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Wednesday, November 25, 2015 · 12:10 AM

Waves of Refugees, Part 2 of 2

(Survival Manual/ Prepper articles/ Waves of Refugees, Part 2 of 2)
Continued from: Waves of Refugees, Part 1 of 2

E. Four Waves of Food and Shelter Seekers
23 Aug 2012, Code Green Prep, by David Spero
Pasted from: http://codegreenprep.com/2012/08/four-waves-of-food-and-shelter-seekers/

Shortly after some type of disaster that disrupts the normal flow of food and energy into your nearby towns, people will be forced to leave their residences and fan out into the countryside, foraging for food (and subsequently shelter too). That is obvious – if there is no food in the town/city, people can either stay where they are and die of thirst or starvation, or they can pro-actively start looking for food.

People will initially look for food on one of two different levels.
The first level is ‘looking for food nearby and returning back to one’s normal home to eat it and continue living’.
The second level is ‘abandoning one’s former residence and moving, as a refugee, towards wherever the possibility of ongoing survival may be greatest’.
A third and fourth type of food seeking will develop later into a crisis.

It is helpful to understand the differing types of contacts you’ll have, because each poses different challenges, problems, threats, and even opportunities, calling for different responses on your part.

And while we consider our four different waves to be more or less chronologically sequential, there will be some overlaps, with some people representing some waves either earlier than most others, or later than most others.

The First Wave

[The waves of refugees after TEOTWAWKI will be both heart-rending and dangerous.]

The first wave will start shortly after the social disruption occurs, initially as a trickle, and then successively greater and greater as more and more people run out of food and come to realize that the government won’t magically solve the problem that occurred.

It will only take a week or two before the first type of food-seeking necessarily ends, due to people running out of gas for their vehicles, and being reduced instead to only traveling and foraging as far as they can walk or bicycle (although, on flat terrain, fitter people could fairly easily cycle up to 50 miles out and then 50 miles back home again).

We predict that people in this ‘first wave’ won’t be very threatening, because they will be more in a hurry to cover as much ground as possible to find as much easy food as possible, rather than becoming fixated on specific potential targets. Plus, the ‘kill or be killed’ reality of tough survival won’t yet have fully penetrated, and the region will have patches of remaining lawfulness alongside areas of growing anarchy.

Furthermore, these people are primarily seeking food only, not shelter. They’ve not yet accepted that their city residences have become unviable and need to be abandoned.

Your tactic to resist problems from the first wave of food/shelter seekers will be to maintain a low profile, so most of such people pass you by, and to positively respond to people who do come visiting, encouraging them to go find easier targets/food sources elsewhere.

Of course, the further you are from the nearby towns and cities, the fewer the number of people who might stumble upon you. But you’ll never be 100% guaranteed to be safely far from such itinerant scavengers. Fortunately the danger they pose to your retreat at this early stage is low, so while your location choice will ideally not be right next to a freeway exit, a mere 10 miles from the city center, you don’t need to keep yourself hundreds of miles away from any and all population concentrations.

The Second Wave
As the first wave ends and is replaced by the second wave, people’s attitudes will be hardening, because their ability to travel far and wide is massively reduced. They have probably used up most of their emergency food stores, and now, limited primarily by their ability to walk, any source of food becomes one they must take full advantage of. They can no longer afford the luxury of leaving empty-handed, and their lack of mobility now reduces the number of places they can travel to in search of food. They have to make the best of every possible opportunity.

The grim reality of the ‘eat or be eaten’ concept will also be one which the survivors can no longer ignore.

If these people come across your retreat, they are likely to be a stronger and more determined adversary than people in the first wave (and people in the second wave could well be the same people who visited more peaceably in the first wave, too).

Fortunately, most of these people in the second wave will still be nomadic and itinerant. They’ll be traveling in the hope of finding a Shangri-La somewhere that is full of food, energy, and welcoming people keen to help them, and probably won’t yet be in the ‘looking for anywhere to settle’ mode that will come later. They might hope for overnight shelter, but they’re not yet looking for a place to settle – or, if they are, they’re probably not yet realistic enough to appreciate the value of your retreat.

People will start abandoning their homes anytime after only a very few days of the crisis commencing and once they start to accept that no magic solutions are forthcoming. This won’t only be due to the lack of food and lack of any future food supply, but may also be due to lack of water, lack of plumbing, and lack of energy in general. A high-rise apartment with no water, no working elevators, and no lights or heating/cooling will quickly become uninhabitable, food or not.

The second wave will probably diminish after three or so weeks, because by that point, people will have either left the city, or died, or created some sort of semi-stable ongoing basis of existence in the city.

Your strategy during this exodus stage is to be located somewhere reasonably far from the main routes people are likely to travel along. It is as important that you are off the likely refugee routes, whether you are 1 mile or 100 miles from the major population centers, because people will potentially be traveling long distances in their search for somewhere better to live.

People may fan out slightly from the main routes as they search for food en route, but they will generally follow the major arterial routes.

Major routes will tend to be well maintained highways, and generally we expect people will move to the coasts and south, rather than inland and to the north. People will, either by reason or instinct, seek out warm climates and water/ocean. The warm climate reduces their dependency on shelter and energy, and the ocean has the appeal of ‘free fish’ and also some type of instinctive deep-seated lure.

The Third Wave
The third wave will be refugees, the same as the second wave, but this time it will be people looking for somewhere to settle.

These will be people who are becoming more realistic in their expectations, and now rather than mindlessly going anywhere in the hope of finding (nonexistent) salvation, they are now looking for somewhere they can settle and survive for the medium or longer term.

Your appeal to these people is not just the food you have stored, but also your retreat as a whole, the under-way food cultivation, the energy creating resources you have, and everything else you have done to prepare yourselves for this future.

1) Some of these people will be seeking short-term easy solutions. They’ll want to rob you of your food, your shelter, and everything else you have. They have no concern for sustainability, they want to live for the moment, and when they’ve exhausted everything you have, they’ll move on to somewhere else.
2) Others of these people will be more realistic, but they’ll still want to displace you from your property and take it over.
3) There will also be a very few people who will be fair and honest and decent, and who will offer to work their way for and with you. They’ll offer their labor and their skills, in return for your shelter and assistance – probably as a ‘package deal’ for themselves and their other family members.
It would be good if you had a way of responding positively to such people, because they may prove to be valuable additions to your small community.

The Fourth Wave
The fourth wave is very different from the other three. It is longer lasting and more potentially impactful on your retreat and community.
Due to the importance of this fourth wave, we have devoted a separate article to it – below.

F. Preparing for the Fourth – and Deadliest – Wave of Refugees, Bandits, and other Problem Groups
Code Green Prep, by David Spero
Pasted from: http://codegreenprep.com/2012/08/preparing-for-the-fourth-and-deadliest-wave-of-refugees-bandits-and-other-problem-groups/

refugee2 horseman

A 13th century depiction of the red – second – horse and rider of the Apocalypse.
The biblical prophecy of the four horsemen is eerily similar to how we see the four waves of refugees after TEOTWAWKI.

No-one really knows what to expect after TSHTF in an extended Level 2 or 3 situation, but it seems universally agreed that the starving masses will be forced to flee their city dwellings and do whatever it takes to survive, wherever they can find the opportunity and ability to do so.

It is helpful to look at the types of people who will come out from the cities as a series of different waves, each with different characteristics. We’ve discussed the first three waves of refugees in this other article, and the good news is they will be relatively brief in duration and not necessarily ultimately threatening to the wellbeing of your own retreat community – indeed some people in the third wave could well become positive additions to your community.

In this part we wish to instead look at the last of these waves – the fourth wave. And rather like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, this is the most threatening and dangerous wave – not only by its nature, but also because it will be the longest lived of the four waves. (Christians will be impressed at how closely all four waves can be viewed as having characteristics similar to the four horsemen described in Revelations.)

The first two waves were fairly simple and easily understood. In the third wave, we saw how some members were threats but others could be valuable allies. There is a similar dichotomy to the fourth wave, but in a very different sense, and their duality is part of their danger.

Both will be organized groups, and both will probably already have their own shelter and possibly even other food sources. They probably don’t need your shelter, and they may not even need your food and other resources. But, taking advantage of a collapse of law and order, they want to take it simply because they can, and because all around them, other people and groups are acting similarly, just like the looter who takes items from stores in a city riot, even if they are things of no value – they just take them for nihilistic reasons.

Organized Lawless Gangs
The first of these groups will be organized lawless gangs, seeking to dominate and rule their new expanded territory. The might possibly seek ongoing tribute and ‘taxes’ from you in exchange for their ‘protection’.

refugee2 brigand training
Or maybe they’ll be less formal, and will simply be roaming around as an organized and maybe nomadic gang, taking and destroying as they go.

Gangs that seek to impose their own structure and what passes for their version of order may be groups you can negotiate with. But groups who are little more than anarchistic looters will not be people you can negotiate or create win-win outcomes with.

When encountering the former, you need to shift their perception of you from being a one-way source of goodies they can seize from you, to instead being a two-way trading source and resource they can benefit from. Maybe you can help them maintain some of their equipment. Maybe you have medical resources. Maybe you can trade with them – exchanging items they’ve plundered elsewhere and have no use for, and giving them in return food or other things they do need.

When encountering the latter, you are best advised to indicate to them that you are not an easy target, and any attempt to attack you would seriously weaken or destroy their own force, while leaving you relatively unharmed. With most of the rest of the entire continent lying helpless at their feet, encourage them to go after easier targets.

This encouragement is best done in a ‘face saving’ manner. If you challenge the gang leader’s authority, and the overall ‘machismo’ of the gang itself, they may have no social choice but to fight it out with you – and from their perspective, the lives of their junior gang members probably has much less value to the gang leaders than do the lives of your family and fellow community members to you.

We’re From the ‘Government’ and We’re Here to ‘Help’ You
The second of these groups may be more dangerous. They will claim to be semi-official government groups, seeking to impose their definition of emergency martial law on the region they have assumed control of.

Sometimes their intentions may be honorable and well-meaning (even if dysfunctional and dangerous to you in the process), other times they may be as corrupt and despotic as the outlaw gangs, but cleverly seeking to wrap up their dictatorial actions with an ill deserved veneer of assumed legality.

Unfortunately, whether honorable or not, it is almost a certainty that these self-appointed groups of enforcers will be primarily tasked with taking stuff from you – either to keep for themselves, or to give to the unprepared other people in the region who have empowered these people to act for their benefit.

refugee2 militia

They may attempt to claim special emergency powers that suspend all your normal legal protections and constitutionally guaranteed rights, and if they have been sufficiently clever and sophisticated, they’ll have compliant judges ready to issue court orders authorizing things that should never be authorized.

If you don’t like it, they’ll say, you can go appeal, all the way to the US Supreme Court if you wish – this being in a scenario where the Supreme Court may have ceased to exist, and even if it did, it would be close to impossible for you to go there, and may take years for you to get a case heard and resolved. Meantime, you will be told you must comply with what they tell you is a lawful order to surrender your food, to take in refugees, or in many other ways to destroy the viability of the retreat that you built, for yourself.

Some of the people in this fourth wave will be people you might choose to reluctantly ‘do business’ with. If they are realistic and don’t seek to ‘kill the goose that lays the golden eggs’ and understand that only if your are prosperous can they take a levy or share of your prosperity, then all you’ve done is substituted one form of previous law, order, and taxation for another. And whether the people imposing it on you are bona fide government officials, lawless gangsters, or ‘pretend’ government officials, the net result is the same, and you simply have to matter-of-factly strike the best win-win deal you can.

But if they ask too much, and leave you with too little, you have some real problems to face.

Even a True Democratic Elected Government May Abrogate Your Rights
In particular, you know that even in the ‘best’ of our 50 states, the massive majority of the population is not nearly as well prepared as you are. In the normal world, they might be wealthier than you and have more possessions, a fancier house, and who knows what else, but in the post-crisis world of a Level 2 or 3 event, their wealth and possessions become meaningless while yours become invaluable.

Any sort of democratic majority based government, especially one raised on the notion that the ‘wealthy’ are obliged to support the ‘poor’, and doubly especially where the lawmakers themselves are not prepared and are faced with their own pressing life or death challenges, won’t hesitate to urgently pass any needed laws to compel you to give everything you have to them.

This may well be unconstitutional and unlawful and illegal. But who are you going to complain to, when the local mayor, the local sheriff, and the local judge all turn up on your doorstep together, themselves all starving, and demanding by their joint powers that you give them all your food?

We don’t have easy answers to offer you about these ‘fourth wave’ attackers. But we can tell you that the fourth wave will be an ongoing thorn in your side, and you may find it increasingly difficult to tell between the ‘lawless gang’ fourth wave members and the ‘lawful posse’ fourth wave members.

Hiding from Fourth Wave Threats
A continuation of the article from above: http://codegreenprep.com/2012/08/preparing-for-the-fourth-and-deadliest-wave-of-refugees-bandits-and-other-problem-groups/

Many preppers feel that an important part of their overall defensive strategy is to keep as low a profile as possible; to obscure the existence of their retreat, so as to avoid being noticed – both before and after the onset of some type of societal collapse.

Obscuring yourself prior to social collapse is getting harder and harder with every passing year. The ‘information society’ is finding out more and more about us, and with the increasing tendency of government drones, spotting planes, and even satellites to survey vast areas of countryside, and to create extremely detailed ‘GIS’ databases of all the land and structures in a region, your retreat structure will surely be noticed and if not officially registered, sooner or later will cause the authorities to respond.

If you have an unauthorized structure that has not been permitted and which is not compliant with applicable zoning and health and other regulations and restrictions, you risk having it seized and destroyed. You also risk civil and possibly criminal penalties, and being labeled as another crazy group of survivalist/supremacists. You can imagine the headlines now – ‘Anti-government supremacists arrested, large weapons cache found on site’ and so on and so forth. Remember that what we consider prudent, and what is indeed truly lawful, can – and will – be portrayed as evidence of crazy extremism by the news media and the authorities.

Because one of the fourth wave groups you may encounter will be some form of revived local government, it is inevitable that the ‘footprints’ you have created in developing your retreat will be uncovered. Local health department approvals for your septic system. Utility records for electricity or internet or cable services. And so on and so on. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of the generally sensible strategy of locating in an area with low population density is that you become more obvious by your presence than you would in a denser region.

You may delay your discovery, but you will not prevent it. You need to have a more viable plan to ensure the safety and security of your retreat – fortunately, we have some suggestions on this point to share.

Becoming Part of the Solution, Not Part of the Problem
Your key strategy is to position yourself, your retreat, and your community, so it can create ‘win-win’ relationships with organized ‘fourth wave’ groups.
One of the key things about this fourth wave threat is that it is longer term. Earlier waves of threats can be repulsed or ignored or in some other way worked around, but the fourth wave will be a longer term issue that must be resolved.

A confrontational approach risks failure on your part. And any type of exchange of hostilities can be much more damaging to you than to your opponents. Your opponents probably have either greater manpower to start with, and/or greater ability to recruit new members into their forces. They are willing to accept some risk to their rank and file ‘foot soldiers’.
But you have a finite community of friends, family, and colleagues. You can not dispassionately risk their lives in an encounter. Remember also that with a loss of the sophisticated healthcare facilities we enjoy at present, even minor wounds become life threatening, and even if the wounds can be treated and resolved, they risk depleting your precious limited supplies of antibiotics and other medical resources.

