One of the best commentaries on what’s happening right now in America. He’s a foreigner, and he notes that our problems aren’t unique to the US. This is a very good read.
“If we can prevent the Government from wasting the labor of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy,” Thomas Jefferson said.
The last few decades in the US showed that the “we” Jefferson referred to were not successful achieving this goal.
I try to avoid discussing politics. Our society is so divided right now, that it doesn’t even meet the definition of a society.
By definition, a society is a number of persons united together by mutual consent, in order to deliberate, determine, and act jointly for some common purpose. What unites us? How are we able to deliberate, determine and act jointly? What is America’s common purpose?
I am actually very excited about the Presidential elections. Before everyone stops reading this blog in disgust, please indulge me and let me explain.
Ignore for a moment the actual candidates and concentrate on the messages that they represent.
At the beginning, both the Democrats and the Republicans had chosen their “anointed” heirs to the presidency. The Democrats anointed Hillary Clinton, and the Republicans anointed Jeb Bush.
And then something exciting happened. The American people actually voted to choose someone else!
The Bernie supporters were outraged with the Democrat machine! If the Democrats didn’t have a rigged system with their “super delegates” then Hillary would have lost.
The Republicans weren’t so clever (you can bet that they will fix that going forward). Donald Trump won the nomination over 15 other Republicans, all on the back of voters who raged against the machine.
And the attacks went viral. Trump may be a bad messenger and hence they are attacking him. In reality, they are attacking those of us who despise the machine. Both parties are scared to death that our votes might actually make a difference.
The easiest example of my argument is the reaction to the wikileaks emails. They clearly show the democrats for the machine protection party that they are and go into painful detail how the democrats work to further themselves and ignore the people. You’d think that these emails would go viral in every republican candidate’s campaign. What you see is the opposite. A sitting Senior Republican Senator is actively pushing the argument that the republicans need to ignore the leaked emails because, “they might release emails that implicate us”.
Both parties currently exist to protect the machine and extend it’s power…..at our cost.
We can debate over and over again who might be better in their actual policy decisions.
This election is not about potential policy decisions.
This election is about we the people versus the political machine.
This might be the only chance we have in our lifetime to see behind the screen and see our politicians for what they are.
The system has been rigged against “we the people” for a long time. Both parties have counted on us as groups and ignored us at best as individuals (and vilified us at worst).
Quite frankly, I am supporting Donald Trump merely for his potential to destroy the machine.
I like his current stand on the constitution, abortion, guns, and foreign intervention. I see these as bonus issues.
There is only one choice to be made in November. You either vote for Hillary (or stay home or vote third party) to maintain the machine, or you vote for Trump to take on the machine.
The recent fuel pipeline break in Alabama didn’t affect us much at our house. We really mean it when we talk about being prepared for 90 days.
In the case of the pipeline break, price increases happened almost everywhere on the east coast, and there have been some places where there have been outright shortages.
Fuel shortages are often about a lot more than you running out of fuel or adjusting your lifestyle because you can’t drive around. In this case, it was problems with gas. The next time, it could be diesel. Most of the 18 wheelers you see running up and down the highway run on diesel. Those same 18 wheelers deliver groceries daily to your grocery store and fuel to your gas stations.
The impact of this pipeline break is expected to be over in a week, when everything is expected to be back to normal. Of course they waited a week before they announced it, so that means that the impact was two weeks.
What does that mean to us? You need to be able to make it for two weeks when nothing else is going wrong. Two weeks of going to work every day, feeding your family, going to church on Sunday and essentially doing all of the things that you normally do.
So, how do we do that?
To begin with, you need to keep your vehicle as full of fuel as possible all the time. Develop the habit of filling your fuel tank as it gets to half a tank. Always.
Figure out how much fuel you use in two weeks.
Simple computations tell us the amount of fuel we need to have in storage.
10 gallons of diesel and 30 gallons of gasoline is not hard to store. I don’t consider this my long term storage fuel, so fuel stabilizers aren’t needed. Once I created this amount of storage, I have the cans readily available. I change out the 10 gallons of diesel every week, filling the tank with the fuel in the fuel cans and refilling the diesel fuel cans. I do the same with the gasoline, except it takes 3 weeks to change it all out. Fresh fuel every 3 weeks as the worst.
This planning is all based on the worst case. Vehicle 3 is driven by my wife and if we adjusted our lives out a little, she could ride with me in vehicle two. We could cut back on some of our driving. Nonetheless, it is very doable with a little planning.
