Preppers’ PING!!
We’re in some real pretty **** now man. Game over.
And I feel fine. R.E.M.
Very interesting.
One thing I know for certain, when TSHTF and it becomes hard labor to stay warm in the winter, the entitlement army will head south.
At the end of The Time Machine, Herbert George Wells invited us to ask ourselves what three books would we select to rebuild civilization.
I was never able to settle on three...
bflr
How things work, volumes 1&2. Can get them on amazon for cheap.
Open Source Ecology’s Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) (a set of machines buildable in any low grade machine shop, all run off steam or human power, can be built with standard steel pipes and beams if not wood) is probably a better solution long term.
http://opensourceecology.org/
They even have instructions on how to build your own 3D printer.
Going through old books and a newsletter fell out. It was dated September 1999 and the headline read “the Shaking”. Checked to see if the ministry was still going and guess what? “the Shaking” was on the website. In re-reading the newsletter “the Shaking” was a chapter written for a book authored by several pastors. I read the website post last night it in its entirety. . .instead of scripture by scripture the author used a fictional character to take the readers through the tribulation. Whether you are pre-trib, post-trib or don’t know what a trib is, I think it is worth the read.
http://www.lifereachministries.com/theshaking.aspx
I quit reading after he claimed the Hill Country is so desolate. Bunch of horse hooey.
Thanks for posting. This will go on my wish list.
Depending on the nature of the calamity, my guess is that a sizable percentage of the population would die within the first few days or weeks, of illness, injury, misadventure, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many of those adults left will be healthier, smarter, tougher and more adept at handling emergencies and adversity.
I, too have often thought how complicated our degree of civilization is, and how much we take for granted. Specialization has made a lot of it possible but also has a steep downside.
Thanks for the post. I will look for this book.
Reminds me of George R. Stewart’s dystopian novel “Earth Abides.” He posited that the struggling remnants of civilization would re-adopt polygamy and shamanism, would forget forgery and revert to almost Stone-Age toolmaking, and would abandon literacy.
Books to keep: Bible, Foxfire Books, When There Is No Doctor, How Things Work, plus a Webster’s Dictionary.
I have this book and it is a little different from standard prepper tomes. Most prepper books focus on survival.
This book does have suggestions for survival, but its focus is on providing information for rebuilding a society...or another way to look at it would be that its focus is on saving the most essential “basic knowledge” so that the world doesn’t go through another Dark Ages ala Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.
So this book shows crop rotations and farming handtools up through stages of useful farm mechanization to eventually get to modern farming, for example.
...and it points out that obtaining crop surplusses frees up labor/people for non-survival activities such as inventing, music, arts, building, etc.
*interestingly enough, its author focuses on annual plantings of civilized basic crops such as rice, wheat, and corn instead of on labor-saving perennial orchards of cherry trees, apple trees, grape vineyards, kiwi plants, etc.
He shows how to make thread from sheep/cotton, and the labor saving devices in using thread for fabric.
How to make and use quicklime, and why.
Bronze Age and Iron Age basics that can be performed from scratch so that a society doesn’t drop back to the Dark Ages once the pre-apocalypse surplusses of goods have been consumed.
Step by step is given, at stage after stage (gunpowder, electricity) with the focus on rebuilding a “modern” society more efficiently than if all knowledge was lost by survivors and the wheel had to be re-invented.