There may be times when you must respond to force with force yourself; where the potential outcome associated with giving in to a fourth wave group is worse than the potential outcome of repulsing their attack, and in such cases you must be resolute in your defense of your retreat and its community.
But in general, you want to position yourselves so that you can find ways to co-exist on a win-win basis with these fourth wave groups.
How would you do that? Please see our article on becoming part of the solution, rather than part of the problem, for a discussion on strategies to create win-win situations for you and the community you are close to.

Summary
After an initial period of grave social disruption, during which the first, second and third waves of refugees will occur, the rate of change will slow and some periods of semi-stable social arrangements will probably follow.
Invariably, regional leadership organizations will appear, and whether they are ostensibly benevolent or despotic, you need to position yourselves and your community so that it can co-exist on a win-win basis with these other (and possibly stronger) forces around it

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Filed under Prepper articles, Survival Manual

Tagged as disaster, ecology, economy, famine, food, government, political, storage, water

Thursday, November 19, 2015 · 1:15 AM

Waves of Refugees, Part 1 of 2

(Survival Manual/ Prepper articles/ Waves of Refugees, Part 1 of 2)

A. Who Are The Zombie Hordes?
September 2, 2013, ModernSurvivalBlog.com by Ken Jorgustin
Pasted from: http://modernsurvivalblog.com/security/who-are-the-zombie-hordes/

Some preparedness websites will sometimes refer to ‘Zombies’, ‘Hordes’, or ‘Zombie Hordes’. A question is, what are they talking about? What’s their definition of a Zombie?

Zombies became particularly popular following the hit AMC TV series, “The Walking Dead”, in which the $hit had hit the fan, the country had collapsed and some sort of virus/plague/? would turn those who died into flesh eating mind-numbed Zombies. It became a battle of survival for the living – versus the Zombie hordes.

Due to the subsequent popularity of the term Zombie, many have been using the word in varying context, including the preparedness sites.

When we happen to use it here, it is to represent some wide generalizations…

Zombies represent those who have not prepared, and have reached a point of desperation.
There will also be those in the same category who have not prepared, but will not become Zombies because they will find a way to adapt and manage to survive. However they will certainly not be a majority of the unprepared.
To become a Zombie, it will be the unprepared who will have not had the ability to adapt and survive in a SHTF world. They will reach a point of desperation which will cause one of several things to happen…
Some Zombies will wither away, unable to help themselves.
Some Zombies will be given some help by the goodwill of others, and will remain reliant on them for their continued survival. Some in this category will be able to provide some services in return, while others will not be so able.
Some Zombies will venture out in a non-threatening way, in search of solutions for their survival. Some of them will succeed, and many will not.
Some Zombies will venture out in a threatening way, and ‘take’ what they need by force. Some will succeed, and many will not.

So… when we happen to reference the word, Zombie, it could mean any of the above. It is a generalization of those who have not prepared for a SHTF scenario, and what many will become afterwards.

By referencing Zombies or a Zombie horde, it does not mean that we would not help a Zombie. That would depend upon many things… Not all Zombies will be ‘bad’. Some even useful. However, many will be ‘bad’.

The Zombie hordes reference those Zombies who are branching out from their origins, in search of survival. Some of them will be organized, some not. There will be varying sized groups. Some will be essentially harmless, but many will not be. A desperate Zombie could be a very dangerous Zombie.

If TSHTF, there will be many hard choices to be made with regards to Zombies. Some easier than others.
Don’t be a Zombie. Get prepared now, so you won’t turn into one…
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B. How to Find Your Way out Of the City on Foot during a Crisis
5 June, by Preparing For SHTF
Pasted from: http://prepforshtf.com/find-city-foot-crisis/#.UjV_KzEo6zY

You may have seen some of the reality shows where people are practicing their bug-out-techniques. Typically, they are bugging out from large urban areas. Why would you need to know how to escape your own city though?

Large metropolitan areas or areas where there are symbolic structures or events happening are targets. There are certain organizations or even governments that are plotting at this very moment on how to create chaos and havoc in American cities.

Urban areas are heavily populated and creating injuries and fatalities is the objective of these organizations. They do not blow up trees and release chemicals and biological agents to harm the wildlife in rural areas, they will attack where the people are, in heavily populated cities.

You May Have To Escape To Save Your Life
Being ready to evacuate is important, you cannot wake up one morning and hear the sirens and simply flee. You need supplies and a plan, and you can neither plan nor gather supplies once disaster strikes.

Humans have the unique ability to plan for tomorrow by gathering information today and then to make a reasonable assumption about what may happen in the future. Start doing threat assessments for your area to give you some idea of what to expect.

You know that large cities are a target and it is just a matter of time. Just a matter of time before one of the hundreds or even thousands of cyber attacks that occur daily against the United Sates is successful. The power grid can go down, planes would be grounded and trains sidelined.

At anytime, canisters of Sarin gas can be carried away from a rogue nation that has it stockpiled. One drop of the gas the size of a pinhead is deadly to humans, so imagine the destruction if just one canister is left on a subway platform somewhere. You will have to flee and you will need to know how to do it to survive the crisis.

Getting Prepared
You know what a bug-out-bag is but just a quick reminder about priorities. To survive you will need shelter, water, fire and food. In addition, you will need the means to collect and purify water and have the knowledge and skills to forage, fish, hunt or trap for food once you have a base camp set up. You have to assume you will not be able to resupply within a 72-hour period so it is important you have the skills and knowledge needed to obtain what you need from your environment.

Travel Routes
Use Internet mapping software that shows terrain features and landmarks, usually this means satellite imagery and there are free programs that provide this. Have at least three routes mapped out, and ensure none of the routes requires that you travel across bridges, through tunnels or use elevated highways. These are ambush points and they may very well be heavily congested to the point of being impassable even on foot.

If walking alone on level terrain, the average adult can expect to walk at about three miles per hour. With a heavy pack and having to backtrack a few times, you will not be able to maintain this pace. It will take time to clear the urban area.

When to Leave
Avoid leaving at night unless your life is in immediate danger. You will stand out more at night and will be a target for looters and other criminal elements. If Martial Law has been enacted, then troops will be out patrolling at night especially if there are quarantined areas. Mingle with the panicked citizens to make your escape in the early morning hours.

Avoid traveling with others unless they are family or trusted friends and in particular avoid anyone that claims to be fleeing but does not have any supplies with them. They may very well be waiting for the right moment to relive you of your supplies.

Move as efficiently as possible to get clear of the urban sprawl, before sheltering. If you must shelter in the city, do not set up any tents or shelters that you can be trapped in if your camp is overrun. Wrap up in a thermal blanket and sleep with your back to a wall with a clear view of the surrounding area.

Carry all personal protection devices on your belt. Do not pack firearms in your pack you should always carry them on your belt. Use bear spray canisters to repel animals and humans not because it is more potent, but because the canisters can spray farther, up to 25 feet in some cases.

Stun guns are another option but they require physical contact, which is something you want to avoid. An alternative is a stun baton that can extend up to 48 inches, this will prevent anyone from getting close enough to grab on to you or your pack.

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C. What happens after the SHTF, dealing with being a refugee
14 May 2013, IWillGetReady.com, by admin
Pasted from: http://www.iwillgetready.com/what-happens-after-the-shtf-dealing-with-being-a-refugee/

As good preppers we usually think that we will be the lucky ones and we will not be stuck in an urban area when the SHTF. As we all know that is the ideal situation where we will have all of our bug out bags and survival kits to weather any storm, but what happens if you are visiting family or friends that are not preppers? Or if you are on vacation where you flew into the area? Would you have your emergency supplies with you, most likely not as most of that stuff is no longer allowed on an airplane.

So enter into an urban survivalist mode. This is something that is not widely discussed, and should be. Let’s pretend that you are in a major city (like Boston) and something happens and you are no longer able to get out of the area the way you can into it. Using this scenario you just found yourself a refugee, meaning you are pretty much homeless with little cash on hand, what do you do to protect your loved ones and make sure that you stay safe?

For the sake of this blog, cell phones are up and down because so many people are overloading the lines, the local law enforcement are now too busy to be of much assistance to you or anyone else that was not involved directly when the SHTF.

Do you have your everyday carry items on you? This right here will determine how you act. If you do have it then you are moving in the right direction. If you do not have your everyday carry items, you are at a disadvantage as you will have to require those items or try to make do without.

Ask yourself these basic questions:
> Do you have a place to go?
> Would you enter a shelter?
> Would you find a shelter that is off the beaten path?

We all know what happens when we enter a shelter; that is why we say to never go to a shelter if at all possible. Just remember Katrina shelters and what went on in them. In most situations upon entering a shelter they will search your bags and confiscate most of your survival tools, food, and other useful supplies. So what do you do? Do you hid your kit somewhere and hope it survives the night and has not grown legs and walked away by the time you go back to get it?

If you seek out shelter that is secluded and off the beaten path, can anyone see, or find you? You might not want others to be able to find you as they could be gang members, criminals, and your pissed off refugee who has no survival skills and gear.

Mass people will be trying to leave the area so crowd control is something to watch out for. With all the people trying to go the same way people will become heated, angry, tried, scared, and can lash out at others. So do you follow the mob or do you look for another way? Just remember that natural disasters have taught us many things if you paid attention, just look at news footage of the highways where all the cars are stopped and you can’t move your car for hours. Would you leave your car like half of the others, and start walking?

We all know that the basic items like water and food will be the first things to go when something goes down. Or you get the military trying to round everyone up and move them to an area they set up (shelter).

A thing not to forget is that is you end up in one of these scenarios, you will become sleep deprived. This is something that is often overlooked and needs to be reminded, without sleep your ability to process your situation and your decision making ability will become diminished leading to you making bad choices for your family’s survival.
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D. The Top 4 Reasons Why You’re Not Going to Survive Bugging Out to the Woods
Ready4ItAll.org,
Pasted from: http://ready4itall.org/the-top-4-reasons-why-youre-not-going-to-survive-bugging-out-to-the-woods/

In today’s post we’re going to go over a very common and highly flawed bugout plan that many preppers have apparently chosen as their first response for most SHTF scenarios. We’re going to dissect the fundamental flaws with this plan and give some viable alternatives to bugging out to the woods.

There are many reasons why bugging out just in general is probably the worst idea you can have in a real-life SHTF scenario. We went into detail about this topic in THIS article. However, it seems that not only are a lot of preppers insisting on bugging out for practically any disaster scenario, but that many of them are planning on grouping up like some para-military pack of wannabe Rambos and “living off the land” and shooting anything and anyone that moves.

The other day on Facebook there was a heated discussion in one of the larger prepper groups about the best way to train “firing teams” to be ready for the eventual wilderness bugout that apparently is right around the corner.

Guys….that’s not prepping. That’s schizophrenia, or at best, extremism. Honestly, if you spend all day arguing on Facebook about the best way to place “troops” around your “bugout base camp” to “stalk and take out the sheeple coming in to YOUR woods” you have problems. Please go talk to a professional.

What I found more interesting about this conversation wasn’t the whole para-military thing. I don’t think we’re ever going to get rid of the unstable, wannabe Rambos from the prepper community, but what was really interesting was that practically everyone commenting on this debate apparently had the same plan to bug out to the woods during a SHTF scenario.

So today, we’re going to go over 4 reasons as to why bugging out to the woods is a REALLY bad idea, why you’re probably not going to survive out there if that’s what you’re planning to do and some alternatives to think about when planning a bug out.

_1. Whose land do you think you’re going to bug out to?
Although there are a lot of public and state-owned forests, nature preserves and other non-private lands out there you could theoretically bug out to, it’s not like these areas are just around the corner for everyone. For most people, it’s going to take some time to get out there, and since you’re not the only one with this plan. It’s very likely you won’t be the first ones out there. Now, you’ve got to hope that everyone else that got there first is either going to welcome you with open arms, not see you, or not shoot you on sight and take your supplies. Remember, there are people on Facebook literally right now that are not only planning on doing exactly that, but DEBATING THE BEST WAY TO DO IT.

Planning on bugging out to that nice patch of woods in the farmlands outside of town? Well, those farmers have been keeping people off their property a lot longer than you’ve been trespassing. They’re more self-reliant that you are, they know the land better than you do and they’re probably a lot better armed. Just because the S has hit the fan, doesn’t mean they’re not going to defend their land.

_ 2. There are VERY few people who have the skills to survive in the wild
This isn’t an attack on anyone that’s spent time working on their bushcraft and wilderness survival skills. These are 2 very important skills that all preppers should learn and practice. That being said, there’s a big difference between surviving in the woods, and surviving in the woods during a SHTF scenario. In a real SHTF scenario, rule of law is likely to be gone. We’ve already shown there are people who have no qualms with shooting people on site, just for their resources and to keep them out of “their” A.O.

If you’ve got a family, and for whatever bonehead reason you’ve drug them out into the middle of the woods to bug out after the S has hit the fan, you’re going to have some real problems. Are you going to be teaching little 4 year-old Jimmy advanced military evasion and survival techniques? How are you going to make sure little 2 year old Sally is going to stay silent for the next couple weeks to avoid the hundreds of confused, hungry, angry and hostile people out there? We could give a hundred examples like this, but in the end the answer is “you’re not”. Even if you’re by yourself, surviving in an area without immediate survival resources AND evading hostiles isn’t something that is usually taught on Man vs. Wild or in your average bushcraft course.

_3. It seems like EVERYONE is planning heading to the hills when SHTF. What makes you so special?
As we mentioned earlier, there are a great many preppers whose SHTF bugout plans involved heading out to the woods to survive. If a real SHTF scenario were to happen, not only will these people be headed out there, but after a day or two without food, even non-preppers are going to start thinking about hunting, fishing and gathering in the woods. Before long, you’re going to see a massive population shift from the cities to the country and forests.

This will mean a few things will happen:

The roads leading to the rural and wooded areas are going to be come congested, and probably impassable.
The roads leading to the rural and wooded areas are going to be a prime spot for anyone that’s thinking about taking supplies from others by force.
There will be intense competition for the limited amount of resources in these areas, likely causing more violence there than in the cities everyone is fleeing from in the first place.
Local land owners will very likely be shooting trespassers on sight.

_4. You’re not giving animals nearly enough credit …and humans are greedy.
Despite what a lot of people may believe, animals aren’t stupid. They’ve been surviving without guns, MREs or solar panels a lot longer than we have. Their main instincts revolve around protection and food procurement. They don’t just stand out in the woods waiting for humans to come kill them despite what Elmer Fudd might think.

If you don’t have a lot of experience hunting then you probably don’t know this, but towards the end of the hunting seasons, it becomes a lot harder to find game on public hunting grounds. The reason is simple. Animals have been hearing gunshots, seeing and smelling humans and generally fleeing for their lives for a couple months or more. There is a cycle among game animals. Towards the tail end of the season, the animals are leaving these areas to go to less populated areas where there are fewer humans. Several months after the hunting season is over, they start coming back because the humans have left. In a SHTF scenario, the same thing is going to happen. The animals will leave when more humans enter the forests and start hunting them. In fact, if everyone flees the cities, that’s exactly where the animals are likely to go!