Note, we’re only discussing your day to day fuel storage plans. In this posting, we’re not going to go into the concepts of long term fuel storage, nor discuss the pros and cons of E-10 fuel versus non ethanol blended fuel. If you rotate your fuel stocks weekly like we suggest, the E-10 fuel will not be an issue. We will discuss this in a later post.
So, how do you store it? For the purposes of short term storage, most any of the readily available plastic fuel cans are ok. Modern fuel cans are all required to be CARB (California Air Resources Board) compliant. For those of us old enough to remember when gas cans were easy to use, this CARB compliance is what made them a pain in the neck. No more venting, so you get to use a spout that while advertised as child safe is pretty much adult safe too.
There are some ways to overcome this with replacement spouts, drilling of vent holes and such, but the easiest way is to get a self priming siphon hose! It actually makes filling your yard tools and camp stoves/lights much easier, and it is very inexpensive. No more swallowing fuel with an old fashioned siphon hose. Walmart, sporting goods stores, Amazon, you name it, they all sell them and a good one costs less than $9.
As I was about to finish off this post, I got a call from a friend who was checking on the availability of fuel. Turns out he was up in Kentucky this past weekend and was trying to make his way home. I did some spot checking. Where he was, they were out of fuel. I found him a route that got him around Atlanta (shortages listed all over the web), and eventually to some areas that still had fuel.
Well, this got me to thinking. Short term storage of fuel is great if you are at home. What happens if you are on the road?
I did some research. Carrying a fuel can inside your vehicle can be dangerous and there are even a number of states where it is illegal!
Obviously a small diesel engine car (like a VW Jetta/Passat wagon) gets you 600-700 miles of range, which makes it easier to get home. One of the other advantages of a diesel engine is that in an emergency, you can make diesel fuel out of gasoline if that is all you can find (the Army’s field expedient lists adding one quart of motor oil to five gallons of gasoline to make emergency diesel).
But if these aren’t your options, what do you do to safely carry fuel?
There are examples of people who have taken the space where their spare tire is and having a fuel tank fabricated to fit in the space! For some vehicles, they are premade and for the $1700-$2000 price, are connected to your fuel system and are essentially auxiliary tanks. Probably too expensive for most of us. A fabricated tank that merely stores fuel is much cheaper. Using the hose, merely fill your tank.
If you can’t do that, consider a fuel can inside your vehicle. The only one that we would ever take a chance with inside a vehicle is the Scepter fuel cans that are made for the US Military. These were originally designed for the off-road racing folks. They are virtually indestructible, don’t leak, don’t break even if you drive over them, etc. They are made in Canada.
A genuine Scepter fuel container will have the “Scepter” brand name, and “Made in Canada,” molded into the plastic on the side of the can. (It will also say “U.S. Government Property” or “Military Use Only,” but don’t let that put you off.) With the draw down of the perpetual wars, plenty of them are being auctioned off.
Well, when the CARB folks screwed up all the rest of the fuel cans, they screwed these up too. They can no longer be sold new in the USA. If we lived near the border, we’d go and buy them new.
They are very hard to find on the surplus market. Used ones on EBay sell for well over $150. At gun shows (when you find them) they are cheaper. The spouts for them are also expensive, if and when you find them. Another good reason to have the self priming siphon hose.
As with anything used, you face the challenge of finding repair parts (gaskets, adapters for using gasoline instead of the diesel that they were sold to the military for, etc.) That problem too has been solved by creative capitalism. jagmte.com carries and sells all of the parts you might need. We don’t have any business relationship with them, but we love their motto, “just a guy making things easier”. They even sell an emergency plug just in case the cap get’s broken.
A little planning ahead will allow you to smile at your friends who are wasting fuel driving all over the place to find fuel. This peace of mind doesn’t have to be expensive either. You are buying small amounts of fuel, just a little more than you usually buy. If you need 30 gallons for your short term storage, you don’t have to buy all 30 at once. Build up gradually buying an extra five to ten gallons the next time you fill up. In a few weeks, you’ll have what you need.
There are many different kinds of foods that you can stock up on.
There are five major categories of commercial food storage:
Deciding which is the best food for you to store depends on a lot of factors. Cost is important of course, but so is shelf life, tastiness, ease of preparation and use, and ease of actually getting the stuff in your home.
