. Smith, you can hang you M4 right next to my coat” I don’t think so. Guys, unless you have your own shooting school, you do not get to carry your rifle to work.

OK, now that I got that out of my chest lets look at some options.
Handguns: Revolver or Pistol? Pistol ALL THE WAY! Yes, I saw the video of the guy that accurately emptied his S&W in ½ a second. I also saw the shooting range and the crowd behind him, watching the event. Can he shoot and reload that way if he is in his car, driving with one hand and shooting with the other, while a bunch of scum bags in another car are shooting at him? Hey, maybe he can. I know I can’t. Can you?

Generally speaking, the revolver is more difficult to master than the pistol. The double action is hard and it affects speed and accuracy. It can be done, but I found that pistols are easier, as did many shooters. Also, even though they seem to be more simple, revolvers are not as rugged as service pistols, the mechanism that cycles the cylinder and cocks the hammer is both complicated and fragile compared to auto pistols.

Before anyone starts casting evil voodoo spells at me for insulting their prized S&W or Ruger: I own revolvers and like shooting them, I just don’t think they are the best option for self defense, and I see that everyone I talk to in my country who is worried about security as I am also chooses pistols. Quality pistols resist sand, mud and dirt in general better than revolvers, where a small pebble locked in the mechanism may render the revolver inoperable.
I personally had a problem with a new stainless steel Taurus Tracker .357 magnum. After shooting it a couple of times I reloaded it and shot all 7 rounds as fast as I could and when I tried to empty it, I found that the empties were stuck because they expanded because of the heat. I had to wait until the gun cooled a little so I could empty the gun. Stuff like this can get you killed, even more in a 7 round handgun.

I once saw a man walk into a gun store wanting to trade his 357 magnum revolver for a 9mm high capacity pistol. He said he was driving when thugs from another car started shooting at him. He was chased for a few blocks. He said that he pulled his revolver and started shooting at them, and ran out of ammo real fast. He wanted more capacity and fast reloading. I could not agree with him more. Some will consider this “Spray and pray”, thinking that all rounds should hit the target and if some don’t then it means that you need more time at the range. Those same people will tell you that they intend to use bolt action rifles as defensive rifles, making each shot count, without ever missing their target, one shot one kill. I don’t agree with this. One shot one kill is ok for snipers, but the survivalist should have other alternatives.

I don’t see anything wrong with shooting four or five rounds at a chasing car. If those rounds make them think twice about their intentions, they are rounds well spent in my book, even if they don’t kill the attacker. Suppressive fire is possible if you have a high capacity pistol. I wouldn’t doubt on using such a tactic if it serves my purposes, or if it buys me time to get out of there. Also keep in mind that criminals are cowards and therefore attack in groups. The survivalist should be able to face more than just one attacker. Getting into a gunfight with two or three armed men while packing a 6 round revolver is rather hard to deal with. A high capacity pistol can load about 15 or 19 rounds, and that can certainly make a difference in a gunfight where you are outnumbered.

A forensic doctor that used to live in my neighborhood got killed last year. He was ambushed when he exited a restaurant by 5 or 6 men. Even though they did kill him he managed to kill 4 of them and severely injure another. He shot regularly and carried a Glock .40. I’m sure he was lucky but I also think that his choice of weapon was also important in the outcome. If anyone is wondering, people in my country that are serious about self defense carry Glocks. Those that don’t have the money for a Glock carry Bersas, FN 9mm High Powers or 1911 surplus .45s. At first I wasn’t sure about the Bersa, but once I tried them I saw that they are very decent guns.

The caliber choice calls for endless debate and it is not my intention here. Lets just say that 9mm , 40S&W and 45ACP are the obvious choices. 40S&W seem to be the most adequate, both in FMJ and HP, while 9mm lacks some stopping power and hollow points should be used if possible. Though the 9mm lacks power compared to the 40S&W, it is more popular world wide, a factor to consider seriously when choosing a handgun for SHTF. Besides, 9mm can also be used in a number of carbines and SMG, another important fact to be considered.

