My Roomie tenders up some musings on TEOTWAWKI.
Current events seem to have lots of people in an eschatological mood. I'm not quite ready to go strapping a colander to my face just yet, but I'm keeping the buckles shined and the straps oiled, just in case...
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These are the times when I view my choice in mates ( former Marine who taught winter survival at the Mt Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, CA ) with a little more positive eye than as the retard who forgot to set the trash cans by the curb on trash day...
Dammit. Well now they'll have twice as much of my trash to pick up next week.
Didn't see the ChiComs mentioned over at Bobbi's...and those fine capitalists are starting to get restless.
And if that gets to a certain point, things over there could get all mushroomie pretty quick.
In which case we can all skip the meticulous preparation and just assume the old plane crash position...head between legs kissing your ass goodbye.
AT
I figure that if I can't afford/don't have room for my own preps, I'll do all the larnin' I can and make myself useful to have around.
Personally, I prefer a steamer basket, on account of I can adjust it for a comfortable fit.
One Word: bandoleers.
Beans, Bullets and Band-Aids. 6 months supply per Adult person per Household (hard to put a Glock 17 in a 3 months old baby's hand and say "Cover my Back"). Find a way to cook/clean/heat/cool/water your body and your house for those 6 months completely Off Grid. Defend it like you mean it. Try to keep Looters, the Federales and your SUV driving, Plasma TeeWee watching, living on their credit cards to eat out every day Yuppie neighbors from trying to rob you. Don't get sick, nor have a house fire/tornado/blizzard/heat-wave hit your neighborhood.
That's just the beginning of what it takes to being as self-sufficient as possible in case of TSHTF. But it never hurts to start. I recommend going to Jim Rawles "Survival Blog" ( he likes you, Tam) and get some details from those how have been doing it for awhile. Hope this helps.
I'll go the other way and opine staying away from survivalblog. There is good info there, no doubt, but you have better things to do than separate wheat from chaff over there. My 2 star Amazon review for his latest book also sums up my feelings about survivalblog. Beware the cult of personality.
Go camping. Grow a garden this year. Can something like Grandma used to. Shut off your electrical service for a couple days. Meet your neighbors. Put a first aid kit together for your office/cube. Figure out how you'd get home from work if your office burns down. Get your finances in order.
None of this involves hording a pallet of AR lower receivers. That's called "hobby" and is the fun part. ;)
Les,
odds are really good that 6 months will not be enough. Except for being snowed in all winter, or job hunting. Think crop cycle, which could be one year. Plus, could you expect other family members, etc, to show up during that time?
For a more low-key look at the subject, I like http://commanderzero.com/
Well, I'm pretty much boned both here in the South Pacific and home in the US. If the US goes Tango Uniform, then I'll probably get my visa pulled and marched to the nearest port of departure.
If I was in my home area of the US, well, it's central Florida. Lots of people and very little productive land area.
Its like the "you can't outrun a bear" joke. In a mass catastrophe, I just have to outlive the 99% who are going to die off from starvation to be able to then survive on subsistence hunter/gathering.
A technological collapse would be fatal to many. I enjoyed the way the scenario played our in Stirling's "Dies the Fire" series. The stupid PC end of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” would have the same effect – cannibalism with months, 90% death rate in the Western World in a calendar year.
We could go back, but it would be impossible to do so during the collapse. The population density of the New Jersey suburbs (sorry big city people - you would have to die) is still sparse enough to live off the land - IF they had adequate tools, seeds, and animals - AND everyone worked. I’ve been to places in the Third World sustaining themselves off manual farming with higher densities.
The first rule for the communities that survive - no work, no food.
aczarnowski said...
I'll go the other way.
Could not agree more about Survivalblog.
a current thread promote living and growing "crops" out West cause it's deserted. Rowles just loves Wyoming, Montana and the dryer parts of Oregon. Nice places to visit, but if you want to eat - bring it all with you cause you ain't going to be growing anything but sage brush and all those elk and other critters you just know are all bunched up on the other side of the mountain-aren't.
If you want to live grid down, find the places where the Amish live and buy a few acres next door. Then ask a lot of questions.
Oh and bring a black rifle cause you ain't cool without one. Don't worry about the old guy down the street with the 30-30 lever who's been deer hunting for the last 50 years and never misses. I'm sure you'll intimidate the hell out of him.
Good luck all.
"Current events seem to have lots of people in an eschatological mood."
Forgot to mention this earlier. It must be my shitty outlook that caused my brain to read that as "scatological mood".
And come to think of it, I guess the terms are rather interchangeable in this context.
AT
Tam, glad to hear your colander's in good shape. Don't forget the fitted, velvet-lined case for your S&W 27.
Wow..just realized that the fact that I even know that piece of movie trivia means I'm an incredible geek.
Snowed-in and out of work ain't as sexy but it's far more common.
Prepping can cost as little as $5 a week. Every week, spend an extra $5 on "put-by" foods. Take care to remember to buy stuff for breakfast as well - I like "just add water" pancake mix and tinned fruit for this. Before you know it, you'll have three, four months of stuff put by and you'll be in the habit of doing this.