Freeze Dried versus Dehydrated Food
How Do They Work And What Are The Differences
Moisture Content. The main objective with food preservation is to remove the moisture so that the food doesn’t decompose, grow mold, etc. Dehydration removes about 90-95 percent of the moisture content while freeze drying removes about 98-99 percent. Foods that you dehydrate at your home will typically have a 10 percent moisture content level while foods that are dehydrated professionally will have a lower moisture content – which increases the shelf life.
Shelf Life. The moisture removal has a direct impact on the shelf life. Most dehydrated products like dried fruits, vegetables, powders and texturized vegetable protein (TVP), also known as textured soy protein (TSP), have a 15-20 year shelf life. However, dehydrated items like honey, salt, sugar, hard wheat and oats have a 30-year shelf life – sometimes longer. Freeze-dried foods will have a longer average shelf life. Freeze-dried fruits, vegetables, just-add-water meals and real meats will have a 25-30-year shelf life.
Nutritional Content. According to research by the American Institute for Cancer Research freeze-dried foods retain the vast majority of the vitamins and minerals found in the original food. However, when compared to fresh fruits and vegetables, freeze-dried foods did lack in some vitamins – like Vitamin C – which break down very rapidly. Dehydration doesn’t change the fiber or iron content of food. However, dehydration can break down vitamins and minerals during the preservation process and retain less of their nutritional value when compared to freeze-dried food. Dehydration tends to result in the loss of Vitamins A and C, thiamine, riboflavin and niacin
Cost. Usually dehydrated foods are going to be cheaper than freeze-dried. If you’re on a tight budget, dehydrated foods are definitely the way to go. We have a mix of both.
The Main Similarities
Storage Requirements. There isn’t a difference in storing food that’s freeze-dried or dehydrated. The cans or buckets are all the same size.
Pros and Cons of Using a Freezer for Food Storage
Pros of Freezing:
Cons of Freezing:
How Long Does Frozen Food Last:
Like with any storage method, how long you can store food for will depend on the specific type of food. Frozen foods can last only a few weeks in some cases, but more often then will be fine to eat after several months. After a year, most foods will start to taste “off”.
Storage Times Listed are for QUALITY ONLY; Frozen foods remain safe indefinitely!
Here is a basic chart of storage times for keeping food in the freezer.
Pros and Cons of using commercial canned goods for food storage
Note: This report isn’t long enough to discuss home canning in depth. Watch for a future report which will discuss home canning in depth!
Pros of Commercial Canned Goods:
Cons Commercial Canned Goods:
The bottom line: Don’t be so quick to toss out or donate those canned food items sitting on your basement shelves just because they hit their printed expiration date. When all else fails, open them and use your senses to determine if they are still edible (they probably will be). (Swollen cans are the best indicator that something is wrong—bad food also smells bad)
When in doubt some high heat from your stove and an iron skillet can serve as another method by which to “cleanse” the food prior to eating it.
Plastic Retort Packages (AND Military Meals)
Note: This report will be an overview of the various military meals (MREs and such). Watch for a future report which will discuss military meals in depth!
What Are They?
We’ve seen them all over the place! Those who are veterans remember them as the pouch that holds the entrée in the MRE. Most of us have seen them in the grocery stores as the “flexible can” in quick, ready to eat pouches.
In science terms, it is a heat resistant bag made of laminated plastic films. It is then heat sealed and sterilized by pressure cooking in a retort (autoclave). As a result, the retort pouch contains heat treated food that is safe from micro-organisms.
Pros of Plastic Retort Packages:
Cons of Plastic Retort Packages:
So, What is the Best Food to Buy?
We don’t think any ONE type of food is the best.
We do think that a combination of all of them can be useful.
Storage of Fruits and Vegetables
Freeze Dried or Dehydrated are clearly the choices. Price is the huge factor here, with dehydrated fruits and vegetables being very reasonable.
Storage of Meats
Canned meats are the tastiest, and we recommend home canning for meats (WATCH FOR A REPORT ON HOME CANNING OF MEATS SOON!)
Storage of Single Serving Foods
Retort packaging is the most convenient to store, carry and eat.
In part 2-A, we’re going to talk about how to achieve the cost savings of buying in bulk and still allowing you to achieve family happiness by having a variety of foods that they love to eat!
For this post, we’re skipping ahead a little. We want folks to start thinking and start planning. Next week’s post will go into greater detail on the different types of long term storage food.
