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What if history really isn’t any guide?

In a past life, I used to be a historian. Or at least, a historian-in-training (I bailed on a PhD). I spent ten years at two good schools reading dead languages and writing papers, and in one of my seminars a professor said something that has stuck with me ever since (I’m paraphrasing): “there are two types of thinkers: lumpers and dividers.”

What she meant was, some people (lumpers) spend most of their time arguing that two seemingly disparate things are actually alike, while others (dividers) tend to argue that these two things that look alike are actually very different.

This insight isn’t all that novel — in Plato’s Timaeus, the universe is laid out on the axes of “same” and “different.” But it is useful, and I recall it every time I get into a lumper vs. divider fight with a practicing historian over a current political issue — the historian is usually trying to win an argument by analogy with the past (lumping), while I’m on the other side of the table pounding my fist that this new thing is very different from that old thing and the attempted historical analogy is just plain wrong.

I’m now having more and more of these arguments around the topic of the pandemic, as different kinds of thinkers begin to tackle it with the tools they have at hand. For historians, the main tool is the historical analogy. And the results are a kind of master class in how to royally screw this up.

Here’s an example of an historian-in-training (at an institution I spent five years at, no less!) doing some misguided lumping:

people are losing sight of the distinction between "things are going to be weird for a year or two" and "things are going to be weird for a year or two, therefore they will stay that way forever" pic.twitter.com/9KMySqMEKs

— Jake Anbinder (@JakeAnbinder) May 13, 2020

I did a short Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1260961277033185281) in response to the above, but I’d like to come at it from a different angle, here.

There’s a trap that historical lumpers so often fall into, not just with the pandemic, but whenever they try to bigfoot everyone in a current events debate by jumping in with their 10,000-foot historical perspective.

Lumping together two historical events/groups/trends that are both in the past can work because there are agreed-upon boundaries for the two historical things. In other words, because in the process of writing a “history” of things X and Y, historians have drawn some temporal and social boundaries around X and Y in order to “construct” (*gag*) them as objects of historical inquiry. (I can’t believe I just wrote that but whatever.)

Where historians get into trouble is when they try to lump together an historical event with an event that’s still unfolding and is open-ended, where it’s impossible to draw the necessary hindsight boundaries needed to make the analogy truly work. This is especially treacherous when historians undertake to make predictions about the future based on a historical analogy.

But as fraught as the practice of predicting the future based on analogy with the past is, the whole thing comes completely and hopelessly unglued when you’re trying to do the historical analogy thing with a pandemic.

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The act of constructing an object of historical study out of events of the past — of drawing a circle around a collection of things that happened, and saying “this is all connected, and I’m giving it a name and telling you how it worked” (i.e. “lumping”) is what the kids these days would call a powermove (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Powermove).

And the act of taking someone else’s historical object and whacking it until it cracks apart and then reassembling the pieces into two or more different historical objects (i.e. “dividing”) is also a powermove.

The sport of making an historical object, and then rallying your camp to defend it, king-of-the-hill-style, while some other faction within your guild tries to smash it to pieces in order to create their own object out of the same material, is “history.”

When historians bring these powermoves into the area of a live political debate, they’re deliberately trying to shape the debate and the eventual historical outcome. It’s an overt attempt to intervene and steer the unfolding of events by means of analogy. In this respect, they’re taking a strategy that works for the status game they’re playing inside their guild, and trying to juke current events with it. Sometimes that works really effectively, and sometimes it doesn’t.

But a pandemic is not a purely political issue that you can intervene in and steer. Sure, it has massive political ramifications, and politics definitely affect how it unfolds in a particular geography. But in between the forces of political cause and political effect is a novel pathogen with a mind of its own, and that novel pathogen gets the final say in how the pandemic unfolds.

So while the pandemic comes wrapped in a thick cloud of politics, the novel pathogen at its heart is a force of nature, and that force of nature does not even see any of the human social constructions that are so real to you and I, much less respect them. It just burns through every clan and faction and border and popular movement and historical moment, with zero regard for what came before or what will come after. Your rhetorical powermoves have no effect on it. It doesn’t know they’re there.

It’s also important to remember that the novel pathogen is novel. We have never faced this particular threat before, which means that “long-lasting changes to important aspects of the human condition” are very much out there in the unmapped space of possible futures that will unfold from what’s happening right now.

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There is actually a family of useful historical analogies that can help guide our response to the novel pathogen. That family of analogies is the very epidemiological models that are the subject of so much present debate.

But these models-as-analogies don’t function quite the same way as the analogies that even politically engaged historians make. They aren’t powermoves in either an intra-guild status contest or a current political fight — or at least, they’re not supposed to be such.

