Active New Top (30 days) Compact Card A reminder to check the expiration dates on your IDs Robert LarsonContributor - November 27, 2022 Today I had a head smacking moment when I was looking through my wallet and realized that my concealed carry permit expired back in February! 9 months expired! This could have been really bad if I had used my weapon in self defense and then had to show the officers an expired permit, because I have been carrying constantly during that entire time. I am going to have to pay for my mistake now because since I passed the 6 months of having my permit expired I can’t just pay the renewal fee online but have to attend an entirely new class, go through the background check and fingerprinting again, and pay the full new permit holder price. Yikes! It’s going to be a multiple month long process to get going again and cost three times as much. I have definitely learned my lesson and am making calendar reminders for the expiration dates on all my IDs in my wallet and will help my wife do the same. Check your expiration dates! Read More 12 3 Advice Winnerwell Nomad camp stove Seasons4 - November 27, 2022 One of the gaps in my prepping was that I never learned how to start a fire, keep it lit, use its warmth, put it out, and manage the ashes. Someone here mentioned the Winnerwell Nomad camp stove (thank you), so I bought it and recently used it for the first time. I bought the small version, along with a fireproof mat and the “water tank” that nestles against the chimney. It’s compact and easy to assemble. I liked the three eyelets on the spark arrestor for attaching guy lines to tent stakes to keep the chimney steady in the wind. I used my own cords and tent stakes, not ones from the company. Its small size meant that the only wood able to fit in it was kindling that I chopped in half or dried stems of a shrub. I need to figure out how to shorten standard size split fireweed. I tried using my Sawzall, but the firewood bounced around, so I quit. I got interrupted and had to stop the process the first time and start it later. The water in the tank didn’t get super hot during the time I spent with the stove, but it was hot enough to make tea. I made the mistake of apparently touching the chimney while wearing synthetic fiber gloves and burned holes in the fingertips. I have a melted mess on the back of the chimney. It’s broken in now! I did not burn myself. I learned these are not the gloves to wear while using a wood stove. I think that I will like the stove. I need more practice lighting fires and keeping them lit. I need to figure out how to reduce the size of standard firewood to fit in the stove. I need to figure out how long it takes to heat water, maybe cook an egg, or heat soup. I need to obtain more wood. I need to figure out how to anchor the guy lines if the ground is frozen. Maybe retaining wall pavers? Then I need to keep three of them where they don’t freeze and get covered by snow. I need to figure out what to do with the ashes. Once I get more comfortable with this controlled fire, I plan to practice making a campfire in a portable metal fire pit. One step at a time. Read More 13 13 Gear How to avoid losing your entire digital life in an instant Supersonic - November 25, 2022 TL;DR: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Download all your data and store offline regularly. A New York Times article this week, really got me thinking about how I organize my digital life. Sorry it is long but please take the time to read this, the lessons learned from this person’s experience can apply to 99% of us and there are things we can do now to prepare and be resilient against losing our entire digital life in an instant. Here’s a brief summary of the article. A dad noticed a rash occurring on his toddler son’s genitals and took pictures with his Android smartphone to document the problem and track its progression. The parents contacted their doctor who requested the photos so they could review them in advance to their doctors appointment. The husband texted the photos to his wife’s iPhone and she then uploaded them to the doctor’s patient portal. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and the rash cleared up for the toddler. Two days later, the dad’s phone received a message stating that his Google account was suspended because of “harmful content”. He then thought about it and realized that Google probably thinks he was sharing child porn. No big deal though, he could just contact Google and clear it up, he did nothing wrong. He filled out a form requesting a review of Google’s decision and explained his son’s infection and that the doctor requested those pictures. A few days after that, he received a response stating that they will not reinstate his account. It gets worse… Google then contacted the authorities and the San Francisco Police Department opened up a case against this dad. He received a letter in the mail stating that they were investigating him, and served warrants to Google and his internet service provider. This would include all of his internet searches, location history, messages, documents, pictures, and videos. The dad contacted the investigator and tried to clear his name, the investigator responded that they have already closed the case because they could tell that no crime had occurred (and clearly had common sense). The dad appealed his case to Google again sharing the police report that he is innocent, but Google was not going to budge. The New York Times also reached out to Google and asked if this dad could have his account back and they said no as well. He then got a notice that all of his information with Google was going to be permanently deleted. The sorta happy ending to all this though is that because the police had served that warrant with Google, they had a copy of all his data. They are in the process of getting this dad his information. What a headache right!? Let’s look at all the real damage that was done. This Google account was decades old and contained all of his emails for all that time. His contacts were stored with Google. All of his appointments were in his Google Calendar. All of his phone’s photos and videos were stored in the Google Cloud. His phone’s service plan was with the Google Fi provider so he lost that as well. He received is 2 factor authentication codes through text messages tied to that Google Fi phone number This dad really put all his eggs in one basket and got sucked into the convenient ecosystem that Google has set up. Look up at that list and think about what you would do if you could no longer receive, send, or view old emails, could no longer receive calls or texts, couldn’t get into your accounts that needed a text message verification code, lost all your calendar appointments, and years of pictures and videos of your family. I personally would be devastated! It could be even worse if you took important notes in Google Keep, bought lots of apps, music, movies, and books through your Google account, subscribed to various YouTube channels, and more. The lesson here is that you could be totally innocent and did nothing wrong and get your entire account banned, and even if you plead your case and any normal person with common sense would be on your side, they can still have your account banned. Below are my tips on what I do and want to do better to avoid situations like this from totally disrupting my life. Please share your thoughts and advice as well, I want to hear if there is some better or different approach I can take to make things better. Email – This actually happened to me last month. I was switching email accounts and for a weekend didn’t have access to my emails. It made me feel vulnerable that I could no longer contact certain people, receive notices from my bank, or get important medical test results that I was waiting on. Email is vital. Easy step – Download a copy of your emails through Google Takeout. This will give you an offline copy of your existing data. Medium step #1 – Have all of your emails automatically forward to a secondary Google or other email account. That way if you got banned from one account, a copy would exist in another account. Medium step #2 – Switch to another email provider that isn’t able to see the content of your emails. ProtonMail is a great solution. Advanced step #1 – POP/IMAP your emails to your computer for offline viewing. Advanced step #2 – Set up a custom domain. If your main email gets banned, you can then move it to another service and continue as normal. Calendar – Easy step – Export weekly/monthly your Google Calendar or any other calendar service you have. This offline file can then be imported into another Google account or pretty much any other calendar service and be rebuilt without losing all your appointments. Medium step – Move to a totally offline calendar solution and don’t sync it to the cloud. Still keep your regular backups though in case your device gets broken. I like the app Simple Calendar for Android. Photo and video storage – This all might have been avoided if he hadn’t set his phone to automatically upload his pictures and videos to the cloud. Easy step – Turn off cloud sync with Google or iCloud. Yes, Apple also scans and flags potential bad pictures on their service too. Easy step – Plug your phone into a computer monthly and download all your pictures and videos to it. Medium step – Move to more secure cloud storage like ProtonDrive or Sync.com where they cannot access or see what you store with them. Phone service – Easy step – Having a different phone provider like Tmobile or Verizon will make it not as life disrupting if you lost you Google account. Medium step – Create another Google account and use it solely for Google Voice, which gives you a free additional phone number that you can use to make and receive calls and text messages. 2 Factor Authentication – Easy step – Prioritize software based 2FA over text or email based 2FA. It is commonly an option everywhere except for banks in my experience. That way if you lost access to your phone number, you can still get into accounts. An easy solution is to use Authy. Easy step – Many sites will offer backup recovery codes if you don’t have access to your authenticator app, store these to get in again. Medium step – Move to a totally offline 2FA application like Aegis for Android or OTP Auth for iOS. Back these up manually on a regular basis in case your device is ever lost or destroyed. Advanced step – When setting up 2FA with each service, download your seed codes into your password manager. Then if your authenticator app breaks or whatever, you can manually rebuild. Contacts – Easy step – Download and backup your contacts offline monthly. Medium step – Request alternative phone numbers and emails for each of your contacts and set up alternatives for yourself and give those to all your contacts. Make sure everyone can reach everyone at any time by any means possible. Medium step – Print off your contact information and store in your emergency binder. Good tip for all the above and everything else – Download all your data regularly and store offline. If that’s through Google Takeout, or manually for each service, this is the best thing you can do to prevent total loss. Then back that up again somewhere else, preferably at a friend’s house. Gone are the days you can take pictures of your kid running naked in the sprinklers without having to worry about getting your account suspended. There are many other situations where you can fall victim to such things like driving past a house where someone is getting murdered and your location data is on and police think you are the murderer, or someone uses your unlocked device and looks up bad things that then gets tied back to you. Don’t fall into the thinking that “This will never happen to me” because that dad probably was thinking that and look at what he has had to go through now. Read More 13 5 NewsScenarios An idea for another safety tool at the drive-up ATM? Bigwig - November 24, 2022 I was getting money from the drive-up ATM one Saturday morning. The bank was open but there wasn’t anyone else at either machine. It’s in a low-crime area but I always keep my head on a swivel and take as little time as possible. I overshot the machine, so I had to back up. After getting into a better position, I glanced at my rear camera. Just then it hit me that if I keep my vehicle in reverse (and foot on the brake), I have a really good rear view of what is going on behind me. Of course, if anyone is behind me it might freak them out, and if something were to go down I would likely back into the car behind me. No, I don’t have any aftermarket front or rear security cameras and realize that would work better. Just wanted some thoughts from the community. Read More 9 4 Scenarios A little holiday treat that’s shelf stable Steve Martin - November 23, 2022 https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1138270381/spam-figgy-pudding-why Read More 5 3 Public safety power shutoffs – Dress rehearsal for the real thing hikermor - November 21, 2022 In SoCal, we now routinely experience PSPS when high winds prevail. While inconvenient, they are preferable to wildfires sparked by down power lines. They also offer a chance to test at least some of your preps and experiment with procedures. We just had a two hour PSPS, and last year we had one that lasted for three days. With internet down, keeping phones charged was a top priority. Camping gear came into use, especially for cooking. Our headlamps and portable lanterns proved useful. Batteries recharged by portable solar panels were great. We learned to minimize opening and closing the fridge. On balance, not exactly fun, but a good learning experience for more difficult episodes….. Read More 9 2 Scenarios Emotional support group – Lay your burdens down J.Swain - November 20, 2022 I just bought two of the water filter systems recommended by TP (the virus water bottle is out of stock). I’m going through waves of shaking and crying. It’s such an emotional process to be doing this. I go