This is where preparing gets challenging. Most of the folks that sell long term storage food get you excited by the number of servings that they include in their price. Anyone who has had company for Thanksgiving knows that serving size is meaningless. Cousin Eddie eats like a horse. Aunt Sal eats like a sparrow. Heck, when the wife and I get a rack of ribs, she eats less than half and I eat the rest.
We’ve got to plan based on how many calories are required, not serving size.
So, how do we know how to do this? Well, our medical community has actually studied this for us. They have come up with information that has determined how many calories a person needs in a day broken down by age and gender, and how active these people are!
So, how do you use this information?
We’ve taken it one step further to figure out how many calories are needed for more than one person, such as a family!
If you take the chart shown above and add a few columns, you will have a sheet that computes your total family daily requirements!
Here is an example of a chart like this filled out. Let’s say for example that you are a family of four, with the husband being 32 years old, the wife 30, with two children, one 4 years old and one 9 years old.
Filling in the numbers of people, you see that you will need between 7000 and 8850 calories per day for your family.
If we take a look at #10 cans of some typical items, we find out that different things produce different calorie counts.
It’s interesting to see that different items provide very different calories per serving and even more importantly cost per calorie.
For those on a budget, you may want to explore recipes that make use of the higher calorie contents (like Red and Black Beans in this example) to be able to create adequate calorie counts with less money spent.
Once you have your basic essential food stuffs on hand, there are certainly other considerations, such as snacks, fruits, etc. These will be covered in a later chapter.
And these are just examples. You can create a spreadsheet like this, input the things you like to eat and/or already have in stock, and see where you need to adjust to create adequate calorie counts.
Now comes the fun part – planning your menus! If we go to a sample calorie count sheet, you’ll see that we took ten #10 cans of vegetables and meat and figured out the calorie count per serving. That chart also computed the number of calories produced by the total of the 10 cans.
These ten cans produce 29,152.75 calories.
Computing our from your daily requirements, you see that these 10 cans of food will feed your family for 3.29 to 4.16 days. Adding it up for 90 days tells you that you will need 216 to 273 #10 cans of food.
Of course this is based on a number of factors that can change. It’s based on you having nothing other than long term storage food. You might have other food options such as MREs, commercial and home canned food. For planning purposes, I’ve worse-cased it.
If you are on a budget, you can certainly adjust out higher calorie food for lower calorie food. Whatever food stuffs that are planning on, you can do the same computations.
It’s not serving size, its caloric requirements.
The beauty of using a “calculator” for computing your requirements is that you can “play around” with different menu items to increase calorie content and reduce costs.
Let’s see what the lowest costs could be.
We learned very early in our preparing process that the expensive part was meat. Freeze dried and other long term storage meat was very expensive. For example, in our scenario of a family of four, using “real” meat versus TVP meat increases your food storage bill by over $2000 over the 90 days! If there were no other options, it might make you want to become a vegan!
We tried TVP meat. Used in casseroles and stews, it actually isn’t bad tasting! The cost per calorie for TVP meat is far less than “real” meat.
We looked at different options. The first was to mix TVP and real meat on a 50-50 basis. It certainly works out, and cuts your food storage bill by $800 or so.
Another option was to home can meat! We practiced that and found it not only to be fairly easy to do and an incredible cost savings, but it is also very good to eat! Our challenge is to keep it in storage instead of using it and eating it regularly!
A later chapter will discuss home canning of meat.
We can’t state strongly enough that the key to planning for food storage is to first determine how many calories you and your family needs to survive.
Once you’ve figured that out, you need to explore different menus. If you have all the money in the world, you can pretty much replicate your day to day foods via long term food storage. If you are like most of us, you are on a budget, and some menu adjustments will have to be made to maximize caloric input versus cost per calorie.
These spreadsheets will make it easier to compute and adjust different items. In our examples, we only used dehydrated and freeze dried food. You can use these spreadsheets for any kind of food, be it canned goods from the grocery store or any other food. Input the serving and calorie count and you get the results you need.
The strongest recommendation that we can make is to try these menus now, before you have to live on them. There is nothing worse than having to eat things that you can’t stand. Most folks just won’t eat it, or won’t eat enough of it. Calorie intake is critical.
