Prepography
The Art & Study of Self-Reliance
Top 10 Preparedness Uses of WD-40 (2,105)
Snake Eater – How to Field Dress a Snake (661)
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OCOKA – A Key Survival Acronym (638)
Fan of the Ammo Can – Top 10 Uses (595)
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Prepper SALUTE Report – An Observation and Reporting Tool (360)
Physical Security and the Forms of Protection (306)
Situational Awareness – An Introduction (271)
Top 10 Preparedness Uses of Diatomaceous Earth (250)
Prepping Consequences of the Election
I’ve received several inquiries today from concerned preppers asking what changes they should make to their preparedness plans in light of the recent election results so I gave some thought to the prepping consequences of the election and here’s what I’ve come up with…
First off, by a margin of roughly 2.5% (popular vote – as of the writing of this article) the citizens of the U.S. have chosen a path that clearly encourages dependence as opposed to self reliance…make no mistake though, the Republicans would have been better…but not by orders of magnitude. For those in the depths of post-election depression let me point out that this country survived over 12 years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s equally flawed economic strategies. A huge portion of our population continues to work hard in spite of an ever increasing tax burden, adapts to changes instead of giving up, and finds ways to succeed instead of being frustrated into paralysis by red tape and institutional favoritism. This country still has the biggest economic engine in the world idling under the hood and the most stable and successful form of government (but for some reason we always impose parliamentary governments on the countries we conquer).
So back to the question at hand…what are the prepping consequences of the election? Continue reading
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