SMGs and carbines chambered for 40S&W and .45 ACP are also available, but they at not nearly as popular as those chambered for 9mm. Whatever you choose keep 500 or better yet 1000 rounds of quality ammo for your handgun at all times. 100 rounds won’t last much if the crisis lasts long. Also consider that once the balloon goes up, governments tend to restrict guns and ammo.

Rifles
I previously stated that the urban survivalist will be using his handgun 90% of the time he needs to defend himself and family from attackers. I didn’t pull this figure out of thin air; it is quite accurate based on what happens here on daily basis, even a little optimistic. Cold harsh reality has shown us that most attacks occur when entering or exiting your home, when you are more vulnerable.

Almost no one is stupid enough to try to enter a barred house with armed occupants. Believe me people; the gene pool will clean itself rather fast once the SHTF. So, is a rifle necessary? Of course it is! There is still that 10%, and that 10% can still ruin your day. And this percentage sky rockets if you intend to use that same rifle for putting meat on the table. If you have to settle with just one rifle, go for a semi auto. Ideally you should have a bolt action one and a semi auto rifle. A bolt action and a semiautomatic 308 would make a nice combination.
Whatever you choose, try to keep it within military calibers and military weapons if possible.
It may seem that I have something against bolt rifles but I don’t. I think they are fantastic weapons, but I think that semi autos are much better fighting weapons. The idea of “picking them out” 300 meters away with your bolt rifle, as they come in a row blowing whistles and firing warning rounds is laughable at best. Bolt rifles do have advantages over semi autos, accuracy not being the most important one. Bolt rifles such as Mausers last forever and are harder than rocks, and THAT’S important. They are simple, easy to repair tools that will serve you (within their limitations of course) longer than any other weapon. For example, the coil spring on my Mauser 1891 safety broke into 3 separate parts, after almost 100 years of faithful service. I dug into my tool box and found a spring left over from a kitchen shelve door. I cut it approximately to the length of the previous spring, replaced it and the rifle was fixed. There are not many weapons that allow this. And it is a very valuable attribute once the SHTF and spare parts are no longer available.

Stick to common calibers, 223, 7.62×39mm, or 7,62×51 (308). 223 vs. 308? I’m not going there. If you prefer 223 because it has less recoil, it’s lighter, or you favor the AR rifle go ahead. If you think that 223 is more powerful than 7,62 sign up to Physics I.
Just remember what I said before, a survivalist is not a soldier serving in Iraq, and you don’t have the entire USMF to back you up. You are on your own. You are not going to pin your attackers down with a questionably effective round and wait until someone hits them with artillery.
About ARs… I wouldn’t trust my life to a rifle that has more versions than Rocky sequels… the way I see it, it means that the basic design was the problem and there is no solution. On AK … all has been said. The most popular rifle on the planet, and popular not because of politics, but because it works. It also fires an intermediate power, effective round, available world wide. SKS are also good, but I’d rather have removable magazines. Again, don’t use voodoo on me because I say I wouldn’t trust my life to a AR. If you keep your weapon clean, know its limitations and feel comfortable with it, go for it please. A couple of rounds of 223 will kill anyone just as well.
If you want a rifle that can do a little bit of everything relatively well, do yourself a favor and get either a M1A or a FAL in 7,62 (308) with a carbine length barrel. Preferably with a red dot scope and some kind of light mount. Leave full length barrels to hunters and bench rest shooters. Do your homework on both guns and you’ll see what I mean.

Choose 308 not because of the added range you can get out of it, but because of its power at all ranges, choose it because it turns cover into concealment. Think about all the possible cover material you can find in a city, like cars, trees, low walls and other structures. The 308 will go right through it, or destroy it after a few rounds. It’s a proven cartridge through out the years.
Shotguns.

Shotguns are good general purpose guns. The main advantage I see is the devastating stopping power and the ability to use special ammo, like slugs and less than lethal ammo. I’m not so sure about the role as an “inside house” gun. The muzzle blast is great and quick follow up are not easy, especially when adrenalin is pumping through your system or, even worse, when someone is shooting back at you.

