Free Republic

Neil Strauss hardly seems like a guy who'd kill a goat and gut it with his own hands. A slim intellectual in silver jewelry and designer jeans, he doesn't appear to be the kind of person who would stash food in a forest or plot an escape from his Los Angeles-area home using fire trails and a motorcycle he barely knows how to ride. Yet that's precisely what Strauss has learned to do in the past three years in an effort to prepare himself should society collapse. It's a journey he not only chronicles in his new book, "Emergency: This...

It has all the plot points for an end-of-the-world action film. Some kind of natural or man-made disaster has left Hamilton with limited accessibility to the outside world. People need to regroup, organize and provide stability. But how do you provide the food? How do you feed over half a million people if an area’s transportation lines are severed? As professor SarahWakefield, the co-chair of the city’s Food Security Stakeholders Committee said recently, the city’s grocery stores have only three days of food to feed over 500,000 people. “It doesn’t take us long to be without food,” she said. Although...

In the serene hills of rural upstate New York, Kathie Breault is hunkering down for doomsday. It's not an all-out Armageddon that the 51-year-old grandmother is convinced of, but an imminent economic apocalypse. A few years ago, Breault began reading about what happens when the world surpasses "peak oil" -- a point where we will use more oil than we can produce. "I was afraid that any day that oil would disappear, that gas would start to disappear, that I wouldn't be able to get to work, I wouldn't have money, I wouldn't have food that I needed," she said....

It pays to peek inside Anthony Hardwick’s pricey survival ‘bug-out’ bag Back when I first got interested in survival preparedness, I’d have long discussions with friends about the necessity of always having a pack ready in case you ever had to make a quick evacuation. We discussed all the contents of our survival packs, and considered both short-term and long-term survival needs away from home. Knives, tools, water, seeds, clothes, fire, shelter, light. We agreed that the ideal survival pack — also referred to as a “bug-out bag” — would be lightweight and not a burden. We would bring these...

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, who switched to the Democratic side of the aisle from Republican last month, is shocked, shocked that some of his former brethren aren’t so happy about the move. “I feel very comfortable being a Democrat. My new colleagues were always my friends,” the five-term Senator told Men.Style.com, the online site for GQ and Details magazines.

Americans have been hearing for several years about potential war with Iran. For instance, on September 17, 2006, Time magazine reported, “The U.S. would have to consider military action long before Iran had an actual bomb.” On October 10, under the heading “A Chilling Preview of War,” Time warned: “As Iran continues to enrich uranium, the U.S. military has issued a ‘Prepare to Deploy’ order.” In September 2007, US News & World Report stated: “Amid deepening frustration with Iran, calls for shifting Bush administration policy toward military strikes or other stronger actions are intensifying.” And in June 2008, President-to-be Barack...

They are ready for a catastrophe of a global scale every minute of their lives and are prepared to meet the challenge wherever they are – at home, in the office, or just walking about. Yahoo StumbleUpon Google Live Technorati Scoop del.icio.us Digg Sphinn Furl Reddit The people who lay salt and canned food in stores all year around do not surprise experts anymore. In St. Petersburg alone, there are more than 10,000 getting ready for the End of Days right now, informs Petersburg Business. Russian survivalists call this speculative catastrophe the SHTF-day. Leaving aside atomic bomb shelters that were...

In the 1950s and 1960s, bunkers were a feature of many American suburban homes, populated by families fearful of the prospect of nuclear war. That threat has subsided, but now many reasonable people are stocking up on essential supplies in preparation for a new cataclysm. When you hear the word "survivalist", what image comes to mind? Or maybe you think of end-of-the-world religionists retreating to a fortified camp with enough food and drink to last them until Judgement Day. But today there is a new breed of survivalist – and they're well-heeled, well-educated and more likely to wear an immaculately...

Dear Lou, As a resident of South Mississippi, I think it is officially time to stock my swine flu/tornado/hurricane/foreign invasion pantry. How do I do this without filling it with a bunch of processed crap, but still manage to stock away flavorful and nutritious staples? Kelly S. Dear Kelly, This particular swine flu pandemic—which may or may not be linked to factory farms—doesn’t appear to pose much of a public-health menace. But it reminds us of an old lesson: chaos happens. Regarding pandemics, our very own government advises people to keep two weeks’ worth of supplies on hand, which is...

CRYSTAL CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Survivalists, doctors, even the parents of Joshua Childers marvel at how the 3-year-old, barely clothed, survived for 52 hours alone in the untamed woods of Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest. {Cut} "I don't know how he did it," Childers said. "I don't know grown men that could do it. But all I can say is he's a tough little bugger."