through it each time I take the next step in preparing. It’s really hard, but better the emotion now than later, eh? Read More 11 10 Prepper demographics updated with 2020 FEMA survey data: over 20M people in the US alone! Dr. Chris Ellis - November 19, 2022 Editor’s note: Colonel Chris Ellis, PhD, directs a disaster cell for the US military at India-Pacific Command. In part via his fellowship as a Goodpaster Scholar at Cornell University, he’s spent years analyzing data about the preparedness community. The last time we analyzed FEMA survey data, it caused a bit of a splash, becoming #1 on google for “prepper demographics” and leading to a wave of mainstream press coverage about how this community has grown and moved into the mainstream. (Such as today’s 60 Minutes episode about the market growth!) But that was using 2018 pre-Covid data (which is released years later), and we’ve since been anxious to get hands on the data FEMA collected after the pandemic changed everything. Everyone’s been expecting that Covid — and everything else that’s made ’20-22 so much fun — did nothing but continue to pour fuel on the fire of this growing community. I’ve finished crunching the numbers using FEMA phone surveys collected in the first half of 2020, comparing it with annual data from the National Household Survey (NHS) going back through 2017. So this does capture the Covid effect, but perhaps may have been too soon to really reflect the long-term changes, as people were still caught in the chaos the first months of 2020, just trying to figure out how to get toilet paper or not be a cat on their courtroom Zoom. The future batch of data that covers ‘20-21 should be more telling. Key takeaways: The number of people who can handle >31 days of self-reliance grew 50% over the 2017-20 period. The 20 million US preppers mark has solidly been crossed. If you use the broader definition of a prepper as someone who can handle at least two weeks of disruption, the number gets even higher. That means around 7% of all US households were actively working on self-reliance in ’19-20, solidly increasing from 2% to 3% then 5% in recent years. 10% is only a matter of time. While the “basic preppers” segment was consistently growing year over year before Covid, the “advanced preppers” segment had been flat or even shrank a little — but that trend reversed in 2020, showing that many people saw the need to go beyond the basics in response to world events. Nothing major changed around geography: the same states that prep a lot (eg. Montana) and those that don’t (eg. Washington D.C.) stayed in their relative rankings. Islanders, such as people in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, continue to prep at rates 50% higher than mainlanders. Rural households are still more likely than urbanites to prep, but we continue to see strong growth among city dwellers. Asians disproportionately embraced prepping in ’20, which perhaps makes sense given what they may have been hearing from friends and family back in Asia during early Covid combined with some of the anti-Asian racism that grew in the US in ’20. Perhaps most surprising: the trend in recent years was that preppers were getting younger. But that trend reversed in 2020, with the average age actually increasing a little to 52.6. The number of younger preppers still grew — 25-34 year olds are still the largest segment on The Prepared — but there was even more growth among the older crowd during this period. There’s some weird results in this data, though, which show there’s still a disconnect between reality and how a typical household thinks about risk. But we’ve started getting a peek at the ’21 data, where FEMA changed some of the survey questions to be clearer, and I think it will result in better data going forward. While the term “prepper” is ill-defined quantitatively, in my research I use a simple heuristic from the NHS: how long can you survive at home without publicly provided water, power, or transportation? I quantify anyone with 31 days or more of self-reported preparedness as a Resilient Citizen. Those with 30 days or less are Regulars. Highly Resilient Citizens (HRCs) have 90 days or more and Ultra-High Resilient Citizens (UHRCs) are at 97 or more days (the maximum allowed response in FEMA’s survey). Preparedness trends Americans collectively have increased their levels of disaster preparedness from 2017 to 2020. For Regulars, the effect is small – an average of seven days in 2017 to just over eight days in 2020 – but still measurable. For this group, each year saw a slight increase. When including Resilient Citizens and averaging all Americans, the mean jumped from just under 10 days of resilience in 2017 to 12.4 days in 2020. The overall number of Resilient Citizens in America has also increased every year. In 2017, approximately four out of every 100 people was a Resilient Citizen. In 2020 it had increased 50% to nearly six per 100. In sheer numbers this means 14.9 million Americans had 31 days or more of at-home preparedness in 2020. Ultra-Highly Resilient Citizens (97 days or more of preparedness) jumped from four million people in 2017 to 6.7 million in 2020. There is still a heavy stereotype against “preppers,” but as more people prepare from across the political spectrum – and in various ways – the stigma appears to be slowly eroding. Geography Where do these households reside? I analyzed the data in two different ways. First was by US state or territory. Generally speaking, lower population, rural states have the highest rates of preparedness. Montana, Idaho, Alaska, New Hampshire, Maine, Utah, Wyoming, West Virginia, Delaware, and Hawaii make up the top ten, in descending order (i.e. Montana had the highest average). The lowest average states were, with the exception of Texas and Illinois, all east coast states or the District of Columbia (Washington, DC was the lowest, followed by Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina). A cursory look at yearly changes, by state, yielded no discernable pattern. California and Florida saw annual increases in Resilient Citizens all four years, but Texas and New York saw random fluctuation. Another pattern that held from my previous research was that of higher aggregate rates of preparedness in US islands (Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands). The four-year average of residents of island locales indicates preparedness rates ~50% higher than those on the mainland (15.7 days versus 10.8 days respectively). I maintain my original conjecture that primary drivers of this disparate finding are a “fear of state failure” coupled with an inability to easily flee larger disasters for island residents. A second way to geographically analyze the data is by an urban-rural delineation. The US Department of Agriculture bins zip codes into one of ten population density categories (1 = an urban area with 50,000 people or more, 10 = rural at less than 2,500 people). There is a positive correlation between ruralness and higher levels of preparedness across all Americans. 80% of Regulars surveyed lived in an urban area. However, a sizable two-thirds of all self-identified Resilient Citizens and 56% of UHRCs lived in an urban area as well. Race In regard to race, the four-year aggregates of all Americans yields that the category “Alaskan or Native American” had the highest average at 14 days of preparedness. After this was Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, then Whites, Hispanics, Blacks/African Americans, and Asians, in that order. Whites and Blacks saw yearly increases while the other races had fluctuations. Asians were very stable from 2017-2019 but saw a major jump in 2020. Several possibilities explain this latter finding: increased discrimination, higher cultural or social transmission of preparedness, news consumption patterns, or affinity to stories emanating from China and Asia writ large at the beginning of COVID. The story among Resilient Citizens is slightly different. For four-year aggregates, Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders topped the list at 92 days, followed by Alaskans/Native Americans (79 days), then Hispanics (77), Whites (76), Blacks (71), and Asians (65). A large word of caution is in order here though, with all races other than Whites, the number of minority resilient citizens is quite low in any given year. There are not enough respondents in these categories for me to confidently depict any racial patterns among Resilient Citizens on a yearly basis. Relatedly, when conducting multi-variate analysis and controlling for things such as income, education, and an urban vs. rural home location, the variable of race was a poor indicator of being a Resilient Citizen or not. The maximum observed impact across numerous calculations was only 2%. Age Resilient Citizens are slightly older (52.6 years old) overall than Regulars (51.7), but this difference is less than a year. Interestingly though, the steady growth in Resilient Citizens is NOT among the young. The 35 and under crowd make up a much smaller percentage of Resilient Citizens in 2020 (14.4%) than they did in 2017 (20.6%). Comparatively, growth in those aged 36-49 is nearly 50% and for those 50+ it is 62% from 2017 to 2020. Isolating those 60 and over saw a near doubling; the increase was 92%! Some of this differentiation between young and old could be due to income levels and overall net worth. Other variables In all of the data analyzed, the most shocking finding to me was the reported rates of experiencing a disaster. FEMA asked, “Have you or your family ever experienced the impacts of a disaster?” Among all respondents, the 2020 data – in the midst of COVID – was slightly down as compared to 2017. Among all Resilient Citizens, it was down nine full percentage points. The 2020 survey was conducted in the summer of 2020, at the height of the first lockdown and several months before any vaccines were developed and available. A higher percentage of women reported being Resilient Citizens in 2020 than in 2017, but the numbers were too small for any statistical significance. Another interesting jump was in the number of Resilient Citizens with a disability. There was a 50% increase from 2017 to 2020. Of note, the FEMA data indicated, at best, only a 3% rise in disabilities in the overall population during the same timeframe. Among preparedness circles is the concept of “bugging out”. That is, quickly leaving your home at – or just prior to – disaster onset with an already assembled bag of emergency supplies. Among Regulars, even though they reported higher rates of at home preparedness, their reported ready-to-go rates saw no discernable patterns among the four years studied. By contrast, Resilient Citizens reported a 35% jump in bug-out readiness in 2019 and maintained that new high in 2020. Homeowner’s insurance levels increased in both groups slightly, however there were just three years of data, so this could be observed randomness. Money saved for an emergency increased among Regulars but decreased among Resilient Citizens. My hunch is that Resilient Citizens converted cash into preps. What didn’t change? Education levels between Regulars and Resilient Citizens continues to be nearly equal across all four years. Income levels were relatively stable with Resilient Citizens on average earning a few thousand dollars more per year than Regulars. Resilient Citizens still report higher levels of confidence in their ability to take the steps necessary to prepare for a disaster than Regulars. Resilient Citizens also maintain they are far more likely to have had a disaster plan for at least a year. Looking forward to 2021 data FEMA has just released the 2021 National Household Survey raw data. The survey instrument has undergone some substantial changes. First of all, it’s a larger query of America. 2021’s sample size is around 7,200 people versus the roughly 5,000 per year in each of the 2017-2020 datasets. Secondly, some of the key questions have been modified. For example, people are no longer asked their monthly income, but rather their annual income. I personally think this will yield clearer results. Another question modification that will have significant impact on comparing 2021 to previous years is my key variable of days of total survival at home. 2021’s new survey instrument no longer asks about how long one could last at home without power, water, or transportation. It now breaks these down into separate questions. For example: “How long could you live in your home without power?” And, the answers are no longer discrete numbers, but rather chronological heuristics such as “More than one week” or “More than three months.” If you assume that those who answered at more than one month and more than three months, combined, for both the power question and the running water question are analogous to Resilient Citizens, then the percentage of Americans in 2021 at this higher level is now 8.3%, or roughly 21.5 million Americans. Analysis is ongoing and I hope to release findings in 2023. Read More 21 9 MetaNews How to prepare with pets Mariette Feeney - November 19, 2022 I’m fairly new to prepping (I’d been thinking about it for a good while, but the pandemic combined with world events really kicked things into gear for me) and while I have a solid go bag and a plan in case I need to leave the city with my two kids – I’m at a complete loss with regards to how to prepare for travelling with my cat. I don’t drive, and even though my partner does, I don’t want to rely on that necessarily, so all of my plans are based on walking to my folks’ house in the country, a journey that could potentially take 2 days. Anyone in a similar situation? What do I need to keep my cat safe and warm in an emergency situation that could involve camping overnight? Read More 14 27 AdviceGearScenarios Should I get a natural gas home generator or one that runs off propane or diesel? Steve Martin - November 19, 2022 Have been thinking about a Generac home generator for the essentials. Most of them in our area are natural