Pistol caliber carbines and SMG.
If possible , I’d choose a SMG reduced to semi auto (only if necessary, of course, full auto selector is better if possible ) or other kind of short, small, pistol caliber carbine. The combination of a 9mm handgun and a 9mm carbine or SMG reduced to semi auto or full auto class III has lots of advantages in my book and is a fine combination.
Some think that full auto is a waste of ammo. I don’t think so, not if you know how to use your head, and use this feature wisely. If you can get a short barrel and collapsible stock, you’ll also have a weapon that can be hidden under a heavy coat. A red dot scope would enhance accuracy a lot. The advantage of having the same ammo for long and small arm is not to be taken lightly. From the logistical, survivalist point of you, this is one big thumbs up! Think about cowboys and Americans that lived in the west, they also knew the value of using the same ammo for rifle and handgun. They had single action handguns and lever action handguns chambered for the same ammo, the modern survivalist can have the same ammo for his auto pistol and his sub-rifle as well.
Some think that a pistol caliber long arm is just one big clumsy pistol or a rifle sized gun that delivers pistol power and accuracy. This is BS. Anyone that ever fired a pistol caliber rifle or SMG knows that they are much more accurate, hitting torso targets at 100 yards is easy, and a little more if you have a red dot scope. Also, SMGs can manage hot ammo specially made for such guns, much more powerful than the one for handguns. Even if you use regular handgun ammo, the added barrel length adds a few extra feet per second making it more powerful. Just check the information on boy armor. Body armor that is rated to stop 9mm, for example, is not rated to stop the same 9mm ammo out of a SMG or carbine, because the added speed will make that same round penetrate the vest. Anyway, +P ammo is more than enough power out of a SMG or carbine, you don’t have to go looking for special SMG ammunition.

If you can get full auto that’s one nice feature to have, not worth it if you are on a tight budget, but if you can get it, it may come in handy someday. Full auto SMG are giving police in my country a lot of headaches. A criminal with little or no training will put 3 or 4 cops armed with pistols and shotguns on their toes, just because of the sheer volume of fire these high capacity 9mm deliver. There was this case of a bad guy standing in front of a patrol car full of cops on a red light stop, pulling a 9mm SMG out of his coat and emptying it on full auto. The cops didn’t have a chance, he killed them all. The car looked like Swiss cheese with 40 9mm holes all over the vehicle.

SOUND SUPPRESSORS
All I’m going to say on this subject is: Have one if you can. That’s it. I’ll leave the rest of it to your imagination, don’t make me say it. Today it may seem like a “nice to have” feature… after the SHTF, it may be a “O God I’ve got to get a suppressor!!” feature.
I’d buy a good suppressor instead of a ultra high dollar scope like the SOG. Buy a good quality scope, but don’t spend a fortune on it, and use the rest of the money on a suppressor. If you are serious about preparing for SHTF, you’ll thank me one day, just trust me on this one. 9mm and 45 suppress quite well. Not as well as .22 , but there is much more power on the big bore ammo. Combined with a full auto SMG, the possibilities are much greater. Sometimes it’s just better to go unnoticed, especially in a SHTF crisis.

BODY ARMOR
Dear God! Buy body armor PLEASE!! It’s dirt cheap in USA. Preferably, get the police concealable kind (class II) Then continue to work on it and get class III A military armor and some rifle plates, just as you do when you start buying guns. You’ll end up with 2 or 3 sets of armor which are great to have for family members and spares. Just so you know, I got so desperate about body armor I ordered it from USA through internet (bulletproofme.com), I ended up paying a total of nearly 600 USD for body armor that costs 200 USD in USA. Buy it while you still can. When the SHTF you’ll end up wearing it, believe me. I don’t wear mine all day long but I do wear it when I have to go some place dangerous, deal with people I don’t trust, or when I have to go teach Architecture Representation late at night, and must travel through a much dangerous road at 12 PM.”