When used properly, epidemiological models are tools for exploring and reasoning about the space of possibilities by testing different input parameters. Like all good historical analogies the best ones are deeply rooted in a high-quality grasp of the details and minutia of historical precedent — in this case, R values, fatality rates of various flavors, test positivity rates, curves, and all the other parameters underlie each model.

But to take these models as straight-forward predictions, or even worse to mistake them for political interventions or to make them stakes in a tribal political fight, to abuse and misuse them.

It’s also wrong to do the opposite — to take your facility with creating forward-looking historical analogies that only really work as powermoves in a present political debate, and turn it to the task of actually modeling out the space of possibilities for the epidemic.

Let me put all this a different way:

The point of an epidemiological model is to act as a sandbox where we can test different input parameters and visuals what their effects might be on the next few weeks’ development of the pandemic. The point of a historical analogy is that it’s a powermove that’s meant to influence a present social dynamic.

So if you are trying to predict what will happen with the SARS-COV-2 pandemic based on a historical analogy with the 1918 Spanish Flu, or the Great Depression, or the Great Recession of 2008, you’ve gotten the above all twisted and are just going to end up playing yourself. This is not that, and your attempt to lump this with that is far more likely to confuse more than it is to clarify.

First, just look around at the vastly different outcomes that different countries are seeing with this pandemic, and then think about that the US of 1918 is a different country than the US of 2020. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” goes the quote.

Second, and more importantly, SARS-COV-2 is a brand new virus from a totally different family than the 1918 influenza. Again, the qualities of this novel pathogen — both the qualties it has right now and the qualities it will develop as it moves in and sets up shop in the human population — will govern the course of this event. The virus gets a vote in all this, and we have no idea what it will do next.

A properly used epidemiological model takes full account of the virus’s agency — to plug in different parameters for R0 and IFR and see what happens is to account for the fact that the virus can behave in different ways in different places. The strength of modeling as an exercise is that it gives you a framework for exploring the question of “what if the virus does, or what if it does that?”. It does not predict what the virus will do next, because that is impossible.

I think historians, investors, and everyone else who’s trying to answer the question of “what’s next” in a systematic way can learn from epidemiologists: don’t predict, just model.

Predicting is saying what’s about to happen. Modeling is constructing a little device that lets you play with different inputs and explore what might happen if the virus + human system does this or that thing.

So don’t get honeypotted into lumping a past even with the present outbreak in order to make a prediction. Just stick to a plain old model, where you can fiddle with the inputs and watch the outputs change.

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Virginia’s snowy I-95 traffic jam invites call for better preparedness for the unexpected – I love Fox’s headlines

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/virginia-i-95-traffic-jam-better-preparedness-unexpected

Virginia’s snowy I-95 traffic jam invites call for better preparedness for the unexpected Some drivers were trapped in traffic for more than 24 hours on Interstate 95

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Camper or trailer option for dodging disasters

Hello,

I’ve been thinking about natural disasters and how mobility could mitigate the impact. Specifically, I like the idea of converting a worn in box truck into a stealth camper. Besides the recreational aspect, having an affordable house on wheels to relocate for a week or month might come in handy.

Any existing threads on this topic or has anyone built something like this?

Here’s a link to one I like. It’s not prepper outfitted, but shows the general idea:

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Has anyone used a DD tarp?

What is opinion on a DD tarp ( 3m x 3m)? They are expensive but they have good reviews on Amazon and YouTube.

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Dear Moderators, Thanks

Thanks to the mod team for keeping this current wave of spammers from posting, its much appreciated.

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Relearned two important lessons… and learned a new one

This past Saturday, we had some storms come thru the area.  Didn’t appear to be anything unusual for this area.  However a microburst hit a section of Memphis… a section of Memphis where my 100 year old mother-in-law lives.  That microburst snapped & uprooted huge trees in a several block area, taking down power lines with them.  Her power lines to the house snapped & were laying in the yard.  The tree that took them down hit another house.  To make it even worse, the temps were going to drop to around 20 on Sunday night.

So I loaded up my truck with all sorts of extension cords, tools, saws, portable rechargeable lighting, solar generator, 3 forty pound LP tanks and my dual fuel generator.  This prepper was off to rescue the needy.  🙂    Now my generator, as discussed in another thread, is setup where a thick cable runs between the generator and a receptacle on the outside of my house.  Obviously that would not help me here, as I was taking the generator elsewhere.  But I was smart enough to have purchased another long, thick cable that connects to the same port on the generator but has a 4 receptacle box at the end.  I thought such a cable would be a great way to bring electricity into another structure & then branch off of that with extension cords.  And it was.  Here is a pic.