Additionally, humans are greedy. There’s a reason why conservation agencies exist. It’s to keep us from destroying entire populations of animals. If you stick 100+ “hunters” in an area with only enough game to support 10 of them, all the game will disappear, either by the animals fleeing or they’ve all been taken. The same is true with fishing. If a pond gets over-fished, there are no more fish to mate and restock it naturally.

What about water? Sure, there’s lots of natural ways to procure water in the wild. There’s plenty of water out there for a few people… but not hundreds. Again, if there’s only a handful of streams or rivers to get water from, and EVERYONE wants water from there, 2 things are likely to happen. The water will be gone, or someone’s going to start thinking about defending “their” water source by force. Don’t think it will happen? Read some history books… WARS have been started over water rights.

In a nutshell, all those resources you thought were going to be in abundance out in the woods are going to dry up extremely quickly, likely before you even get there. At that point, you’re going to be hungry, without a source of food or water, living without a real shelter, exposed to the elements and dealing with a lot of angry and armed people.

Sounds fun huh?
Ok, so now, let’s talk about some alternatives to this highly dangerous and extremely illogical plan. First and foremost, please read THIS article. The term “bugging out” has gotten so much hype in what I’m going to start calling the “vanity-prepper” crowd, (I blame that stupid Doomsday Preppers show) that every new prepper I talk to immediately thinks that having a bugout bag for the BIG SHTF scenario and being able to live off the land is the most important thing they need to worry about right now. They spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on weapons and gear and then within a couple months they get burned out of prepping altogether and sell stuff to me for cheap on craigslist. J

Having a bugout plan IS important. That is a given. If a hurricane is coming that is a definite bugout situation. If your house is in the path of a wildfire, that is a bugout situation. Tornados, flooding… I think you see the pattern here. These are REAL bugout scenarios, and yes you should have a bugout bag for every family member ready to go just for these types of situations. However, more importantly, you need to have a bugout PLAN. We will be going more into detail about preparing a detailed bugout plan and bugout bag in a future article, but for now, you NEED to have somewhere you can go if your residence becomes unsafe like a family members home or even a hotel.

Now, I know what some people are thinking “…but what about SHTF?….when the SHTF hits…when the looters come…when the pandemic hits…when the mutant biker gangs take over…..blah blah blah”

STOP
You’re arguing a situation that has a 0.00000001% chance of ever actually happening. Yes, there is a chance that someday we may face one of the Hollywood disasters, but why is THAT what you’re so worried about right now? Do you have contingency plans for all the natural disasters that could hit your area? What would you do if you lost your job right now? How much food and water do you have stockpiled? What are you planning on doing about hyper-inflation? Heck, do you even have jumper cables in your car?!

You see, these (and many others) are REAL disasters that you WILL face in the coming days. So, with that being said, maybe instead of arguing with someone on Facebook about “the best way to set up firing teams”, … make a real bug out plan, practice it, document it, prepare for it… and most importantly, try to keep some perspective and reality in your preps and your plans. The rest of the world already thinks we’re nut-jobs; we don’t need to prove them right.

People fleeing Houston preceding Hurricane Rita

Continued on Thursday, 27 March 2014, in: Waves of Refugees, Part 2 of 2.
Contents:
E. Four Waves of Food and Shelter Seekers
F. Preparing for the Fourth – and Deadliest – Wave of Refugees, Bandits, and other Problem Groups
G. Taking over: The governments proactive attempt to remain in control:

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Filed under Prepper articles, Survival Manual

Tagged as disaster, ecology, emergency, famine, food, government, political, storage, water

Wednesday, July 29, 2015 · 12:10 AM

Dancing with viral dangers

A. Smallpox: Will Human Error Cause the Next Global Pandemic?
11 July 2014, Viral Global News Reader, posted in Health
Pasted from: http://www.viralglobalnews.com/health/smallpox-will-human-error-cause-next-global-pandemic/11790/

This past week, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), revealed that they have discovered containers of smallpox vials in a cold storage room at the Maryland National Institute of Health. This is big (and scary) news in the health field because this National Institute of Health is unauthorized to carry such an infectious disease. The smallpox disease is so dangerous and deadly that nations around the globe have agreed to a mandate that states that only two labs in the world are allowed to possess it. Will human error cause the next global pandemic?

Authorities are not sure why the smallpox vials were in the Maryland facility, and experts were not sure how the smallpox avoided detection for such a long time. This is coming off the heels of a previous CDC announcement in which they revealed that another protocol breach may have resulted in 75 CDC employees being accidentally exposed to anthrax.

The good news is that neither incident has reported any inadvertent exposures to the infections during both accidental events. The bad news is that both incidents have exposed potential hazards and security holes in even the most safe health facilities and labs across the globe.

Many researchers have reported that Americans are quite lucky that accidental exposures and health “slip-ups” like these did not happen with a virus like the flu, but the discovery of the unchecked smallpox virus in Maryland has many asking: will human error cause the next global pandemic? In 1918, there was a strain of influenza that killed around 50 million people. That 1918 strain of the flu, and some other strains as well, are currently being studied and researched in medical research labs in the United States and in various facilities around the world. If any of those labs make a mistake or have a slip-up, the results could be deadly and disastrous.

Current detractors of this type of research are not saying that researching dangerous pathogens is not important – these types of experiments can often provide valuable insight into combating such diseases – but they are saying that the rationale that is used to replicate these dangerous pathogens does not necessarily justify the risk that is taken by creating them.

They mention how scientists have been able to create the vaccines for these pathogens without having to recreate the viruses themselves, meaning that developing new strains of the pathogen is not necessary for protection; and as a result, people in the United States and around the globe will be able rest with a lot more at ease at night,

One of the biggest concerns amongst detractors of the studies is a form of research called “gain of function” studies. In this type of study, researchers and scientists will take a strain of a deadly pathogen that humans do not have immunity to yet and make them even more contagious in an effort to find a vaccine and to see how it transfers itself to mammals. Currently, “gain of function” studies are going on in the Netherlands and in the state of Wisconsin.

Mistakes and slip-ups in medical labs are not just hypothetical situations; they have happened before. Most recently, it happened in 1977 when the H1N1 virus escaped from a lab in China, and an outbreak in China and Russia ensued.

Basic human error can waltz pass even the most strict of security and safety protocols. Yes, it is very unlikely to happen, but it is not out of the realm of possibility. After the smallpox discovery, many are wondering if human error could cause the next global pandemic. If an outbreak like this does happen, humans will be asking themselves, “Was it worth it?”

B. Movie Plagues Not Entirely Claptrap
13 Jul 2014, MedPageToday, by Correspondent, Michael Smith
Pasted from: http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/GeneralInfectiousDisease/46735

It’s a recurring theme — a plague threatens to kill us all and a few brave souls work tirelessly to prevent doom.
Think, The Andromeda Strain. Think, Contagion and Outbreak. On the small screen this year, there’s, The Last Ship. And the list could go on.
The consensus among MedPage Today staffers in a morning meeting a few weeks ago was that such fictions are just … well, fiction. Tinseltown trash. Hollywood hokum.
So we decided to ask the experts and found a consensus among infectious disease specialists that is considerably more nuanced. Such stories are overblown, yes. Sensationalist, of course. But nonsense? Not entirely.
We asked if it is even possible that a sudden pathogenic scourge could threaten to kill us all.
The scientific consensus: Yes, although it’s unlikely. But it’s likely enough that highly trained specialists spend their working days worrying about it.

Worst Case Scenario (Really)
We also asked: What’s the worst that could happen, assuming a novel pathogen, easily transmitted, with no pre-existing immunity anywhere?
The scientific consensus: It could kill a lot of people, but probably not everybody.
“Theoretically, such a pathogen is possible,” commented Gail Reid, MD, of Loyola University Health System in Chicago. “It does not need 100% mortality, just close.”
“Although in such a case not all humans would die, societal structure would most certainly be negatively affected,” Reid told MedPage Today.
And assuming a novel, easily transmitted pathogen, “a large portion of the population of the planet could be affected rather quickly,” she said. “Just one plane ride from anywhere in an initially asymptomatic individual has the potential to lead to a pandemic.”

“My Infectious Diseases fellows saw the movie, Contagion several years ago and were very scared. Need I say more?”

Such movies are “fictional, sensationalistic, and raise the specter of extinction events,” said Amesh Adalja, MD, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a specialist in pandemic preparedness.
But “they do reflect the continual threat that humans face from emerging pathogens,” Adalja told MedPage Today.
He, like many other experts, cited HIV, SARS, the 1918 pandemic flu, and the recent flu pandemic as examples of novel diseases jumping to humans in recent times. But, as we all know, none has been uniformly fatal.

Lessons From History
“The popular fictional portrayals are not only possible, they have already occurred, “Adalja said, “and preparing, predicting, and attempting to mitigate the effects of this continual onslaught is of paramount importance.”

The 1918 flu pandemic “was a vivid example that a novel respiratory virus from another species can effectively mutate to evolve into a competent human pathogen with high potential for person-to-person transmission and virulence resulting in catastrophic illness affecting millions worldwide,” said Amar Safdar, MD, of New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City.

That’s just the most dramatic example, Safdar told MedPage Today. The “concern for alarm” comes from repeated epidemics and pandemics in the 90 or so years since then.
To fit its movie role, a novel pathogen would need several characteristics — it would have to be easily transmissible and eventually lethal but with a long incubation period in which the victim was asymptomatic but able to infect many people.
Luckily, we have yet to encounter such a bug.

Robert Holzman, MD, of NYU School of Medicine in New York City, told MedPage Today: “There is no question that infections can have a high death rate and major impact on human and nonhuman populations.”
The question, he said, is how likely such an event is.

“Over a lot of years of human existence we have not yet encountered a human pathogen combining the high fatality rate of, say, rabies and the high transmissibility of, say, norovirus or chicken pox or measles,” he said.

Possible, Yes. Probable, No
Such a bug is not impossible, he said, but it’s “very, very, …, very unlikely.”
“Fortunately,” agreed Talia Swartz, MD, PhD, of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, “the notion of a scourge that could instantly wipe out humanity is not a likely event.”

Indeed, “it would take an incredibly virulent and contagious pathogen in another species to jump to humans and still be both virulent and contagious,” argued Matthew Sims, MD, PhD, of the Beaumont Health System in the Detroit area.
“The big fear is we will hit a perfect storm of disease where all of the worst possibilities come true,” Sims said.

“It is very, very uncommon that a disease is so lethal that everyone who catches it dies,” commented Jorge Parada, MD, also of Chicago’s Loyola University Health System.

Parada, who was a medical source for the 2011 movie, Contagion, added that “even the devastating 1918 flu pandemic that killed an estimated 20 to 40 million people had a mortality rate only as high as around 20%.”
Indeed, regardless of the pathogen itself, commented Kevin Morano, PhD, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, some of us would be okay.
“In any population there would almost always be a small percentage of immune individuals, based on chance and genetics,” he told MedPage Today. “With a planet of six billion, a 1% survival rate still leaves 60 million.”
However, as Loyola’s Reid noted, that would still have a devastating effect on human society.

It Really Is a Small World, After All
One thing that worries experts is that we travel a lot more these days. As CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, is fond of saying, any pathogen is just a plane ride away.

Since the 1918 flu, medical science has gotten better at treating disease, but “the advent of air travel presents a new dilemma, as communicable diseases can now be spread across continents within days,” said Glenn Wortmann, MD, of MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

SARS in 2002-2003 “highlighted this risk,” he said — an initial outbreak in southern China spread to 37 countries, eventually causing more than 8,000 cases and more than 700 deaths.
SARS was highly virulent, but not completely so, Sims noted: “It stormed through the population but not everyone was affected even among those exposed.” But it’s very virulence meant that the outbreak burned out relatively quickly.

Put another way, some pathogens “kill so fast that the virus becomes self-limiting, unable to spread faster than it kills,” Morano said.
For SARS, there is still no established antiviral therapy, commented David Perlin, PhD, of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark — the virus was essentially starved of victims by quarantine measures.
(The same is true of the Middle East coronavirus (MERS), incidentally — there is no specific treatment and control is essentially a matter of good quarantine measures. When they fail, as they did this spring, outbreaks can occur.)

The 2009 pandemic flu, Perlin noted, “was not particularly lethal, but CDC estimated that in approximately one year, there were between 43 (and) 89 million cases.”
But a 10% or 20% fatality rate — like SARS or the 1918 flu — “would have killed many millions.”
Not all diseases burn out, of course. HIV spread for years before it was even recognized and has now killed some 36 million people. Luckily, it’s quite hard to catch.
The same is true of the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu. It has a case-fatality rate of about 60% — still not enough to kill us all off — but only a few hundred cases have been recorded since the bug was first recognized.

“The major worry for scientists,” Wortmann said, “is that a deadly virus, such as Ebola, would mutate to become more contagious, and then spread internationally through air travel.”
“As there are few effective treatments for viral infections, this would represent a global challenge,” he added.
Ebola, now raging in West Africa, is a pathogen with an alarmingly high case-fatality rate but it needs close contact between a victim and another person for infection to take place.
Importantly, it doesn’t spread through droplets in the air, as do the flu and common colds. And in places like the U.S. with a highly developed healthcare system, simple barrier precautions and isolation would prevent a widespread outbreak.

Worst case scenarios involve either an antibiotic-resistant bacterium that kills quickly or a virus that kills more slowly or has a latency period where it can be transmitted but is not debilitating, argued UT Health’s Morano.
In either case, the rate of infection might be fast enough and the rate of death slow enough that the pathogen could spread by common means of transportation, he said.
It would be even worse if the agent was aerosolized and spread by coughing or sneezing so that many people could be infected by a single patient, Morano added.

The White Knight
But what about the heroes of the tale? What about the brave scientists who track down the pathogen and come up with a cure/vaccine/treatment?
Here the experts are more divided.
Loyola’s Reid said: “I think the most fictitious aspect of this is the rapid ‘cure’ that is developed.”
After all, she added, “we still don’t have a vaccine for HIV or hepatitis C or Ebola virus, and our vaccine for influenza has to be updated yearly.”

On the other hand, Beaumont Health System’s Sims said, “technology has come incredibly far in the last decade or so.”
It took years for investigators to identify HIV, come up with a test for it, and develop treatments (although no cure or vaccine so far), Sims noted. But it took only a month or so to realize that SARS was a new disease, and a few weeks more to identify the agent that caused it.

Research on possible treatments was underway when the disease had begun to burn itself out.
“Unfortunately, the scenario of an intrepid doc or scientist coming up with a cure or vaccine in the span of a few weeks or months is highly unlikely, especially if the infectious agent is poorly studied,” Morano commented.

“These things take a great deal of research, time and money — exactly what we’re doing now in medical centers across the globe.”

(News & Editorial/ Dancing with viral dangers)

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Tagged as disease, ecology, political

Monday, July 21, 2014 · 12:10 AM

Walking to your destination

(Survival Manual/Prepper articles/Walking to your destination)

A. How Far can You Walk in a Day When Bugging Out?
Feb 2014, PreparednessAdvice.com, by admin – Howard
Pasted from: http://preparednessadvice.com/survival/far-can-walk-day-bugging-foot/#.UwM9IYmYbmh

The question how far can you walk in one day recently came up in regards to bugging out. This led to quite a discussion, and many different opinions. For the last twenty-five or so years, I have done a lot of hiking in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and can cover some pretty good distances.