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Filed under Prepper articles, Survival Manual

Tagged as depression, economy, emergency, food, future, government, investing, martial law, storage

Monday, October 14, 2013 · 12:10 AM

The coming SHTF event

(Survival Manual/ Prepper articles/The coming SHTF event)

A. What Will The End Be Like For Me If I Don’t Prepare?
13 Aug 2013, SHTFplan.com, by Be Informed
Excerpts pasted from: http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/what-will-the-end-be-like-for-me-if-i-dont-prepare_08132013

This article has been shared with the SHTFplan community by long-time contributor Be Informed. It is a continuation of efforts to alert and inform Americans of the real possibility of a sustained collapse of the world as we have come to know it. We encourage you to read previous contributions from Be Informed that include How Horrific Will It Be For The Non-Prepper? and Life or Death Choices: 35 Excuses That Will Doom the Non-Prepper.

When “The End” is brought up in conversation most people think of a science fiction novel or movie portraying it as some Earth shattering event – boom and it is over. The almost certain truth behind this is that it will not be the Earth, the Sun, or solar system that gets it. The real end will more than likely come with human civilization as we know it coming to an abrupt closure. What you as a person are in danger of is very likely not a mass extinction of all of human life, but the crumbling and complete fall of the structures and foundation that holds up all that most every human being depends on for survival.

There is an old saying that ‘no man is an island.’ It indeed takes a rare, almost unique person who can boast that they are free of dependency of the components of modern day life to make it alone. If and when human society collapses, someone’s chances of post True SHTF (TSHTF) survival will be partially in proportion to just how self reliant they can become. The other ratio will be just how well someone can adapt to a new world void of the conveniences which have become totally expected by the masses.

Many will say to the themselves, “here we go again with another doomsday prophesy that will again fail to manifest itself.”

So what makes this warning any different than those of the past? This is NOT some forewarning of any imminent mega society ending event(s) such as World War 3, an economic collapse, super virus outbreak, colossal solar flare, supervolcano erupting, or some other equally awful horror. This is about understanding what you are doing as a person, a parent, a son or daughter, a friend. If you awoke one morning and learned that a catastrophic event had broken loose, how well prepared (or how totally unprepared) are you?

Anyone doubting just how terrible life can be need only experience longer term (more than 3 days) power outages at any time of year, but especially during temperature and weather extremes. These losses of power happen all the time, EVERYWHERE. Being brutally honest, can anyone say to themselves that that life without power for weeks or months or longer will be anything less than awful for the general population? This is a mere taste of what an implosion would be like. The frailness of the infrastructure of any country is incredible. Few understand or care to think about this, because the prevailing attitude for most is, “it will always be there for me and work for me.”

Again, this is not to convince anyone of a specific event such as a widespread cyber attack that destroys the electric grid or a wide variety of natural disasters that can and do sometimes flatten what someone depends on working to live. The internet is full of disaster scenarios and even some probabilities of occurrences. The vulnerability to any place on the planet is there, as recent hurricanes have proven all too well. It is about how awful life threatening events, a whole host of too many to mention, that ends your modern day life as you know it. This does not mean it has to end your life and your family’s lives though.

When people think of losing modern day conveniences they think of losing their cell phones, their access to games and other entertainment, mobile devices; in other words, FUN devices. The list of just how much will be lost that modern humans have become totally reliant on to live is absolutely staggering. With a civilization collapse you can expect much to be lost immediately, then gradually over the next few hours to days that list will continue growing and expanding to frightening levels.

The following list exemplifies just how much a person has to lose if they have failed to prepare themselves for emergencies. After a large enough catastrophe, the recovery time frame can be very long term, or potentially never for certain critical needs.