So I get to her house, hook the generator to an LP tank, run the above cable into the house & then branch off of that to run some lights, the refrigerator/freezer, coffee pot, microwave, TV. and 3 portable electric heaters.  The generator starts perfectly (electric start) and runs all Saturday evening and Sunday morning.  Once I felt that that LP tank was getting pretty low, I switched to another LP tank and got the generator back up and running.  All is good… until the generator starts sputtering and shuts off.  What the heck?  Hit the start switch and we are back in business, until this happens again in around 10-15 minutes.  Damn.  I do this a few more times & decide to switch to the other full tank.  Starts beautifully and within a few minutes… same problem.

I’m beginning to wonder if I got some bad LP gas.  These 3 tanks were filled at different times.  One was filled by itself and then a couple of weeks later, I filled the other two.  So to verify my assumption, I put the first tank back on & the generator ran perfectly.  Two tanks have bad LP gas.  I didn’t know you could get bad LP gas but sure looks like I did.  So the plan was to take the now empty tank & one of the full to get refilled… in Memphis on a Sunday, the day after a holiday.  U-Haul fills LP tanks, they are open on Sunday, & there is a store a few miles away.  Yep, they are open but they don’t have LP gas for some reason… but they tell us another U-Haul store a few miles away has LP gas.  So we drive there… and they don’t have LP gas either but another store further away does.  OK, we learned our lesson and told them to call that store to verify they had the gas.  Nope… no gas there.  And we couldn’t find any other location open on a Sunday.

First lesson relearned.  Crap happens!  Sometimes your best laid plans often go awry.

Second lesson relearned.  Be flexible and adapt.  So how was I flexible & how did I adapt?  If you remember, my generator is a dual fuel model.  It can operate on LP gas or gasoline.  My best laid plans were to use LP gas only, as it burns very clean & won’t foul up the ignition system like gasoline will.  It is also safer to transport.  It also stores long term with any problem.  Thankfully I’m a prepper & understand we have to be flexible in a crisis… so I spent the extra money on a dual fuel generator.  So now I ran up to an auto parts store, picked up a few 5 gallon gasoline containers, filled them up, filled the tank on the generator, flipped the generator switch from LP gas to gasoline, hit the start button… and we were back in business.   The generator ran perfectly all night with the low at 20 and ran perfectly today until the power came back on at noon.

It never occurred to me LP gas could be bad.  Lesson learned.

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4 recep

Book giveaway: “Move” by Parag Khanna

Giving away 3 copies of the new book Move. The author worked directly for General McChrystal at JSOC in Iraq / Afghanistan (who was portrayed by Brad Pitt in the recent Netflix film War Machine.)

The book talks about the movement of people, under the context of the expected upcoming (or already starting?) mass migrations due to climate change, political and economic instability, etc. 

Just reply if you’d like us to mail you one (and we’ll reach out to get mailing info). We do expect you to follow through with sharing your thoughts here, but you don’t have to finish the whole book if it’s lame.

I’d like to do more of this, where we coordinate giving away review sample products to great people in this community, so you can get some free stuff in exchange for sharing a review in this forum 🙂

Edit: Copies going out to brekke, NazSMD, and Seasons4. We’ll email you for info.

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Best ways to store #10 cans

I’ve been building up my supply of #10 dehydrated food cans & am just getting around to organizing them. Anyone have suggestions for tall shelving that fits these specific cans? I live in earthquake country so something with a bar holding them in would be great too. I’d love to build some custom wood shelving but that’s way beyond my skill set. I’m also wondering about rodents. Should I be concerned about the metal cans attracting mice/rats & putting them in totes on the shelves (they’re going in my garage) or are the metal cans safe on their own? Thanks guys!

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EDC FAK for classroom/school use

Good afternoon!

I teach at a commuter college in a major metropolitan area that in recent years has experienced a disproportionate number of school shootings (mass shootings, drive-bys, and the occasional random disgruntled student shooting at a classmate).  In at least one instance, a couple of students lives were saved by quick-thinking campus security guards who applied tourniquets while waiting for EMS to arrive.  Fortunately, none of these incidents have affected my school yet BUT it does seem like a reasonable situation to be prepared for.

While I do keep FAKs in my truck and office, I’m thinking about putting together a small EDC (sub-Level I) that I could stash in my book bag or briefcase while in meetings or classes where, in certain types of emergencies, it wouldn’t be practical or possible to retrieve a larger FAK from my office or truck.

Another variable that I’d like to consider is tornadoes, since we live in tornado country, which would likely be the other main scenario where I might find a need for a FAK but am unable to retrieve my main kit from my truck or office.