However most of the time I am with someone else who is in shape to hike and we are not carrying much weight. A seven-mile hike in about 2-3 hours is quite doable and I am 70 years old. But that brings up the question of how much weight could I carry and could I do it day after day, while sleeping on the ground and making camp. No nice soft lounge chair in which to recover.

A young man in good shape normally walks around three miles an hour, and can do it all day on level ground with little to no weight. But remember the speed of the march is determined by the weakest member of the group not the strongest. When bugging out the weight of a pack is going to slow him down.

Other factors that determine your speed are the weather, terrain, the condition of the trail and what you are carrying. Do you have children or elderly people with you, do any of your group have medical conditions that slows them down. Another factor is threats, are you having to hide to avoid other people.

The U.S. Army Ranger Training includes a 12-mile forced, tactical ruck march with full gear from Camp Rogers to Camp Darby. This is the last test during one phase and is a pass/fail event. If the Ranger student fails to finish the march in less than 3 hours, he is dropped from the course. With the ruck and their other gear, they are carrying 65–90 pounds. Now this is an extreme case, very few of us could even come close.

Many of us would be traveling with a family and might even have to carry younger children or infants. In addition, we would have to carry our food and other supplies, set up a camp each day and take care of other chores.

I have done a bit of research for this post and looked at the speeds that were considered fast in traveling across the American plains.

A pioneer wagon might do 15-25 miles on a very good day, if it was being pulled by horses or mules. Oxen on the other hand only traveled one or two miles an hour but didn’t require as much rest or as good a forage as horses or mules. They might do 10-12 miles in a 10-hour day

A horse will walk 3-4 mph, trot about 8-10 mph and gallop depending on the ability of the animal and the terrain at 30-40 mph. According to the U S Cavalry, a horse can cover some 30-40 miles a day, but can be pushed to double that, but then will be pretty much spent for several days while he recuperates.

I spoke to a local scout leader and was told that many of the young boys would struggle on a three or four mile hike in the mountains when carrying a full pack.

Now I see some preparedness books that tell you that when bugging out your pack should weigh up to a third of your body weight. Now this may be a good guideline for a twenty year old in good shape. But it won’t work for the rest of us.

Freezedryguy.com an old friend of mine and an old SF guy, says that most people way over estimate their ability to walk in planning for bugging out. He feels that most family groups with children or elderly will travel closer to 3-5 miles a day when walking cross country. A lot will depend on you and your families physical and emotional condition and don’t forget very good foot ware.

After talking with several-experienced hikers and some friends who have seen a real evacuation by foot I believe that most people over estimate the distances they can walk. This is largely the result of having to travel at the pace of the slowest member of your group.

Most family groups with young children or elderly would average closer to 5 miles a day. Young people in average shape should do 20 miles or so in good terrain for the first couple of days, then blisters, light rations and other problems will slow them down. So plan on your bug out taking longer then you expect if you are traveling by foot. Howard

B. How to Go Unnoticed
Edited by FatDuckling, IngeborgK, DifuWu, Katie and 11 others
Pasted from: http://www.wikihow.com/Go-Unnoticed

This is a guide for those who desire to go unnoticed or hide in plain sight.

1. Ascertain why you don’t want to be noticed. Whether for a game, avoiding someone or just to blend and relax. It’s easier to know what you’re doing and why.

2. Dress plainly. One of the most important things you can do is dress down. Jeans and a T-shirt are generally good. Don’t wear tight jeans, low-cut shirts, or tons of make-up if you’re a girl. If you’re a guy, don’t wear your jeans half-way down your butt and a T that’s way too big. You’re trying not to stand out. It is also best to avoid bright colors, especially reds, oranges and yellows, especially when these colors come in stripes across the body. The human brain is wired to react to these colors, leading you to be noticed more easily.

3. Act as if you belong even if you don’t. People notice people who look as though they don’t fit far quicker than people who look as if they walk down this street every day. Practice feeling comfortable in any setting – this takes some confidence.

4. Act natural. If something catches your eye in a shop go look at it, if you feel hungry go get food. If every third person has a shopping bag, go buy something. If half the people around you are eating, then eat. People tend to pass over people who look preoccupied doing something else.

5. Be quiet. It doesn’t seem important but people hear easier than they see in crowded places. Even if a person is not looking at you they can still hear you.

6. Be still. If pressed stand still. People notice movement more than shapes. Don’t become a statue. Just stand still like you don’t have a reason to move, not like you have a reason not to.

7. Walk with your head down. That way you can move slower if you want and people can’t see your face as easily.

Tips:

Don’t look people in the eye. They will definitely notice. Keep your head down.
If you see someone you know don’t go and greet them. Walk past and see if they notice you. This is a good test for your covertness.
If you’re following someone don’t always keep your eyes on them, reflective glass is good. If they walk into a shop look in the window of one across from it or look in the shop next door, don’t follow them in.
Get lost in a crowd. A person in fifty is harder to spot than a person in five.
If you’re avoiding someone don’t try to hide behind a wall or something if they look your way, just keep right on doing whatever you were doing. A person jumping behind a wall is very noticeable.

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Tagged as ecology, economy, martial law, political

Monday, September 17, 2012 · 12:10 AM

Images from the near future

(News & Editorial/ Images from the near future)

[Something very wrong is happening here. My vision of the near to midterm future, ie., 1-5 years, is “more of the same”, but up there amongst the think tanks, computer algorithms, politics and big business, there exists a dark and different view of that future.
This brief post, points to two elements, that like gathering storms are now becoming visible on the US public horizon.
Nervously, I wonder to myself, “Why are the people who I have voted for and the institutions I have trusted for my seventy years of life, arming themselves? Why are the smiling political faces on TV talking about freedom and democracy, while the organizations they operate from, are making weapons to wage war on the US public? What new vision does our leadership have? Why are we privy to discussions of “the dream” but not told of “the reality?”
Note: The various models of vehicles seen below are being manufactured, they are rolling off established productions lines. These vehicle have supply lines, inventory and parts, employees and the support of community infrastructures.
Are they being supplied by Detroit, from recent years “bail out” funds, or sold to us at a discount rate by our friends, maybe the Chinese? This article is only a glimpse of a startling reality. I suggest you also read a recently posted article, “State of Alaska to Stockpile Mass Amounts of Food and Supplies in Giant Warehouses”…My fellow Americans, now is the time to become concerned, maybe afraid, something very wrong is happening here. Mr. Larry]

What are the MiliPolice Planning On Doing With These Heavily Armored Vehicles?
September 12th, 2012, SHTFplan.com, Mac Slavo
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/what-are-the-milipolice-planning-on-doing-with-these-heavily-armored-vehicles_09122012

With a massive biometric FBI surveillance system going live across the United States in recent weeks,tens of thousands of drones to be flying over American skies within just a few years, over 1 billion rounds of ammunition being acquired by non-military government agencies, and host of laws and executive orders outlining military and police emergency response plans to lock down the United States, it isn’t much of a stretch to suggest that our government is preparing for something that aims to fundamentally transform America as we know it today.

New evidence for a coming lock-down of America is presented to the public by citizen journalists and alternative media on an almost weekly basis, which suggests that whatever is being planned is on a much more accelerated schedule now than ever before.

The latest, from alternative news hub “Rense.com”, indicates that Department of Homeland Security is expecting significant push-back in the very near future, which explains why they would need some 2,500 heavily armored vehicles with DHS Police/Rescue logos:

What could they need equipment like this for here in the US? They are hitting the road with it. Caravans of National Guard equipment but with new never before seen equipment in the convoys. Take a close look at what is painted on the side of the Black Humvees. The Humvees are fully armored the same standard used by our military.

The use of the word ‘Rescue’ is an obvious psy op…makes it sound nice and benign, kind of like a life-saving paramedic ambulance and not a domination and death machine. The Posse Comitatus Act is gone.

They are gearing up for serious business and are training the National Guard, FEMA and Police with them. The latest batch of 2,500 GLS vehicles don’t come more heavily-armored. The GLS is the larger vehicle on the trailer below. It is a deadly serious piece of equipment and they have never been used inside the US until now. All information in this email has been released publicly.

[Images/commentary courtesy of Rense.com]

The United States government is and has been planning for unlikely events like war and societal collapse for many years. This year President Obama has implemented, by Executive Order, doomsday response plans that would essentially give the government an unprecedented ability to nationalize large industries, personal farm and ranch land, and even your skills and labor in the event of a declared emergency. A control grid is being put into place to handle what they know is coming.

The only question is: What, exactly, is it that is coming to America?

The Ultimate Goal of the Surveillance State
September 12th, 2012, The Daily Sheeple, Jon Rappoport
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-ultimate-goal-of-the-surveillance-state_092012

Surveillance is coming at us from all angles. Chips, drones, TSA checkpoints, smart meters, back-doored electronic products, video cameras, spying home appliances; our phone calls and emails and keystrokes and product purchases are recorded.
The government and its allied corporations will know whatever they want to know about us.
What then?
What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?
Smart meters give us one clue. Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.
Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.

National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.

Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”

As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”

Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”
Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.
This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.
As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.

In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.
We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We see (planned) drought and famine. We are told about desperate shortages and a frying Earth. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.
The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.
On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.
Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.
This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.

The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.
Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.
An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.
Surveillance; planning; control.
The surveillance is expanded, not because we are constantly under threat and must be protected from terrorists, but because we can then be labeled and entered on to 10 billion squares of the game board, to be moved around or held in place.
This is the vision.
It isn’t ours. It never was. But we are not consulted.

Instead we are made witness to watershed events: the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the 2001 assault on the Trade Center and the Pentagon. These ops paralleled the unleashing of better and more far-ranging methods of surveillance.
We are profiled down to the threads on our clothing and DNA in our cells. But what is our profile of the technocrats and their bosses?
They are divorced from human life. They live in a vacuum. They take pleasure from that vacuum.

In 1982, I interviewed Bill Perry, who had just left his job as PR chief at Lawrence Livermore Labs, where scientists design nuclear weapons. Perry had been given the kind of job PR people long for. But one day, when he passed the desk of a researcher and listened to his complaints about budget limitations, Perry said, “Listen, America already has the means to blow up the whole planet eight times. What more do you need?”
The researcher looked up at him with a genuinely puzzled expression. He said, “You don’t understand, Bill. This is a problem in physics.”
In the same detached sense, the technocrats who want to calculate and direct our future, move by move, minute by minute, see us as components of a complex and very interesting problem.

Yes, they indeed expect to exercise power and control. But they also live in an abstraction. They deal their answers from that realm. They exercise cool passion. They see, for example, that not every single twitch of thought of every person on earth is yet mapped, so they want to finish constructing the means by which they can chart those “missing elements.” They want to complete the formula.
They view their research as a wholly natural implication of the mathematics they can manipulate. They swim in technology and they want to extend its architecture. To abandon the program would be tantamount to denying their own intelligence. They climb the mountain because it is there.

They do perceive that one factor does not fit their algorithms: the free individual. It’s the wild card. Therefore, they are compelled to analyze freedom and break it down into DNA functions and brain processes. They assume, because they must, that the free individual is an illusory idea that flows from some older configuration of synaptic transmission, at a time in our evolution when we needed it. But now, they suppose, the engineering of human activity and thought has superseded such quaint notions. Now we all can be tracked, traced, and studied on a different and wider scale. Now we can be seen for what we really are: a hive.
Therefore, we must be instructed, within tight limits, about our various functions.
I’m reminded of a statement attributed to Nobel Laureate, Alfred Szent-Giorgi: “In my search for the secret of life, I have ended up with atoms and electrons, which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am retracing my steps…”

Today’s technocrats will admit no such disappointment or existential crisis. They flourish with great optimism as they design the future world and its single society. If they run out of pieces of their puzzle to study, they’ll try to track the motion of every atom and electron and quark in the universe. They’ll delight in it.
Knowing all this, we know the terms of the war we are in.
The Central Planners have an equation: “free=uncontrolled=dangerous.”

By the gross terms of that equation, they lump us in with thugs and murderers and terrorists. They even see the normal functioning of the brain as a threat, as an intrinsically defective process, and they have long since decided that organ must be corrected with drugs.
We, on the other hand, must assert, in every way possible, that freedom is real and inviolable, and we must back that up with our actions.
When individual freedom is no longer discussed in great depth by people who should know better, when it is left to wither on the vine, many programs and structures are built to take its place. When freedom is not understood beyond a superficial level, the question, WHAT IS FREEDOM FOR, goes begging.

Of all the criticisms of our education system, this one should be primary. Thomas Jefferson envisioned public education purely as a way to teach children what being a citizen in a Republic meant—because, until the Constitution was enacted, there had never been an experiment in freedom on such a scale. It was a new premise.
Now, in one of our greatest cities, Chicago, people are scrambling to ensure that, during a teacher’s strike, schools can remain open as baby-sitting warehouses for half-days.

Delivered by “The Daily Sheeple”

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Friday, December 9, 2011 · 2:36 AM

Martial law – 1

(Survival manual/2. Social issues/Martial law-1)

Our great myth has been that America is strong (economically, morally and militarily); the land of the free; home of global democracy; where the son of a common man may grow up to become President; where you can become whatever you want, if you have the personal intelligence and ambition to get there; that there will always be an economic safety net to catch you, if you fail; that government at all levels, live by the guiding code of the Constitution of our nation; that America is always right; that there will be inexpensive gasoline for our cars into the deep future; that our homes in suburbia– miles from work/school/stores are safe from a systemic/structural failure (don’t even mention peak oil); and who would ever think even for a moment, that America drunken with its past glory, like Goliath, might someday be felled by an event orchestrated by brazen David.
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Up’s & Down’s: How it looks on the way down
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A. Notes reiterated from elsewhere in this blog, and more, a lot more.
1. Mankind endures ‘an episode of great wealth destruction’ at least once every century. So people should prepare to ride out a disaster, be it a tsunami, a market meltdown or Islamic terrorists with a ‘dirty bomb’.
2. People generally do not feel the unthinkable will happen to them. However, many times there are
situations out of our control that affect us in a big way. Major events that affect the food supply are especially troubling.
3. The rich (everyone in the Western world) get complacent, assuming they will have time “to extricate themselves and their wealth” when trouble comes. The rich are mistaken, as the Holocaust proves.
4. Events move much faster than anyone expects’ and the barbarians are on top of you before you can escape–Bloomberg (Jan. 30)
5. In May and June 1940, some 338,000 British and French troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk by a flotilla of fishing boats, tugs, barges, yachts and river steamers. The French and Belgian armies had collapsed; the Dutch had surrendered. Britain stood alone, as bombs shattered London and the Nazis prepared to invade. In this, the United Kingdom’s darkest hour, stocks rallied and indeed the period around the Dunkirk evacuations’ marked the ‘market bottom’ during the WWII.

Our daily perceptual outlook is based on a slow-moving average of our previous observations and expectations regarding the environment. So, when there have been long periods of ‘times have been good’, regardless of negative occurrences in the last few days or weeks, we still cling to ideal of the observed and learned long-term trend.

The victims of the Holocaust failed to adapt to the rapidity of change. Their environment became hostile while they clung to a long-term, learned pattern, meanwhile dismissing the obvious. German anti-Semitic social conditions rapidly deteriorated, costing millions of otherwise optimistic, perceptual, and bright people– their lives.

