08:28 – We made a quick Sam’s Club run yesterday. We met Frances and Al there, since we’d dropped our membership a couple of months ago. We prefer Costco, but there are some things that Sam’s carries and Costco doesn’t.
Lots of ideas seem eminently reasonable until you really think about them. I was reading an article yesterday on a prepper website that focused on so-called OpSec, AKA operational security. Borrowed from the military, the idea of OpSec is to prevent the enemy from learning your position, intentions, capabilities, and other tactical factors. Many preppers seem to believe that this is a useful concept for prepping. The idea is apparently that if no one knows what you’re doing, they won’t show up at your door after TSHTF demanding that you share your stuff.
Good luck with that. The truth is that everyone who might care already knows. You can’t keep it a secret. Your family knows. Your friends know. Your neighbors know. Your mailman and USPS guy know. Your bank and credit card companies know. And the government certainly knows. Secrecy and privacy are quaint ideas that are long gone.
But even assuming that you could somehow keep your preparations a secret from everyone, why would you even bother to try doing so? If/when things get really bad, do you really think no one is going to notice that you seem to be doing well? Do you think if your neighbors are hungry they’re going to ignore the obvious fact that you seem to be thriving? The safe bet is that they’ll show up at your door, armed if it comes to that, and demand that you give them what they want. And you’ll give it to them, voluntarily or involuntarily. I don’t know many people who would just sit on a massive stockpile of food while they watched their friends, neighbors, and their children starve. We’re just not built that way.
Put simply, an individual or small family cannot make it through very bad times on their own. Larger groups are much more likely to survive and thrive because they can bring additional skills and resources to bear. Yes, a larger group means more mouths to feed and most of them won’t have nearly as much stored food as you do. That means your stored food will be feeding not just you and your family, but possibly many others as well.
When our long-term food storage first reached 24 person months, Barbara said that enough was enough. I told her to think about that stockpile not as a year’s supply of food for two people, but as a two months’ supply for a dozen people or even as a month’s supply for 24 people. And that’s still the way I think of it.
If push comes to shove, we’re not going to turn away Barbara’s sister and brother-in-law. That cuts how long our food lasts in half. Adding people cuts down fast on how long x amount of food will last. But we wouldn’t turn away my brother and his wife, either, assuming they somehow made it to our door from the Raleigh area. Nor would we turn down our new next-door neighbors. If Paul and Mary show up at our door, we’re certainly not going to slam it in their faces. And so on.
It’s very easy to focus on the drawbacks of a larger group while ignoring the advantages. One of our neighbors, for example, might be a farmer. They might not have enough food stored to last the family for the winter (although they might; rural residents are much more likely to be prepared than are urban and suburban residents.) But if we can give them enough additional food for them to survive the winter, they may be able to bring in a crop next spring, in which we would share. They also have cattle, and a good ongoing source of animal protein would be very important.
In short, if you decide that you’re only out for yourself, best case you can’t expect any help from other people. None. Zero. And that’s best case. If you put yourself in a position where you can help others when they need it, you can expect others to help you when you need it. And that’s the key to getting through a long-term emergency.
The single most important thing you can do is store more food than you think you’ll need. Much more. Bulk staples are cheap now, so stock up on them while you still can. Once we relocate, we’ll be buying 50-pound bags of sugar, flour, beans, salt, and other bulk staples. We’ll also maintain a good supply of vegetable oil, because oils and fats are both critical and hard to come by in a widespread long-term emergency. We won’t be able to help everyone, but we will be able to help some people, and that goes a long way toward ensuring our own security.
Most people simply don’t think that way. Our society has evolved to the point that many think of themselves and perhaps their family. They don’t see the interdependence of any society.
We can hope, though, to make it through by working together.
That was the one thing I really liked about Crawford’s Lights Out. The protagonist, Mark Turner, wasn’t a Rambo wannabe. He was just a regular guy, doing the best he could in a grid-down disaster. Cooperation and community was the constant theme running through the book. Crawford managed to hit all the important points.
I exchange email with a lot of preppers, and most of them understand the importance of cooperation and sharing, which is interesting considering that they tend toward the libertarian individualist worldview. But they’re smart enough to understand that the recurring prepper meme of an isolated cabin in the woods is just a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.
Some people look at neighbors and see nothing but freeloaders. I look at neighbors and see mechanisms for turning cereal grains into meat. Mmmm, long pork…
I draw the line well short of cannibalism. My mother taught me very young, “Bobby, it’s not nice to kill and eat people.”
This implies that you’d killed and eaten somebody already. Otherwise, why bring it up?
We had us some very light and short-lived sleet/snow here yesterday but today is another gorgeous fall wonder.