For most other likely scenarios, if the smaller EDC classroom kit was insufficient, I’d most likely be in a position to retrieve my main kit or, at least, hold things together until campus security and/or EMS showed up.  Another piece that’s helpful is our school now has AEDs on every floor of every building.  I’ve heard that some schools now stock basic “trauma kits” in each and every classroom so, if that’s a things, perhaps I could suggest that our school consider doing that as well.

With this background in mind, here’s my question:  Based on this prioritized FAK list, how far down the list would you recommend that I go in assembling an EDC FAK for the purposes described above AND would you recommend changing adding or deleting anything from the topi-tier Level I list?

Thanks for your input!

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BOB plus Get Home Bag?

First, I would like to say what an impressive site this is. I have never joined any forums; but wanted to, in part, to thank you for the very clear, factual and thorough information!

My question is about the Get Home Bag. Is it best to create a duplicate of your main BOB? I am taking an inventory of my BOB, and with the help of this site, working on upgrading it. Should I create two bags exactly the same–one for home and one for away? Or, is the Get Home Bag typically a smaller kit?

Thank you for any advice!

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Thoughts on Quick Dam flood bags?

Does anyone have experience with the Quick Dam products? Specifically the flood bags?

I’m in the southwest and we’ve had a couple of nasty flash floods this past spring / summer where the water was just about to flood our garage. I’ve had sand bags in the past but the sun just eats the fabric up in a season or two – looking for something a bit more user friendly / portable. 

Thanks! 

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Annual, periodic, seasonal maintenance checklists?

I searched for this topic & didn’t see it addressed yet. Being the start of a new year, it occurred to me that I don’t really have a workable (read: simple) timeframe checklist for some basic preps. For example, I change out the water in our extra storage tank annually (when I think of it.) So I thought I’d ask you organized people to share yours!

Odd things like: how often should you charge rarely used rechargeable battery powered electronics that you have in your preps so they last a long time? Rechargeable batteries? How often do you rotate the really long term foodstuffs? Beans will last many years but become resistant to cooking/softening after a while. Start up that generator how often?….Please share!

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Should I start with a bug out bag or preparing my home first? – New and need advice

Hi all,  I am very very new to the prepping community. I am a young mom with a son, Husband, and a dog. We live in Canada, my biggest concern is winter, and I am unsure of where to begin.

I have lots of questions, but I will start with the basics. Do I begin with a bug out bag or prepping my home first? This is tricky because we are currently renting till March 2022 and have a limited space for storage. My budget is also minimal as my husband doesn’t totally see the value of prepping at this moment in time. I’m also unsure of what should be my first buys for our climate. Thanks! 

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My portable generator setup

Thought I might show how I use my portable generator during outages… which can be rather common here in rural America.  My generator is about as big as I can handle by myself and provides enough electric to power two electric refrigerator freezers, well pump, about half our lights and around half the receptacles.  AC is out of the question using such a generator but since we have natural gas, it will power the blowers on our heaters.

You first will need an electrician to move the electric circuits you wish the generator to power into their own electric panel.  You then have to ensure your generator electric can’t feed back into your electric feed coming from the electric company.  In my case, there is a bar that connects the breaker with the power company feed to the breaker for the generator feed.  With this setup, that electric panel can receive power from either… but not both.   So power from the generator can never run back into my main electric panels.

I had an electrician put an outdoor receptacle out on the back of the garage.  I have a 30 foot extension which connects from the generator to this receptacle.  So when needed you simply start the generator, throw the breaker panel switch… and those circuits now run off the generator.  When the electric feed comes back on, you just throw the breaker in the opposite direction… killing the generator feed and turning on the feed from the power company.

My generator is a dual fuel model, meaning it can run off of bottled LP gas or gasoline.  My intent is to use just LP gas as it runs cleaner & won’t foul up the ignition system like gasoline can.  However, if running for extended time, I have the option of running off of gasoline too.

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generator panels

FYI – Notice of Non-Conforming NIOSH Approved N95 Masks from ALG Health

Hello!  I was on the ALG Health website earlier today to purchase more foldable surgical N95 masks, and I saw a notice posted on the ALG Health website that several lots of their 100,000 PT-N95F-01S respirators were produced using materials and processes that were not conforming to the NIOSH approval issued. The following finished good lots affected are as follows: Manufacture dates were: Last week of Feb 2021 – March 2021Lot# PT-N95F-01S-204-2021Lot# PT-N95F-01S-301-2021Lot# PT-N95F-01S-302-2021Lot# PT-N95F-01S-303-2021Lot# PT-N95F-01S-304-2021 

I have three boxes of these masks on hand – I checked the lots and found one of the boxes was affected by this notice.  I threw the bad box of masks away and will be reaching out for a refund.  