gas powered, a few in rural areas I’ve seen with a propane tank nearby and today even saw one with a diesel tank attached. My property has nat gas service….but if the SHTF, how long will the gas flow? Am I better off with a propane or diesel powered version? Enquiring minds wanna know! Opinions? Either way, eventually when the fuel stops, obviously the generator dies too, just wondering which would last the longest. Read More 8 6 Philosophies for good mental health Ant0kneeguy - November 18, 2022 Prepping can really take a mental toll on preppers. I find myself paralysed by thoughts of the worst, and am interested in learning about philosophies that can combat this. What philosophies have you lived by or come across that you’d recommend to other preppers? Are there books or resources you think make a good starting point? I notice that there are plenty of medical books in the prepper book list, but none on mental health or the philosophies needed to get through disaster. Read More 17 33 Advice Experiments with home dehydrated strawberries Barb LeeContributor - November 18, 2022 Hi folks, thought you might enjoy the results of “playing with my food” experiments this week. Definitely falls into the “Using only shelf stable foods” category. I decided to dehydrate a four pound bag of (grocery store) frozen strawberries yesterday, thinking they might be good to snack on. Actually, I didn’t like them too much. Commercial strawberries are usually tasteless and dehydrating them didn’t improve them. However, there’s more! Preliminary information: 16 oz of fresh, hulled, sliced strawberries yielded 1.5 ounces, or about 3/4 cup, dehydrated berry slices. (Not freeze dried.) Four pounds of dehydrated strawberry slices fit snugly in a quart mason jar. What I decided to do with them was make some sort of jam or spread. The problem being, it would be hard to figure out the exact amount of water and sugar to add to get them fully hydrated and the correct sweetness without using excessive water. I decided to treat them like reconstituting dehydrated tomato paste, to make a spread. The first task was to powder the berries in a coffee grinder. I have learned that powdering veggies (and now berries) works best if the dehydrated produce is first very cold, otherwise it’s leathery and tends to gum up the grinder. A short spell in the freezer did the trick. Something to do before the power goes out. I used a recipe for medium syrup for canning/freezing fruit, which was approximately 1 cup water to 1/2 cup sugar. I brought this to a boil on the stove, which took the briefest time. Hot tap water would probably do to dissolve the sugar. I powdered 1/2 cup dehydrated berry slices, which produced about 1/4 cup berry powder. To the powder I added about 3 Tablespoons of the syrup. (Might have been 1/4 cup, start conservatively). The resulting berry sauce was at first taste, a little too thin and had a “wet powder” mouth feel. HOWEVER, after allowing to stand a few minutes for the powder to absorb the liquid, the mixture thickened to perfect spreading consistency. Spread on buttered toast, it delivered a HUGE strawberry flavor that wasn’t boiled to death and full of commercial pectin. This amount made enough strawberry spread to smear on 3-4 pieces of toast! No refrigerating a partially used jar of jam! You could go with a little higher amount of sugar in the syrup if you like your “jam” sweeter. Or, you could add enough extra syrup to make a berry syrup for pancakes etc. If you were going to powder berries (or tomatoes) BEFORE the power ever goes out, I’d strongly suggest storing the powder in vac sealed Mason jars with a silica gel pack, which I don’t have, but am going to order right now. The stuff will cake. Maybe a person could make individual packets of pre-measured dehydrated berry powder and sugar, then “just add water”. Needless to say, that’s the next experiment! And of course there’s always just making leather out of pureed berries. Read More 15 2 Skills How to prevent and survive a home invasion Robert LarsonContributor - November 18, 2022 There are 8,000 home invasions in North America every day. Your home is probably the place you spend most of your time, followed by work or perhaps school. It is also where you let your guard down and feel most safe. A home invasion not only is devastating, with the possible physical damage to yourself and possessions, but can also leave you with horrible mental and emotional trauma. After a home invasion, you may never feel completely comfortable or safe in your home again, and have many sleepless nights of anxiety long after the initial crime was committed. Don’t let this ever happen. Take the steps now to protect yourself and your loved ones from this horrible event that does happen. While the elite crew of trained mercenaries cutting phone lines and executing a months-long plan to invade and hold you ransom does happen (and I’ll talk about that), most home invasions are from burglaries. 1 out of 5 homes will experience a home burglary. Every 30 seconds, a burglary takes place in the US. That’s 2.5 million per year. The majority of those occur during the day, and 25% are when someone is home. SCARY! I have enjoyed reading, learning from, and taking steps based on the home-hardening articles on this site. They offer many solutions that are affordable, easy to install, and offer a lot more protection than your standard-built home. That is my first recommendation, harden your home using those guides to prepare against the most common form of home invasion, burglary. But let’s say a burglary does happen when you are at home, here’s a possible scenario and what to do about it: Scenario #1 – A break in or burglary in progress. In this first scenario, you are either in your bedroom asleep or in the living room with your feet up watching a movie with your family to wind down for the evening. Let’s say you are watching the movie National Treasure with America’s national treasure Nicolas Cage. Both are situations where you are relaxed and feel safe and comfortable in your home. You hear a noise coming from across the house or in the garage. It’s not wise to run out of the home every time you hear a noise and get spooked. Especially if you have pets or family members are not aware of their location, it most likely would be them accidentally dropping a glass or shuffling things around. If you think it through a little and come to the conclusion that it could be something dangerous, then dial 911 from a nearby phone and tell them you think someone might be in your house. It’s better to have the police aware and on the way than to be staring down the barrel of a gun by a home invader. You can always call back and apologize later that it was your cat if that was what it was. Calling a close neighbor is a backup if you really are hesitant to call 911, just do something to have another person come to assist you and be aware of the situation. My first tip is to have some sort of weapon in every room to grab and respond to disturbances. Even if you carry a gun, you probably are not wearing that with your pajamas. Pepper spray is a good one that can be bought in bulk and easily distributed to hiding places throughout your home without taking up too much room. Improvise if you don’t have anything. A lamp or rolled-up newspaper is better than nothing. Take a couch pillow or jacket wrapped around your arm as an improvised form of body armor that could give some protection against a knife. If you confront someone in your home, tell them to get out. If they stand there with a knife and act threatening attempt to talk them down, offer them cash from your wallet, or say “Take that then you can go free.”. A few bucks are worth deescalating the situation and avoiding an altercation. Be on guard though. Fight for your life if you need to. My friend experienced a situation like this before when he was watching TV and a young burglar hopped up on drugs broke into his home. He used a commanding voice to tell the person to leave, but the burglar charged him, forcing my friend to at the assailant. He was justified but still lives with the guilt of taking a life. Again, harden your home to deter and reduce the risk of anything like this from ever happening. While this next scenario is less likely to happen, it’s good to be aware of and at least think of. Scenario #2 – A professional home invasion If you hear a loud noise and try and call 911 like in the above scenario but are met with a cut phone line or even jammed cell phone then you could be facing a much greater threat than the teenage punk trying to steal some stuff to pawn. In this case, you have multiple points of evidence that you are facing a home invader. Get out and don’t investigate or confront them. Even if you have a gun and feel confident that you would be okay, they could have larger and more guns than you. And even if you were able to take them out, you now have to live with that for the rest of your life and now have a mountain of legal issues to worry about that probably will bankrupt you. If you see people outside your home, they could attack as you try and flee, so even the get out advice isn’t a hard rule. Be smart about the situation you are in. Most professional home invasions and kidnappings follow the following steps: Stalking – they watch you, and know your routine Entry – they surround your house, cut off escape routes, and enter your home most likely fast, loud, and with a lot of guns to surprise and have the upper hand. Control – They will try and establish control over you and the situation by showing force or separating you from your children or spouse. Event – They will use you as their key to get what they want. Kill hostages – If they kill one of you or reveal their faces, they might show they have nothing left to lose and could easily kill the rest of you. Escape – The home invaders will try and escape after getting what they want. If this occurs at night, turn off the lights and stay away from windows that will silhouette you. You know your house and the layout, they don’t. Have the upper hand. If you are out numbered, act passive and non-threatening. The kidnappers/home invaders have elevated adrenaline and want to maintain control, especially in the early stages of the event. During the control phase, don’t try and reason with them, talk with them, or even look at them. Follow their orders because if you fight, they will try and exert even more control and dominance. Use this time to gather as much information as you can. Remember any names they mention, look for tattoos, how many are there, etc. This intel will be valuable for when you escape. During the control phase, they will likely hold your spouse or children separate from you as leverage. They know that we are less likely to make an escape or fight back if we know we will leave a loved one behind or in danger. If you are presented the opportunity to escape however, you should. The ability to get away, secure your safety and call the SWAT team will leave you in a better situation than being left alone with the home invaders and the guns. One way to create a diversion is to hit the panic button on your car’s key fob if you have your keys on you. Once they leave to check out the disturbance, you can try and escape. Do not run, it creates too much noise, move swiftly and quietly. If you can get out of the house, be aware that professional home invaders may have additional men outside to keep an eye on things like police or you escaping. If you are caught again, expect to be met with extreme violence as they try and regain control and show you who’s boss. Watch for patterns your captors exhibit. Do they send a text message or call the other kidnappers who are holding your family every 10 minutes to let the other person know that everything is going to plan? If you need to attack and subdue them, know that if they don’t get that phone call at that prescribed time, your family might be at risk. You would want to attack right after they make that call so you have at least 10 minutes to locate your family before things go bad. Thanks to Ubique for sparking the idea of this forum post. She had posted scenarios last year that I have saved and finally am getting around to thinking about more, researching, and sharing my viewpoint on the subject. Here’s her first post that details out a home invasion scenario, and then in a followup forum post goes over the various things that could have been done to prevent and change that situation from happening. Your homework is to read those two and think about what you would do. Read More 12 4 ScenariosSkills Some basic questions on water storage Alice - November 17, 2022 This is a really basic question about water storage. Can I fill one of those storage containers and just leave it in the house indefinitely? Does the water need to be changed? If so, how often? TIA! Read More 10 17 Advice Protein powder seems to be an ideal staple for prepping crimsonsun - November 17, 2022 I’m surprised to not see as much discussion about it! Protein powder seems like a really good staple. It’s nutritionally dense (doesnt take up much space per calorie), doesn’t spoil, and I think you’d find that quality nutritional protein is going to be hard to get a hold of, under difficult conditions. There could be plenty of big cheap bags of flour or rice (carbs) and plenty of cooking fat, but not so much protein. Especially if lots of domestic animals die off (sad!) from no one being there to work the farms, or the water supply getting heavily contaminated with disease. And there’s actually not that many wild animals to hunt either. I believe they’d be rare in a week. So it really makes sense to me to have a good store of protein powder. The one thing I keep in mind though, is that if this is going to be a staple of my nutrition for a while, I need to get a clean protein powder brand. Ideally, there’s lab testing to prove it doesn’t have any nasty chemical stuff in it that shouldn’t be there. I have managed to find a few like that without chemicals. Heavy metals, fillers, and