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I get this question often so I answer it here. “I would like to be part of a community or family larger than 2 or 3, but my extended family is worthless. My husband’s family is 1000 miles away, and don’t get the advantages of family either. My hope is to stick to our suburban home with a few good neighbors on our block. Is that a fantasy?”

Picture the scene: It’s the end of January 2012 and already it is clear the year to come will make that which has just passed seem something of a picnic. The last strains of Auld Lang Syne had barely faded before Greece defaulted on its debts. Over the next few weeks, Italy and Spain will follow. Across Britain and the Continent, bank after bank goes down, a domino effect exacerbated by panicking customers desperately withdrawing their savings. Where three years ago the giants of High Street banking were seen as too big too fail, now they are too big and...

At Carolina Readiness Supply in Waynesville you can buy freeze-dried macaroni and cheese by the 20-ounce can and a solar oven in which to warm it. You can get a woven bracelet in a variety of fashionable colors that converts into handy lengths of cord. Then, in theory at least, you are prepared for almost anything: making simple repairs to your backpack, starting a fire with a friction bow or fashioning a ladder for an elaborate escape from some futureristic prison. You can buy emergency kits that contain quick-assemble shelter and his-her hygiene necessities, water purification systems, lanterns of every...

NOAA Warns of Monster Solar Storm Region Facing Earth for Next Two Weeks; Fully Capable of Producing X-Class Flares Mac Slavo November 8th, 2011 SHTFplan.com Last Thursday the sun produced an X1.9 rated solar flare that narrowly missed Earth. Although it wasn’t aimed directly at us, about 45 minutes after leaving the sun it was still powerful enough to disrupt radio communications. Now, that same area responsible for producing the X-class flare may pose a direct threat to Earth. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center says that the region on the sun known as AR11339 and...

A surge in food prices this year is impacting local grocery stores and restaurants, which in turn affects the people buying food from these places. But in many cases, owners of eateries and shopping venues say they have little choice but to raise prices to keep up with costs. “Oh yeah, prices have gone up like crazy,” said Mike Hetelekides, owner of The Villager Restaurant and Diner in Canandaigua. “We can’t keep up.” The U.S. Agriculture Department said last week that it expects retail food prices to increase 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent this year, after climbing just 0.8 percent...

The USDA has released their projections for food price inflation in 2011/2012, showing troubling forecasts that may send you to the grocery store today, before paying higher prices tomorrow. The report shows that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for all food increased 0.8 percent between 2009 and 2010, and is forecasted to increase 3.5 to 4.5 percent in 2011. Items that are expected to inflate the most include beef, cooking oils, and seafood. Processed vegetables and beverages were projected to to see smaller changes in the CPI. The Wall Street Journal notes that “the midpoint of the new USDA outlook...

<p>The number is out, and it's HOT!</p> <p>PPI hs jumped 0.8%, well above the 0.2% analysts had expected.</p> <p>Core PPI, which excludes food and energy, was only up 0.2%, which is still above the 0.1% that analysts had expected.</p> <p>The culprit? Blame food and energy.</p>

High energy prices and bad weather -- including blistering hot temperatures, flooding in some places and drought in others -- hurt this year’s agricultural output. But farmers agree that a major problem is the soaring price of corn, which is used directly in products like cereal, and indirectly as livestock feed. Corn is nearly twice as expensive now as it was last summer -- even though US farmers planted the second-largest crop since World War II. Why? Well, 40 percent of the crop goes to produce 12.6 billion gallons of ethanol to meet the government’s renewable fuel standards. In other...

Leading Trend Forecaster: We Are Not Entering a New Recession Mac Slavo July 14th, 2011 Trend forecaster Gerald Celente, of the Trends Research Institute, in his latest Trend Alert to subscribers, says that media presstitutes continue to sell Americans and the rest of the world the big lie of recovery. It’s nothing more than a cover-up. We never exited the recession that started in 2008.For the second consecutive month, employers added scarcely any jobs in June, startling evidence that the economic recovery is stumbling … The government also revised downward the small gain for the previous month to 25,000 new...

All over America, restlessness and frustration are growing. It has now been almost three years since the great financial crash of 2008, and yet the U.S. economy is still a complete and total mess. In fact, there are all sorts of signs that things are about to get even worse, and the American people are just about fed up. Virtually every major poll, survey and measure of consumer confidence shows that the American people are becoming more pessimistic about the economy. Millions of hard working Americans that worked their fingers to the bone for their employers and that did everything...

I would like to thank my neighbors and friends for participating in our annual emergency preparedness meeting. Your comments and contributions were what made the meeting great. Hopefully we all left with a desire to be better prepared so our family and loved ones are well taken care of in the event of...