I received no proactive notice from the website where I purchased these masks, therefore I could have been using defective N95 masks without knowing it!  In the event anybody here happens to have any of these masks from the affected lots / production dates, I wanted to let everybody know.

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European Natural Gas supplies

All records for the price of natural gas (NG) have just been smashed, Its just passed $2000 per 1000 unit suply. The normal price in in the low hundreds of dollars.  It is causing energy companies across europe to go bust in growing numbers and the price of NG to retail customers is going up very vast.   its caused by a mixture of geopolitics, logistics, greed and high demand and its damaging many economies and financial markets.

It has a knock on effect as those who have coal or log burning stoves are buying much more than normal and this is also driving up prices  of coal based products and kiln dried fire wood.

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I thought I knew how to perform CPR until I needed to.

Being prepared for any unexpected emergency was what I took pride in. I worked in a hospital and was BLS/CPR certified every year during 2000 and knew my stuff but all of my training went out the door when my 2-year-old son experienced a near-death choking incident. 

This happened while my husband, myself, and our children were in the car going for a drive. My husband managed to pull over to the side of the street and we both jump out of the car and released our baby from his car seat. My husband, who is also an Army Veteran, gave our son to me to help dislodge the candy that was stuck in his throat. My son at this time became unresponsive and required CPR. Instead of performing chest compressions(pressure from chest compression can push objects back up the airway), I froze, and I couldn’t recall ANYTHING I was taught! My husband noticed me panicking, took our son, and saved his life. 

This messed with my head for several years because my flight or fight response was the exact opposite of what I thought I would do. I knew I had to do something so I invented an improved CPR mask(CPRWrap) that not only protected the responder from fluid contamination during rescue breathing but had the entire steps of CPR with hand placements embossed on the template. 

I want to be part of the solution of making sure every man, woman, and child is prepared and able to step up and execute safety measures when they are needed. It’s not a matter of if it will happen but when.  I would love to send out some samples to get your thoughts and feedback on CPRWrap. Just reach out to me at [email protected]. CPRWrap video

Stay safe and Happy New Year.

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Fireproof safes

I’ve been thinking about a simple prep that strikes me as essential: Fireproof safes or lockboxes to save documents, cash/jewelry and hard drives even when everything else is lost.

I also wonder how useful it would be to bolt such a safe to my car’s trunk and store my GHB/precious car supplies to avoid losing them to theft or fires. Cars being randomly burnt isn’t too uncommon an occurence in my country’s suburban areas…

Do you have any experience with fireproof safes, or even products you’d recommend ?

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Test your preps!

I know you’ve all heard this before, but I thought I would share a few recent events that brought ‘testing your preps’ to the front of my thoughts.

I have a 4AA battery headlamp that I use often.  I had some issues with past ones and was really impressed with the company’s customer service, so I bought a couple more which i’ve never used.  I decided to break them open and try them out.  The modes are high, low, and strobe.  While I was using one of them, suddenly the strobe mode came on without me touching the switch.  I tried to change the mode but the switch didn’t work.  I touched the front of the light and it was hot.  I touched the battery pack and it was really hot.  I hurriedly took out the batteries (which were also hot) and noticed that they were starting to melt.  These were lithium batteries, so you can imagine what could have happened.

I decided to test out the other one as well.  After 10 minutes, both the front light and battery pack were hot and again the 4 batteries were starting to melt.  I double-checked the polarity and they were correct.  The headlamp that I use often has 4AA lithium batteries.  The newer ones are slightly different as they have a different color battery cover, so I suspect there was a design change.  I’m down 8 lithium batteries but at least I wasn’t injured and it didn’t happen during a crisis.  The company has been out of business for several years, so no possibility of a return.

In another situation, I generally drain the batteries of my rechargeable radios and then fully recharge them twice a year.  I’m having a problem charging one of my radios.  The rechargeable battery was just replaced last year and I did some ‘conditioning’ to ensure a longer life.  What is really strange is it seems to hold a charge using the crank but not using either of my two AC chargers.  I’m still trying to figure it out but the radio can be operated with AAA batteries and I have a spare rechargeable battery pack. 

I’d like to hear from others about issues they have encountered because of not checking preps.  

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If our public servants focused on enlightening the unpreppared, what would they say?