Mrs. OFD is at a lovely Air BnB cottage in rural Louisiana for the week, owned by a retired Navy ‘Nam vet and his retired (from IT) wife, for half the cost of a hotel room closer to her gig. The wife had a nice loaf of home-baked bread, home-churned butter and homemade jam waiting for her there.
Next weekend she’s off for two weeks to northern Kalifornia with Great-Grandma, who will stay out there through the holidays, I am told, with son and DIL and great-grandkids. Son has been promoted to senior ranks at Salesforce.com, got hisself a $17k raise, and recently gave a strategy presentation to the company’s principals that was enthusiastically received. Sonny is evidently well on his way to a quarter-mil per annum, but with a wife and three kids and house in Kalifornia. I’d rather be poor and live here. DIL drives him through an hour of traffic to the BART station from where he takes the train into SF, reversing the process at the end of the day, but can work two days a week from home.
Princess is in her senior year at McGill and continues the double major in music and languages, recently doing a harp performance of 17th-C English folk songs to some folk music organization down in Colchester. Plans still afoot for her spending next spring/summer in Germany and then graduating a year from this December.
We hope the young star kidz will remember their poor old ma and pa and great-grandma in the years to come…
Well, you know how babies and little kids are, they’ll eat anything because they don’t know any better. Toys, pennies, bugs, boogers, the neighbor kid’s ear, it’s all good until the little kid learns otherwise.
And we largely have a population now that is infantilized and on some kind of dope or booze most of the time, so when SHTF, they’ll also pretty much eat anything they can get. Which is why I keep flogging that image of the greased BBQ spits amidst the urban slag heap wastelands.
This guy sez some kind of detonator will flip the switch; I’ve been calling it the “perfect storm.”
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/318986-america-bomb-society-crisis/
More tripwires here:
“…makes the case there is an inevitable “revolution” coming because our politics, culture, education, economics and even philanthropy are so polarized that the country can no longer resolve its differences.”
http://nypost.com/2015/10/17/history-is-repeating-itself-america-is-due-for-a-revolution/
Princess is in her senior year at McGill and continues the double major in music and languages, recently doing a harp performance of 17th-C English folk songs to some folk music organization down in Colchester.
Music makes a great hobby, but for most people it isn’t a profession. Does she have an idea how she wants to earn a living?
Friend of ours has two kids, both wanted to move out into their own apartments. Both are still in college, not earning any money. While I understand the desire for independence, this isn’t. And they didn’t even move close to their university (which is an hour or so away), nor are they rooming together. So the parents are funding three households. Don’t make no sense to me – seems like those two younglings ought to be working for their own rent. McDonalds is hiring, and actually pays pretty well here.
“Does she have an idea how she wants to earn a living?”
Funny you should ask; no, that topic has yet to arise. The world is her special oyster and life is wunnerful and travel is great and wunnerful friends from all ethnicities, religions, etc. everywhere and everything is coming up roses. Except for when she is robbed and stuff stolen, like the first money she made doing a music gig, $200 cash, or her wallet is stolen, etc., ’cause she just leaves stuff lying around in public places, evidently. But no worries, ’cause mom and dad and grandma will always be around to hand out more cash and pay for stuff.
Conceivably she could cobble together a decent living doing occasional small music gigs pretty much anywhere in the world, and also be a translator, since she’s fluent in about seven languages now and learning more all the time. I also figure, that based on her size (six feet, 200 pounds, 44D) she could do a bang-up job in the roller derbies, but she’d have to get a lot more aggressive, hostile and angry, like she was during her teen years.
“Don’t make no sense to me – seems like those two younglings ought to be working for their own rent.”
Me, neither; too many parents enable their offspring in all kinds of stuff and we’re guilty of that, too, although I will mention that Princess has worked some crappy part-time jobs in the past and evidently works pretty hard at her studies, where she maintains a 3.6 GPA. And her mom has told her, supposedly, that if she wants grad skool, it’s on HER dime. We’ll see how that works out in actual practice, however.
@OFD: The link attached to your name times out before connecting.
@Mr. medium wave: I just checked both links, the RT and the Daily Post above and they came up OK for me. They’re basically articles covering stuff already discussed here, so even some MSM types are talking about it now. Of course it could be statist agitprop to make us think certain things, get scared and tense, and buy more prepper stuff, or get scared and tense and rely on and hope the gummint can save us before things get too bad. Haven’t they done so before?
I also figure, that based on her size (six feet, 200 pounds, 44D) she could do a bang-up job in the roller derbies, but she’d have to get a lot more aggressive, hostile and angry, like she was during her teen years.