pesticide residue are all big problems with a lot of commercial protein powders. Like this kind of thing. I don’t want that! Cause I’m gonna be eating a lot of it and I don’t want to be accumulating nasty stuff, even if it is a no holds barred situation. Long term health is key! Anyway, I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts on protein powder for prepping? Also any brand recommendations? Read More 9 16 Prepping with family member having dementia Steve Martin - November 16, 2022 Well wanna talk about emotional burdens? My wife of 45 years has early onset dementia. Not too bad just yet but we’re at that point where I have to supervise anything serious she does such as cooking. I have to check the stove to make sure she didn’t leave the burners on, at night I have to be the last one in bed so I can check the doors to make sure she hasn’t left the doors standing wide open all night etc. So how does she fit into my prepping plans? I honestly don’t know anymore. The last year has been an emotional roller coaster but at least its slow progressing dementia. I know of patients here locally that have gone from “nothing wrong” to wheel chair use and full time care in just 2 years. Something to think and worry about: do you have a family member who’s already suffering some mental/emotional issues due to the developing world/political situation? If the SHTF as they say….they may get worse. Have you figured that into your plans and preparations? I have no magic advice in that area. Wish I did. I have one “ace in the hole”….the family doctor is also a member of my prep team and lives close by. Read More 11 8 Cooking in a haybox – a fuel efficient way to slow-cook your meals Barb LeeContributor - November 15, 2022 This has been discussed a little before, but I’ve got a “new” resource to share in the form of a 1909 online booklet: https://archive.org/details/firelesscookbook00mitc/page/n7/mode/2up “The Fireless Cookbook”. The Haybox is a type of thermal cooker that only requires fuel for the initial boiling of the food. The container of boiling food is placed inside a box filled with hay or other insulating material and allowed to slow-cook for a few hours. I’m just about ready to give it a try. Bought an excellent heavy duty box from the UPS store and have a supply of hay. Just need the time to get all set up. I’ll start with some dry beans, which are notorious for their long cooking time/fuel consumption. I’m pretty interested in this method because most of our power outages occur in foul weather and my cooking resources would otherwise all be mainly outdoors. Read More 20 61 GearSkills Rocket stove recommendations? Barb LeeContributor - November 14, 2022 I am weakening to the temptation to buy a rocket stove. Considering this one . Can anyone offer advice? My apologies if there are previous posts or articles on the site, I couldn’t find anything specific. There’s just the two of us. Small, twiggy fuel is almost limitless on our property but firewood, not so much. I’d like something compact like this that can be stored away easily, and I’m not up for a DIY project. As always, I appreciate wisdom shared! Read More 8 10 Non-lethal/improvised weapon options Steve Martin - November 13, 2022 I teach a class in self-defense to transit bus drivers a couple of times a year and thought that maybe our forum here might make use of the advice I issue to them. Many of us have gotten training and now have firearms available, some at home, maybe on your person, whatever…but what if you don’t want a gun? Or maybe have decided the world is safer without you waving a gun around? Perhaps philosophical objections? Whatever the reason you may find yourself in danger without a firearm….there are probably non-lethal options nearby. Nearly every public building has dry chemical fire extinguishers hanging conveniently all over the place. If nothing else, use it to blind the assailant and while he’s rolling around on the floor trying to claw his eyes out, either make a quick exit or take the empty extinguisher and use it as a weapon upon his head…repeatedly if necessary! These usually have a good 20 foot range, the powder is unbreathable so you have him blind and can’t breath! Another option is hornet spray. I have a can near each door of my house. 20 foot range and the police can’t bug you about that gun permit! Pepper spray, mace and tear gas all work well, but you may run into police in some areas who consider those illegal weapons. Heck I even got in trouble one time on a military base once because I had a “tire thumper” in my car trunk ( they searched) A tire thumper is essentially a billy-club with a lanyard on the end for hanging it up. It’s used to check that truck tires have air in them. You thump the tires with it. The lanyard is what makes it a weapon in the Army’s opinion! Some people carry tasers and stun guns….same problem. Some states consider these offensive weapons and regulate them….and they require your assailant to be very very close to work. I don’t won’t any bad guy that close. When thinking about non-lethal options, don’t rule out the good ol Louisville Slugger. I once faced down an armed intruder with the baseball bat labeled “The Bowen Butt Buster”. It was all I had available and it worked. I was just out of the Army in 76, and had been hired to “clean up” a business establishment that had developed a bad rep due to the nasty types hanging out there. The old manager had given me the Butt Buster as he left on his last day. I still have it, right next to my bed. But it too forces you to have the target waaay too close. Read More 8 5 60 Minutes segment this Sunday Nov 6 about TP and how sane prepping has gone mainstream! John AdamaStaff - November 12, 2022 Edit: The segment is streamable here, but we don’t know how long it will be public/free. Excited to share that 60 Minutes is doing a major piece about the modern prepping community, featuring TP and myself! It premiers this Sunday Nov 6th right after the evening NFL game on CBS (west coast might see local news first). So it depends on the game, but might be around 7:30pm Eastern. We are slated as the third 15-minute segment in the show, of which I should be around 4-5 minutes. It will be available to stream on Paramount+ starting the next day. Our friend Dr. Bradley Garrett (author of the Bunker book) is also featured, along with some ‘sane’ families showing how they’ve embraced this lifestyle. Here’s our past interview with Brad. Another friend Col. Chris Ellis, PhD, also contributed to the data analysis (he’s posting updated FEMA survey/demographic data in the forum soon!) We’ve spent the last 8 months working with the CBS news team on this segment, and while I haven’t seen the outcome yet, I’m optimistic — the team truly understood what’s happening in our community and sincerely wanted to show that in a non-sensationalist, rational light. (Although I’ve heard the marketing folks have made some more cliche bunker-ish type promo teasers to air during the morning shows and NFL games… sigh) Personally, it’s been refreshing to see a mainstream news source put so much effort into getting it right, fact checking, etc. — we’ve spent months just on fact checking what I said on tape, like how the number of US preppers has crossed 20 million people. Tune in! Hopefully I did a good enough job representing us, but I appreciate your forgiveness if not 🙂 In the meantime, three weeks ago some of the same folks at CBS did this segment about Taiwanese civilians learning resilience skills, such as austere first aid, to prepare for the eventual Chinese invasion: https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/OnkKy0mQ3p1HNzMhGH84MGsKQwDy__n1/ Read More 24 70 Meta I’ve been prepping for a long time! hikermor - November 12, 2022 First of all. I was a kid during WWII and I learned then about scarcity and rationing. Later on, my parents always had a well stocked pantry we rarely did any last minute shopping for anything. In college, I began hiking and technical climbing and began to equip myself for potential emergencies. I also had my first search and rescue experience, very educational. I eventually made a career in the National Park Service, frequently in isolated spots (Wupatki National Monument) and continued my volunteer SAR work which soon became rather frequent. I soon learned that I needed a bag, packed and ready to go with basic items, and with other things organized within quick reach. The items within this bag needed to be changed with the season and location of the operation, Later in my career I came to Channel Islands National Park, a fabulous place with many isolated spots. Relief was not always on time and packing extra food was routine.. Living now in SoCal, I routinely prep for wildfires and earthquakes. I still maintain a bugout bag which was handy when wee had t leave at 2 AM when a big fire came through. I am prepared to remain at home if we suffer a big EQ, which is likely to be a good initial strategy. Read More 11 3 Novel and delicious shelf-stable foods Stephanie ArnoldContributor - November 12, 2022 Hi friends, I’m thinking of putting together a novel pantry foods post/list. There are a few weird and delicious items that are shelf stable that get very little attention: canned dolma (oh, my!), canned country gravy with sausage (don’t get me started…), pimento cheese, caramelized onion jam (you just don’t know), pork pate, Oregon specialty fruits, and dried hash browns (the texture is AMAZING) come to mind. My list needs to be filled out. What is your favorite but odd (or otherwise little-known) shelf-stable food? -Steph Read More 26 96 Preview of whole new TP website launching soon John AdamaStaff - November 11, 2022 Timing update: The person building the website got sick with the ‘tripledemic,’ so we’re delayed at least into January. Crossposting this from the blog since some people only visit one or the other (which we’re fixing in the new site, haha!) This first version is more about cleaning up the existing site/experiments and laying a solid foundation for faster future improvements. For example, the current site tech prevented us from improving the way threaded convos happen here in the forum / how you could track what was the newest comment. The new foundation will let us do that. More details and sneak peeks here. Example: Read More 12 4 MetaNews A library card is one of the best prepping tools at our disposal. And it’s free! Robert LarsonContributor - November 11, 2022 A library card is so much more than just a tool to checkout books. Here are some of the uses for this little card that just might convince you to see your library in a different light. Libraries sometimes loan useful household items to people such as tool kits, power washers, table saws, gardening tools, lawnmowers, printers, cameras, laptops, cake molds and more. I’ve borrowed a Kill-A-Watt meter from a library in the past and tracked energy usage of my appliances. This helps me understand how much I am using and know what size generator I would like to buy in the future. If your internet, power, or heat goes out in your house, it could make it difficult to surf the web at home. The library is a great location that is more comfortable and quiet than a coffee shop and allows you to access the internet. If your house burned down, you could have a nice place to go on the internet and file insurance claims or contact loved ones. Some libraries even have internet hotspots you can check out to bring free internet home. You can get books, music, audiobooks, or movies on any topic. Learn how to sew, watch a documentary, get a car or home repair manual, or listen to a prepping book. So many options. Every book that people have recommended on this site that I was interested in was available at the library. Check it out, see if you like it, and then you can buy the book if it looks like a good future reference. If you can’t find a particular item at your library, they often can ask neighboring libraries or even ones in other states. And if what I am looking for is not available at any library in their network, I submitted a request for them to purchase it and they did. Libraries are seeing that people like to stream content, so they now have great music, book, and movie streaming apps to replace things like Netflix or Audible. My library lets people rent out passes to local museums and other events. Fun date night idea? I’ve found online car repair manuals and guides specific to my vehicle, and today I just learned that they have an entire home improvement and craft section with downloadable PDFs on every topic you can think of like how to maintain a garage door, how to replace a ceiling fan, how to start a garden, and even how to sew. They also have guides on small engine repair and legal information. Example of the car repair guides online: Read More 17 16 Prepping/survival in literature Steve Martin - November 8, 2022 I’m curious….how many of you have read Pat Frank’s novel “Alas Babylon”? It was my introduction to prepping when it was called “Civil Defense”. Did you know it was actually a tv show in the 60s? Playhouse 90 did a LIVE 90 minute play based on the book with some big name stars, including a very young Burt Reynolds. It was live so few video copies survive today. UCLA film preservation has the only known copy. I must have been about 12 when I read this book the first time. Read More 6 1 < Prev 1 2 3 … 12 13 14 … 57 58 59 Next > Recently Active What is the best camp stove for an emergency power outage or camping? - 12 hours agoChickens for preppers: Important considerations - 1 day agoNews for the Week 2024-04-15 - 4 days agoAlexapure - 1 week agoPlants with Saponins - 2 weeks ago RULES This forum is heavily moderated to keep things valuable to as many people as possible. Full community policies are here. The basics: 1. Be nice to each other. 2. Stay focused on prepping. 3. Avoid politics, religion, and other arguments. 4. No unfounded conspiracies, fake news, etc. 5. Debate ideas, not people. FILTER Show all Advice Gear Meta News Scenarios Skills