I’m running for president (LP) not with any hope of winning even the nomination, but to try to change the discussion. Eventually- I can’t broach this ‘radical’ notion ’til I get name recognition- I aim to focus on our declining air, water & food quality, extreme weather, dwindling resources, diminishing sperm counts and testosterone levels; basically all the things that went into the 1972 MIT study that says societal collapse around 2040, and everything we’ve learned since then. Any ideas on what to say and how to say it would help. My basic message of now is, “You can’t count on the gov’t, learn some stuff, and build a community.”
BTW, my handle is short for, International Thrival Society: a coalition of like-minded groups who accept things change, and the best way to meet those challenges is through fortitude & community endeavor. And, the more prepared there are, the less hysteria there will be.

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We Should All Be Preppers – an interesting article in the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/we-should-all-be-preppers/611074/

Preppers all over the world have been hunkered down safely at home or in their bunkers during the COVID-19 pandemic. For them, long-term food storage is a baseline, so making it through a season or two without venturing out is primarily a psychological challenge. I’ve spent the past three years interviewing people preparing for an ambiguous future disaster, and some of them emailed me in the early days of the pandemic from their redoubts, expressing wry frustration as they watched shoppers on TV frantically stacking supplies—hand sanitizer, bottled water, and, yes, toilet paper—in their shopping carts. One wrote me, “These people are fixing a leaky roof in a rainstorm.”

Chances are you have a neighbor who was ready for this pandemic. And if you knew they were stockpiling before the disaster, you likely thought they were weirdos. I know I did, even as I traveled the world writing a book about them. Not anymore. Although preppers have long been the subject of ridicule, I imagine many of us will take on some of their habits, or at the very least make space in our closets and garages for nonperishables.

Scooping up scarce necessities gives people a sense of control during times of uncertainty, so the great toilet-paper dash-and-grab of 2020 was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rarer something is, the more people seek it. Six weeks after the initial pandemic hoarding spree, many key commodities are still in short supply. President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order to prevent meat shortages. With about 15 percent of the population now unemployed, Americans are looking for assistance from food banks, in lines stretching for miles in some places. These spectacles of desperation are both a censure of our society and a revelation about our collective lack of personal preparedness.

The crisis has also highlighted how woefully inadequate many of our living arrangements are for social distancing. I have friends in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Sydney who have little ability to cook, let alone store food. That level of base-needs dependency on society is anathema to preppers, who are quick to point out that only a few hundred years ago not having enough food and fuel stored to make it through winter was effectively suicide.

A couple of years back, I flew to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to interview a wealthy Canadian offshore oil-rig worker and doomsday prepper who asked me to refer to him as “Auggie.” I was baffled by Auggie’s desire for a pseudonym, because he was in the middle of building the most conspicuous house I’d ever seen. Operating on the extreme end of disaster preparedness, he was constructing an “eco-fortress” composed of four villas that he would stock with enough supplies for a multi-month siege. He designed three of these villas for future buyers. Auggie’s own stronghold was a three-story concrete block with bulletproof windows and an open-air central atrium. He planned to scaffold the interior walls with lattice for passion-fruit vines that would drape down over a swimming pool. He assured me that the off-the-grid building, which sat in the middle of an abandoned orchard at the far edge of a secluded village, would have remote surveillance systems, mantraps, a panic room, and a nuclear-fallout shelter that doubled as a day spa.

 He called his customized hideaway “Sanctum,” which in Latin means “a holy place,” but in English denotes a private retreat. For Auggie, the doomstead served both purposes, being a place for safety, study, and self-improvement during the crisis he was sure was just around the corner. And here we are.

Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, preparing for emergencies, in the casual sense, could no longer be considered a niche activity in the United States. A 2017 survey by the financial-tech company Finder suggested that roughly 20 percent of Americans spent money on survival materials that year, and a further 35 percent said they already had what they needed for an emergency. But my guess is that many of these same people are now finding that their preparations were inadequate. Someone might keep a flashlight and a first-aid kit hanging from a garage hook or tucked under the bed, or may have even purchased a three-day tactical assault “bug-out bag” available on Amazon for $49.99, but only staunch cynics have stockpiled food, water, medicine, fuel, tools, weapons, and equipment for months of isolation.

 Auggie’s eco-fortress in Chiang Mai, Thailand. (Courtesy of Bradley Garrett)In 2013, at least 3.7 million Americans self-identified as survivalists, according to 24/7 Wall Street, a financial-news source. Many of these citizens, who suspected that the government lacked the resources to protect them after decades of cuts to the public sector, have hoarded with the gusto of frontier settlers. Prepping is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. In a 2017 interview with Bloomberg, Aaron Jackson, then the CEO of Wise Co., a Salt Lake City–based producer of freeze-dried fare with a 25-year shelf life, declared that his food was a staple “that every American household in this age of uncertainty should have.” Jackson estimates that survival food sales alone total about $400 million annually. The company delivers certainty in a pallet of black plastic buckets for $9,499.99. Supposedly, this mail-order pantry can provide three meals a day for one year for a family of four. Long-term food buckets for your “deep larder” can now be bought at Kmart and Bed Bath & Beyond. Costco recently had a page dedicated to “Emergency Food by the Pallet,” advertising “one year of food storage” for $4,999. These pallets sold out two months ago, as did many of the televangelist Jim Bakker’s “survival food buckets.”

