Economic Collapse & Security: I Am Your Worst Nightmare

email | Aug 3 2011 | NewAmericaNow

[robowombat]

Dammit it did it again. Look at the beginning of sentence two. I wrote it as ‘This I predict’ and the Pad rewrites it as ‘This predict’ . I hate this feature with the Pad.

[grey_whiskers]

Cheers!

[papertyger]

I don’t own an iPad, but you know you can turn that off if it’s anything like the iPhone.

settings>general>keyboard!

[grey_whiskers]

Also, you are correct: some of the responders here fail to understand that the original writer is offering a lesson. They only have to get lucky once. We have to beat them or avoid them every time.

That's flat out WRONG.

What if THEY get unlucky? Then they are down from 8-12 to 7-11 (no pun intended).

After three or four "unlucky" happenings they won't have the manpower to do much at all: and may get desperate and foolish.

Cheers!

[driftdiver]

“After three or four “unlucky” happenings they won’t have the manpower to do much at all: and may get desperate and foolish.”

The pack of 200 behind them will continue the attack.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

There will be people in every generation that can escape socialist education and be taught.

Amongst my five siblings, I did seek something better. I don’t see the world as they do. They are victims of the circumstances that they sought in life.

I let them quietly be. There is no sense in trying to teach them otherwise. They don’t want to pay attention. A few of them are trapped into a victimhood mentality where they want to hate the world. Another one is having too much fun paying for toys and playing with them. Any preparation for the future would not be something that she would enjoy because that would involve actual work.

I just live my life the way that I know best. My children see the world much the way that I do. My hope is that this will give my children a better chance in life. My goal is to prepare them to be responsible, strong, self-reliant and God-fearing young adults.

My niece and nephews will live their lives the way that their parents taught them to live. They will never be prepared for the smallest of emergencies and their parents are ill-suited to help them. All I can do is pray for them.

[grey_whiskers]

I was responding to the OP, whose article posited 8-12.

None of this is good if you are against Holder's people's version of the stragglers to Sherman's army...

NO cheers, unfortunately.

[driftdiver]

It’s surprising how many people think they can hold off the hordes by themselves.

[grey_whiskers]

Was that directed at ME?

I'm gonna go Pict on their ass and take just one of them with me. It adds up.

(Incidentally, in line with the botulism-goodies, how about a dead man's switch or such on your stash, so whoever unauthorized tries to abscond with it after your death, gets hit with six or seven Bouncing Bettys, or the whole thing Molotov cocktails itself?

Cheers!

[going hot]

That is what the ak with the 80 round drum mag is for.

[going hot]

from what I have heard.

[driftdiver]

No way was it directed at you.

My goal is to make myself a harder target than my neighbor. :)

Nothing against my neighbor.

[danielmryan]

A thought-provoking article...but it misses the fact that criminals, not matter how well trained they are, think like criminals.

There are two obvious defenses that don't rely upon military tactics and training:

1. Poverty: crying poor. Look like you're on the edge of subsistence, or even on the edge of starvation. In the inner city, it's the Mercedes that gets jacked. A beaten-up old Ford blends in, and it's not worth the effort of jacking, so it's left alone. Using insecure radio to complain about lack of goods, offering prayers that clearly ask for deliverance from hunger, etc. gives off a clear signal that there's nothing worth stealing in your place. In this sense, felt privation (regardless of what you really have) is a help.
   
   One side note: if something like a machine shop is a prize to the community, it'll be a prize to looters too. Taking the machine shop means gaining real leverage over the community. The same thing applies, I should add, to the local moonshining operation.
   
   
2. An unlikely location. Organized criminals smart enough to use what's left of the Internet will figure out where to send the big batallions. Even a city dweller like me knows full well that there are a lot of preppers in Idaho. Just as bank robbers go to where the money is, chancing the sophisticated detection and alarm system for a chance at the big score, looters will try their luck where the well-stocked preppers are. The best-trained ones will use books like Rawles' Patriots as a reverse training manual. If there are lots of flush preppers in a certain area, the time and expense of pre-training will pay off. It won't for other areas.
   
   Despite the aggravation entailed, the shrewdest place to go might well be a red outpost in a blue State - the kind of high-tax, high-regulation State that preppers normally eschew. Who would expect to see preppers dotting (say) the state of New York or California? The names of those two states are anathema to the patriot movement. Being in places that are the farthest from the stereotypical prepper's esteem is the kind of camo few people consider.
   