A reminder to check the expiration dates on your IDs

Robert LarsonContributor - November 27, 2022

Today I had a head smacking moment when I was looking through my wallet and realized that my concealed carry permit expired back in February! 9 months expired!

This could have been really bad if I had used my weapon in self defense and then had to show the officers an expired permit, because I have been carrying constantly during that entire time.

I am going to have to pay for my mistake now because since I passed the 6 months of having my permit expired I can’t just pay the renewal fee online but have to attend an entirely new class, go through the background check and fingerprinting again, and pay the full new permit holder price. Yikes! It’s going to be a multiple month long process to get going again and cost three times as much.

I have definitely learned my lesson and am making calendar reminders for the expiration dates on all my IDs in my wallet and will help my wife do the same.

Check your expiration dates!

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Advice

Winnerwell Nomad camp stove

Seasons4 - November 27, 2022

One of the gaps in my prepping was that I never learned how to start a fire, keep it lit, use its warmth, put it out, and manage the ashes. Someone here mentioned the Winnerwell Nomad camp stove (thank you), so I bought it and recently used it for the first time. I bought the small version, along with a fireproof mat and the “water tank” that nestles against the chimney.

It’s compact and easy to assemble. I liked the three eyelets on the spark arrestor for attaching guy lines to tent stakes to keep the chimney steady in the wind. I used my own cords and tent stakes, not ones from the company.

Its small size meant that the only wood able to fit in it was kindling that I chopped in half or dried stems of a shrub. I need to figure out how to shorten standard size split fireweed. I tried using my Sawzall, but the firewood bounced around, so I quit.

I got interrupted and had to stop the process the first time and start it later. The water in the tank didn’t get super hot during the time I spent with the stove, but it was hot enough to make tea.

I made the mistake of apparently touching the chimney while wearing synthetic fiber gloves and burned holes in the fingertips. I have a melted mess on the back of the chimney. It’s broken in now! I did not burn myself. I learned these are not the gloves to wear while using a wood stove.

I think that I will like the stove. I need more practice lighting fires and keeping them lit. I need to figure out how to reduce the size of standard firewood to fit in the stove. I need to figure out how long it takes to heat water, maybe cook an egg, or heat soup. I need to obtain more wood. I need to figure out how to anchor the guy lines if the ground is frozen. Maybe retaining wall pavers? Then I need to keep three of them where they don’t freeze and get covered by snow. I need to figure out what to do with the ashes.

Once I get more comfortable with this controlled fire, I plan to practice making a campfire in a portable metal fire pit. One step at a time.

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Gear

How to avoid losing your entire digital life in an instant

Supersonic - November 25, 2022

TL;DR: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Download all your data and store offline regularly.

A New York Times article this week, really got me thinking about how I organize my digital life. Sorry it is long but please take the time to read this, the lessons learned from this person’s experience can apply to 99% of us and there are things we can do now to prepare and be resilient against losing our entire digital life in an instant.

Here’s a brief summary of the article. A dad noticed a rash occurring on his toddler son’s genitals and took pictures with his Android smartphone to document the problem and track its progression. The parents contacted their doctor who requested the photos so they could review them in advance to their doctors appointment. The husband texted the photos to his wife’s iPhone and she then uploaded them to the doctor’s patient portal. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and the rash cleared up for the toddler.

Two days later, the dad’s phone received a message stating that his Google account was suspended because of “harmful content”. He then thought about it and realized that Google probably thinks he was sharing child porn. No big deal though, he could just contact Google and clear it up, he did nothing wrong. He filled out a form requesting a review of Google’s decision and explained his son’s infection and that the doctor requested those pictures. A few days after that, he received a response stating that they will not reinstate his account.

It gets worse… Google then contacted the authorities and the San Francisco Police Department opened up a case against this dad. He received a letter in the mail stating that they were investigating him, and served warrants to Google and his internet service provider. This would include all of his internet searches, location history, messages, documents, pictures, and videos. The dad contacted the investigator and tried to clear his name, the investigator responded that they have already closed the case because they could tell that no crime had occurred (and clearly had common sense).

The dad appealed his case to Google again sharing the police report that he is innocent, but Google was not going to budge. The New York Times also reached out to Google and asked if this dad could have his account back and they said no as well. He then got a notice that all of his information with Google was going to be permanently deleted. The sorta happy ending to all this though is that because the police had served that warrant with Google, they had a copy of all his data. They are in the process of getting this dad his information.

What a headache right!? Let’s look at all the real damage that was done.

This Google account was decades old and contained all of his emails for all that time. His contacts were stored with Google. All of his appointments were in his Google Calendar. All of his phone’s photos and videos were stored in the Google Cloud. His phone’s service plan was with the Google Fi provider so he lost that as well. He received is 2 factor authentication codes through text messages tied to that Google Fi phone number

This dad really put all his eggs in one basket and got sucked into the convenient ecosystem that Google has set up. Look up at that list and think about what you would do if you could no longer receive, send, or view old emails, could no longer receive calls or texts, couldn’t get into your accounts that needed a text message verification code, lost all your calendar appointments, and years of pictures and videos of your family. I personally would be devastated! It could be even worse if you took important notes in Google Keep, bought lots of apps, music, movies, and books through your Google account, subscribed to various YouTube channels, and more.

The lesson here is that you could be totally innocent and did nothing wrong and get your entire account banned, and even if you plead your case and any normal person with common sense would be on your side, they can still have your account banned.

Below are my tips on what I do and want to do better to avoid situations like this from totally disrupting my life. Please share your thoughts and advice as well, I want to hear if there is some better or different approach I can take to make things better.

Email – This actually happened to me last month. I was switching email accounts and for a weekend didn’t have access to my emails. It made me feel vulnerable that I could no longer contact certain people, receive notices from my bank, or get important medical test results that I was waiting on. Email is vital.

Easy step – Download a copy of your emails through Google Takeout. This will give you an offline copy of your existing data.

Medium step #1 – Have all of your emails automatically forward to a secondary Google or other email account.  That way if you got banned from one account, a copy would exist in another account.

Medium step #2 – Switch to another email provider that isn’t able to see the content of your emails. ProtonMail is a great solution.

Advanced step #1 – POP/IMAP your emails to your computer for offline viewing.

Advanced step #2 – Set up a custom domain. If your main email gets banned, you can then move it to another service and continue as normal.

Calendar –

Easy step – Export weekly/monthly your Google Calendar or any other calendar service you have. This offline file can then be imported into another Google account or pretty much any other calendar service and be rebuilt without losing all your appointments.

Medium step – Move to a totally offline calendar solution and don’t sync it to the cloud. Still keep your regular backups though in case your device gets broken. I like the app Simple Calendar for Android.

Photo and video storage – This all might have been avoided if he hadn’t set his phone to automatically upload his pictures and videos to the cloud.

Easy step – Turn off cloud sync with Google or iCloud. Yes, Apple also scans and flags potential bad pictures on their service too.

Easy step – Plug your phone into a computer monthly and download all your pictures and videos to it.

Medium step – Move to more secure cloud storage like ProtonDrive or Sync.com where they cannot access or see what you store with them.

Phone service –

Easy step – Having a different phone provider like Tmobile or Verizon will make it not as life disrupting if you lost you Google account.

Medium step – Create another Google account and use it solely for Google Voice, which gives you a free additional phone number that you can use to make and receive calls and text messages.

2 Factor Authentication – 

Easy step – Prioritize software based 2FA over text or email based 2FA. It is commonly an option everywhere except for banks in my experience. That way if you lost access to your phone number, you can still get into accounts. An easy solution is to use Authy.

Easy step – Many sites will offer backup recovery codes if you don’t have access to your authenticator app, store these to get in again.

Medium step – Move to a totally offline 2FA application like Aegis for Android or OTP Auth for iOS. Back these up manually on a regular basis in case your device is ever lost or destroyed.

Advanced step – When setting up 2FA with each service, download your seed codes into your password manager. Then if your authenticator app breaks or whatever, you can manually rebuild.

Contacts – 

Easy step – Download and backup your contacts offline monthly.

Medium step – Request alternative phone numbers and emails for each of your contacts and set up alternatives for yourself and give those to all your contacts. Make sure everyone can reach everyone at any time by any means possible.

Medium step – Print off your contact information and store in your emergency binder.

Good tip for all the above and everything else – 

Download all your data regularly and store offline. If that’s through Google Takeout, or manually for each service, this is the best thing you can do to prevent total loss. Then back that up again somewhere else, preferably at a friend’s house.

Gone are the days you can take pictures of your kid running naked in the sprinklers without having to worry about getting your account suspended. There are many other situations where you can fall victim to such things like driving past a house where someone is getting murdered and your location data is on and police think you are the murderer, or someone uses your unlocked device and looks up bad things that then gets tied back to you. Don’t fall into the thinking that “This will never happen to me” because that dad probably was thinking that and look at what he has had to go through now.

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NewsScenarios

An idea for another safety tool at the drive-up ATM?

Bigwig - November 24, 2022

I was getting money from the drive-up ATM one Saturday morning.  The bank was open but there wasn’t anyone else at either machine.  It’s in a low-crime area but I always keep my head on a swivel and take as little time as possible.  I overshot the machine, so I had to back up.  After getting into a better position, I glanced at my rear camera.  Just then it hit me that if I keep my vehicle in reverse (and foot on the brake), I have a really good rear view of what is going on behind me.  Of course, if anyone is behind me it might freak them out, and if something were to go down I would likely back into the car behind me.  No, I don’t have any aftermarket front or rear security cameras and realize that would work better.

Just wanted some thoughts from the community.

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Scenarios

A little holiday treat that’s shelf stable

Steve Martin - November 23, 2022

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1138270381/spam-figgy-pudding-why

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Public safety power shutoffs – Dress rehearsal for the real thing

hikermor - November 21, 2022

In SoCal, we now routinely experience PSPS when high winds prevail.  While inconvenient, they are preferable to wildfires sparked by down power lines.  They also offer a chance to test at least some of your preps and experiment with procedures. We just had a two hour PSPS, and last year we had one that lasted for three days.

With internet down, keeping phones charged was a top priority.  Camping gear came into use, especially for cooking.  Our headlamps and portable lanterns proved useful.  Batteries recharged by portable solar panels were great.  We learned to minimize opening and closing the fridge.

On balance, not exactly fun, but a good learning experience for more difficult episodes…..

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Scenarios

Emotional support group – Lay your burdens down

J.Swain - November 20, 2022

I just bought two of the water filter systems recommended by TP (the virus water bottle is out of stock). I’m going through waves of shaking and crying. It’s such an emotional process to be doing this. I go through it each time I take the next step in preparing. It’s really hard, but better the emotion now than later, eh?

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Prepper demographics updated with 2020 FEMA survey data: over 20M people in the US alone!