During the United Kingdom’s ‘darkest hour’, with the immediate observational evidence: a major battle lost at Dunkirk, the Nazi’s bombing London and the Allied War effort losing ground, who would guess that in this dismal, fearful time, that the British stock market would change its long term direction, bottom and rise optimistically.

From this discussion, a general concept can be stated, it’s the oldest investment cliché around: “Buy Low. Sell High”. Add to this mix the concept of ‘volatility. Volatility is considered the most accurate measure of risk, the higher the volatility, the higher the risk and the reward. When the German news media and later, gangs of ‘Brown shirt Nazi youth’ increasingly attacked Jewish citizens and their neighborhoods, these were signs of increased social volatility hence, risk was increasing. Volatility- risk increased at the peak of had been a long period of ‘good times’. Human group social behavior moves from peak to trough, from trough to peak, in broadly stroked fractal waves. See the charts below, The Cycle of Market Emotions and the fractal pattern, Basic Elliot Wave Cycle.

[When things have been ‘good’ for some time, they’re going to become ‘less good’ for a time in the future, and they may become outright perilous. The Cycle of Market Emotions chart, seen below, goes beyond stock market trading. When things have been so good that you don’t even think about how easy life has become, you’re probably near an economic-social peak.
And, when in the depths of despair, when all of your environment seems that it just can’t get much worse, there follows the bottom, and a turning point, after which ‘times’ will begin to improve.
Phase length is related to cycle length, the period from Thrill to Anxiety (chart below) could be perhaps seen as years 2005 to 2008. Maybe we’re in Denial now, maybe Fear follows in 2012, and things get really bad around 2015… Phase length, to a degree, depends on the length of the cycle you’re looking at. Things get better, then they get worrisome; Buy Low – Sell High; What goes up must come down. Its nature’s way.]

[Image at Left: the Basic Elliot Wave Cycle shows a more detailed movement path for the human social sphere matrix of: consumer confidence-stock market-economic feedback loops-political reaction. It’s a five wave series with 3 wave advances and two wave corrections; there’s a peak period, followed by a declining three wave correction, where upon the entire pattern repeats. Have we just about finished Wave B Up, soon to be followed by Wave C down? Mr. Larry]

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10 Things We Can Learn From Egypt About Preparing for Economic and Societal Collapse
January 31st, 2011, SHTFPlan.com, by Mac Slavo
http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/10-things-we-can-learn-from-egypt-about-preparing-for-economic-and-societal-collapse_01312011
As riots spread across the world, having started first in Europe, then engulfing the Middle East, most people in the U.S. outright rejected the possibility that the same could happen right here at home. But the fact of the matter is that we remain in economic crisis and there is a real possibility of a collapse of the system we have come to know.

If the system does happen to collapse, be it because of a hyperinflationary currency meltdown, political uprising or anything in between, here are ten things you can expect to happen, just as they are happening in the Middle East today:

There will be a general breakdown in law and order. Law enforcement will not be policing your neighborhood. This will likely lead to a community response and vigilante groups setting up neighborhood security details. The law and justice will be determined by those walking your streets with sticks and guns, so be sure to mind your P’s and Q’s.
Food and water will become scarce. The average American has about three days worth of food in their home, and likely very little water, as most are dependent on their local city for this essential commodity. As with any major disaster, like hurricanes or earthquakes, panicked people will immediately make a run for the grocery store, either before or at the onset of crisis, looking to acquire any non-perishable goods. They’ll buy everything they can in one trip, which leaves less food for the next guy. Our just-in-time inventory management systems ensure that there will be no reserves in the back of the grocery store, so once the store shelves are cleared, it
will be a while before they are restocked.
Looting will be rampant. Until all of the food, water, diapers and HDTV’s have been cleared from store shelves, looters will be breaking into retail businesses in search of goods. In Egypt, most of the population is not armed. In the U.S., however, it’s a different story and the general rule on looters is: shoot them. Regardless of whether you are trying to acquire food for your baby or a free Xbox, you will be considered a looter if you enter a private business.
If the rioting and looting gets bad enough, expect full deployment by the military. As we are currently seeing in Egypt, and like we saw in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina saga, government is prepared to restore order by whatever means are available. There will be heavily armed soldiers, tanks and unmanned aerial vehicles patrolling your city.
When rocks start getting thrown, Molotov cocktails start exploding, and citizens take it upon themselves to shoot at military and law enforcement personnel, soldiers will fire back – and the firing will be indiscriminate, just like we’ve seen in Egypt and during the Iranian riots of 2009. One report out of Egypt indicates that President Mubarak of Egypt has issued shoot-to-kill orders giving the military authority to open fire on anyone it deems a threat.
Hospitals will run out of basic medical supplies. We saw this in Haiti and we’re seeing it in Cairo. As the injured and wounded stack up, medical personnel will be overwhelmed. Basic medicines like hydrogen peroxide and antibiotics will disappear, and minor injuries may lead to amputation or death in a matter of days if supplies are not restocked. As more dead bodies stack up, this could potentially lead to widespread outbreaks of disease like it did in Haiti.
The internet will get shut down. Governments have realized that the internet is the communication medium of choice to organize protests and riots. When Iranians protested their Presidential elections in 2009, Twitter and other social networking sites were used to organize, as well as to broadcast pictures of the events in near real-time. This gives the government ample reason to shut down all digital means of communication, the most important being that government is unable to stop mass gatherings, nor are they able to control the news propaganda of the event itself. Egypt is the first country to have taken steps to completely shut down everything from traditional internet connectivity via ISPs, as well as phone and text communications. Expect the same in your neck of the woods if and when it hits the fan.
Banks will be closed and ATM’s will be out of money. With no law enforcement, banks will be unable to operate. There will be no one to refill the cash in ATM’s, and it’s possible that even if they do have money you will not be able to withdraw it because problems with electronic processing will prevent it. Those who don’t have cash or barterable goods on them will be left with no way to transact.
The real value of gold and silver against most other assets will rise. Though only anecdotal reports exist at this time from the streets of Egypt, it’s clear that anytime governmental, economic or social instability hits a particular region, the value of these precious metals rises. The 2010 riots in Greece prove this point, as the price of gold on the street rose to a reported $1700 per ounce, even while gold in global commodity exchanges was trading at $1100. When there are no open banks or working ATM’s, precious metals will become the de facto reserve currency on the ground.
The ‘important’ people will probably get the heck out of Dodge. If you’ve got money and power, you’re going to be fast-tracked out of the region. President Mubarak’s sons quickly fled Egypt when the riots broke out. In Tunisia, the President’s wife made a beeline for the nearest international destination – with a ton of gold in tow. While the elite will have access to evacuate a disintegrating regional riot or collapse, everyday folks will likely be stranded. Expect that wherever you are when it hits the fan is where you’ll stay, so be sure to be stocked up on the essentials.

Remember how New Orleans residents fared after Hurricane Katrina?
That’s why today, it is vital that you develop a food storage program for your family. Even FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security recommend you should be able to be self-sufficient for a minimum of 3 days. Now, why would they do that? What do they know that you don’t know?
FEMA and DHS know they won’t be able to take care of everyone.
That’s why it’s up to you to take care of your family.
Remember: Where the Refugee Camps set up, disease will surely follow.
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The basic plan (Amidst times of local rioting)
<http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/egypt-vigilante-groups-form-to-protect-local-communities-amid-riots-looting_01292011>
Any well rounded plan for pervasive, large scale riots may include, but is not limited to:

Having enough food on hand for at least two weeks, as the normal flow of commerce will likely come to a halt
Having enough water on hand for at least two weeks, just in case water utility plants are attacked
(it wouldn’t take much to make your local tap water undrinkable)
Close range firearms like handguns and shotguns in the event of a break-in of your home while you’re inside
Longer range weapons to handle perimeter defense of the outer security layer of your property or neighborhood.
Some sort of communication devices for neighborhood patrols (FRS walkie talkies will do)
Flashlights, flood lights (including extra batteries and/or a generator) that can be used to help illuminate the outer security layer of your neighborhood if a threat is detected.
Discretion – Remember, today it’s a riot and the Shit is Hitting the Fan, tomorrow it could be TEOTWAWKI.

Under no circumstance should you alert your neighbors, even if you are working with them to setup perimeter defense of your neighborhood, about your reserve food, water, ammunition, gas or other preps. Don’t share your weapons if you don’t have to – because you might not get them back. If the neighborhood finds out you have reserve food and water, and if the situation goes into extra innings, there will be tens of people at your front door looking to consume your larder on a daily basis.

Remember these four points:
1) “Nothing in politics happens by chance”. — President Franklin Roosevelt
2) “Strategy is something that happens to you while you are looking the other way”. — President Franklin Roosevelt.
3) “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie –deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” – President John F. Kennedy
4) “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger

Authoritarian Governments
One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that “knowledge is power,” this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless.
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What Would Life Be Like Under Martial Law?
July 1st, 2010, By Giordano Bruno
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/what-would-life-be-like-under-martial-law_07012010
The U.S. Federal Government under both the Bush and Obama administration has made it perfectly clear that in the event of almost any major disaster scenario, including economic and environmental, they see the institution of Martial Law as not only viable, but inexorable. From legislative actions like the Patriot Act and the Enemy Belligerents Act (currently in committee) to continuity of government programs such as Rex 84 (formerly classified) and Presidential Directive PDD 51 (currently classified,
even from Congress), all the “legal” precedents have been put into place to allow the Executive Branch to implement military oversight of civilian affairs, dissolution of Constitutional liberties, even the end of Miranda Rights and the right to a speedy impartial trial as protected under the Sixth Amendment. In some cases, government legislation allows for the rendition and torture of American citizens as combatants, all for the “greater good”, of course.

Some in this country dismiss such bills and directives as abstract novelties that don’t constitute any real threat to our freedoms or our daily life. People have a tendency to assume that the atmosphere we live in today will remain the same tomorrow and always. Many of us never consider that dramatic, even violent change in American domestic policy is possible on a moment’s notice. On the contrary, the continuity legislation now in place shows that our government under the direction of corporate globalists is not only prepared to implement a military lockdown of this country, they fully anticipate that such an event will occur in the near future.

In this article, we will examine how Martial Law will be presented to the citizens of the U.S., how it would likely evolve and progress, and what the ultimate end result will be if such action is not stopped by the Liberty Movement and the American public.

A “Reasonable” Tyranny
Tyranny does not always burst through your front door wearing body armor and brandishing an assault rifle. Sometimes, it waltzes through your living room and sweeps you off your feet. Sometimes it wears a glad mask that promises warmth and safety. Sometimes, tyranny invites you out to the party and makes you feel like you belong.

NEVER leave your drink unattended around tyranny…

Regardless of how apathetic the American public may seem at any given moment, the majority of them at their core hate false authority backed by thuggish jackboot mentality when directly faced with it, and will not capitulate to despotism easily. That’s just the way we are.
Revolution is in our blood (though now slightly diluted), and it is an undeniable aspect of our national psyche. Widespread and immediate military control of U.S. streets would be met with a fury the world has never seen. If martial law were ever to be achieved by the Federal Government, it would have to be presented to Americans gradually, as absolutely reasonable and necessary to their personal well-being not to mention that of their families. Globalists would have to twist the reality of martial law into a tapestry of fuzzy logic and two-dimensional rationalizations, making the action appear almost mathematically evident. They would also need a crisis on a scale nearly beyond belief.

The U.S. is on the verge of many such crises. The economic health of this country is blatantly unstable, and even some mainstream analysts who called us “fear mongers” six months ago are now reluctantly admitting that some form of collapse is probable.
See also the New York Times article at:

The financial life of America hangs by the thinnest of threads, and any moderate disaster at this stage will most definitely send it spiraling out of control. Reports of U.S. warships positioning off the coast of Iran are now verified by the Department of Defense, and the media is beginning to spew WMD propaganda once again.

The likelihood of a U.S. or Israeli attack on the major oil producing nation has increased drastically. It is only a matter of time before Iran gives the West an excuse, or the West fabricates an excuse from thin air. Any new war, anywhere, would spell disaster for the world economy. Period.

And, perhaps the most devastating of all circumstances, BP’s act of eco-terrorism in the Gulf of Mexico has turned from a distraction that should have been disentangled immediately, into a slow motion catastrophe whose consequences could be so far-reaching they might turn out downright biblical, not to mention, an ample pretext to call for a coastal evacuation and even martial law, see the article:

http://www.examiner.com/x -17299-Hernando-County-Political-Buzz-Examiner~y2010m5d9-Gulf-Oil-Spill-2010-Plans-to-evacuate-Tampa-Bay-area-expected-to-be-announced

These scenarios do not include the ever-present threat of government sponsored false flag terrorism, which could exacerbate social tensions one hundred fold. A 9/11 scale attack, perhaps even nuclear in origin, would assuredly be followed by a declaration of martial law. Under circumstances like these, people tend to allow their fear to dictate what is “reasonable” at the moment. Principles often take a back seat to “moral relativity” in the face of misfortune, even though wisdom demands that
principles be held as most important in the worst of times. Freedom and civilian control over government are vital not just when our wallets are stuffed, our stomachs are fed, and the weather is mild, but when the threat of national upheaval hangs in the sky like a sun-baked vulture. When an early and unpleasant demise becomes a distinct possibility for a significant majority of the citizenry, this is when liberty should take precedence over all things.

One argument is always presented by tyrants and their flock during the initial stages social enslavement: “You can’t enjoy freedom if you are dead. It is always better to be alive, no matter the cost.” However, what they fail to mention is that it is exceedingly difficult to enjoy being alive when you are a modern feudal peasant whose destiny is subject to the whim of power-hungry corporatists and madmen. There is nothing meaningful in that kind of life, just as there is nothing meaningful in the life of a cog in a great machine except to turn around and around. You can’t enjoy freedom if you are dead, but you also can’t enjoy living if you’re not free.

At the beginning of any autocratic system, total authoritarian control is almost always presented as a panacea, a wonder-drug for the masses. When confronted with epic struggle, some people would rather defer responsibility for their survival to someone else rather than make the effort to save themselves, and thus, totalitarianism is born.
Martial law in America would be no different. It will be presented to us as purely rational and absolutely necessary; an “extreme solution to extreme times”. Its success would rest solely on how many of us are willing to make the effort to determine our own destinies, and how many of us are too cowardly to do so.

Consequences Of Martial Law
Regardless of how well governments sugarcoat the prospect of martial law at its introduction, after it has been instituted, it doesn’t take very long for the people to realize they have been duped. The consequences of a militarized society cannot be hidden after the fact, nor does the establishment feel the need to hide those consequences after they have been handed unlimited power.

To peer into the future of what American martial law might look like, one need only research the history of martial law and dictatorships in general. From the Philippines to China to the Soviet Union, the stages of tyranny are pretty much the same no matter where you are in the world. Anyone who believes martial law in America will forgo any of these terrible steps, or that we will somehow maintain a sense of propriety and fairness, is going to be sorely disappointed.

