Prepography
The Art & Study of Self-Reliance
Situational Awareness – An Introduction (1,334)
Don’t Be ‘That Prepper Guy’ (876)
Fan of the Ammo Can – Top 10 Uses (636)
Prepping with Garage Sales (558)
Top 10 Preparedness Uses of Mineral Oil (503)
Top 10 Initial Steps to Preparation (489)
OCOKA – A Key Survival Acronym (477)
Prepper SALUTE Report – An Observation and Reporting Tool (329)- Difference Between .223 Caliber & 5.56mm (321)
- Best Prepper Caliber? (317)
Jefferson’s Top 10 Commandments for Living (312)
Physical Security and the Forms of Protection (274)
The Real North Korean Threat
Frequent Prepography contributor Roger Reality wrote in to ask that I remind our readers that the 27 year old Leader of North Korea, Kim Jung-un just scrapped the 1953 Armistice that ended…really just hit the ‘pause button’ on the Korean War. His declaration technically returns us to state of open warfare with the Stalinist state.
This puts us in a state of war with another nuclear armed nation…the first time this has ever happened. I should also mention that this nuclear armed nation has also successfully launched a satellite into orbit demonstrating what is essentially an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capability. Put together ICBM and nuclear capabilities and we’ve got a whole new kind of threat to worry about…and it likely isn’t the one you’re thinking about right now. Continue reading
A Nuclear Axis of Evil
As I listened to the President’s State of the Union address last night I couldn’t help but remember the same speech eleven years ago when another President described the ‘Axis of Evil.’ If you’ll recall the Axis included Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The only thing worse than an Axis of Evil is a Nuclear Axis of Evil.
In case you’ve been on a low information diet this week… North Korea apparently detonated another nuclear weapon amid a blitz of anti-U.S. rhetoric.
Cannibalism and Centralized Planning
As any serious student of history knows, centralized planning leads to inefficient logistic and economic systems. It seems like a smart person or group of people would make better decisions than the creative chaos of the free market…but it’s just not the case. No one is smart enough to direct an economy and as anyone who’s ever served on a committee knows…committees tend to make worse decisions than any single person could make individually. My rule of thumb is the bigger the committee the worse the decision…but it takes the world’s longest running Stalinist regime to bring us cannibalism and centralized planning. How bad can centralized planning screw up a country…
Hungry parents in North Korea have been caught eating their children to avoid starvation.
via Starving North Korean parents ‘eating their children’ | The Sun
I know hunger changes brain chemistry but how hungry do you have to be to become this insane!
The article mentions a long running drought…but what’s really at work is called famine. Famine is a frequent companion when centralized planning meets farming decisions. If one farmer makes a bad farming decision…his family goes hungry…if a centralized planner makes a bad farming decision it starves the entire country. North Korea’s on it’s third generation of bad decisions.
Today’s Top 10 Prepping Motivators
September is Preparedness Month. Here are 10 headlines from the past few days on diverse topics to help keep you focused on your prepping:
- Yosemite doubles scope of hantavirus warning to 22,000; third death confirmed: Many diseases including hantavirus can be prevented through proper pest control and sanitation (personal and environmental). Stock what you need and know what to do. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) information on preventing hantavirus can be found here.
- Drug shortages down overall, but some linger longer: Stocking the medicines your family needs to stay healthy is important for both mundane ‘drug shortages’ as well as societal upsets that could potentially break down the medical or drug distribution systems. Make sure you stockpile legally by talking with your doctor or hiring a new one like Dr. Bob Olson. Until recently Dr. Olson conducted his consultations by telephone to help preppers safely and knowledgeably stockpile critical medications. The State of Missouri actually changed its law to close down Dr. Olson’s tele-practice. You can still visit him in person or find a like-minded medical provider in your area.