Dr. Chris Ellis - November 19, 2022

Editor’s note: Colonel Chris Ellis, PhD, directs a disaster cell for the US military at India-Pacific Command. In part via his fellowship as a Goodpaster Scholar at Cornell University, he’s spent years analyzing data about the preparedness community.

The last time we analyzed FEMA survey data, it caused a bit of a splash, becoming #1 on google for “prepper demographics” and leading to a wave of mainstream press coverage about how this community has grown and moved into the mainstream. (Such as today’s 60 Minutes episode about the market growth!)

But that was using 2018 pre-Covid data (which is released years later), and we’ve since been anxious to get hands on the data FEMA collected after the pandemic changed everything.  Everyone’s been expecting that Covid — and everything else that’s made ’20-22 so much fun — did nothing but continue to pour fuel on the fire of this growing community.

I’ve finished crunching the numbers using FEMA phone surveys collected in the first half of 2020, comparing it with annual data from the National Household Survey (NHS) going back through 2017.

So this does capture the Covid effect, but perhaps may have been too soon to really reflect the long-term changes, as people were still caught in the chaos the first months of 2020, just trying to figure out how to get toilet paper or not be a cat on their courtroom Zoom.  The future batch of data that covers ‘20-21 should be more telling.

Key takeaways:

The number of people who can handle >31 days of self-reliance grew 50% over the 2017-20 period. The 20 million US preppers mark has solidly been crossed.  If you use the broader definition of a prepper as someone who can handle at least two weeks of disruption, the number gets even higher. That means around 7% of all US households were actively working on self-reliance in ’19-20, solidly increasing from 2% to 3% then 5% in recent years.  10% is only a matter of time. While the “basic preppers” segment was consistently growing year over year before Covid, the “advanced preppers” segment had been flat or even shrank a little — but that trend reversed in 2020, showing that many people saw the need to go beyond the basics in response to world events. Nothing major changed around geography: the same states that prep a lot (eg. Montana) and those that don’t (eg. Washington D.C.) stayed in their relative rankings.  Islanders, such as people in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, continue to prep at rates 50% higher than mainlanders. Rural households are still more likely than urbanites to prep, but we continue to see strong growth among city dwellers. Asians disproportionately embraced prepping in ’20, which perhaps makes sense given what they may have been hearing from friends and family back in Asia during early Covid combined with some of the anti-Asian racism that grew in the US in ’20. Perhaps most surprising: the trend in recent years was that preppers were getting younger. But that trend reversed in 2020, with the average age actually increasing a little to 52.6.  The number of younger preppers still grew — 25-34 year olds are still the largest segment on The Prepared — but there was even more growth among the older crowd during this period. There’s some weird results in this data, though, which show there’s still a disconnect between reality and how a typical household thinks about risk.  But we’ve started getting a peek at the ’21 data, where FEMA changed some of the survey questions to be clearer, and I think it will result in better data going forward.  

While the term “prepper” is ill-defined quantitatively, in my research I use a simple heuristic from the NHS: how long can you survive at home without publicly provided water, power, or transportation?  I quantify anyone with 31 days or more of self-reported preparedness as a Resilient Citizen.  Those with 30 days or less are Regulars.  Highly Resilient Citizens (HRCs) have 90 days or more and Ultra-High Resilient Citizens (UHRCs) are at 97 or more days (the maximum allowed response in FEMA’s survey).

Preparedness trends

Americans collectively have increased their levels of disaster preparedness from 2017 to 2020.  For Regulars, the effect is small – an average of seven days in 2017 to just over eight days in 2020 – but still measurable.  For this group, each year saw a slight increase.  When including Resilient Citizens and averaging all Americans, the mean jumped from just under 10 days of resilience in 2017 to 12.4 days in 2020.

The overall number of Resilient Citizens in America has also increased every year.  In 2017, approximately four out of every 100 people was a Resilient Citizen. In 2020 it had increased 50% to nearly six per 100.  In sheer numbers this means 14.9 million Americans had 31 days or more of at-home preparedness in 2020.  Ultra-Highly Resilient Citizens (97 days or more of preparedness) jumped from four million people in 2017 to 6.7 million in 2020.  There is still a heavy stereotype against “preppers,” but as more people prepare from across the political spectrum – and in various ways – the stigma appears to be slowly eroding.

Geography

Where do these households reside?  I analyzed the data in two different ways.  First was by US state or territory.  Generally speaking, lower population, rural states have the highest rates of preparedness.  Montana, Idaho, Alaska, New Hampshire, Maine, Utah, Wyoming, West Virginia, Delaware, and Hawaii make up the top ten, in descending order (i.e. Montana had the highest average).  The lowest average states were, with the exception of Texas and Illinois, all east coast states or the District of Columbia (Washington, DC was the lowest, followed by Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina).  A cursory look at yearly changes, by state, yielded no discernable pattern.  California and Florida saw annual increases in Resilient Citizens all four years, but Texas and New York saw random fluctuation.

Another pattern that held from my previous research was that of higher aggregate rates of preparedness in US islands (Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands).  The four-year average of residents of island locales indicates preparedness rates ~50% higher than those on the mainland (15.7 days versus 10.8 days respectively).  I maintain my original conjecture that primary drivers of this disparate finding are a “fear of state failure” coupled with an inability to easily flee larger disasters for island residents.

A second way to geographically analyze the data is by an urban-rural delineation.  The US Department of Agriculture bins zip codes into one of ten population density categories (1 = an urban area with 50,000 people or more, 10 = rural at less than 2,500 people).  There is a positive correlation between ruralness and higher levels of preparedness across all Americans.  80% of Regulars surveyed lived in an urban area.  However, a sizable two-thirds of all self-identified Resilient Citizens and 56% of UHRCs lived in an urban area as well.

Race

In regard to race, the four-year aggregates of all Americans yields that the category “Alaskan or Native American” had the highest average at 14 days of preparedness.  After this was Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, then Whites, Hispanics, Blacks/African Americans, and Asians, in that order.  Whites and Blacks saw yearly increases while the other races had fluctuations.  Asians were very stable from 2017-2019 but saw a major jump in 2020.  Several possibilities explain this latter finding: increased discrimination, higher cultural or social transmission of preparedness, news consumption patterns, or affinity to stories emanating from China and Asia writ large at the beginning of COVID.

The story among Resilient Citizens is slightly different.  For four-year aggregates, Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders topped the list at 92 days, followed by Alaskans/Native Americans (79 days), then Hispanics (77), Whites (76), Blacks (71), and Asians (65).  A large word of caution is in order here though, with all races other than Whites, the number of minority resilient citizens is quite low in any given year.  There are not enough respondents in these categories for me to confidently depict any racial patterns among Resilient Citizens on a yearly basis.  Relatedly, when conducting multi-variate analysis and controlling for things such as income, education, and an urban vs. rural home location, the variable of race was a poor indicator of being a Resilient Citizen or not.  The maximum observed impact across numerous calculations was only 2%.

Age

Resilient Citizens are slightly older (52.6 years old) overall than Regulars (51.7), but this difference is less than a year.  Interestingly though, the steady growth in Resilient Citizens is NOT among the young.  The 35 and under crowd make up a much smaller percentage of Resilient Citizens in 2020 (14.4%) than they did in 2017 (20.6%).  Comparatively, growth in those aged 36-49 is nearly 50% and for those 50+ it is 62% from 2017 to 2020.  Isolating those 60 and over saw a near doubling; the increase was 92%!  Some of this differentiation between young and old could be due to income levels and overall net worth.

 

Other variables

In all of the data analyzed, the most shocking finding to me was the reported rates of experiencing a disaster.  FEMA asked, “Have you or your family ever experienced the impacts of a disaster?”  Among all respondents, the 2020 data – in the midst of COVID – was slightly down as compared to 2017.  Among all Resilient Citizens, it was down nine full percentage points.  The 2020 survey was conducted in the summer of 2020, at the height of the first lockdown and several months before any vaccines were developed and available.  

A higher percentage of women reported being Resilient Citizens in 2020 than in 2017, but the numbers were too small for any statistical significance.  Another interesting jump was in the number of Resilient Citizens with a disability.  There was a 50% increase from 2017 to 2020.  Of note, the FEMA data indicated, at best, only a 3% rise in disabilities in the overall population during the same timeframe.  

Among preparedness circles is the concept of “bugging out”.  That is, quickly leaving your home at – or just prior to – disaster onset with an already assembled bag of emergency supplies.  Among Regulars, even though they reported higher rates of at home preparedness, their reported ready-to-go rates saw no discernable patterns among the four years studied.  By contrast, Resilient Citizens reported a 35% jump in bug-out readiness in 2019 and maintained that new high in 2020.  

Homeowner’s insurance levels increased in both groups slightly, however there were just three years of data, so this could be observed randomness.  Money saved for an emergency increased among Regulars but decreased among Resilient Citizens.  My hunch is that Resilient Citizens converted cash into preps.

What didn’t change?  Education levels between Regulars and Resilient Citizens continues to be nearly equal across all four years.  Income levels were relatively stable with Resilient Citizens on average earning a few thousand dollars more per year than Regulars.  Resilient Citizens still report higher levels of confidence in their ability to take the steps necessary to prepare for a disaster than Regulars.  Resilient Citizens also maintain they are far more likely to have had a disaster plan for at least a year. 

Looking forward to 2021 data

FEMA has just released the 2021 National Household Survey raw data.  The survey instrument has undergone some substantial changes.  First of all, it’s a larger query of America.  2021’s sample size is around 7,200 people versus the roughly 5,000 per year in each of the 2017-2020 datasets.  Secondly, some of the key questions have been modified.  For example, people are no longer asked their monthly income, but rather their annual income.  I personally think this will yield clearer results. 

Another question modification that will have significant impact on comparing 2021 to previous years is my key variable of days of total survival at home.  2021’s new survey instrument no longer asks about how long one could last at home without power, water, or transportation.  It now breaks these down into separate questions.  For example: “How long could you live in your home without power?”  And, the answers are no longer discrete numbers, but rather chronological heuristics such as “More than one week” or “More than three months.”  If you assume that those who answered at more than one month and more than three months, combined, for both the power question and the running water question are analogous to Resilient Citizens, then the percentage of Americans in 2021 at this higher level is now 8.3%, or roughly 21.5 million Americans.  Analysis is ongoing and I hope to release findings in 2023.

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MetaNews

How to prepare with pets

Mariette Feeney - November 19, 2022

I’m fairly new to prepping (I’d been thinking about it for a good while, but the pandemic combined with world events really kicked things into gear for me) and while I have a solid go bag and a plan in case I need to leave the city with my two kids – I’m at a complete loss with regards to how to prepare for travelling with my cat. I don’t drive, and even though my partner does, I don’t want to rely on that necessarily, so all of my plans are based on walking to my folks’ house in the country, a journey that could potentially take 2 days. Anyone in a similar situation? What do I need to keep my cat safe and warm in an emergency situation that could involve camping overnight?