Free Press Destroyed: The very first action of any government that has achieved military control of a country is to dominate the flow of information. The greatest threat to elitist domination is usually the people who they mean to rule over. Ending freedom of the press stalls chances that a view that opposes government control will gain footing. In America, the mainstream media is already under globalist control and would likely remain active during martial law, at least for a time. FOX, CNN, CNBC, etc, would change little, while the true free press (alternative web news which now dominates over the ratings of mainstream media) would be attacked, if not shut down completely. Government enforced web filters (like those in China and being legislated in Australia) could be put in place, and arrests of citizen journalists are liable to occur.
Dissolution Of Checks And Balances: In some cases, military rule allows for the dissolution of states’ rights and even of Congress itself. If Congress is allowed to remain, it would be in a ceremonial capacity only. Under martial law, all decision-making is “streamlined” into the hands of the executive branch. The excuse given for this is often the same everywhere; the President (dictator) must not have his hands tied by checks and balances during a state of crisis, otherwise, his decisions are slowed, and more people could be hurt. Once the executive branch of a country removes checks and balances, they almost never put them back willingly, even after the so-called “crisis” has subsided.
Erasure Of Civil Liberties: Say goodbye to Habeas Corpus immediately. All tyrannies have abruptly suspended rights to fair trial, rights to legal representation, Miranda Rights, even the right to know what one has been charged with before being arrested. This process quickly devolves the justice system to the point where those who are detained simply disappear, and are never heard from again. The U.S. currently has many pieces of legislation that have passed or are pending which allow rendition and even torture of regular citizens, specifically in the event of a national emergency, which under current rules, the President can declare at his leisure.
Curfews, Checkpoints, Searches, Citizen Spies: Say goodbye to privacy. Expect ID checkpoints, and arrests for lack of ID. Expect nighttime curfews in cities enforced with extreme prejudice. Expect warrant-less searches of your home without cause, not to mention surveillance of web and phone traffic. Also count on the fact that some people, out of paranoia, or out of some twisted desire for petty influence, will start pointing an accusing finger at anyone who looks at them the wrong way, and the establishment will encourage this. Tyranny is much easier when the citizens police each other. We actually see some of this behavior today, however, under martial law, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of holding the authorities or anyone who supports them legally accountable for any wrongdoing. There is essentially no means to voice grievance. Martial law is like a free pass to law enforcement officials to do whatever they please, whenever they please.
Arrests Of Activists And Dissidents: Political opponents of the establishment, no matter how honorable and peaceful they may be, would likely be arrested. Those who have the capability to lead a movement in opposition of the current government or those who have the respect of a sizable percentage of the populace will become priority targets during martial law. All tyrants seek to quash other voices, especially strong voices, so that they can create an environment in which THEIR voice is the only one that can be heard. Activists are normally labeled as subversives, insurgents, or terrorists. They are arrested and treated as enemy combatants.
The reigning government will claim that such people are “dangerous” to the stability of the country, and a threat to national security. Associating activists with terrorists also makes the idea of rendition and torture slightly more palatable to the fearful public.
Economic Feudalism: In an autocracy, everything becomes a matter of national security, even the state of the workforce. All jobs become state jobs. The very poor become a possible burden.
The middle class and the very rich (if not already part of the establishment) become possible competition. This is why most tyrannies seek to establish “harmonization”, which is really just a
flowery way of saying that everyone is made equally dependent on the system for their survival. It is hard to become a successful man in an oppressive society if you are not one of the elite. It is even harder to be a pauper in the same society because you are seen as a parasite feeding off the collective (though you are probably hurting no one). Martial law is always followed by an end to
economic prosperity for the average citizen and the removal of the traditional middle class. In the end, this causes the public to subjugate themselves. It creates a system which rewards those who submit with a semblance of the status they once had. The alternative: barely eking out an existence while under constant fear that you could be labeled an impediment to social progress. Given this choice, many would choose to conform.
Food, Water, and Healthcare Rationing: Food and water are life. Control these two things in a culture, and you have the makings of a tyranny. One of the most notable aspects in the elitist quest for empire is the trail of hunger and starvation they leave in their wake. All methods are green lighted. Burning of farmland, hording of grain, heavy taxation on livestock or harvests, government micromanagement of planting, everything is fair game. Food regulation can be taken to a whole other level in our modern age. With malicious corporations like Monsanto in operation, genetically modified crops can be created to control diet, ‘terminator seeds’ which yield only one crop can be used to keep the masses from replanting, and the pollen from these plants can be used to infect the genus of non-GMO crops birthing mutant strains which damage the food chain. By creating a food shortage, rationing then becomes inevitable, and with rationing comes greater influence. Healthcare rationing would be a natural extension, until every moment of ones life relies on the good graces of a centralized bureaucracy.
It is rare for a government to implement all of these actions in a single instant. Usually, they are introduced slowly over a period of years, and with each new decree a problem is preemptively engineered by the elites to give a “reasonable” cause, or generate a concrete fear. As time passes, people forget what life was like before, left only with the dreadful
circumstances of the present, and a disquieting sensation in the pit of their stomachs, telling them that the world they have been presented is not the world we should have settled for.

Never Compromise Liberty
Tyrants prevail when they are able to fool the masses into compromising their ideals, and their conscience. They enjoy devising scenarios by which we are made to tread through a “grey area”, a place
where the truth is supposedly a matter of perspective, and that which is right and balanced could become unbalanced and destructive. Once you choose to compromise a fundamental principle, they then use that moment to set precedence. “If torture is tolerable in the chance that it could save some lives, then perhaps it is tolerable in other situations…” they say. “If some freedoms are expendable in the name of security, then perhaps others are as well.”

How do we stop elites from setting precedence in this way? We never compromise.

“Grey Area” scenarios are a charade. A rigged casino game in which there is only a single outcome and a single winner, and the winner is definitely not you. The crisis is usually one that the establishment created in the first place, i.e. the economic collapse, the BP oil spill, false flag terror, etc. And, the solution is always predetermined. No obstacle has only one solution, there are a myriad of answers to every dilemma, some far better than others. Yet, time and time again, we are offered only one way to resolve every disaster; greater centralization and extended government power.

Most disingenuous of all is the constant promise by government to keep us safe. No government has the power to offer security. Security provided by others is an illusion. The only true safety is that which one provides for himself. We accomplish this by becoming self reliant, self aware, and tough minded. We do not wait for some abstract ruling body to come to our aid, and we do not trade our freedom on the false promise that they will honor their agreement.

I have heard it argued that America is different, that we should not suspect our government capable of tyranny because “we are the government”. I find this assumption extraordinarily naïve. Our government has not represented the wishes of the people for decades. The leaderships of both major parties have supported almost identical legislative measures and extolled parallel globalist ideologies, making a mockery of our election process by giving us only one choice in the casting of our vote. We should be very suspect of such a government, for we are not the same, our goals are entirely opposed, and only one group can be allowed to endure; those who wish to dictate, or those who wish to be free.

I have also heard it said that freedom exists under the purview of government. That the liberties we enjoy are only possible because of the protections that government provides. Elitists often take advantage of our presumption that government is some kind of cultural obligation, one that we must bow to, and that by attrition, we must bow to them. In reality, government is a philosophical construct; a framework that only exists because we will it so, and that administrates freedoms only so far as we
allow it to do so. WE are the source of our liberty, NOT government. It is we as individuals who ultimately must protect the freedoms we enjoy. Under no circumstance is any government more vital than our personal liberty. The choice is eternally simple; when asked to sacrifice one or the other, government must go.

The Constitution of the United States was drafted as a means to reign in government and force it to respect the freedoms of the people. It exists to deter the power-hungry, for under the Constitution they are supposed to be denied the control they thirst for, not given unrestrained supremacy. Martial law is a tool by which the power-hungry can remove the restraints of the Constitution and cast aside freedoms on a whim.
This is unacceptable no matter the state of affairs. War, terrorism, economic collapse, environmental catastrophe, none of these events gives anyone the license to usurp our liberties. It cannot and will not be allowed. It is a title every man is born with but few men have the strength and fortitude to keep. “Independence” requires taxing vigilance, a persevering spirit, and the determination to see that neither is tread upon. Independence has a price. In the event that we are confronted with martial law in this country, it is a price we may have to pay all over again.

Recent areas of government expansion

(Have you read or seenin the national ‘news’ media, about the follwing Institutions, Bills, or Presidential Orders (discused in the rest of this post)? Read on, then answer that question to yourself. We’re not talking about a sporting event, a celebrity ‘gone bad’ or who got kicked off ‘Dancing With The Stars’, but with Federal Governmental policy, National-local police information networks, Presidental Martial Law enactment powers being quietly woven into the fabric of our social and economic life.

1. Fusion Centers
(‘Google’, Fusion Centers)
December 5, 2007,
<http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/whats-wrong-fusion-centers-executive-summary>
A new institution is emerging in American life: Fusion Centers. These state, local and regional institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. Though they developed independently and remain quite different from one another, for many the scope of their mission has quickly expanded – with the support and encouragement of the federal government – to cover “all crimes and all hazards.” The types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector.

These new fusion centers, over 40 of which have been established around the country, raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the “war on terrorism” are combining to threaten Americans’ privacy at an unprecedented level.

Moreover, there are serious questions about whether data fusion is an effective means of preventing terrorism in the first place, and whether funding the development of these centers is a wise investment of finite public safety resources. Yet federal, state and local governments are increasing their investment in fusion centers without properly assessing whether they serve a necessary purpose.

There’s nothing wrong with the government seeking to do a better job of properly sharing legitimately acquired information about law enforcement investigations – indeed, that is one of the things that 9/11 tragically showed is very much-needed.

But in a democracy, the collection and sharing of intelligence information – especially information about American citizens and other residents – need to be carried out with the utmost care. That is because more and more, the amount of information available on each one of us is enough to assemble a very detailed portrait of our lives. And because security agencies are moving toward using such portraits to profile how “suspicious” we look.

New institutions like fusion centers must be planned in a public, open manner, and their implications for privacy and other key values carefully thought out and debated. And like any powerful institution in a democracy, they must be constructed in a carefully bounded and limited manner with sufficient checks and balances to prevent abuse.
Unfortunately, the new fusion centers have not conformed to these vital requirements.
Since no two fusion centers are alike, it is difficult to make generalized statements about them. Clearly not all fusion centers are engaging in improper intelligence activities and not all fusion center operations raise civil liberties or privacy concerns. But some do, and the lack of a proper legal framework to regulate their activities is troublesome. This report is intended to serve as a primer that explains what fusion centers are, and how and why they were created. It details potential problems fusion centers present to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, including:

Ambiguous Lines of Authority. The participation of agencies from multiple jurisdictions in fusion centers allows the authorities to manipulate differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information collection while evading accountability and oversight through the
practice of “policy shopping.”
Private Sector Participation. Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arm’s length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies, and
increasing the risk of a data breach.
Military Participation. Fusion centers are involving military personnel in law enforcement activities in troubling ways.
Data Fusion = Data Mining. Federal fusion center guidelines encourage whole sale data collection and manipulation processes that threaten privacy.
Excessive Secrecy. Fusion centers are hobbled by excessive secrecy, which limits public oversight, impairs their ability to acquire essential information and impedes their ability to fulfill their stated mission, bringing their ultimate value into doubt.

“…With regard to the ultimate purpose of state and regional fusion centers, the topic remains open to debate. In some cases the stated purpose of these centers has shifted in the few years they have been operating. Many of the “first-wave” centers, those created soon after 9/11, were initially solely focused on counterterrorism.

Today, less than 15% of the fusion centers interviewed for this report described their mission as solely counterterrorism. In the last year, many counterterrorism-focused centers have expanded their mission to include all-crimes and/or all-hazards. For some this shift is official, for others it is defacto, reflected in the day-to-day operations of the center, but not in official documentation.

This shift towards an all-crimes and/or all-hazards focus can be explained by several factors: appearance of a national trend, need for local and non-law enforcement buy-in, and need for resources.
First, leadership at several fusion centers interviewed for this report noted they believed the country was moving towards an all-crimes and/or all-hazards model and they felt they needed to move with the changing tide. Others suggested it was impossible to create “buy in” amongst local law enforcement
agencies and other public sectors if a fusion center was solely focused on counterterrorism, as the center’s partners often didn’t feel threatened by terrorism, nor did they think their community would produce would-be terrorists.
Rather, most police departments and public sector agencies are more concerned with issues such as gangs, narcotics, and street crime, which are more CRS-22 relevant to their communities. Lastly, one fusion center mentioned that having a wider purpose, that is all-crimes and/or all-hazards, allowed the fusion center to apply for a greater array of grants and draw on resources from more public agencies and individual partners.”

See also the Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, at : http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL34070.pdf
.

2. Council of Governors
(‘Google’, Council of Governors)
“President Obama establishes “Council of Governors”
Pasted from <http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin562.htm>
January 19, 2010, By Chuck Baldwin, NewsWithViews.com
The White House Office of the Press Secretary released a report on the White House web site titled “President Obama Signs Executive Order Establishing Council of Governors.” According to the press release, “The President today [January 11, 2009] signed an Executive Order establishing a Council of Governors to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State Governments to protect our Nation against all types of hazards. When appointed, the Council will be
reviewing such matters as involving the National Guard of the various States; homeland defense; civil support; synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States; and other matters of mutual interest pertaining to National Guard, homeland defense, and civil support
activities.”

According to the report, the Council will be composed of “ten State Governors who will be selected by the President to serve two year terms . . . Once chosen, the Council will have no more than five members from the same party and represent the Nation as a whole.”

The press release also states that “Federal members of the Council include the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs, the U.S. Northern Command Commander, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, and the Chief of the National Guard Bureau. The Secretary of Defense will designate an Executive Director for the Council.”

As with most Presidential Directives or Executive Orders that have the potential to swallow our liberties and expand federal–or even international–police powers, the mainstream media conveniently fails to inform the American people as to what is happening. Such is the case with Obama’s EO establishing a Council of Governors (COG). Therefore, it is left to independent writers to issue the alert. Thank God for the Internet!

As with any expansion of the federal government, this new Council of Governors needs to be monitored very carefully by freedom lovers. One blog rightly noted that the COG “clearly represents another assault on Posse Comitatus, the 1878 law that bars the military from exercising domestic police powers, which was temporarily annulled by the 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act before parts of it were later repealed.”

Another blogger wisely stated, “As with most government powers, there is always the potential for abuse. In this case, there is cause for serious concern because every bit of this entails expanding traditional Command in Chief powers to the DOD [Department of Defense], spreading troops around the US (potentially not American troops at that . . .) and deciding who has ultimate tactical command over reserves and Guard in the event of ’emergencies,’ terrorist attacks, or natural disasters.”

Actually, this EO is simply the latest in a series of events going back to the Bush and Clinton years, in which the federal government has taken steps to lay the foundation for extensive military police action within the United States.

Back in 2008, retired lawman Jim Kouri wrote, “In a political move that received little if any attention by the American news media, the United States and Canada entered into a military agreement on February 14, 2008, allowing the armed forces from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation during a domestic civil emergency, even one that does not involve a cross-border crisis, according to a police commander involved in homeland security planning and implementation.

“It is an initiative of the Bi-National Planning Group whose final report, issued in June 2006, called for the creation of a ‘Comprehensive Defense and Security Agreement,’ or a ‘continental approach’ to Canada-US defense and security.