1. No clean water pouring out of the faucets to drink.

2. No hot or cold water to shower, bathe or wash your hands.

3. No washing machines or dishwashers to clean your clothes or dirty dishes.

4. No flushing toilets.

5. No heat or air conditioning, not even fans.

6. No light at night.

7. No grocery stores or home delivered food, no restaurants, no food period.

8. No trash pickup; the waste quickly mounds up, harbors bacteria and allows the spread of disease.

9. No medications, especially antibiotics, or simple over the counter remedies.

10. No vitamin or mineral supplements to help maintain your body.

11. No 911 emergency help service.

12. No mechanical transportation; no fuel available.

13. No protection, no law enforcement.

14. No communications; no Internet, no TV, no radio, no clue what is going on.

15. No telephones, no way of talking to people miles away, you’re cut off from your social network.

16. No refrigeration, no freezers, no food preservation to keep food from going bad quickly.

17. No stoves or microwaves, no cooking food or sterilizing water.

18. No easily prepared meals.

19. No toilet paper, and no good alternative to toilet paper to those unaware of other options.

20. No feminine toiletries.

21. No pest control against injurious insects, or from packs of roaming feral animals.

22. No utilities; no gas, no electricity, no way to make anything in your home function.

23. No advanced warning of weather, war, or other life threatening events.

24. No odor control from rotting wastes or rotting corpses.

25. No healthy food to maintain proper nutrition, leading to weakness and ill health

26. No proper basic hygiene, lack of bacteria control on the body, especially the teeth.

27. No repair of tooth cavities or other life threatening oral problems.

28. No pain control, no aspirin, no way to ease pain, ie., from a bad tooth.

29. No basic first aid to treat minor injuries to keeping them from becoming infected.

30. No replacements for worn out clothes, shoes, socks, or underwear.

31. No replacement parts to fix things that have broken.

32. No soap or disinfectants.

33. No outdoor protection from the elements such as sunburns.

34. No social safety nets: No welfare, no assistance, no government food.

35. No sexual protection from the wide array of deadly diseases that are transmittable.

36. No treatment for the sick and dying.

37. No modern power tools for structural or mechanical repairs.

38. No way of cleaning up toxic spills that range from irritating to hazardous.

39. No care, help or chance for medical help for the needs of infants and children.

40. No protection against rabies.

41. No means of easing widespread and intense chronic depression.

42. No outlets of entertainment to distract people from their overwhelming despair and fear.

43. No familiar and basic everyday needs that give comfort and security to most people.

44. No way of contacting family and friends.

45. No respectable way of laying to rest the body a family member, friend or neighbor.

46. No way of protecting yourself and family from roaming gangs, unless you have adequate firepower.

47. No workable answers-solutions from the rudimentary to complex problems that will frequently present themselves.

48. No calling up your local professional help to repair something that is essential to you.

49. No feeling of being civilized; losing everything, becoming dirty and unkept tends to rapidly reduce everyone’s sense of humanity.

50. No way out of your predicament without having prepared to some degree for downfall of society.

The need for society and human civilization to remain as close to “normal” and fully functioning cannot be over emphasized as it relates to the life and death of nearly 100% of our population if these systems cease to operate. The more modern a country is, the farther the fall will be to the bottom when the infrastructure fails to support the people. The above 50 losses paint a very bleak picture and show the likelihood of a mass die off as almost certain with the breakdown of the foundation that keeps the masses upright. This doesn’t have to occur to anyone willing to just say no to this addiction of letting society mollycoddle everyone into helpless baby birds unable to live without constant feedings.

To prevent the obvious helplessness of anyone and to strengthen the resolve and readiness of those whom choose to prepare, one must start right now and continue to ready themselves for the day when human civilization will either partially cave in or fully disintegrate.

So what is the answer to someone that wants to survive an end to modern human civilization?

First and foremost you must be willing to do what is necessary and have the conviction to stick to the need for survival. Each survival situation is vastly different – city vs. country life, arid vs. humid areas, frigid vs. hot climates, etc., etc. In other words, no survival plan fits all. Our efforts should be focused on having the tools, supplies and skills to cope with a mega, or even lighter weight, disaster.

The best course of action is to be willing to spend the time and effort to learn what survival plan is right for you.