When we were in the Army, there was an old saying when you wrote plans and other instructions. People always referred to a concept that Napoleon used when issuing guidance to his subordinates. He would always have the instructions read to one of his corporals. He figured if they understood it, then everyone else would too. The notion became used in the Army as finding your “Napoleon’s Corporal” before you sent something off.
Well, we had this chapter read by our Napoleon’s Corporal, and we got some feedback that we figured we needed to address. He told us that he had read and understood the “storing by calorie” concept, but wasn’t sold completely on long term storage food. “After all, you are the one that said that commercial canned goods don’t really have an expiration date. Why couldn’t I just buy that?”
He raises a good point, so here is a little better examination of commercial canned food.
We went to Walmart’s web site and got some prices for some of the more common commercial foods that folks might eat. You can see that cost per calorie is very similar to long term storage foods!
Heck, if you got it on sale it might even be cheaper than that. So far, long term storage food doesn’t have a price advantage.
Let’s look at some other things. Fat content and sodium content generally is incredibly higher in commercial canned foods than in long term storage. We were shocked to look at the labels and see that many of these items had fat as almost 50% of the calories that you got from eating it! The sodium (salt) per serving, not per can was often as much as 30% of your daily allowance.
Long term storage foods have fat and sodium counts that are controlled by you. You make the meals and you get to choose. Advantage goes to long term storage foods.
When we talked about how long commercial canned food lasts, we were talking about how long it is safe to eat. Canned food can last a long time, but it does lose its flavor and nutritional value over time. Freeze dried and dehydrated food doesn’t have this problem.
We have always been adamant about the fact that there is no one single type of food to put in your storage. We have a mix of all of the types (except frozen) because all of them have their advantages and disadvantages. Some commercial canned food can be useful, not only for how quick it is to prepare, but also its ease of transport if you are out and about.
Most liberty-minded folks believe that the “bad times” are inevitable. Most of us want to be prepared for whatever those “bad times” really mean. A large number of us never prepare.
There are lots of reasons why folks don’t prepare.
Many in the liberty movement don’t make it easier for us. There are many web sites out there telling us what the one single thing is that will make us “winners” in the fight to restore liberty.
Some of what is out there is legit and good info. Sadly much of what is out there is written by people who merely want to make money off the backs of us in the liberty movement. On the one hand, that is kind of neat. We’ve become a market that folks recognize and want to target us for sales. On the other hand, there is a lot of useless junk out there that is incredibly overpriced.
No one knows what will precipitate the upcoming troubles. No one. Some ascribe to a huge government crackdown on the citizenry. Others fear an invasion by a foreign power such as China, Russia, ISIS, the UN, etc. The theories abound. Certainly the actions of our Government in the last 50 or so years have driven us to the breaking point.
At the end of the day though, the threat that you plan for needs to be broken down into the short term, intermediate term and long term.
For most of us, we usually start with the long term threat, namely a complete breakdown of the government as we know it with either an internal civil war or a war against foreign aggressors on our homeland. We try to plan backwards.
And for most folks, that’s where they stop. It just looks too big to handle.
We’re all on limited budgets, have limited time, and quite frankly limited skills. We can’t all move off the grid to some magical “safe spot”. We can’t all possibly learn everything that is needed.
I suggest that we need to start with the short term threat. If you can’t survive the short term threat, it really doesn’t matter that you were prepared for the intermediate or long term threats.
You need to survive for 90 days.
You need to have food, water and the means to protect it for 90 days.
Until you have these basic preps, you shouldn’t spend a dime on any other preps. Having a ham radio that allows you to talk to the world doesn’t help you if you don’t have food or water. The best generator in the world is not edible. An arms room full of tons of guns and bullets doesn’t help you if you run out of food and water.
So what does the 90 days look like?
I predict that an unnatural disaster will cause a nationwide breakdown of society. Lots of things could cause it, but I think the most likely cause will be the loss of food. EBT card breakdown would be the most catastrophic, but it could be massive rioting causing stores to stop resupply.
Note, this is just one of MANY possible reasons for societal breakdown. Your threat analysis may vary!
No food will cause massive unrest. Violence will be terrible. Quite frankly those who will cause the violence will probably descend to killing each other very quickly. Roving bands of violent thugs will wander throughout cities and they will destroy what they can in an attempt to get their own food and water.
And what of Federal, State and Local law enforcement? Sadly, most of them will be used to guard what the Federal, State and Local governments want protected. Much of it will be critical infrastructure. Lots of it will be guarding the “elites” in government.