I thought is was a good idea to add a page on the site about the core philosophy I have about being survival minded and modern survivalism. My hope is that individuals from those areas will enjoy this site but that the “average Joe” and the “average Jane” will also get a great deal from my site and podcast as well. The core of my philosophy about being prepared, life style planning, self sufficiency and energy independence can be summed up with in the following 10 core values… 1. Everything you do to “prepare” for emergencies, disasters or economic turmoil...

With little fanfare, the Government Accountability Office released a document last week that points to the day when the American dream dies and is buried beneath a middle-class welfare state. You can see death coming for the American dream as surely as you can see cirrhosis coming for a drunk. We are bringing it upon ourselves—although not all Americans deserve what is going to happen. For one, our children don’t deserve it. For another, Americans who have tried to live independent, self-reliant lives don’t deserve it, either. But they are going to be dragged down with everyone else, if we...

We are Americans, we don’t torture. To torture would lower our moral standing, knock us down from the moral high ground into the muck of sordid violence. Our enemies may torture us, mutilate us and behead us-- but to pour water on one of their terrorists makes us no better than them. And why else are we fighting them in the first place, in order to protect our own citizens… or to be better than them? Clearly we are fighting to be better than them, that is why as Americans we do not torture. We are Americans, we don’t kill...

Since the economy began sliding downhill in late 2007, mainstream economic and market experts have consistently erred on the sunny side. As late as June 2008, mainstream consensus held that the U.S. was heading for a “soft landing” and would avoid recession. Several months later, the slump was acknowledged to have started in January 2008, but we were supposed to see renewed growth by mid-2009, with unemployment peaking in the eight-to-nine percent range. A quick “shovel-ready” stimulus bag was supposed to set us back on the road to prosperity. In January, recovery projections were pushed forward to late 2009. Today,...

These are good days for survivalists, those dour predictors of dire times who’ve said all along we’d better prepare for the worst. With people losing jobs, homes and life savings through no fault of their own, and with natural disasters, oil shortages and terrorists in the news, those long-predicted grim times may have arrived. Kurt Wilson, who hosts a Web site called “Armchair Survivalist,” predicts the nation is falling into such chaos that survival skills will be crucial. But what are those skills? I think I have a good idea, based on what pioneers endured as they worked to settle...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Ammo. Canned goods. Vegetable seeds. Fortified water by the case. They are reportedly flying off the shelves, these staples of the stockpile crowd. “Survivalist” isn’t the right term, not in a downturn that has got everyone nervous. “Preparedness” or “self-sufficiency” — that is what they are saying. Adhesive bandages. Gardens in the works — be they victory gardens or, as some prefer, “crisis gardens.” The closet off the living room in the Owens home near Lawson, Mo., isn’t huge, but it’s organized. Heavy coats, sweatshirts and Ron Owens’ cap collection greet wife, Jan, as she enters...

The Pakistani Taliban, even while continuing their penetration of central Pakistan, have begun mobilizing fresh recruits from all over the country to go help their Afghan Taliban brothers resist the newly arriving Western troops. The Taliban now control the tribal regions of Pakistan, huge sections of the Swat Valley and have just consolidated their control over the district of Buner, just 60 miles from Islamabad...(Snip) Pakistan was one of only two nations on earth that recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government (the other being Osama's home country of Saudi Arabia)...(Snip) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made headlines last weekend...

FORT WORTH, Texas -- Jack Spirko owns a media company, is married to a nurse and has a son in college. He has two dogs and lives in a nice house with a pool in a diversified neighborhood in suburban Arlington, Texas. Spirko, 36, considers himself an average guy with a normal life. But for the past few years, Spirko has been stockpiling food, water, gas, guns and ammunition. He also has a load of red wine, Starbucks coffee and deodorant stashed away. "I refer to myself as a modern survivalist, which means I don't do without," Spirko explained. "I...

It must be bad: survival manuals are racing up the book charts. Ordinary folks are preparing for the worst Question: you are faced with a flu pandemic, economic extinction, climate disaster and what survivalists nickname TEOTWAWKI, the end of the world as we know it. What do you do? Answer: Go shopping — for survivalist literature. In the past few months sales of apocalypse-friendly books have rocketed — from new hunker-in-your-bunker thrillers to SAS manuals to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — which indicates that ordinary folks are preparing for the worst. Not since the words DON’T PANIC appeared in large...

MIAMI - Immigrants and their families gathered at rallies across the country Friday to push for changes to U.S. immigration policy, but as a swine flu outbreak continued to spread, attendance at some events was smaller than organizers had hoped.