Posted on 11/05/2011 5:39:11 PM PDT by blam
very dire.
will i need glenn beck’s 250 lbs of flour behind the living room sofa and a machine gun?
If this week’s power outage here in the state is any indication, I hope I have moved by the time the SHTF.
Rich liberals sure do whine a lot.
The ones I don’t eat will leave.
So I guess I won’t have any neighbors.....
marked for later
Bump
My power was out 24 hours and my mother’s 5 days. Upper-middle class blue staters in our neighborhoods and they coped well and cheerfully. Worst was a couple I only read about, who had a generator: “Doesn’t the power company know they are costing us money? We have to eat out every night.” Heck, my mother ate peanut butter sandwiches and heated canned soup on a Sterno can before she came to stay with us.
If it’s long enough that the high crime areas get hungry, it will be a different story. I read one town of 25,000 only had 5 registered handguns; it’s not the kind of place that has a lot of unregistered guns either. I’d rather live surrounded by armed rednecks when it all goes up (and intend to move there soon.)
Community is the key, not holing up in some well-stocked shelter. When money fails, the barter economy begins. The important thing is to have an important skill to barter and to have a wide network of contacts who have other skills and can benefit from yours.
Have a plan to start working when everything around you stops working.
“The ones I don’t eat will leave.”
LOL! I’m using that as my response from now on. Maybe change it to: “The ones I don’t eat I’ll hunt for fun.”
Heh, I heard that! Hubby thinks they won't be that much of a problem, because the folks who whined so much about the outages will be the first to starve to death, or freeze to death, waiting for someone to take care of them.
I would APPRECIATE IT if you wouldn’t post this stuff...it’s simply too intense to deal with.
To me it was the most awesome Twilight Zone ever...because they NAILED IT regarding how preppers are seen by non-preppers.
I think the best analogy that I have was when Hurricane Rita was approaching the Houston area (where I live). My wife thought that I was a nutcase for taking out street maps and plotting out an escape route that only used side streets. She said: “Why don’t you go on I-10”. The Houston areas has 4,000,000 people, at least 2,000,000 vehicles that will be evacuated (i.e., many families took at least two cars). We had 4 usable outbound lanes of freeway (we have 3 more, but they were in the possible hurricane path...so not really usable). 4 lanes simply cannot carry 2,000,000+ vehicle in the timeframe needed to clear out the city, as the world saw.
We took my backstreet route and made it to San Antonio in 8 hours...most people were lucky to move 20 miles in 8 hours, and most of them turned back after not moving much more in 24 to 36 hours.
I bring this up because most ‘neighbors’ that are not preppers, no doubt, figure they can go to Walmart or Sam’s to buy what they need when our distribution system shuts down. Boy will they be in for a surprise. If I had to guess, I doubt that Sam’s has enough toilet paper on the floor for more than 1% of their local population to buy a package of it. With the stuff in transit, maybe 2%, or at best, 3%. The other 97% of customers are simply out of luck. But if you go there tomorrow, you can buy all you want...no questions asked (which is one of the reasons that I like Sam’s and similar stores). Which is why I keep 4 years worth (at least) in my house, along with everything else that I can think of, that won’t spoil or otherwise decay during that time.
I still would have a lot of trouble fighting off a marauding gang...but it may not come down to that - rather it may simply come down to having to wait an hour in line to get my two rolls of toilet paper.
No one really knows how things will go...but generally, short of a war, the police are still around and gangs can be somewhat controlled.
All armed rednecks are not the same. Most are shirt-off-their-backs sorts, regular church attendance tends to foster this. But, some have an outlaw mentality that goes back centuries, the root of bootlegging, NASCAR and clannish mountain feuding. Not all or even most of these would be a potential problem, just the ones who have progressed to the drug trade, a logical leap for them given their history. These will go feral on you due to a minor traffic incident, let alone TEOTWAWKI. They’re to be avoided.
Ping.
I was mostly distressed that people who are supposedly ‘tough New Englanders’ can’t handle a week without power. I’ve lived in the wilderness for longer than that with just a 50lb pack.
Maybe I’d be better off moving to Maine or someplace down South where people can handle a bit of hardship without turning into a bowl of wimpering jell-o.
I also would rather be surrounded by armed rednecks than these wimps. A woman who grew up in NYC was on the Jim Vicevich show and couldn’t believe how selfish and whiny her community was during this power outage. She suggested this behavior didn’t happen where she lived in NYC when they lost power, that people looked out for each other.
“If it’s long enough that the high crime areas get hungry, it will be a different story.”
That’s the problem...if it’s one geographic area and the rest of the country is fine, then it’s not an issue. However, if the whole country goes lights-out (i.e., EMP) then it’s something entirely different, and it will not be pretty.
So, uh ... which one of these categories does Brandon Smith fall into?
Four years worth of toilet paper?
Well, you’re prepared...for taking care of your (rear) end if not the world’s end!
The ironic thing is that one of the reasons the power outages were so bad was because some of these picturesque little towns have enviro-wackos and tree-huggers who complained when the power companies wanted to cut tree branches away from the power lines in the last couple of years. The loudest mouths of the towns didn't like that their trees would look 'ugly', and barred the power companies from cutting the branches. Well, guess what; those loud mouths are at it again, this time BLAMING the power companies for taking too long to restore power, after those branches fell on the lines.
Buncha goobers.
Interesting trivia about Mad Max the Road Warrior. All the nuclear war stuff in the beginning was a last minute addition. Originally in the plot society just broke down and fell apart, but the producers felt audiences just wouldn't believe society could break down without some sort of cataclysmic event like a nuclear war or other disaster causing it.
Today however, Society just falling apart doesn't sound so far fetched after all.
>Well, guess what; those loud mouths are at it again, this time BLAMING the power companies for taking too long to restore power, after those branches fell on the lines.
Yup. I grew up in a fairly rural part of CT and we are used to being on our own. This storm hit the rich suburbs of the Farmington valley and they are whining up a storm.
I have a friend whose husband is a CL&P lineman. She told me that one of the crews had some harpy throw dog feces at them, while they were hooking up the electricity! I mean WTF lady. And the media breathlessly complains about everything, as though this is not a historic outage (worst in state history).
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