This is where the internet comes in. While you still have access to it, utilize it. SHTFplan.com has many excellent ideas and plans in the archives on survival. Other sites all over the internet and many excellent books on the subject are everywhere. Some excellent resources we recommend:

Ready Nutrition
The Organic Prepper
Survival Blog
The Survival Mom
Prepper Website
Alt-Market
The Apartment Prepper

(There are tons of great sites out there, so please feel free to share your favorites in the comments section)

It is the commitment to go that extra mile to obtain this information that is best for you as the individual. Then you as a person, part of a family, whatever, must do what is suggested and best for you with this wealth of information available to you before anything happens and all is lost. You and your family has to want to NOT be stuck in the sinking of the tar that society will become someday. Say to yourself that ‘I won’t accept being the individuals that have nothing’ and that ‘I will act on my desire and need to survive and won’t delay one moment.’

Even seasoned preppers and survivalists can ALWAYS learn that much more and should not procrastinate obtaining that special need that still eludes them.

Today not tomorrow, because time could be running out faster than anyone realizes.

B. Beck Warns Of Mass Chaos: “The Likes of Which the Globe Has Never Seen”
14 Aug 2013, SHTFplan.com, by MacSlavo
Pasted from: http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/beck-warns-of-mass-chaos-the-likes-of-which-the-globe-has-never-seen_08142013

There will come a time this decade when everything that we have come to believe about the stability of our socio-economics system will be revealed for the underlying disaster that it really is.

When the US dollar is rejected by our lenders, when EBT distributions no longer cover critical expenses because food prices reach unattainable levels, when our debt burdens overwhelm our government, when America’s polarized political factions starting pointing fingers – it is then that we will experience a collapse unlike anything we could ever imagine.

The Constitution and the rule of law will be thrown out the window.
And the people will turn on each other.

I am telling you, we are about to have an economic impact the likes of which the globe has never seen.
When… not if… when the chickens come home to roost you will have mass chaos, not just in the middle east, but it will slide the entire globe into chaos. And, that means an economic impact – because of all of the things that we have done – the world has never seen.

And then comes the giant reset.
…
If you don’t know history, you are about to repeat it.
And if you think you know American history, where it’s all sunshine and lollipops because we had the Constitution and that we were always good… if you think we’re past the lynching in the streets…
It’s not about black or white. It’s about who has power. Forget racism. Try to put this into the context of humans. Racism is a human defect, not a white defect, not a black defect, not a brown or yellow… It’s a human defect.
And whoever has power lynches the others in the streets…. blames them… and kills them.
If you think I’m wrong on that then read history for ten minutes.

Glenn Beck YouTube video
Pasted from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CpCo63uFos0

History has proven this to be true, and if you think humans have changed in the last 5,000 years because of modern conveniences and ideologies, then you’re kidding yourself.

This is coming. The government knows it, and that’s why they have been simulating the collapse of our economic system and its aftermath. That’s why they have militarized our local police forces. That’s why they are stockpiling food, ammunition, weapons and other supplies.

We have created the largest financial and economic bubble in the history of humankind, and it is clearly unsustainable.
Widespread chaos is coming, just as it has done so many times throughout history.
It’s time you take measures to prepare for it, or face the inevitable horrors that will follow.

.
C. The ‘Die Off’ Will Start Immediately After a Complete Collapse
23 Feb 2011, SHTFplan.com, by MacSlavo
Pasted from: http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/the-post-shtf-die-off-will-start-immediately_02232011

In his book, One Second After, William Forstchen, paints a grim picture of a post-apocalyptic world in which an electro-magnetic pulse has wiped out the entire power-grid infrastructure of the United States. Utilities like water and electric, transportation systems, cell phones, and even vehicles are disabled by the blast. The book focuses on one particular town and the challenges they face going forward.

One of the key issues becomes what is commonly referred to in the preparedness and survival community as “the golden horde,” a term introduced by James Rawles of Survival Blog:

As the comfort level in the cities rapidly drops to nil, there will be a massive involuntary outpouring from the big cities and suburbs into the hinterboonies. This is the phenomenon that my late father, Donald Robert Rawles–a career particle physics research administrator at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories–half-jokingly called The Golden Horde. He was of course referring to the Mongol Horde of the 13th Century, but in a modern context. (The Mongol rulers were chosen from the ‘Golden Family’ of Temujin. Hence the term The Golden Horde.) I can remember as a child, my father pointing to the hills at the west end of the Livermore Valley, where we then lived. He opined: If The Bomb ever drops, we’ll see a Golden Horde come swarming over those hills [from Oakland and beyond] of the like that the world has never seen. And they’ll be very unpleasant, believe you me!