“The law enforcement executive told Newswithviews.com that the agreement–defined as a Civil Assistance Plan–was not submitted to Congress for debate and approval, nor did Congress pass any
law or treaty specifically authorizing this military agreement to combine the operations of the armed forces of the United States and Canada in the event of domestic civil disturbances ranging from violent storms, to health epidemics, to civil riots or terrorists attacks.

“‘This is a military plan that’s designed to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act that traditionally prohibited the US military from operating within the borders of the United States. Not only will American soldiers be deployed at the discretion of whomever is sitting in the Oval Office, but foreign soldiers will also be deployed in American cities,’ warns Lt. Steven Rodgers, commander of the Nutley, NJ Police Department’s detective bureau.”

Of course, the groundwork for this US-Canadian agreement occurred in 2002 when President G.W. Bush created USNORTHCOM. For the first time in US history, an entire Army division has been tasked with “homeland defense efforts and to coordinate defense support of civil authorities.” (Source: USNORTHCOM official web site) Plus, The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, which passed with almost unanimous bipartisan support, and was signed into law in January 2008 by
then-President Bush, required the implementation of the COG.

Then, in June of 2009, USNORTHCOM sent a legislative proposal to Congress requesting “amending Title 10 of USC, expanding the Secretary of Defense’s powers to mobilization of the Army Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Navy Reserve, and Marine Corps Reserve to assist civil authorities in disasters and emergencies . . . ‘thus enabling a truly Total Force approach to disaster response.'”

Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive penned, “The Pentagon has approached Congress to grant the Secretary of Defense the authority to post almost 400,000 military personnel throughout the United
States in times of emergency or a major disaster.”

Concerning this, David Mundy at the Texas National Press commented, “If granted, the move would further erode the authority of the states and would minimize the role played by the states’ militia . . . in handling domestic issues.

“More ominously, nothing in the Pentagon’s request specifies that the troops to be posted in U.S. cities would necessarily be Americans.”

The report notes that in September of 2009, USNORTHCOM released its 32-page initial framework for the “Tri Command,” referring to NORAD, NORTHCOM, and Canada COM. It is noted that while NORTHCOM AND Canada COM are national organizations, NORAD is set up as a binational force.

It is largely understood, therefore, that the Council of Governors has been established for the purpose of getting the governors’ blessing on this newly accumulated power. In other words, the COG is Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Stockton’s effort to establish a liaison between the governors, DHS, DOD, and the National Guard.

Of course, as the report suggests, what is not being disclosed is what powers will be conferred upon the 10 gubernatorial council members and what authorities they will be required to cede to the federal government.

Anyone who is not concerned about the ever-increasing encroachment of federal power upon the states and citizenry at large is either not paying attention, or is already a slave at heart. Instead of worrying about whether a gubernatorial or State legislative candidate is a conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, we need to be focusing on whether or not our State governors and legislators have the historical and constitutional acumen and resolve to resist the current dismantling of State sovereignty and personal liberty being orchestrated by this federal leviathan that is known as Washington, D.C.

We can survive hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, looters and thugs, blackouts, and even Muslim terrorists. What we cannot survive–at least not without great cost and effort–is tyranny at the hands of our own government. In this regard, our greatest threat is not foreign terrorists or natural disasters; our greatest threat is Washington, D.C.

3. FEMA internment camps
(‘Google’, FEMA camps)
Global Research, March 18, 2009, Preparing for Civil Unrest in America Legislation to Establish Internment Camps on US Military Bases, by Michel Chossudovsky
Excerpt:
“A bill entitled the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (HR 645) was introduced in the US Congress in January [2009]. It called for the establishment of six national emergency centers in major regions in the US to be located on existing military installations.
<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-645>

The stated purpose of the “national emergency centers” is to provide “temporary housing, medical, and
humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster.” In actuality, what we are dealing with are FEMA internment camps. HR 645 states that the camps can be used to “meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

There has been virtually no press coverage of HR 645. These “civilian facilities” on US military bases are to be established in cooperation with the US Military. Modeled on Guantanamo, what we are dealing with is the militarization of FEMA internment facilities.

Once a person is arrested and interned in a FEMA camp located on a military base, that person would in all likelihood, under a national emergency, fall under the de facto jurisdiction of the Military: civilian justice and law enforcement including habeas corpus would no longer apply.

HR 645 bears a direct relationship to the economic crisis and the likelihood of mass protests across America. It constitutes a further move to militarize civilian law enforcement, repealing the Posse Comitatus Act. “

——————————————– H.R. 645 ———————————————-

ANNEX

Text of H.R. 645: National Emergency Centers Establishment Act

This version: Introduced in House.

This is the original text of the bill as it was written by its sponsor and
submitted to the House for consideration. This is the latest version of the bill
available on this website.

[SOURCE: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-645]

HR 645 IH

111th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. R. 645

To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

January 22, 2009

Mr. HASTINGS of Florida
introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and in addition to the Committee on Armed Services, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

——————————————————————————–

A BILL

To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ‘National Emergency Centers Establishment Act’.

SEC. 2. ESTABLISHMENT OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS.

(a) In General- In accordance with the requirements of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall establish not fewer than 6 national emergency centers on military installations.

(b) Purpose of National Emergency Centers- The purpose of a national emergency center shall be to use existing infrastructure–

(1) to provide temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster;

(2) to provide centralized locations for the purposes of training and ensuring the coordination of Federal, State, and local first responders;

(3) to provide centralized locations to improve the coordination of preparedness, response, and recovery efforts of government, private, and not-for-profit entities and faith-based organizations; and

(4) to meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.

SEC. 3. DESIGNATION OF MILITARY INSTALLATIONS AS NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS.

(a) In General- Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, shall designate not fewer than 6 military installations as sites for the establishment of national emergency centers.

(b) Minimum Requirements- A site designated as a national emergency center shall be–

(1) capable of meeting for an extended period of time the housing, health, transportation, education, public works, humanitarian and other transition needs of a large number of individuals affected by an emergency or major disaster;

(2) environmentally safe and shall not pose a health risk to individuals who may use the center;

(3) capable of being scaled up or down to accommodate major disaster preparedness and response drills, operations, and procedures;

(4) capable of housing existing permanent structures necessary to meet training and first responders coordination requirements during nondisaster periods;

(5) capable of hosting the infrastructure necessary to rapidly adjust to temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance needs;

(6) required to consist of a complete operations command center, including 2 state-of-the art command and control centers that will comprise a 24/7 operations watch center as follows:

(A) one of the command and control centers shall be in full ready mode; and

(B) the other shall be used daily for training; and easily accessible at all times and be able to facilitate handicapped and medical facilities, including during an emergency or major disaster.

(C) Location of National Emergency Centers – There shall be established not fewer than one national
emergency center in each of the following areas:

(1) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions I, II, and III.

(2) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV.

(3) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions V and VII.

(4) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region VI.

(5) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Regions VIII and X.

(6) The area consisting of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IX.

(D) Preference for Designation of Closed Military Installations-
Wherever possible, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, shall designate a closed military installation as a site for a national emergency center. If the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense jointly determine that there is not a sufficient number of closed
military installations that meet the requirements of subsections (b) and (c), the Secretaries shall jointly designate portions of existing military installations other than closed military installations as national emergency centers.

(E) Transfer of Control of Closed Military Installations- If a closed military installation is designated as a national emergency center, not later than 180 days after the date of designation, the Secretary of Defense shall transfer to the Secretary of Homeland Security administrative jurisdiction over such closed military installation.

(F) Cooperative Agreement for Joint Use of Existing Military Installations – If an existing military installation other than a closed military installation is designated as a national emergency center, not later than 180 days after the date of designation, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of Defense shall enter into a cooperative agreement to provide for the establishment of the national emergency center.

(G) Reports-

(1) PRELIMINARY REPORT- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site–

(A) an outline of the reasons why the site was selected;

(B) an outline of the need to construct, repair, or update any existing infrastructure at the site;

(D) an outline of preliminary plans for the transfer of control of the site from the Secretary of Defense to the Secretary of Homeland Security, if necessary under subsection (e); and

(E) an outline of preliminary plans for entering into a cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f).

(2) UPDATE REPORT- Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site–

(A) an update on the information contained in the report as required by paragraph (1);

(B) an outline of the progress made toward the transfer of control of the site, if necessary under subsection (e);

(C) an outline of the progress made toward entering a cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f); and

(D) recommendations regarding any authorizations and appropriations that may be necessary to provide for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site.

(3) FINAL REPORT- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, shall submit to Congress a report that contains for each designated site–

(A) finalized information detailing the transfer of control of the site, if necessary under subsection (e);

(B) the finalized cooperative agreement for the establishment of a national emergency center at the site, if necessary under subsection (f); and

(4) ADDITIONAL REPORTS- The Secretary of Homeland Security, acting jointly with the Secretary of Defense, may submit to Congress additional reports as necessary to provide updates on steps being taken to meet the requirements of this Act.

SEC. 4. LIMITATIONS ON STATUTORY CONSTRUCTION.

This Act does not affect–

(1) the authority of the Federal Government to provide emergency or major disaster assistance or to implement any disaster mitigation and response program, including any program authorized by the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5121 et seq.); or

(2) the authority of a State or local government to respond to an emergency.

SEC. 5. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.

There is authorized to be appropriated $180,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2009 and 2010 to carry out this Act. Such funds shall remain available until expended.

SEC. 6. DEFINITIONS.

In this Act, the following definitions apply:

(1) CLOSED MILITARY INSTALLATION- The term ‘closed military installation’ means a military installation, or portion thereof, approved for closure or realignment under the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (part A of title XXIX of Public Law 101-510; 10 U.S.C. 2687 note) that
meet all, or 2 out of the 3 following requirements:

(A) Is located in close proximity to a transportation corridor.

(B) Is located in a State with a high level or threat of disaster related activities.

(2) EMERGENCY- The term ‘emergency’ has the meaning given such term in section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122).

(3) MAJOR DISASTER- The term ‘major disaster’ has the meaning given such term in section 102 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5122).

(4) MILITARY INSTALLATION- The term ‘military installation’ has the meaning given such term in section 2910 of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (part A of title XXIX of Public Law 101-510; 10 U.S.C. 2687 note).

————————————— Δ ——————————————–

The bills status: Feb 10, 2011: Referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Pasted from <http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-645>

Displaced persons/Refugee camps
A refugee camp is a temporary settlement built to receive refugees. Hundreds of thousands of people may live in any one single camp. Usually they are built and run by a government, the United Nations, or international organizations, (such as the Red Cross) or NGOs.

Refugee camps are generally set up in an impromptu fashion and designed to meet basic human needs for only a short time. Some refugee camps are dirty and unhygienic. If the return of refugees is prevented (often by civil war), a humanitarian crisis can result.

Some refugee camps have existed for decades and some people can stay in refugee camps for decades, both of which have major implications for human rights. Some grow into permanent settlements and even merge with nearby older communities, such as Ein el-Helweh and Deir al-Balah.

Facilities
Facilities of a refugee camp can include the following:
• Sleeping accommodations (tents)
• Hygiene facilities (cleaning and toilets)
• Medical supplies
• Communication equipment (e.g. radio)
• Protection from bandits (e.g. barriers, checkpoints, peacekeeping troops).

Duration
People may stay in these camps, receiving emergency food and medical aid, until it is safe to return to their homes. In some cases, often after several years, other countries decide it will never be safe to return these people, and they are resettled in “third countries,” away from the border they crossed.
Although camps are intended to be temporary, it is possible for camps to remain in place for decades. Palestinian refugee camps have existed for 50 years, while other well-known camps such as Buduburam have hosted populations for over 20 years.
.

FEMA housing/camps following Hurricane Katrina
More Than 8,700 Families Out Of Shelters And Into Temporary Housing
Release Date: October 23, 2005
Release Number: 1604-085
State and Federal officials announced today that more than 8,700 families, or approximately 26,000 individuals, have been housed in travel trailers as of October 19. Hundreds of evacuees have been assisted in finding other types of housing such as hotels, apartments and the Holiday Cruise Ship.
• 8,706 families have moved into temporary manufactured housing provided by the government.
• Approximately 400 families are being placed in travel trailers or mobile homes daily.
• More than 400 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant mobile homes are available for those who express a need and qualify.
[Photos at right: A FEMA ‘Katrina’ trailer camp.]
• Some manufactured homes are placed in emergency group sites identified by local officials and others are placed in commercial parks. Some are placed, if possible, on an
individual’s own property or other private property.
• More than 1,000 contractors are hauling travel trailers and hooking up utilities.
• More than 800 FEMA inspectors are checking damaged properties.
• 1,299 persons are living temporarily on the cruise ship Holiday.
• The cruise ship is currently docked in Mobile, Ala. but will be moving to a port at Pascagoula as soon as it is safe to do so.
• The cruise ship provides shuttle service to Mississippi and within Mobile for work, doctor’s appointments and other transportation needs.
• 3 tent camps are in development for Pass Christian, Long Beach and D’Iberville.

** To make emergency housing needs known, visit a Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) or call the FEMA help line at 1-800-621 FEMA (3362). Those with speech or hearing impairments may call the TTY number at 1-800-462-7585.

FEMA prepares the nation for all hazards and manages federal response and recovery efforts following any national incident. FEMA also initiates mitigation activities, trains first responders, works with state and local emergency managers, and manages the National Flood Insurance Program and the U.S. Fire Administration. FEMA became part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on March 1, 2003.

National Security Presidential Directive 51
NSPD-51: Bush prepares martial law
05/24/2007 , by Bill Weinberg
Pasted from <http://www.ww4report.com/node/3940>

“President Bush, without so much as issuing a press statement, on May 9, 2007 signed a directive that granted near dictatorial powers to the office of the president in the event of a national emergency declared by the president.

The “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive,” with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, establishes under the office of president a new National Continuity Coordinator.

That job, as the document describes, is to make plans for “National Essential Functions” of all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president’s directives in the event of a national emergency.

The directive loosely defines “catastrophic emergency” as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.”

When the President determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the President can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an “enduring constitutional government.”

Translated into layman’s terms, when the President determines a national emergency has occurred, the President can declare to the office of the presidency powers usually assumed by dictators to direct any and all government and business activities until the emergency is declared over

Ironically, the directive sees no contradiction in the assumption of dictatorial powers by the President with the goal of maintaining constitutional continuity through an emergency.

A Congressional Research Service study notes that under the National Emergency Act, the President “may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.“

The CRS study notes that the National Emergency Act sets up congress as a balance empowered to “modify, rescind, or render dormant such delegated emergency authority,” if Congress believes the president has acted inappropriately.

NSPD-51/ HSPD-20 appears to supersede the National Emergency Act by creating the new position of National Continuity Coordinator without any specific act of Congress authorizing the position.

NSPD-51/ HSPD-20 also makes no reference whatsoever to Congress. The language of the May 9 directive appears to negate any a requirement that the President submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists, suggesting instead that the powers of the executive order can be implemented without any congressional approval or oversight.

Homeland Security spokesperson Russ Knocke affirmed that the Homeland Security Department will be implementing the requirements of NSPD-51/HSPD-20 under Townsend’s direction.
The White House had no comment.”
..

