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)
Prepping with Garage Sales (650)
OCOKA – A Key Survival Acronym (639)
Fan of the Ammo Can – Top 10 Uses (603)
Top 10 Preparedness Uses of Mineral Oil (574)
Top 10 Initial Steps to Preparation (507)
Don’t Be ‘That Prepper Guy’ (421)
Prepper SALUTE Report – An Observation and Reporting Tool (360)
Physical Security and the Forms of Protection (306)
Situational Awareness – An Introduction (271)
Beware the Butt Bomb (267)
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.
Mamet on Abilities and Needs – Today’s Quote
Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
‘In announcing his gun control proposals, President Obama said that he was not restricting Second Amendment rights, but allowing other constitutional rights to flourish.’
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”
All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.
David Mamet via Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm – Newsweek and The Daily Beast
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.