As the fictional, but quite realistic, crisis in Forstchen’s book grows deeper, and city dwellers spread throughout the countryside looking for essential resources, the people were forced to make hard decisions. They could either share their food and resources with the horde, thereby decreasing their own survival rate, or, they would have to aggressively defend their land. Like most would do in that situation, the town chose to keep what they had to themselves, and send all others packing, by force if necessary.

If the worst were to ever happen – and we’re not talking about a short-term disaster – but, rather, an all out collapse of the world as we know it, including a complete grid-down scenario and a breakdown in food production and emergency services, the majority of the population in the regions(s) affected would likely perish. In a recent report the Center for Security Policy suggested that in such a scenario 9 Out of 10 Americans Would Be Dead Within One Year – a terrifying thought, indeed.

Considering that most people have less than a week’s worth of food in their pantries, no medical supplies, and absolutely no idea how to operate without electricity, one can guesstimate that the die-off would begin almost immediately after the grid goes down. Within several weeks, tens of thousands would succumb to starvation and/or disease. In many cases, dehydration and the elements would also become a key factor. Patriot Nurse recently put together a commentary discussing “Who Will Die First”, in which she breaks down the highest risk groups into sub-categories, which we’ll discuss, in part, below:

Physically Disabled
Those with medical conditions requiring daily drug dosing, as well as those who depend on third party medical care, would likely be the first to go. During Hurricane Katrina hundreds of elderly people were left to die in hospitals and care facilities. They had no food, no clean water and no medicine. Their caregivers, in some cases acting immorally, but in other cases simply acting out of fear, left them without assistance. Those who are dependent on others to stay alive in modern society should consider who their caretakers are, because when the SHTF, chances are that an employee working at a nursing home will choose to go home and be with their family, or flee the area altogether.

Individuals With Drug Dependent Healthcare Needs
In One Second After, the daughter of the main character is a diabetic requiring insulin. Within hours of the grid going down, pharmacies are overwhelmed with patrons attempting to get their prescription medicines. The electronic systems are inoperable, further complicating matters. Even for those who were able to acquire their meds, the supplies were only temporary, because within a week the shelves were empty and no resupply was coming. There are roughly 1.5 million insulin dependent diabetics in the United States. Because this particular drug requires cold storage, in a grid down situation, effective supplies would be depleted within a matter of weeks. In this particular instance, the fatality rate would be nearly 100%. The same can be said for many other types of medications, including oxygen. We urge those with drug dependent medical conditions to treat this aspect of preparedness like water and food. If you will require medicine, try to create a reserve by stocking up some extra medication. For those requiring cooled medicines, do you have an alternative energy plan to keep a compact refrigerator going?

Physical Handicaps
When faced with a survival situation, in general, the old adage “survival of the fittest,” applies. Those with physical handicaps, especially those requiring external locomotion, like those little scooters we see people riding at Walmart, will be at a disadvantage. They’ll be easy targets for looters, and will likely be incapable of foraging for food and resources. For some, the handicap is self-manifested, such as in the case of excessive obesity. In these cases, an emergency preparedness plan should include getting physically fit. For others, however, conditions cannot be treated easily. Physically handicapped individuals should take steps now to determine their action plan in the event of SHTF. Do you have a caregiver who you trust to get you out of a bind? Perhaps looking to relocate to an area where extensive travel post-SHTF will not be required is a good idea.