THE FIRST 30 DAYS
The first 30 days will be violent, with much random killing. I estimate that anywhere as many as half of the population will be killed, many of them the thugs and the remainder innocent folks who got caught up in the violence.
Our mission in the first 30 days is to survive. It’s time to “hunker down”. Note, I don’t recommend “bugging out”. We can discuss bugging out on a different occasion, but I believe that in the first 30 days the random violence will get you killed if you are out and about.
I don’t think anyone should leave their safe space during these 30 days. Blacked out windows, decoy trash in the front yard, vehicles up on blocks, etc., will help keep you from being a target and victim. Not looking like a target will increase your chances of not being a target. Lights visible from the road, a roaring generator, the aroma of food cooked on the grill are all things that will attract attention.
The minimums you must have are non-perishable food, water for drinking and sanitation, a mechanism for handling human waste, and of course the means to protect these things.
EVERYTHING else is bonus at this time.
Yes, it would be nice to have IR wireless cameras to watch your perimeter. It would be nice to have shortwave radios to listen to the news. It would be nice to have ham radios to check on friends. It would be nice to have solar chargers, storage batteries, inverters and the like to keep your phones and laptops operable. The list of “nice” things goes on and on.
But, if you aren’t eating or drinking, it doesn’t matter.
DAY 31 TO 60
The second 30 days will be different. The thugs that are left will be the stronger ones. They survived. They will be more violent and far more desperate. They have run out of all things that they need. They will be a little more organized, but probably in small groups/gangs. By this point most of them will be on foot. With no gas stations and roads/highways cluttered with wrecks, burned out vehicles and vehicles merely out of fuel, rapid transit won’t be easy.
These smaller gangs will target what they believe to be opportunities to get food, fuel, water and arms/ammunition. They have the challenge of food and water just like we do. Imagine a 20 mile hike with nothing for them at the end.
With the smaller numbers of thugs, the Government will begin conducting operations to restore law and order. I imagine it will be with overwhelming force, city by city, with a combined State National Guard, State Police and Local Police. They won’t be able to be everywhere at once, so the restoration will not be automatic. A good percentage of these forces will still be used to protect what the Government thinks is important (important to them, not to you).
During these second 30 days, it may be possible for you to venture outside. I would only do it in daylight and only in groups. At least two vehicles with four armed people in each vehicle. If your area is part of the restoration operations, I probably would stay off the streets. Shoot to kill really means shoot to kill.
As in the first 30 days, our Government will not have the resources to target the good guys. They will be struggling to survive and protect what is theirs.
DAY 61 TO 90
During the third 30 days I think we will see efforts to restore services. Electricity will start to work. Water will start to flow. Stores that still exist will start stocking food, fuel and other essentials. It won’t be universal, and it won’t be easy.
I recommend taking advantage of what is available and attempt to restock my supplies. I still wouldn’t venture out by myself. Perhaps smaller groups but still in multiple vehicles. If you haven’t shaved or cut your hair in a couple of months, I probably would. You want to look like a civilian who needs resupply, not an armed thug. Just because we survived the 90 days doesn’t mean it’s going to get better.
Our country’s population will be smaller at the end of 90 days. Merely cleaning up the devastation and dead bodies will take many months. Heck, some places may never come back.
Our Government will make plans to insure that something like this doesn’t happen again. Change will happen and as always many will attempt to take advantage of the crisis to make changes that we won’t like. Our Government will have more time on their hands to screw with us, the good guys. But, we’ll be alive to try and influence that change.
We’ll all have some serious “lessons learned” from these 90 days. Things we wish we had done different or better. Our mission remains the same. Restock and work on the next 90 days. Smarter, wiser and alive. Armed with what we learned and with what others learned, we’ll probably do it a little different. Resources will be shifted to the next phase of survival.
By the way, this 90 day plan is just that, a plan. Unrest isn’t like a football game. You won’t know when the game starts, there will be no halftime, and there are no four quarters. The length of each phase will likely vary. There may be overtime. You can watch for indicators of when it will start, but based on experience of social unrest localized unrest can grow very quickly.
Part Two of this series will discuss food. Part Three will discuss water and sanitation. Part Four will discuss how to use deception to hide the fact that you are alive, well and capable of surviving. Future parts after that will discuss how to accomplish the “nice” things on a budget.
We all bitch about the lack of quality news in the US mainstream media.