If you are a prepper, you probably haven’t told anyone. My brother, who knew for years that I was writing a book about prepping, let me in on a secret only a few weeks ago: He had a storage unit filled with two years’ worth of food, a handful of N95 masks, long-range two-way radios, and a small arsenal. The crisis having finally arrived, he’d activated the cache. That he never dared mention it to me previously was both vexing and unsurprising.

The reason for secrecy, according to a paper published last year by Kezia Barker at Birkbeck, University of London, is because “hoarding” has been deemed pathological. We’re meant to trust business, trade networks, and markets to provide what we need, to not question the resiliency of globalization. But as these systems shudder under the weight of a worldwide catastrophe, the curtain has been pulled back on the dangers of free-market faith. Prepping is, at its heart, a kind of activism, a bulwark against the false promises of capitalism, of the idea of endless growth and the perpetual availability of resources.

As Barker suggests, stockpiling exposes the magical thinking behind the assurances of universal state security. This is why this kind of preparation folds so well into conservative narratives distrustful of big government, experts, and elites. The right-wing commentators Sean Hannity and Alex Jones advocate doomsday prepping to their audiences, and market products to meet those needs. For people eager to dismantle state infrastructure, the failure of that infrastructure in an emergency is vindication of foresight. President Trump has consistently relegated responsibility for management of the pandemic to state governments and the private sector, all while claiming unprecedented executive authority and proffering erroneous information to the public on a daily basis. It’s the perfect cocktail for compounding the crisis, proving the conservative thesis that big government is bad government.

The political left also has its doom prophets, of course. The cultural theorist Paul Virilio once said that, due to our economic reliance on connection and speed, it was realistic to think that “there is an accident brewing that would occur everywhere at the same time,” words that reverberate dramatically under present circumstances.

I’m now holed up in a bunker of sorts in south Los Angeles—in my 78-year-old mom’s well-stocked and isolated house in a gated community. Like my brother, we’ve acquired radios and a deep larder, planted a garden, and have no need to panic shop. However, we’ve had to leave the house every three days or so to pick up my mom’s prescriptions and take her to doctors’ appointments. I imagine more committed preppers like Auggie in Chiang Mai shaking their heads at this.

I sent him a message recently to ask whether it’s realistic to think that we can prepare for every eventuality. He wrote back immediately: “I created an Ebola hazmat kit a few years ago when I thought the outbreak would take off.” His friends at the time thought that this was a superfluous line of defense. Now he’s unpacking the bunny suit and powered air-purifying respirator. I thought about him laying out that kit in his fortress and recalled some of the skeptical questions I’d fired at him during my visit. I felt my cheeks redden. Then the next message arrived.

“Preppers don’t seem so crazy when there’s a pandemic, correct?” Auggie has now sold two of the three other villa plots at Sanctum.

Over the past three or four years, I’ve hung out in luxury condos inside missile silos, in bunker complexes on the Great Plains, with groups growing food in secret forests, with people building heavily armored vehicles, and with religious communities that have collected supplies that they’re ready to hand over to strangers. Most of the people I’ve met aren’t getting ready for an extinction-level event, and sneer at the suggestion. Rather, prepping for them is about building up hopeful confidence that they’ve planned ahead for the inevitable catastrophes of existence. This pandemic, which they consider mid-level, is rightfully causing us to reckon with the failures of our social, political, and economic systems, and we should all collectively push to make them more resilient to contingencies. But in the meantime, a bit of practical prepping can take some strain off these systems while we wait for the next cosmic surprise.

Bradley Garrett is the author of the forthcoming book Bunker: Building for the End Times.

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What are your grid-down reference resources?

I’ve recently recognized that a fair number of my preparedness resources require electricity to access, whether they’re out on the internet or just saved to my computer. While there are plenty of disaster scenarios where I might still have power, I also recognize that’s not a given—that’s a weak point in my preparation!

Naturally, the ideal situation would be to have every skill I’d possibly need practiced to familiarity, and every iota of relevant knowledge committed to memory. Let’s just say I’m not there yet. 😅

What are your reference resources that you could turn to if you didn’t have electricity? Are there certain books (or zines) you like? Have you printed hard copies of particular guides? Neighbors or community members you know you could count on? Or maybe you’ve compiled your own hand-written reference materials?

