Prepography
The Art & Study of Self-Reliance
Welfare Running Out Of Money – Today’s Quote
We are always hearing about how Social Security is going to run out of money.
How come we never hear about Welfare running out of money?
The Prepper Investment Guru (P.I.G.)
Andrew’s Note: My buddy P.I.G., The Prepper Investment Guru recently sent me this thought…and whodathunkit…but it happened in at least a few states earlier this week when a computer glitch shut down the E.B.T. (Electronic Benefit Transfer) card system. A related glitch actually removed the charging cap at other stores and led to a massive spending spree by some welfare recipients who found that they no longer had a spending cap. God help us on the day that this entire ‘entitlement’ system suddenly crashes hard or shuts down for good because the only thing scarier than an zombie apocalypse is an E.B.T. riot…come to think about it, it might be hard to tell the difference.
The Durants on Savagery and Civilization – Today’s Quote
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
Middle East Escalation in a Dangerous World
The news reports have been particularly troubling lately especially considering our increasingly dangerous world. It almost makes you long for the stability of the Cold War and Détente. Here are a couple of examples out of the Middle East.
An apparent Israeli incursion into Syria…
Israel must defend itself but now we’re mixing Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, U.S. interests, European interests, Russian interests and the rest of the world interested to boot. Complicate that by having Persian, Shia’, Iran assisting Sunni, Arab (Ba’ath Party) Syria and the situation gets very volatile. Oil supplies are in jeopardy, there’s risk of violence escalating generally throughout the region and one of Israel’s other neighbors (Egypt) is being run by the Muslim Brotherhood…where there’s rioting in the streets.
Conflicting accounts emerged Wednesday over an apparent Israeli airstrike inside Syrian territory earlier in the day—with several regional and Western officials saying Israeli jets had struck a convoy of trucks carrying arms near the Lebanon-Syria border, while Syria’s state media described an Israeli strike on a military facility near Damascus.
via Syria Says Israel Struck Military Site, as Accounts Diverge – WSJ.com.
Iranian response for an attack on Syria?
Issuing Tehran’s strongest warning to date, a top Iranian official said Saturday that any attack on Syria would be deemed an attack on Iran, a sign that it will do all it can to protect embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Ali Akbar Velayati, an aide to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made his comments as Syrian troops conducted offensive air raids against rebels and discovered a trio of tunnels they were using to smuggle weapons in their fight to topple Assad.
Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Chicago, Libya, Mali, Philippines, oh my it’s a dangerous world! Are you prepared for this dangerous world?
Shadow Globalization – Bazaars of Violence
Andrew’s Note: Today we return to our crystal ball…or at least the closest thing that the Department of Defense (DOD) has to it…namely the Joint Operating Environment (JOE) 2010. The JOE is the DOD’s keystone document used to project the world in which it will operate up to 25 years into the future. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s a sobering read for the prepper and likely to turn the non-prepper into one. The following is excerpted from PART IV: THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE JOINT FORCE, War in the 21st Century. Links have been inserted by me to provide additional reading for context. Read on to learn what the Department of Defense thinks about Shadow Globalization: “Bazaars of Violence”:
Shadow Globalization: “Bazaars of Violence”
The globalization of trade, finance, and human travel across international boundaries in the commercial world has an analogous dark side as well. Criminal and terrorist networks are intermingling to construct their own “shadow globalization,” building micro markets, and trade and financial networks that will enable them to coordinate nefarious activities on a global scale. The ubiquity and ease of access to these markets outside of legal structures attract shadow financing from a much larger pool, irrespective of geography. In these markets, rates of innovation in tactics, capabilities, and information sharing will accelerate and will enable virtual organizational structures that quickly coalesce, plan, attack, and dissolve. As they grow, these markets will allow adversaries to generate attacks at a higher level of rapidity and sophistication beyond law enforcement’s capability to interdict. For example, we have seen Somali pirates hiring indigenous spotters to identify ships leaving foreign harbors as prime targets for hijackings. We should expect shadow globalization to encourage this outsourcing of criminality to interface increasingly with insurgencies, such that actors in local conflicts will impact on a global scale, with perhaps hundreds of groups and thousands of participants.