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AdviceGearScenarios

Should I get a natural gas home generator or one that runs off propane or diesel?

Steve Martin - November 19, 2022

Have been thinking about a Generac home generator for the essentials. Most of them in our area are natural gas powered, a few in rural areas I’ve seen with a propane tank nearby and today even saw one with a diesel tank attached. My property has nat gas service….but if the SHTF, how long will the gas flow? Am I better off with a propane or diesel powered version?  Enquiring minds wanna know! Opinions? Either way, eventually when the fuel stops, obviously the generator dies too, just wondering which would last the longest.

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Philosophies for good mental health

Ant0kneeguy - November 18, 2022

Prepping can really take a mental toll on preppers. I find myself paralysed by thoughts of the worst, and am interested in learning about philosophies that can combat this.

What philosophies have you lived by or come across that you’d recommend to other preppers? Are there books or resources you think make a good starting point?

I notice that there are plenty of medical books in the prepper book list, but none on mental health or the philosophies needed to get through disaster.

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Advice

Experiments with home dehydrated strawberries

Barb LeeContributor - November 18, 2022

Hi folks, thought you might enjoy the results of “playing with my food” experiments this week.  Definitely falls into the “Using only shelf stable foods”  category.

I decided to dehydrate a four pound bag of (grocery store) frozen strawberries yesterday, thinking they might be good to snack on.  Actually, I didn’t like them too much.  Commercial strawberries are usually tasteless and dehydrating them didn’t improve them. However, there’s more!

Preliminary information:

16 oz of fresh, hulled, sliced strawberries yielded 1.5 ounces, or about 3/4 cup, dehydrated berry slices. (Not freeze dried.)

Four pounds of dehydrated strawberry slices fit snugly in a quart mason jar.

What I decided to do with them was make some sort of jam or spread.  The problem being, it would be hard to figure out the exact amount of water and sugar to add to get them fully hydrated and the correct sweetness without using excessive water.  I decided to treat them like reconstituting dehydrated tomato paste, to make a spread.

The first task was to powder the berries in a coffee grinder.  I have learned that powdering veggies (and now berries) works best if the dehydrated produce is first very cold, otherwise it’s leathery and tends to gum up the grinder.  A short spell in the freezer did the trick. Something to do before the power goes out.

I used a recipe for medium syrup for canning/freezing fruit, which was approximately 1 cup water to 1/2 cup sugar.  I brought this to a boil on the stove, which took the briefest time.  Hot tap water would probably do to dissolve the sugar.

I powdered 1/2 cup dehydrated berry slices, which produced about 1/4 cup berry powder.

To the powder I added about 3 Tablespoons of the syrup.  (Might have been 1/4 cup, start conservatively).

The resulting berry sauce was at first taste, a little too thin and had a “wet powder” mouth feel.  HOWEVER, after allowing to stand a few minutes for the powder to absorb the liquid, the mixture thickened to perfect spreading consistency.  Spread on buttered toast, it delivered a HUGE strawberry flavor that wasn’t boiled to death and full of commercial pectin.

This amount made enough strawberry spread to smear on 3-4 pieces of toast!  No refrigerating a partially used jar of jam!

You could go with a little higher amount of sugar in the syrup if you like your “jam” sweeter.  Or, you could add enough extra syrup to make a berry syrup for pancakes etc.

If you were going to powder berries (or tomatoes) BEFORE the power ever goes out, I’d strongly suggest storing the powder in vac sealed Mason jars with a silica gel pack, which I don’t have, but am going to order right now.  The stuff will cake.

Maybe a person could make individual packets of pre-measured dehydrated berry powder and sugar, then “just add water”.  Needless to say, that’s the next experiment!

And of course there’s always just making leather out of pureed berries.

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Skills

How to prevent and survive a home invasion

Robert LarsonContributor - November 18, 2022

There are 8,000 home invasions in North America every day. Your home is probably the place you spend most of your time, followed by work or perhaps school. It is also where you let your guard down and feel most safe. A home invasion not only is devastating, with the possible physical damage to yourself and possessions, but can also leave you with horrible mental and emotional trauma. After a home invasion, you may never feel completely comfortable or safe in your home again, and have many sleepless nights of anxiety long after the initial crime was committed. Don’t let this ever happen. Take the steps now to protect yourself and your loved ones from this horrible event that does happen.

While the elite crew of trained mercenaries cutting phone lines and executing a months-long plan to invade and hold you ransom does happen (and I’ll talk about that), most home invasions are from burglaries. 1 out of 5 homes will experience a home burglary. Every 30 seconds, a burglary takes place in the US. That’s 2.5 million per year. The majority of those occur during the day, and 25% are when someone is home. SCARY!

I have enjoyed reading, learning from, and taking steps based on the home-hardening articles on this site. They offer many solutions that are affordable, easy to install, and offer a lot more protection than your standard-built home. That is my first recommendation, harden your home using those guides to prepare against the most common form of home invasion, burglary.

But let’s say a burglary does happen when you are at home, here’s a possible scenario and what to do about it:

Scenario #1 – A break in or burglary in progress.

In this first scenario, you are either in your bedroom asleep or in the living room with your feet up watching a movie with your family to wind down for the evening. Let’s say you are watching the movie National Treasure with America’s national treasure Nicolas Cage. Both are situations where you are relaxed and feel safe and comfortable in your home. You hear a noise coming from across the house or in the garage.

It’s not wise to run out of the home every time you hear a noise and get spooked. Especially if you have pets or family members are not aware of their location, it most likely would be them accidentally dropping a glass or shuffling things around. If you think it through a little and come to the conclusion that it could be something dangerous, then dial 911 from a nearby phone and tell them you think someone might be in your house. It’s better to have the police aware and on the way than to be staring down the barrel of a gun by a home invader. You can always call back and apologize later that it was your cat if that was what it was. Calling a close neighbor is a backup if you really are hesitant to call 911, just do something to have another person come to assist you and be aware of the situation.

My first tip is to have some sort of weapon in every room to grab and respond to disturbances. Even if you carry a gun, you probably are not wearing that with your pajamas. Pepper spray is a good one that can be bought in bulk and easily distributed to hiding places throughout your home without taking up too much room. Improvise if you don’t have anything. A lamp or rolled-up newspaper is better than nothing. Take a couch pillow or jacket wrapped around your arm as an improvised form of body armor that could give some protection against a knife.

If you confront someone in your home, tell them to get out. If they stand there with a knife and act threatening attempt to talk them down, offer them cash from your wallet, or say “Take that then you can go free.”. A few bucks are worth deescalating the situation and avoiding an altercation. Be on guard though. Fight for your life if you need to.

My friend experienced a situation like this before when he was watching TV and a young burglar hopped up on drugs broke into his home. He used a commanding voice to tell the person to leave, but the burglar charged him, forcing my friend to at the assailant. He was justified but still lives with the guilt of taking a life. Again, harden your home to deter and reduce the risk of anything like this from ever happening.

While this next scenario is less likely to happen, it’s good to be aware of and at least think of.

Scenario #2 – A professional home invasion

If you hear a loud noise and try and call 911 like in the above scenario but are met with a cut phone line or even jammed cell phone then you could be facing a much greater threat than the teenage punk trying to steal some stuff to pawn. In this case, you have multiple points of evidence that you are facing a home invader. Get out and don’t investigate or confront them. Even if you have a gun and feel confident that you would be okay, they could have larger and more guns than you. And even if you were able to take them out, you now have to live with that for the rest of your life and now have a mountain of legal issues to worry about that probably will bankrupt you.

If you see people outside your home, they could attack as you try and flee, so even the get out advice isn’t a hard rule. Be smart about the situation you are in.

Most professional home invasions and kidnappings follow the following steps:

Stalking – they watch you, and know your routine Entry – they surround your house, cut off escape routes, and enter your home most likely fast, loud, and with a lot of guns to surprise and have the upper hand. Control – They will try and establish control over you and the situation by showing force or separating you from your children or spouse. Event – They will use you as their key to get what they want. Kill hostages – If they kill one of you or reveal their faces, they might show they have nothing left to lose and could easily kill the rest of you. Escape – The home invaders will try and escape after getting what they want.

If this occurs at night, turn off the lights and stay away from windows that will silhouette you. You know your house and the layout, they don’t. Have the upper hand.

If you are out numbered, act passive and non-threatening. The kidnappers/home invaders have elevated adrenaline and want to maintain control, especially in the early stages of the event. During the control phase, don’t try and reason with them, talk with them, or even look at them. Follow their orders because if you fight, they will try and exert even more control and dominance. Use this time to gather as much information as you can. Remember any names they mention, look for tattoos, how many are there, etc. This intel will be valuable for when you escape.

During the control phase, they will likely hold your spouse or children separate from you as leverage. They know that we are less likely to make an escape or fight back if we know we will leave a loved one behind or in danger. If you are presented the opportunity to escape however, you should. The ability to get away, secure your safety and call the SWAT team will leave you in a better situation than being left alone with the home invaders and the guns.

One way to create a diversion is to hit the panic button on your car’s key fob if you have your keys on you. Once they leave to check out the disturbance, you can try and escape. Do not run, it creates too much noise, move swiftly and quietly.

If you can get out of the house, be aware that professional home invaders may have additional men outside to keep an eye on things like police or you escaping. If you are caught again, expect to be met with extreme violence as they try and regain control and show you who’s boss.

Watch for patterns your captors exhibit. Do they send a text message or call the other kidnappers who are holding your family every 10 minutes to let the other person know that everything is going to plan? If you need to attack and subdue them, know that if they don’t get that phone call at that prescribed time, your family might be at risk. You would want to attack right after they make that call so you have at least 10 minutes to locate your family before things go bad.

Thanks to Ubique for sparking the idea of this forum post. She had posted scenarios last year that I have saved and finally am getting around to thinking about more, researching, and sharing my viewpoint on the subject. Here’s her first post that details out a home invasion scenario, and then in a followup forum post goes over the various things that could have been done to prevent and change that situation from happening. Your homework is to read those two and think about what you would do.

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ScenariosSkills

Some basic questions on water storage

Alice - November 17, 2022

This is a really basic question about water storage. Can I fill one of those storage containers and just leave it in the house indefinitely? Does the water need to be changed? If so, how often? TIA!

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Advice

Protein powder seems to be an ideal staple for prepping

crimsonsun - November 17, 2022

I’m surprised to not see as much discussion about it! Protein powder seems like a really good staple. It’s nutritionally dense (doesnt take up much space per calorie), doesn’t spoil, and I think you’d find that quality nutritional protein is going to be hard to get a hold of, under difficult conditions. There could be plenty of big cheap bags of flour or rice (carbs) and plenty of cooking fat, but not so much protein. Especially if lots of domestic animals die off (sad!) from no one being there to work the farms, or the water supply getting heavily contaminated with disease. And there’s actually not that many wild animals to hunt either. I believe they’d be rare in a week. So it really makes sense to me to have a good store of protein powder. The one thing I keep in mind though, is that if this is going to be a staple of my nutrition for a while, I need to get a clean protein powder brand. Ideally, there’s lab testing to prove it doesn’t have any nasty chemical stuff in it that shouldn’t be there. I have managed to find a few like that without chemicals. Heavy metals, fillers, and pesticide residue are all big problems with a lot of commercial protein powders. Like this kind of thing. I don’t want that! Cause I’m gonna be eating a lot of it and I don’t want to be accumulating nasty stuff, even if it is a no holds barred situation. Long term health is key! Anyway, I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts on protein powder for prepping? Also any brand recommendations?