I figure building these resources out for myself could be a useful stopgap, at least until I reach the Platonic ideal of ingrained preparedness. 😜

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How many of you have moved town / city / state PRIMARILY for prepping reasons?

As per the header, I wonder how many of this particular community actually bit the bullet and decided to relocate with PREPAREDNESS the the primary motivating factor.

Its 20 years since it dawned on myself and my wife that the urban location (pop 270.000) we were living in may have been ideal for affordability and commuting, but its drawbacks outweighed any benefits ( highly urbanised, highly industrialised, high population density, high crime levels and above average pollution levels.

No we could not afford the idylic homestead,not even close, but we could afford to get way out of town to a much smaller very rural village ( pop around 3000)

The benefits were myriad and immediate, cleaner air, freshly grown local foods, smaller schools, very low crime, much more of a community spirit, more room to manouvre etc.

We took a large economic hit with me having to give up my main job and focus only on occasional contracts, but my wife retained her nursing role, but again the overall quality of life / peace of mind outweighed the loss of income.

So have any of you good people made the leap, if so whats your story?

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Life on Redneck’s homestead

I figured I’d create a new discussion topic, where I can post pics of what goes on around the homestead, as opposed to posting a lot of individual topics as I’ve done in the past.  I have 20 rural acres in northern Mississippi with most in yards & pastures.  I have a smallish garden in the back yard and an orchard in my upper pasture.  In my bottom pasture I have around a 1 acre pond with grain fed catfish.  As a prepper, my intent is to become self sufficient during a severe crisis.  With my small garden, it provides my wife & me with all the fresh veggies we can eat thru the year.  I test different varieties to find the best ones for my area, and then store large quantities of that seed.  Fruit & nut trees take too long to reach bearing age, so you can’t wait for a crisis to start them.  Thus I have much more fruit that I can currently use, however when I retire in a couple of years, I probably will sell it a farmers markets.

So today my main chores, after grooming horses, are to turn on the drip irrigation in the blueberry patch & in the muscadine grapes, spray the apples & peaches in the orchard & to drag the horse paddock with the chain harrow.  Here I’m filling my 50 gallon sprayer at my upper barn, which is in my front yard.  That is a crabapple finishing blooming out front.  Today I’m spraying myclobutanil fungicide (concentrated version of Immunox available at hardware stores) plus a bactericide to fight fire blight.

I have other fruit & nut trees in my front yard, such as Asian persimmons, pecans, apples & pears.  Here is a pear in the side yard.  Can’t really see here but it is loaded with baby pears.  The pears that come off this tree are absolutely amazing.  I also have climbing roses in multiple locations out front that also get sprayed.

Now headed down to the orchard.  The house & front yard are up on top of a hill.  I’m entering what I call my upper pasture.  The orchard, paddock & horse barn are to the left.  In the bottom is my lower pasture, with the catfish pond to the right.  The little group of trees behind the pond is actually a large berm.  My metal targets are in front of that berm & that is my shooting range.  The blueberries & muscadines are at the very bottom of the orchard, next to the paddock.  I enter both thru gates in the paddock.

Turned on the drip irrigation to the blueberries & muscadines and verified there are no leaks or busted joints from the winter cold.  Here are the blueberries.  They are so danged easy to grow & put out a tremendous amount of food.   Note the bird netting, which also covers my muscadines.

Not much to see here, but this is the muscadine area.  There are three trellises using high tension wire.  The muscadines are just starting to leaf out.

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Making a free cardboard hatchet sheath

Years ago I bought a cheap 1.25 pound hatchet for $8. For how often I chop wood (which is never), it wasn’t too bad of a deal and I am a little more prepared in case I ever needed to. But the one draw back with this hatchet is that it didn’t have a sheath. And with how often I actually use this, I thought a cardboard sheath would at least keep me from accidentally cutting my fingers when I’m reaching for it in my work closet. Definitely not a long term solution for a hatchet in a bug out bag, but it will work for my needs.

Take any old cardboard box and measure an area slightly larger than the front of the head of the hatchet. Then cut three more, these will be the end pieces

Next, cut out some U shaped pieces that will be the inner spacers. The amount will depend on the thickness of your hatchet/axe head.

Glue two end pieces together, then layer the U shaped pieces and glue them together. I just used Elmers glue. This will form the little cavity where your hatchet head will sit.

Finally glue on your last two end pieces. I used the weight of the hatchet head or rubber bands to hold things together and have pressure between steps so it could dry.

What you are left with is a little box that fits the hatchet head perfectly.

I wrapped the outside with packing tape to hold it all together, add durability, and a slight amount of water resistance. Really junky looking… I know, but it works and was free.

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