The line between insurgency and organized crime will likely continue to blur. This convergence can already be seen in the connections between the FARC and cocaine trafficking, MEND and stolen oil, and the Taliban and opium production. This convergence means that funding for violent conflicts will interplay and abet the growth of global gray and black markets. The current size of these markets is already $2-3 trillion and is growing faster than legal commercial trade; it has the potential to equal a third of global GDP by 2020. Continue reading
News to Know
Situational awareness is a key element of survival and today, situational awareness must be global. Today we present news to know from the past week with a dab of commentary:
Security Threat News:
DHS Admits It Is Unprepared for EMP Threat: The Department of Homeland Security says that our electrical grid is even more vulnerable to an Electromagnetic Pulse attack than we were a few years ago.
Al-Qaeda blamed for Europe-wide forest fires: If true, Al-Qaeda has found an extremely efficient and low risk way damage Western society.
‘Killing Is The Solution,’ Gang Member Tells Walter Jacobson: A disturbing look inside the thought process of a street gang member. Give some thought to what’s between your family and people like this…then take appropriate steps.
Communication News:
Britain in talks on cybersecurity hotline with China and Russia: In all the old movies the nuclear hotline phones are red…what color will the cyberhotline phone be…hope it’s not an IP phone.
Financial News: Continue reading
REALITY CHECK Preparing for Class Warfare – Battling the 47th Entitlement Corps
Andrew’s Note: Today we present another commentary in Roger’s REALITY CHECK series. This time Roger takes on the current frenzy over Presidential Candidate’s Mitt Romney’s recently released comments regarding The 47%. Enjoy your REALITY CHECK, Preparing for Class Warfare – Battling the 47th Entitlement Corps!
This is not a political website! [AJJ's Note: Maybe a little bit when it comes to assaults on Individual Liberty] Its purpose is to educate, communicate and facilitate the process of personal preparation for disaster and build self-reliance. However, one of the highest probability and greatest threats likely to cause The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) comes directly from the political realm! I have discussed taxation, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Dependence, and the national debt-saster, in previous posts. I, like a sizable majority of Americans, feel the country is “headed in the wrong direction” and that is a direct result of the actions and inactions of politicians. Thus, I will Reality Check various partisan political topics from time to time.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been sodomized for committing the politically mortal sin of telling the truth during a private political event in which he stated that he felt 47% of Americans would be disinclined to support him because they pay no federal income taxes and/or receive a federal stipend of some kind under the current administration. Romney had the temerity to openly and accurately discuss the taxation and dependency realities of our country!! He then had the gall to stand by his statements and beliefs rather than blubber about how he didn’t mean it and feels horrible about it!! No one, expects his “honesty attack” to catch on with other politicians and, in fact, this condition is likely to prove terminal for him. What it has done is to provide counter-battery fire, a return salvo, to the drooling mutants making up the Occupy Movement and their successful ‘1%’ attack. Continue reading
Required Reading – When the Music Stops – How America’s Cities May Explode In Violence
In yesterday’s article, Roger Reality discussed Preparing For The National Debt-saster. Author and former Navy SEAL, Matt Bracken in his article “When the Music Stops – How America’s Cities May Explode In Violence” provides us with an example of how civil unrest could result from the government’s inability to pay the entitlements that many have come to expect. His excellent analysis matches what we’ve seen in other multi-cultural societies when times get tough, people ‘gang’ up with those of similar ethnicity, religion, social standing, etc. and it becomes ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ Yugoslavia and Iraq are two great examples where multi-cultural societies lived peacefully with each other for decades (as long as you weren’t Kurdish in Iraq), intermarried, worked together, etc…then when a situation or faction lights the fuse everyone runs to their racial/religious/social corners…gets together and comes out fighting.
If anything I think that Bracken’s article understates the dangers represented from rioting groups who will have many of their own veterans of conflict as well as the potential for manipulation by criminal organizations (street gangs, motorcycle gangs, etc.). There are an estimated 1.4 million gang members in the U.S.
His article should be required reading for every prepper. Check it out at When the Music Stops – How America’s Cities May Explode In Violence.