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Prepping with family member having dementia

Steve Martin - November 16, 2022

Well wanna talk about emotional burdens? My wife of 45 years has early onset dementia. Not too bad just yet but we’re at that point where I have to supervise anything serious she does such as cooking. I have to check the stove to make sure she didn’t leave the burners on, at night I have to be the last one in bed so I can check the doors to make sure she hasn’t left the doors standing wide open all night etc. So how does she fit into my prepping plans? I honestly don’t know anymore. The last year has been an emotional roller coaster but at least its slow progressing dementia. I know of patients here locally that have gone from “nothing wrong” to wheel chair use and full time care in just 2 years. Something to think and worry about: do you have a family member who’s already suffering some mental/emotional issues due to the developing world/political situation? If the SHTF as they say….they may get worse. Have you figured that into your plans and preparations? I have no magic advice in that area. Wish I did. I have one “ace in the hole”….the family doctor is also a member of my prep team and lives close by.

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Cooking in a haybox – a fuel efficient way to slow-cook your meals

Barb LeeContributor - November 15, 2022

This has been discussed a little before, but I’ve got a “new” resource to share in the form of a 1909 online booklet:  https://archive.org/details/firelesscookbook00mitc/page/n7/mode/2up  “The Fireless Cookbook”.  The Haybox is a type of thermal cooker that only requires fuel for the initial boiling of the food.  The container of boiling food is placed inside a box filled with hay or other insulating material and allowed to slow-cook for a few hours.  I’m just about ready to give it a try.  Bought an excellent heavy duty box from the UPS store and have a supply of hay.  Just need the time to get all set up.  I’ll start with some dry beans, which are notorious for their long cooking time/fuel consumption.

I’m pretty interested in this method because most of our power outages occur in foul weather and my cooking resources would otherwise all be mainly outdoors.

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GearSkills

Rocket stove recommendations?

Barb LeeContributor - November 14, 2022

I am weakening to the temptation to buy a rocket stove.  Considering this one .  Can anyone offer advice?  My apologies if there are previous posts or articles on the site, I couldn’t find anything specific.

There’s just the two of us.  Small, twiggy fuel is almost limitless on our property but firewood, not so much.  I’d like something compact like this that can be stored away easily, and I’m not up for a DIY project.

As always, I appreciate wisdom shared!

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Non-lethal/improvised weapon options

Steve Martin - November 13, 2022

I teach a class in self-defense to transit bus drivers a couple of times a year and thought that maybe our forum here might make use of the advice I issue to them. Many of us have gotten training and now have firearms available, some at home, maybe on your person, whatever…but what if you don’t want a gun? Or maybe have decided the world is safer without you waving a gun around? Perhaps philosophical objections? Whatever the reason you may find yourself in danger without a firearm….there are probably non-lethal options nearby.

Nearly every public building has dry chemical fire extinguishers hanging conveniently all over the place. If nothing else, use it to blind the assailant and while he’s rolling around on the floor trying to claw his eyes out, either make a quick exit or take the empty extinguisher and use it as a weapon upon his head…repeatedly if necessary! These usually have a good 20 foot range, the powder is unbreathable so you have him blind and can’t breath! Another option is hornet spray. I have a can near each door of my house. 20 foot range and the police can’t bug you about that gun permit! Pepper spray, mace and tear gas all work well, but you may run into police in some areas who consider those illegal weapons. Heck I even got in trouble one time on a military base once because I had a “tire thumper” in my car trunk ( they searched) A tire thumper is essentially a billy-club with a lanyard on the end for hanging it up. It’s used to check that truck tires have air in them. You thump the tires with it. The lanyard is what makes it a weapon in the Army’s opinion! Some people carry tasers and stun guns….same problem. Some states consider these offensive weapons and regulate them….and they require your assailant to be very very close to work. I don’t won’t any bad guy that close. When thinking about non-lethal options, don’t rule out the good ol Louisville Slugger. I once faced down an armed intruder with the baseball bat labeled “The Bowen Butt Buster”. It was all I had available and it worked. I was just out of the Army in 76, and had been hired to “clean up” a business establishment that had developed a bad rep due to the nasty types hanging out there. The old manager had given me the Butt Buster as he left on his last day. I still have it, right next to my bed. But it too forces you to have the target waaay too close.

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60 Minutes segment this Sunday Nov 6 about TP and how sane prepping has gone mainstream!

John AdamaStaff - November 12, 2022

Edit: The segment is streamable here, but we don’t know how long it will be public/free.

Excited to share that 60 Minutes is doing a major piece about the modern prepping community, featuring TP and myself! It premiers this Sunday Nov 6th right after the evening NFL game on CBS (west coast might see local news first). So it depends on the game, but might be around 7:30pm Eastern. We are slated as the third 15-minute segment in the show, of which I should be around 4-5 minutes. It will be available to stream on Paramount+ starting the next day.

Our friend Dr. Bradley Garrett (author of the Bunker book) is also featured, along with some ‘sane’ families showing how they’ve embraced this lifestyle. Here’s our past interview with Brad. Another friend Col. Chris Ellis, PhD, also contributed to the data analysis (he’s posting updated FEMA survey/demographic data in the forum soon!) 

We’ve spent the last 8 months working with the CBS news team on this segment, and while I haven’t seen the outcome yet, I’m optimistic — the team truly understood what’s happening in our community and sincerely wanted to show that in a non-sensationalist, rational light. (Although I’ve heard the marketing folks have made some more cliche bunker-ish type promo teasers to air during the morning shows and NFL games… sigh)

Personally, it’s been refreshing to see a mainstream news source put so much effort into getting it right, fact checking, etc. — we’ve spent months just on fact checking what I said on tape, like how the number of US preppers has crossed 20 million people.

Tune in! Hopefully I did a good enough job representing us, but I appreciate your forgiveness if not 🙂 

In the meantime, three weeks ago some of the same folks at CBS did this segment about Taiwanese civilians learning resilience skills, such as austere first aid, to prepare for the eventual Chinese invasion: https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/OnkKy0mQ3p1HNzMhGH84MGsKQwDy__n1/

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Meta

I’ve been prepping for a long time!

hikermor - November 12, 2022

First of all. I was a kid during WWII and I learned then about scarcity and rationing.  Later on, my parents always had a well stocked pantry we rarely did any last minute shopping for anything.

In college, I began hiking and technical climbing and began to equip myself for potential emergencies.  I also had my first search and rescue experience, very educational.

I eventually made a career in the National Park Service, frequently in isolated spots  (Wupatki National Monument) and continued my volunteer SAR work which soon became rather frequent.

I soon learned that I needed a bag, packed and ready to go with basic items, and with other things organized within quick reach.  The items within this bag needed to be changed with the season and location of the operation,

Later in my career I came to Channel Islands National Park, a fabulous place with many isolated spots.  Relief was not always on time and packing extra food was routine..

Living now in SoCal, I routinely prep for wildfires and earthquakes.  I still maintain a bugout bag which was handy when wee had t leave at 2 AM when a big fire came through.  I am prepared to remain at home if we suffer a big EQ, which is likely to be a good initial strategy.

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Novel and delicious shelf-stable foods

Stephanie ArnoldContributor - November 12, 2022

Hi friends, 

I’m thinking of putting together a novel pantry foods post/list. There are a few weird and delicious items that are shelf stable that get very little attention: canned dolma (oh, my!), canned country gravy with sausage (don’t get me started…), pimento cheese, caramelized onion jam (you just don’t know), pork pate, Oregon specialty fruits, and dried hash browns (the texture is AMAZING) come to mind. My list needs to be filled out. What is your favorite but odd (or otherwise little-known) shelf-stable food?

-Steph

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Preview of whole new TP website launching soon

John AdamaStaff - November 11, 2022

Timing update: The person building the website got sick with the ‘tripledemic,’ so we’re delayed at least into January.

Crossposting this from the blog since some people only visit one or the other (which we’re fixing in the new site, haha!) 

This first version is more about cleaning up the existing site/experiments and laying a solid foundation for faster future improvements. For example, the current site tech prevented us from improving the way threaded convos happen here in the forum / how you could track what was the newest comment. The new foundation will let us do that.

More details and sneak peeks here. Example:

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MetaNews

A library card is one of the best prepping tools at our disposal. And it’s free!

Robert LarsonContributor - November 11, 2022

A library card is so much more than just a tool to checkout books. Here are some of the uses for this little card that just might convince you to see your library in a different light.

Libraries sometimes loan useful household items to people such as tool kits, power washers, table saws, gardening tools, lawnmowers, printers, cameras, laptops, cake molds and more. I’ve borrowed a Kill-A-Watt meter from a library in the past and tracked energy usage of my appliances. This helps me understand how much I am using and know what size generator I would like to buy in the future. If your internet, power, or heat goes out in your house, it could make it difficult to surf the web at home. The library is a great location that is more comfortable and quiet than a coffee shop and allows you to access the internet. If your house burned down, you could have a nice place to go on the internet and file insurance claims or contact loved ones. Some libraries even have internet hotspots you can check out to bring free internet home. You can get books, music, audiobooks, or movies on any topic. Learn how to sew, watch a documentary, get a car or home repair manual, or listen to a prepping book. So many options. Every book that people have recommended on this site that I was interested in was available at the library. Check it out, see if you like it, and then you can buy the book if it looks like a good future reference. If you can’t find a particular item at your library, they often can ask neighboring libraries or even ones in other states. And if what I am looking for is not available at any library in their network, I submitted a request for them to purchase it and they did. Libraries are seeing that people like to stream content, so they now have great music, book, and movie streaming apps to replace things like Netflix or Audible. My library lets people rent out passes to local museums and other events. Fun date night idea? I’ve found online car repair manuals and guides specific to my vehicle, and today I just learned that they have an entire home improvement and craft section with downloadable PDFs on every topic you can think of like how to maintain a garage door, how to replace a ceiling fan, how to start a garden, and even how to sew. They also have guides on small engine repair and legal information.

Example of the car repair guides online:

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Prepping/survival in literature

Steve Martin - November 8, 2022

I’m curious….how many of you have read Pat Frank’s novel “Alas Babylon”? It was my introduction to prepping when it was called “Civil Defense”. Did you know it was actually a tv show in the 60s? Playhouse 90 did a LIVE 90 minute play based on the book with some big name stars, including a very young Burt Reynolds. It was live so few video copies survive today. UCLA film preservation has the only known copy. I must have been about 12 when I read this book the first time. 

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