Nah, with her size, she would not last a game. One girl would hit her high from the right side, the other girl would hit her low from the left side and down she goes. She would wake up in the hospital.
http://www.amazon.com/Whip-It-Blu-ray/dp/B002WH0Z9K/
@OFD, he is talking about your website link on your name:
https://apocalypse_now.biz/
If push comes to shove, we’re not going to turn away Barbara’s sister and brother-in-law. That cuts how long our food lasts in half. Adding people cuts down fast on how long x amount of food will last. But we wouldn’t turn away my brother and his wife, either, assuming they somehow made it to our door from the Raleigh area. Nor would we turn down our new next-door neighbors. If Paul and Mary show up at our door, we’re certainly not going to slam it in their faces. And so on.
If TEOTWAWKI happens and they get out early, they should be able to make it out to you. But if they wait, the roads will be blocked and they will be walking in hostile country. People might let them through, or not.
[snip] our bank and credit card companies know. [snip]
That’s one of the many reasons that cash is king. In the case of ordering things on-line, you might have to get one person to be the guinea pig whose credit card gets charged. Then you buy 1/4 of his purchase of say 100,000 rounds of ammo, and pay him cash.
[snip] Larger groups are much more likely to survive and thrive because they can bring additional skills and resources to bear. [snip]
Isn’t that what used to be called tribes?
“@OFD, he is talking about your website link on your name:”
Oh. If so, that’s a phony web site url. I’ll have a real one up soon enough, though.
Oh. If so, that’s a phony web site url. I’ll have a real one up soon enough, though.
Will there be nakkid wimmens?
You Whitey chauvinist fascist pig! The nerve of you! Oh, I get it: you is angling hard now for that bra-adjusting gig for Cankles! Catch her nekkid and it will likely put you off anything sexual for eternity.
This guy sez some kind of detonator will flip the switch; I’ve been calling it the “perfect storm.”
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/318986-america-bomb-society-crisis/
“In the past, people were in rural communities. They could grow food. They had real communities. They also had self-control and a conception of morality.”
“Today, if the supply lines go down, you are stuck in a house you can’t heat surrounded by millions of FDA-approved drug addicts who are going psycho because they have run out of juice and people who would murder their own grandmother to get a cut-price iPhone.”
Hmmm. There should be a way to make money from this. A lot of money.
Somebody around here is reputed to have at least two of these, one a Target Model with bull barrel and another one being the Takedown. Great article on it all:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/10/no_author/the-ruger-1022-americas-plinker/
OFD wrote:
“We hope the young star kidz will remember their poor old ma and pa and great-grandma in the years to come…”
It’s my observation that kids/grandkids remember their seniors if they’re great cooks. (Was just discussing this with a nephew on FB.)
Brad wrote:
“And they didn’t even move close to their university (which is an hour or so away), nor are they rooming together. So the parents are funding three households.”
I remember when my boss’ son was born in 1990. He immediately started saving for him to attend and live at a university in another state, and the kid would not be given the option of living at home and going to a local university. (I think most Aussie kids go to local universities and live at home.)
OFD wrote:
“…and also be a translator, since she’s fluent in about seven languages now and learning more all the time.
Usually to do translation work it’s not enough to know the language, don’t ya have to be certified and know the right people?
Can’t believe she’s matured from her teenage antics.
“And her mom has told her, supposedly, that if she wants grad skool, it’s on HER dime. We’ll see how that works out in actual practice, however.”
If she pays her own way I’ll become a Latin Rite Kathlick…
“…kids/grandkids remember their seniors if they’re great cooks.”
Mrs. OFD and I are pretty decent cooks, but how will they remember us if they’re staying in Kalifornia? Princess won’t care ’cause she’s a vegan. Still. (but will eat wild-caught salmon).
“…don’t ya have to be certified and know the right people?”
I get the distinct impression she is more interested in music as a way of making a living, but we’ll see. All those languages must be worth something somewhere…CIA? State Department? A college somewhere? Who knows.
“If she pays her own way I’ll become a Latin Rite Kathlick…”
You’ll replace me, then, as I will have had a simultaneous stroke and haht attack.
“…kids/grandkids remember their seniors if they’re great cooks.”
I speak from experience, if you’re too good of a cook it’s harder to get them to leave home in the first place. I guess the benefit is they don’t have to travel far to take care of good ol’ Mom and Dad.
My web persona of DadCooks says it all.
“Princess won’t care ’cause she’s a vegan. Still. (but will eat wild-caught salmon). ”
A vegan who eats salmon isn’t a vegan.
I don’t know. Most vegans eat bacon, right?
And The United Church of Bacon accepts vegans as members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_United_Church_of_Bacon