REALITY CHECK Preparing For The National Debt-saster
As you have probably read in the mainstream media or noticed in the left column of this website, the U.S. National Debt has now surpassed $16,000,000,000,000!! Yes, that’s 16 TRILLION dollars, 16 followed by 12 zeros!! The number itself is staggering but the collective “shrug” of the populace concerning this outrageous profligacy is appalling and indicative of two things. First, it demonstrates how utterly incapable a very sizable majority of the populace is with fundamental mathematical and economic principles. Second, it emblazons the entitlement mentality across the sky in astronomical proportions!
A million seconds is 13 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
My conversations with a wide variety of people concerning federal spending make it abundantly and infuriatingly clear how pathetically inept people are with rudimentary mathematical concepts such as (gasp!) multiplication and exponents. Far too many “citizens” and “voters” the seem to think that the primary difference between a million, billion and trillion is merely a spelling issue involving the letters ‘M’, ‘B’, and ‘T’. There is little comprehension; much less appreciation, for the Reality of the thousand times each is multiplied to change that one little letter! Most people can grasp the impact that winning ‘The Lottery’ (Definition: a self imposed tax operating as a long-odds gambling scheme disguised as a ‘game’ to the “math challenged with the odds of winning roughly equivalent to the odds of being struck by a meteor) would have on their lives. However, very few comprehend that 16 BILLION equals 1,000 winners of such a jackpot. Assuming a two week cycle to reach a 16 million plus jackpot it would take ~40 years to have 1,000 jackpot winners in any game and pay out 16 billion. For our hypothetical winners to collectively win 16 Trillion dollars the game would have to go on for an additional ~40,000 years. This is just one way of trying to conceive of the number representing our current national debt. These are numbers that the “average voter” cannot comprehend and therefore has little concern about. Continue reading
Tax the Rich to Avoid Social Unrest?
Britain which has seen an influx of wealthy European Union migrants in recent months who are fleeing excessive taxation on the continent (France has proposed up to a 75% rate) have found a way to welcome their wealthy, fellow Europeans…tax the rich!
As part of the global push to tax the rich, Britain is now debating an “emergency” wealth tax. But the idea has hit fierce opposition from conservatives, who say the “politics of envy” hasn’t made the country rich.
Deputy Prime Minster Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal-Democrat Party, has proposed a one-time tax on the wealth (rather than the incomes) of high-net-worth Britons. The details aren’t clear, but Clegg says the country is facing an economic war caused by a prolonged recession, and needs to tax the rich in order to avoid social unrest.
via ‘Emergency’ Tax on the Rich Roils Britain – U.S. Business News – CNBC.
A one time tax on wealth sounds remarkably like something else to me…at least a thief won’t tell you that he’s taking your hard earned assets for your own good. Continue reading
Why Prep, Part 3 Triggers & Stressors
Note from Andrew: The complete Why Prep Series has now been consolidated HERE.
Today we present the third article in our series on why to prepare for disaster. In the first article, ‘Why Prep, The Introduction’ we asked and answered the following question:
Question: Why Prep…why become more self-reliant?
Answer: Because it’s the only reasonable and logical response to an unknown future and even a cursory study of history.
In the second article, ‘Why Prep, Historical and Current Examples’ we discussed examples of places and periods where preparedness could have made the difference between survival and suffering (or worse) for you and your family. In this third installment we’ll discuss stressors and triggers for potential The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) situations.
Today we’re going to talk about stressor events and triggers. A stressor event is an occurrence that has the potential to change a system or society. Stressor events happen all the time and can vary dramatically in the amount of stress or influence they place on a system. Some examples of stressor events are election outcomes, legislation, trade wars, disease outbreaks, government spending programs, wars, acts of terror, social movements, development or loss of key infrastructure (like the internet you’re browsing), information releases (like the Watergate scandal) or changes to the physical environment (like drought or natural disasters). From a societal standpoint, stressors often manifest themselves in multiples and if significant enough disruption occurs…they can create a situation that cascades out of control. While it’s an overly simplified model think of these stressors from the last century:
- Germany loses World War I and a large percentage of its reproductive age males
- War damage and reparations create severe economic hardship
- Rise of the National Socialism in Germany bringing Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirts to power (were the Brownshirts easier to recruit due to a lack of fatherly guidance?)
- Election of 1933 gives Hitler enough power in the Reichstag to pass the Enabling Act and assume dictatorial powers
This example from history led to TEOTWAWKI for much of the world from the mid 1930’s to the mid 1940’s and eventually ushered in the atomic age.
