Posted on 03/24/2014 11:13:27 AM PDT by freedumb2003
From Matt Bracken:
In response to recent articles in mainstream military journals discussing the use of the U.S. Army to quell insurrections on American soil, I offer an alternate vision of the future. Instead of a small town in the South as the flash point, picture instead a score of U.S. cities in the thrall of riots greater than those experienced in Los Angeles in 1965 (Watts), multiple cities in 1968 (MLK assassination), and Los Angeles again in 1992 (Rodney King). New Yorkers can imagine the 1977 blackout looting or the 1991 Crown Heights disturbance. (snip) What if a cascading economic crisis, even a temporary one, leads to millions of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards flashing nothing but ERROR? This could also be the result of deliberate sabotage by hackers, or other technical system failures. (snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com ...
And if 25 armed gang bangers show up intent on simply burning your house down? That will take some serious preps and serious planning. I'm not certain I have all the details worked out for my homestead but I'm working it.
Most major cities are on or near a river. Get your filtering equipment now. Plenty of water in the river, but as is, it's not fit even to bathe in, let alone drink. However, it can be made drinkable with the proper equipment. Be sure you have it on hand. Boiling will kill germs, but it won't get rid of everything. Even distillation won't get rid of volatile chemicals.
If you're not near the river, get "water parties" organized now. Groups that will travel together to the river, defend themselves if necessary, and bring back water. If you organize a group, then wagons or wheelbarrows make more sense than carrying jugs.
I had relatives traveling west on highway 59 to my home town during that Marcella. A normal drive from Galveston to here would be about 3 hours and it took them 16 hours!
The police had all highway exits blocked off and you were not allowed to pull off to any convenience store so you went without food or water all that time. As you wrote, people died, dogs died, cars overheated and air conditioners stopped working. You had to stop and go to the bathroom in the dividing grass median in public view.
One of the most illogical things was that people were not allowed to leave the main highway even if they had friends/relatives on one of the sideroads!! This continued until you were a couple hundred miles away I guess, we never really knew how far it extended.
But - people were still polite and law abiding then - I don’t believe they will be the next time.
I was posting links to all the Cincy threads at that time.
Here’s a thread I originated, and in post 9 there’s one of my index posts to all the threads about the event at that time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040322222951/http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3ad646ad6811.htm
Unfortunately, you can’t get to many old links here, as legacy threads before a certain date can no longer be accessed via Free Republic. I’ve learned to stick those old URLs into the search engine at Archive.org, AKA The Wayback Machine.
>>I have personal knowledge of the EBT system supporting 28 of the states.
Bandaids and bubblegum hold it together.<<
People have no idea how thins and unstable are the public sector systems upon which they rely.
It is all relative, of course, but think about this:
And if 25 armed gang bangers show up intent on simply burning your house down...they will have to deal with the 12 trained, experienced and well-armed individuals now living in my immediate residential neighborhood plus the adults living in the targeted house.
I hope your ultimate "homestead" will have similar defensive capabilities.
As do I.
In my area there is nothing but South if you are looking for booty.
They'll give a similar EBT to the military and LEOs. As long as their families are being fed, they'll follow orders.
I didn't get that either, not letting people get off. Hwy. 45 is a few blocks from me and we went somewhere and I saw the exits blocked off and cars stopped and people sitting in their cars. They were not allowed to get off in Conroe. They could have gone east or west on non interstate roads if they could have gotten off.
That's pretty simple thinking, isn't it? Put millions on a road and don't let any get off - guess what, the line of cars isn't going to dissipate any time soon if you won't let them off. Somewhere inside me I'm thinking, “Let me get off this road - it's my car and it's leaving this highway, get the f...... barrels out of my way!” I don't know why some tough guy didn't throw those barrels in the ditch and take an exit. What was anyone going to do to him - come to think of it, I didn't see anyone around.
When you think about it, why didn't someone do that? Would we have enough “save ourselves” gumption to get the barrels out of the way to do what is best for us?
What is your area?
Hmm, interesting point.
As a practical matter, the EBT cards won’t ever read zero – at least not so long as the government can still print money. Sure, the balances reflected would be largely worthless, but that’s a different matter.
I doubt EBT cards will ever stop working while regular ATM cards do. And I doubt most suburban households have more food on hand than people on welfare. In fact, from the quantity of food I have seen snap card users bring home at once, they may have more. Especially if they also frequent food banks, which give out mostly canned food that probably doesn't get eaten.
The example is riots at the beginning in town at stores. Bad guys won't be interested in your house at that time with all those stores full of stuff they want.
Houses may be hit later so yes, have a security plan for the house but I still say don't leave the house at the beginning of riots.
As for burning a house, I don't see burning a house just to burn it for a while after chaos starts. I can see at a later time burning a house if there is nothing there worth having.
But, frankly, really bad guys will stay in their territory because that is where they rule. And also, frankly, this is Texas and nearly everyone in a household has more than one gun and would surely kill them if they tried to get in their house. That's another reason the bad guys will stay in their territory - they know who lives there but they don't know who lives in a house outside their territory and they know damn well know we have guns.
In a state/city that controls guns or won't let people have guns, the bad guys win.
My family was irate, thousands of people were irate about that and as I wrote earlier, it won’t be that ‘calm’ if they ever do that again.
My family saw a woman on her knees, begging, because a policeman wouldn’t let her walk across the highway to a convenience store! He told her, ‘get back in the car lady’!
I believe people will barge right through the roadblocks if it happens again.
Yep. The whole ATM system is remarkably fragile. I'm thinking it'll be a tossup whether the ATM machines run out before the stock on the store shelves does, neither to be replenished without significant security changes in delivery. Fernando "FerFAL" Aguirre described the process as he watched Argentina break down. The ATMs were among the first things to go.
>>I doubt EBT cards will ever stop working while regular ATM cards do. <<
Never underestimate hackers and their ability to do significant mischief. I am in IT and can come up with about 20 hacks to disable only government EBTs.
I don’t know the underlying hacks themselves, but if I had the right hacker I could guide him/her in a pretty precise way.
BOOKbump
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