Afterwards, or concurrent with it, spend that $5 on things like toilet paper, paper towels, laundry soap - other things you need not just to survive but to live.
As to ammo, there's nothing wrong with having mountains of it, provided other needs are met. You can't eat ammo. 10 rounds per day's worth of food is a good round number and gets a person thinking about priorities.
"Slate-wipers" are cool to fantasize about, but if you aren't ready for smaller disasters like week-long power outages and bouts of unemployment - as in READY for them, not just planning for them - what makes you think your plans for "TSHTF" or TEOTWAWKI are gonna work?
gvi
Explanation and clarification time. I picked 6 months as a place for most Surbanites to try and reach in today's economy. A year would be better, such as my Grandfather had on his farm. 30 years would be better. A whole county with a Castle in the middle of it and you're the King would be better still. But a lot of people won't spend the money to keep a weeks worth of food in their McMansions, then they go Bonkers when there's a rumor that a Hurricane might be coming towards their Beach Front Condo, and they only have 5 days to evacuate.
Depending on where you live, a 6 months supply of food buys you time to get in a Garden (if you haven't started one yet) and maybe get some critter meat. But then you have to can your food (know how to can?), Smoke some meat (know how to Smoke Meat?), and do it all yourself. Still won't make things easy, but the more each of us Preps, the less strain there is when TSHTF.
But if I had my Druthers, I'd still head to Framer's Franks before the collapse and take a job as Security Guard for his farms, though. The man needs to get some sleep sometime. As for Rawles, Survival Blog has info. Lots of Info. Like Tam knows Pistols Level of Info. And that's what I like about his place. Damn near an "Encyclopedia Galactica" of Info. But it's up to ME to wade through it, sort out what is useful to MY circumstances ( my In'Laws in the Rockies don't have to live with Lake Effect snow, but I don't have to deal with Hurricanes like my cousins in Florida, right)? Hope this helps.
TEOTWAWKI is always a fun theme for a good novel or Sci-Fi movie, but it's not something to realistically worry about happening anytime too soon. Barring an asteroid impact or other such event, a few weeks worth of preps should get you through almost any realistic scenario.
For now, I think it's more realistic to worry about having a job and just paying your bills; the stuff in today’s paper is basically the same things that have been happening since the end of WWII. Show me today’s paper filled with stories of unrest, riots, monarchies or dictators being overthrown, worries about inflation, and an incompetent US government - and I'll show you news stories from the 60s & 70s of political assassinations in the US, Watts riots, mile-long gas lines, and actual wars in the Middle East. Oh, and just for fun, add Jimmy Carter as President of the US.
Some people worry about hyperinflation in the US, followed by talk of the US government defaulting and economic collapse; but while inflation is always out there, forget the D word. Too many politicians would worry about being burned in effigy (or worse) to ever allow that to happen, and there are just too many better ways to work out a solution that would be acceptable to the American voter, even if the voter wouldn’t be happy about the solutions implemented.
So, do you really think we can't avoid TEOTWAWKI if we Americans just knuckle down and decide to fix our current problems?
Some of us were born just in time for the invention of certain medicines, just sayin', ymmv. Just an extra motivation for the preservation of a certain level of technociv.
Looks like Indiana Democrats are already heading for the hills.
>>>So, do you really think we can't avoid TEOTWAWKI if we Americans just knuckle down and decide to fix our current problems?
It's certainly not impossible to avoid. But the real question is, will we? The majority of Americans are too fat from the govt feed trough to ever give it up.
We may have reached a point of degeneration that a eugenics / natural selection phase is needed.
If it wasn't so necessary, we would have fixed the problems of militant Islam and government bankruptcy when they were both obviously coming at us decades ago.
Could be that we're headed for a "natural selection" clean out phase alright, given that the approach of both of the immediate threats were not seen by many "decades ago" - and are not seen by the majority of the sheeple yet.
+1 endorsement of the Rawles (and other) blog. Ya don't need to go all Moonie in order to learn good stuff, find some thing you've forgotten to consider or at least promote some list-making.
By an interesting coincidence, I finally got around to starting Larry Niven's epic natural-disaster novel Lucifer's Hammer this week, a 1970s novel that probably provided a lot of inspiration for Deep Impact a couple decades later. Given the rather rudimentary state of impact science in the '70s, I'm pretty impressed with how well Niven thought through his scenario.
Haven't finished the book yet (barely halfway through), but I'm already into the "you know, a continental-scale disaster would really suck" part. And it would.
The end of The Way Things Are wouldn't be the end of humanity, though, or even the end of civilization. The fall of the Roman Empire was unimaginable catastrophe at the time, but civilization came back; it was just no longer Roman. Life could be unimaginably hard for a while for those of us used to a middle-class American lifestyle, but it would still be life, and it would go on.
There are many things a person can do to prepare. Making an effort to become more self-sufficient is always better than the alternative. Storing up food and other provisions, learning skills lost in recent generations, banding together with likeminded individuals, all great ideas and will really help for smaller disasters or if there is a slow decline. But if the “BIG ONE” hits (no matter what it is) we are all toast. Medieval if you’re lucky, or more likely pre-history. Better get your clubs out and your spears sharpened just in case…
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