Executive Orders spelling out presidential powers in a national emergency
From Survive Martial Law
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/3545879/Survive-Martial-Law>

The USA is divided into 11 control zones for effective FEMA management. FEMA was created by a series of Executive Orders. A Presidential Executive Order, whether Constitutional or not, becomes “law” simply by its publication in the Federal Registry. Apparently, as we’ve recently learned, so can a simple Presidential Directive. Congress is by-passed!
It can be legal or illegal but still becomes solid “Law of the Land.”

Executive Order Number 12148 created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that is to interface with the Department of Defense for civil defense planning and funding.

An “emergency czar” was appointed. FEMA has spent about 6 percent of the national budget on national emergencies, but the bulk of their funding has been used for their army and construction of secret underground facilities to assure continuity of government in case of a major emergency, foreign or domestic. Executive Order Number 12656 appointed the National Security Council as the principal body that should consider emergency powers. This allows the government to increase domestic intelligence and surveillance of U.S. citizens and would restrict the freedom of movement within the United States and grant the government the right to ‘isolate’ large groups of civilians. The National Guard (mostly foreign troops) will be federalized to seal or control all borders, U.S. air space, and
all ports of entry.

Here are just a few of the Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would and will suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They just need the stroke of President Bush’s Presidential pen… this should terrify you! “Directive 51” probably overrides all this anyway.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 – allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 – allows the government to seize and control the communication media.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 – allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 – allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 – allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 – allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 – designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 – allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 – allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 – allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 – specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis or about anything.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 – grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 – assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 – allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institutions in any undefined national emergency.

“The Federal Emergency Management Agency has broad powers in every aspect of the nation.
General Frank Salzedo, chief of FEMA’s Civil Security Division, stated that he saw FEMA’s role as a “new frontier in the protection of individual and governmental leaders from assassination, and of civil and military installations from sabotage and/or attack, as well as prevention of dissident groups from
‘gaining access to U.S. opinion, or a global audience in times of crisis.”

FEMA’s powers were consolidated by President Carter to incorporate:
1. The National Security Act of 1947, which allows for the strategic relocation of industries, services, government and other essential economic activities, and to rationalize the requirements for manpower, resources and production facilities;
2. The 1950 Defense Production Act, which gives the President sweeping powers over all aspects of the economy;
3. The Act of August 29, which authorizes the Secretary of the Army, in time of war or internal conflict to take possession of a transportation system for transporting troops, material, or any other purpose related to the emergency, and the
4. International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or nation by force if required – although most countries (except those in the Mideast) are afraid of America so basically do as they are told. Right now US financial computers are extracting money from Central American Banks because so many corporations and wealthy people have ‘secured’ their money there.

These powers were transferred to FEMA in a sweeping consolidation in 1985. They have everything covered because the original concepts were laid back in 1933 and have grown slowly over the years into what we have today. The “New World Order” in a nutshell will ensure an elite class served by a lower class, and that’s about it. True, it’s still hundreds of millions of elite people who are served by other hundreds of million workers, so most will have to make a choice to be a worker or dead…”
.

Extreme Paranoia
26 May, 2011, The Economic Collapse
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/extreme-paranoia
Have you noticed that our entire society operates on fear now? Everyone is afraid of everybody else. We are taught not to trust anyone that we do not know and that we should literally spy on our neighbors because they might be a threat. If you do not participate in all of the extreme paranoia that is going on then supposedly something is wrong with you. In fact, if you are not paranoid like everyone else is then you might be a threat. After all, according to FBI Director Robert Mueller, “homegrown terrorists” represent as big a threat to American national security as al-Qaeda does. But in the midst of all of this extreme paranoia, we have thrown common sense out the window.
• We are told that it is Islamic extremists that want to attack us, and yet we are so obsessed with being politically correct that the TSA will grope grandma, grandpa and all the little children they can get their hands on but they will allow men in full Islamic dress to walk right through airport security without even being checked.
• We will put up video cameras to watch schoolchildren eat their lunches and yet we are leaving our borders completely wide open. Thousands of real terrorists could be crossing our borders each day and we would never even know it.
But this is what happens when extreme paranoia sets in – people (and governments) start behaving very irrationally.

Recently, U.S. Representative Paul Broun went through airport security and what he witnessed absolutely shocked him….
“I walked through there was right behind me there was a grandmother — little old lady, and she was patted down. Right behind her was a little kid who was patted down. And then right behind him was a guy in Arabian dress who just walked right through. Why are we patting down grandma and kids?”

Whatever happened to common sense?

The American people are constantly whipped into a state of fear by the mainstream media and so there is a never ending call for even more “security” so that we can all feel safe.

Meanwhile, the most basic things that need to be done for our security, such as securing our borders, are totally ignored because they are not politically correct.

Instead, most of the focus seems to be on keeping as many eyeballs on American citizens of possible.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden made headlines recently when he revealed that the U.S. government interprets the Patriot Act much more “broadly” than the general public does….

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.”

That doesn’t sound good. According to Wyden, “the government is relying on secret interpretations of what the law says without telling the public what those interpretations are.” Isn’t that great?

Now the government has such extreme paranoia that they won’t even tell us what the rules are so we won’t even know if we are breaking them.

Have you noticed that everything seems to be “secret” these days? Everywhere you turn someone in the government is claiming that “national security” is at risk for one reason or another. The American people are being increasingly kept in the dark about everything because we cannot be “trusted”.

Secrecy and extreme security measures are now equated with patriotism.

Recently, U.S. Representative Ron Paul
gave a speech on “The Patriot Act” on the floor of the House of Representatives. The following is a brief except from that speech….

“Our Presidents can now, on their own:
*   Order assassinations, including American citizens
*   Operate secret military tribunals,
*   Engage in torture,
*   Enforce indefinite imprisonment without due process,
*   Order searches and seizures without proper warrants, gutting the 4th Amendment,
*   Ignore the 60 day rule for reporting to the Congress the nature of any military operations as required by the War Power Resolution,
*   Continue the Patriot Act abuses without oversight,
*   Wage war at will,
*   Treat all Americans as suspected terrorists at airports with TSA groping and nude x-raying.

And the Federal Reserve accommodates by counterfeiting the funds needed and not paid for by taxation and borrowing, permitting runaway spending, endless debt, and special interest bail-outs. Does that sound “patriotic” to you?”

Sadly, Ron Paul is vastly outnumbered in Congress by those that want even more secrecy and even more extreme security measures.

America is becoming a much different place. The truth is that even if we give up all of our liberties and all of our freedoms we will still be extremely vulnerable to outside threats.

Do you really want to live in a society where there is very little liberty or freedom? That is the direction America is going. We may feel slightly safer, but we will cease to be Americans.

Recently, I wrote about the growing “big brother” control grid going up all over the country on The American Dream….

Do you want your children and grandchildren to live in a futuristic “big brother” control grid where everything they do is watched, recorded, tracked and tightly controlled? Well, that is exactly where things are headed.
We witnessed some really bad totalitarian regimes during the 20th century, but what is coming is going to be far more restrictive than any of the despots of the past ever dreamed was possible. Today, nearly every government on earth is tightening their grip on their citizens. Paranoia has become standard operating procedure all over the planet and nobody is to be trusted.

The Government and governed relationship
Police State Interrogations: Obama Rolls Back Miranda Rights
June 1st, 2011, SHTF Plan.com, by Mac Slavo
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/police-state-interrogations-obama-rolls-back-miranda-rights_06012011
“…Over the last 10 years the definition of what is or is not a terrorist has evolved. In 2002, a terrorist was a foreigner who attacked US interest at home or abroad. Today, by all accounts, the meaning of ‘terrorist’ has broadened significantly, with various levels of terrorist activities. If you’re a survivalist type, fly a Gadsden flag, or engage in your First Amendment right of free speech through protest, for example, you could very well be considered a low-level terror suspect.

It may be hard to believe but it’s true. The infamous leaked MIAC report highlights exactly these types of individuals as being potential threats, a.k.a. domestic terrorists.

This is where the real issues with the rolling back of Miranda warnings arises. While inadmissible in court for traditional crimes, under the Patriot Act evidence doesn’t matter. The very fact that one’s Miranda warnings are waived suggests in and of itself that you are deemed a threat to public safety under terrorism definitions. This means that it is not only possible, but likely, as has been the case with terror suspects in the past, that those who have their Miranda rights waived by investigators can be held indefinitely without trial – or evidence – under U.S. anti-terrorism laws.

In essence, any activity deemed to be a threat to the public welfare could be deemed an “exceptional
case” under this new policy, potentially leading to charges being filed not under criminal law, but terror law. It’s an easy way out for those law enforcement / anti-terror agencies that would question a suspect without the benefit of advising them of their Miranda rights. If a mistake is made by law enforcement and prosecutors, no problem, because they can detain, try, judge and punish in secret courts, where Constitutional protections don’t exist.

Do You Qualify as a Domestic Terrorist?
April 6th, 2011, SHTF Plan.com, by Mac Slavo
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/do-you-qualify-as-a-domestic-terrorist_04062011
A “terrorist,” it seems, is now anyone who actively engages in an activity – whether it’s violent, peaceful, public or private – perceived to threaten the legitimacy and/or stability of our government.

An eighteen year veteran of law enforcement recently published an article at James Rawles’ Survival Blog detailing how perceptions in law enforcement are being molded to fit the new paradigm. The use of the term “terrorist” to describe a wide variety of crimes, and more alarmingly, the passive behaviors of those who intend to do no harm to the government or the public, is being injected into the broader consciousness and everyday semantics of the American people.

“During the past several years, I have witnessed a dramatic shift in the focus of law enforcement training. Law enforcement courses have moved away from a local community focus to a federally
dominated model of complete social control. Most training I have attended over the past two years have been sponsored by Department of Homeland Security (DHS), namely the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

No matter what topic the training session concerns, every DHS sponsored course I have attended over the past few years never fails to branch off into warnings about potential domestic terrorists in
the community. While this may sound like a valid officer and community safety issue, you may be disturbed to learn how our Federal government describes a typical domestic terrorist.

These federal trainers describe the dangers of extremists and militia groups roaming the community and hiding in plain sight, ready to attack. Officers are instructed how to recognize these
domestic terrorists by their behavior, views and common characteristics. State data bases are kept to track suspected domestic terrorists and officers are instructed on reporting procedures to state and federal agencies. The state I work in, like many others, have what is known as a fusion center that compiles a watch list of suspicious people.

So how does a person qualify as a potential domestic terrorist? Based on the training I have attended, here are characteristics that qualify:

Expressions of libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)
Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership, holding a CCW permit)
Survivalist literature (fictional books such as “Patriots” and “One Second After” are
mentioned by name)
Self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
Fear of economic collapse (buying gold and barter items)
Religious views concerning the book of Revelation (apocalypse, anti-Christ)
Expressed fears of Big Brother or big government
Homeschooling
Declarations of Constitutional rights and civil liberties
Belief in a New World Order conspiracy”

Reading this law enforcement officer’s account may seem like conjecture, considering that we’re supposed to be living in America, historically the last bastion of freedom in the world. But this isn’t conjecture, nor are these the ravings of a disgruntled law enforcement officer.

Take, for example, the now infamous MIAC Report, from the Missouri Information Analysis Center, which is responsible for collecting incident reports of suspicious activity and analyzing those incidents to build profiles of potential terrorists and terrorist activity:

The MIAC report specifically describes supporters of presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr as militia influenced terrorists and instructs the Missouri police to be on the lookout for supporters displaying bumper stickers and other paraphernalia associated with the Constitutional, Campaign for Liberty, and Libertarian parties.

Police are educated in the document that people who are anti-abortion, own gold, display an assortment of U.S. flags, or even those that talk about the film Zeitgeist, view the police as their enemy and conflates them with domestic terrorists like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph and other domestic militia groups who have been charged with plotting terrorist attacks.

Across the entire United States, similar reports are being disseminated to law enforcement, and as incidents of “domestic terrorism” become more broadly prosecuted, reported, and the terminology is further entranced into the daily vocabulary, more people will find themselves the target of probes, investigations and on terrorist watch lists, no-fly lists, and no-work lists.

In a previous report we facetiously opined and calculated that the terrorist watch list may exceed the US population by 2019. Perhaps we weren’t so far off with our assessment.

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Tagged as crisis, disaster, economy, martial law, political, war

Thursday, July 28, 2011 · 7:47 AM

Joe Legal and Jose Illegal

You have two families:
“Joe Legal” and “Jose Illegal”. Both families have two parents, two children, and live in California . Joe Legal works in construction, has a Social Security Number and makes $25.00 per hour with taxes deducted. Jose Illegal also works in construction, has NO Social Security Number, and gets paid $15.00 cash “under the table”.

Ready? Now pay attention . . .

Joe Legal: $25.00 per hour x 40 hours = $1000.00 per week, or $52,000 per year. Now take 30% away for state and federal tax; Joe Legal now has $31,231.

Jose Illegal: $15.00 per hour x 40 hours = $600 per week, or $31,200 per year. Jose Illegal pays no taxes. Jose Illegal now has $31,200.

Joe Legal pays medical and dental insurance with limited coverage for his family at $600 per month, or $7,200 per year. Joe Legal now has $24,031.

Jose Illegal has full medical and dental coverage through the state and local clinics at a cost of
$0.00 per year. Jose Illegal still has $31,200.

Joe Legal makes too much money and is not eligible for food stamps or welfare. Joe Legal pays
$500 per month for food, or $6,000 per year. Joe Legal now has $18,031.

Jose Illegal has no documented income and is eligible for food stamps and welfare. Jose Illegal
still has $31,200.

Joe Legal pays rent of $1,200 per month, or $14,400 per year. Joe Legal now has $9,631.

Jose Illegal receives a $500 per month federal rent subsidy. Jose Illegal pays out that $500 per month, or $6,000 per year. Jose Illegal still has $ 31,200.

Joe Legal pays $200 per month, or $2,400 for insurance. Joe Legal now has $7,231.

Jose Illegal says, “We don’t need no stinkin’ insurance!” and he still has $31,200.

Joe Legal has to make his $7,231 stretch to pay utilities, gasoline, etc . . .

Jose Illegal has to make his $31,200 stretch to pay utilities, gasoline, and what he sends out of the country every month.

Joe Legal now works overtime on Saturdays or gets a part time job after work.

Jose Illegal has nights and weekends off to enjoy with his family.

Joe Legal’s and Jose Illegal’s children both attend the same school.

Joe Legal pays for his children’s lunches while Jose Illegal’s children get a government sponsored
lunch. Jose Illegal’s children have an after school ESL program. Joe Legal’s children go home. Joe Legal and Jose Illegal both enjoy the same police and fire services, but Joe paid for them and Jose did not pay.”

— from the web:
Anonymous

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Tagged as political, satire

Thursday, July 28, 2011 · 7:31 AM

The Ant and the Grasshopper

CLASSIC VERSION:

“The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool, laughs, and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.”

MODERN VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool, laughs, and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing “We Shall Overcome.” Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grass- hopper’s sake.

Al Gore exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his “fair share”.

Finally, the EOC drafts the “Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act,” retroactive to the beginning of the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.

Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of multi-generation welfare recipients. The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.”

THE END
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/785485/posts

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Tag Archives: political

Waves of Refugees, Part 2 of 2

Waves of Refugees, Part 1 of 2

Dancing with viral dangers

Walking to your destination

Images from the near future

Joe Legal and Jose Illegal

The Ant and the Grasshopper

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