The Government Dependent Welfare Class
Patriot Nurse refers to the individuals in this group as those with a “stereotypical” cradle-to-grave mentality. Of course, not everyone in this category is stereotypical, but we can certainly understand what she’s getting at. The majority of these people live on government subsistence, therefore they likely have no ability to procure resources before a disaster. At the onset of crisis, they will likely be looking for help from the same organizations that have provided it in the past. But those organizations will be unable to assist. Many of those within this category will die-off from lack of food, clean water, disease and violence. Given that, in general, within this category is the highest violent crime rate in the country, it will be from within this group of people that we’ll get our first taste of looters, gangs, and violent thieves. Some criminal elements will certainly survive, but violence begets violence, especially in a battle for resources, thus a good portion will be killed off by those defending themselves.

Yuppies and Neo-Hippies
Another name we can give this category is the urban and suburban city dwellers. Though they may be different politically, and possess different skill sets, the majority of those within this category simply do not have the necessary survival tools to make it. Neo-hippies, as defined by Patriot Nurse are those who may be capable of small-scale agriculture and raising micro-livestock, but their ‘peaceful’ nature has not prepared them to handle aggressive and violent behavior aimed at taking the resources they produce. The Yuppies, generally defined as those who live in suburban McMansion style homes are simply ill-prepared. Rather than preparing for a crisis, they spent their hard earned money on new cars, TV’s, fashion and dinners out. When the SHTF, they will simply not be ready and their pantries will be empty within a week’s time, at which point they, like the looters from the welfare class, will be left with no choice but to head into the streets looking for supplies.

There are, of course, other sub categories, but the above covers the majority of the populace. A good portion of those with the capability to travel, be it on foot or in a vehicle, will eventually head out of the cities. The realization that the system has broken down will not take long – perhaps a week or two – before they hit the highways.

Their destination of choice will likely become National or State parks, lakes and coastal regions, or small towns, where they expect to find food. Most will have no more than a tank of gas, giving them a range of roughly 300 miles from their home city. If you are located near an interstate highway, or even a state highway, within 300 miles of a major city, then you may very well see a golden horde of cars. Those without cars will go on foot. As they get further out of the cities, they will begin to perish due to lack of food and potable water. On foot, their range while lacking in resources will be maybe 50 – 150 miles.

Safety in the Country?
For those living in exurbia or rural surroundings the situation will certainly not be as dire as for those bunched in the cities. However, it will likely be just as dangerous. Eventually, elements from the cities with both, good intentions and bad, will reach you. If you are in a small town, and the town fails to implement defense strategies, then it can be easily overrun by organized and heavily armed gangs.

You’ll also have to deal with those of your neighbors who failed to prepare. Even though people may have gardens or livestock, their ability to maintain these will be threatened as traditional feed stores and tools will no longer be readily available. In One Second After, the story revolved around a small town in the middle of nowhere, yet a large portion of the population died off simply because there was a lack of resources. Even hunting became difficult, as game ran thin because everyone in the area was looking to have squirrel for dinner. The additional threat in the country is that, generally, people in the country are well armed with long range hunting rifles, a situation that presents quite a bit of peril if that person is aware you have resources and they are lacking.

The Die Off is a worst case consideration, and one you should be familiar with before any such event occurs. It will occur only in a complete collapse of the world as we know it and would include a complete breakdown of our electrical and utility grids, communications infrastructure and food transportation systems.

Yes, it’s unlikely. But given that our entire way of life is dependent on modern day technology, such a disruption would have severe consequences for all involved.

D. Further reading
1) Mark Levin: Government Is “Simulating the Collapse of Our Financial System, the Collapse of Our Society and the Potential for Widespread Violence” at:
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/mark-levin-government-is-simulating-the-collapse-of-our-financial-system-the-collapse-of-our-society-and-the-potential-for-widespread-violence_03082013

2) Real U.S. Government Debt is Much Worse Than You Think at-
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-real-u-s-government-debt-is-much-worse-than-you-think_102010

3) Shadow Government Bunkers: Security Heightened at Underground Storage Facilities at-
http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/shadow-government-bunkers-security-heightened-at-underground-storage-facilities_05092011

4) Report: Disaster Looms: FEMA Scrambles To Stockpile Food Reserves at-
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/report-disaster-looms-fema-scrambles-to-stockpile-food-reserves_08052013

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