Here are three that I read regularly to get a different perspective on primarily the Middle East and Asia. As we continue to meddle in the world, it’s interesting to see how the rest of the world views both the US and the issue in question. I recommend you at least take a look at them.
Often they even report on things that you never see in our media. The analysis of Obama’s recent NATO summit was very eye opening.
Other than the news, it is interesting to read the comments to the articles. Once translated, you can see for example that the folks that live in Asia and the Indian areas almost unanimously saw the attempted coup in Turkey as totally instigated by the US! Whether it’s true or not, public opinion should play a role in our efforts around the world.
As an aside, Sputnik had some of the best and most up to date coverage of the Turkey coup of any site I found. Pictures, Videos, and virtually up to the minute coverage. Pretty amazing.
A perspective from the region.
The bloody coup attempt in Turkey by a section of the military has failed and the night of the long knives is about to begin. The geopolitics of the coup makes it inevitable that reverberations will be felt far and wide beyond Turkey.
The narrative that this has been an eruption of disgruntled generals and colonels who rebelled against an authoritarian leader is far too simplistic. The target was undoubtedly Erdogan, but the agenda is more complicated than that.
The dramatic events are bound to impact Turkey’s regional and international role in all its dimensions.
Very interesting perspective. Surely after 15 years we’d realize that what we are doing isn’t working.
Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.
The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.
The terrorists, in other words, are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam.
A week has passed now, and I figured it was time to share some thoughts on the attacks.
First off, we all were reminded how easy it is to kill people. Despite what folks say about how hard it is to kill, it really isn’t. Used in the defense of people or even countries, it’s merely killing. Used improperly, it’s murder.
Second, we were reminded that surprise is an amazing tactical multiplier. The police responded the way they were trained. Training that was developed based on historical threats. Obviously, the threat is different now. Copycats will be less effective the next time this type of tactic is tried, and by the third time even less effective. War is always like this. Germany’s blitzkrieg worked because it was different, and their opponents were prepared for the last war.
Third, we learned that police in general need to adapt to the modern age. The “wait and investigate” methods of sharing information worked back in the day when the only source of news was TV, Radio and Newsprint, but in this day of social media, they no longer can wait three to four days to tell the citizenry what happened.
Most of us have read the report from Harvard University (not known as a bastion of reason, reality and the truth) that blacks are no more killed by police than any other demographic in the US. It must have really “killed” them to have to report that truth.
But, we know that we live in a society where the truth really doesn’t matter. With the proliferation of social media, the narrative of what happened is quickly captured by those with cameras, those with crazy opinions, and of course by those who are the professional trouble makers.
I looked hard at the videos from the Baton Rouge and the Minnesota shootings.
I came to the conclusion that the Baton Rouge shooting was probably justified, and that the Minnesota shooting “smelled”.
All based on what information was available via social media at the time. The cops weren’t sharing information.
Finally, over the weekend, the Minnesota police finally released their information, and it was 180 degrees different from the social media. Information backed up with actual police videos and audio tapes. It looks like it might have been a legitimate shooting. But the narrative was already won by those in the social media world, and the truth no longer matters.
How many people even know that the liberal, anti-American US Justice Department cleared the cop in the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson? The truth doesn’t matter once the narrative is won.
The police must do a better job of “coming clean” very early in the process. And then take quick and demonstrative action if it turns out the cop was wrong.
My last observation is on the state of us in the “lover of liberty” movement. We are quick to point out (and very rightly so) that the liberals are wrong to take the actions of one evil person with a gun and paint every gun owner as evil.
We need to apply the same concept to other things that we judge. I recently read on one of the more popular III websites that a patriot was starting a charity to get rifle armor in the hands of cops.
I was disappointed by some of the comments.
Folks proclaiming that all cops are bad based on the actions of a few.
I am not the first person to acknowledge that our justice system is incredibly flawed in the US, but I will never support the notion that everyone who works in that justice system is evil.
I’ve long advocated that those who desire to control us love to splinter us into groups so that we ignore the real wrongs in our society.
It’s not the FBI per se, it’s the Lon Horiuchis, the Richard Rogers’ and folks like him. It’s not the EPA per se. It’s the folks that actually go out and do stupid and wrong things.
We can’t fall into the trap that those that desire to control us have set for us. We need to take the moral high ground and hold those individuals who do evil things accountable and defend those who aren’t evil.
georgepatton325 