   A variant on this idea is to stay in a big city, in a safe but relatively poor area, and making sure to crash diet when TSHTF. If you look and act hungry, then you'll look and act like you've got nothing to steal.
   
   It's also good for that oversized gut :)

[lentulusgracchus]

Unfortunately, farms can’t be picked up and moved about, they’re pretty darn stationary. They’re also very hard to defend.

An archaeology article I read long ago about a farm in Subroman Britain (5th century AD, i.e. after the emperor Honorius called the Roman legions back to the continent in 409 AD) noticed that almost the first change in occupation patterns was conversion of the Roman farmhouse/villa, which had been decorated for obvious residence, into a strictly work location. Residents removed to hilltops and only came down to the old farmstead, which had been located in the middle of the bottomlands, convenient to the best fields, for work.

Spanish vineyards changed their operations in the 5th and 6th centuries, too -- relocating close to navigable rivers. Similar thinking: quick retreat by water if needed. The old fields and vineyards continued to be worked, but people changed where they lived and slept.

[palmer]

The truth is that when SHTF comes to pass, I won't last long; I'm a woman, I'm alone, I'm getting on in years, and my location isn't ideal. But I'll hold out as long as I can.

You'll do better than a lot of younger men.

[lentulusgracchus]

You shall taste the bitter dregs of wheatgrass, and dine on brussel sprouts! ..... Behold our tummies and despair...

O mighty FOWGIC, forbear, behold my trembling, as I incline the head and forelock, thy tummy's insult to appease ....

How'm I doing?

LOL! I'll try to stay in good with FOWGIC .....

[lentulusgracchus]

[TMcG] I think your location will get through anything short of a nuclear strike ... but if the mountain men could do it, so can you!

I think you're right. Where he is, short of long-range downwind drift of fallout, his principal problems will revolve, after the first few weeks, around loneliness, boredom, and the cold. Staying by the radio and searching for news/info will fight the first two. Being underground will help with the last ..... since being aboveground and making smoke to stay warm won't get it either.

The Plains Indians, though, had a trick of using buffalo robes and somehow burning buffalo chips on the ground like pipe tobacco in little depressions in the ground, and then sitting on them in their robes to stay warm. Something my great-grandfather, who saw it (he was a buffalo-shooter "white scout" for Custer for a while, right up until the eve of Little Big Horn), told my father about, 70-80 years ago.

[jboot]

Women are the absolute biggest stumbling block to doing just some common sense preparation for any disruption...

With the exception of a tiny number of enlightened ladies (most of whom surely posted to this thread) you are exactly right in all respects. Precisely right. I still get static over my modest-to-the-point-of-ineffectual Y2K preparations (10 gallons of bottled water, $20 worth of extra batteries, $200 cash on hand and a full tank of gas). I've been quietly stockpiling guns, ammo and survival equipment for years. We recently moved and the size of my cache came to light. It was not a happy day. There's no way to stockpile food or gasoline without a colossal fight. I have some ancient cases of C-rations that would be better served in a museum than in my emergency kit, bit it is the best that I can do without starting a war of my own. I hope if the SHTF they are still edible.

[PieterCasparzen]

But if an enemy wants to eliminate one’s food supply, farm fields and livestock are an easy target.

If one is hiding in the hills, one sits there looking down watching one’s crops being destroyed.

If people can live exactly as the American Indians lived, one can live in nature with no modern machinery.

How many of us can do that and would choose to do that as opposed to being a resistance within ?

And, of course, without modern machinery the American Indians were doomed.

The nazi takeover of Europe during WWII is a very accurate picture of who how a statist regime with para-military police plays out amongst a general population.

The towns that were left alone the most were those which were too small for it to make any sense to devote resources to completely control, and even those had spies in them and were not completely left alone. Basically, in both large cities and small towns, survival within the regime becomes the reality that the population faces.

People soon come to realize that the most dangerous weapon they possess is the ideas and history that they secretly maintain and pass down to their children so that one day, no matter how far in the future, the ideas are there to rise again in power.

[jboot]

Many people who have lived in the mid Atlantic especially Balto-Wash corridor get subtly brainwashed...

Oh gosh, YES. Toss in Northern Virginia and most of Pennsylvania, too. It's wierd how many "social conservatives with invincible liberal assumptions" you meet around here. The other scary thing is that the truism "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged" doesn't wash well here. The folks I know who've been "mugged" by life just get bitter because Someone in Authority didn't spare them. They don't question their assumptions and change their lives. They just become unhappy victims.