- Rescuers told to keep at it after China quake kills 80: Nature’s fury can strike anywhere at any time. Keep on prepping and if you want to see a map showing 2.5 Magnitude or greater quakes for the last week…check out this map at the U.S. Geological Survey (as of this writing the earthquake map looks a lot like the Pacific’s Ring of Fire…it usually does).
- Yet another pig flu virus infects people: Zoonotic diseases (capable of cross species transmission) aren’t just creepy…they’re also scary because of their ability to mutate. We wrote about this particular flu strain earlier this summer in Beware the Fair. Continue reading
Bureaucracy Generates World’s Biggest Power Failure
A population nearly twice the size of the U.S. suffering from a bureaucratically ‘generated’ power outage…and they expect it to happen again in the coming days…
The world’s largest outage brought 500 trains to a halt, trapped 200 miners for hours, shut down shops and left hospitals in the dark.
…Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde blamed the outage on states taking more than their allotted share of electricity. “Everyone overdraws from the grid,” he said. Experts disagreed.”Underinvestment at both the state level and national level has been building as power demand increases,” said Charles Ebinger, director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “This is just a colossal case where everything has come home to roost after years of neglect.”
India’s power situation is made worse by government actions, such as giving of subsidized or free electricity to favored constituencies that has left power operators in debt and unable to improve the grid.
Also, some plants run below capacity because politicians have acceded to pressure from environmentalists not to use coal for fuel.
via Second day of India’s electricity outage hits 620 million – USATODAY.com.
The biggest po
wer failure in the history of the world…no storm, no mechanical breakdown, just the tragedy of central government planing and half of India’s population is in the dark.
Maybe some good will come of it though, Prime Minister Manmahan Singh has pledged to fast track energy projects and introduce free market reforms. A chief executive who intends to reduce centralized planning and encourage the free market…let’s hope it’s contagious.
Why Prep, Part 2 Historical & Current Examples
Note from Andrew: The complete Why Prep Series has now been consolidated HERE.
Last week in Why Prep, the Introduction we briefly discussed the fragility of the status quo and clarified that preparedness is not about getting ready for the ‘end of the world’… it’s about building the skills, resources and resilience to endure the transition periods following dramatic financial, environmental, societal or individual life changes. If you haven’t read the introduction yet, I recommend that you read it before continuing by clicking on the hyperlink near the start of this paragraph..
Today we’re going to take a look at some current and historical situations and events that are/were much more survivable (financial and otherwise) for those that took the time to prepare. For brevity’s sake I have chosen a small sampling of the historical examples available and have chosen not to include many areas of perpetual warfare (Cyprus, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Palestine/Israel, Northern Ireland, etc.).
Note: The links included go to articles or preselected internet searches (to make results more timely) in case you’re interested in doing additional reading on that subject. For convenience, these examples are listed by continent although many of the events/situations spanned multiple continents. Continue reading
The Real Hunger Games
If you’ve read The Hunger Games book or seen the movie you’ll recognize some common themes in the article excerpted below. For those of you who’ve served in Korea this will be a heartwarming story from one who escaped.
Make no mistake, evil isn’t just something you see in book/movie villains.
As to the Hunger Games movie…one of the first movies I ever saw (after reading the book) that didn’t disappoint me…the only thing wrong with it is that it’s way too short at 2 Hours and 22 minutes.
International – Blaine Harden – Born in the Gulag: Why a North Korean Boy Sent His Own Mother to Her Death – The Atlantic
Shin was born a slave and raised behind a high-voltage barbed-wire fence. His mother beat him, and he viewed her as a competitor for food. His father, who was allowed by guards to sleep with his mother just five nights a year, ignored him. His older brother was a stranger. Children in the camp were untrustworthy and abusive. Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.
Love and mercy and family were words without meaning.
In Camp 14, Shin did not know literature existed. He saw only one book in the camp, a Korean grammar, in the hands of a teacher who wore a guard’s uniform, carried a revolver on his hip, and beat one of his primary school classmates to death with a chalkboard pointer.
