Hi James,
You have an excellent blog. It is good to find another right-wing Christian who thinks we’re going down the wrong path, and someone who cares about other people.
I have to take issue with your blog though. It focuses on survival in the short term (maximum five years after collapse). It does not give direction for how to proceed from there, how to thrive, how to rebuild society (or rather, how to build a better society). Surviving the collapse on modern medicine only to die from disease when it runs out is pointless. Surviving only to find that your gene pool is too small to survive into the coming centuries, or that you don’t have enough books or ways to copy them (or write new ones), and thus pass knowledge on… It makes a mockery of survival. Short term focus is what got us into this mess. Let’s have some longer term articles on what we should do to lay the foundations for our children and grandchildren, and more distant descendants, to thrive.
Also, I do not see any articles on how to disappear from view of satellites, or other high-tech surveillance equipment, or how to fight against a modern army. I know it might sound ridiculous, and it is a conspiracy theory (and those are nowadays automatically disreputable), but I do not think that we are in this mess entirely by accident. The constriction of our seed supply to a few large corporations is deliberate. That there exist doomsday shelters with high technology for the elite is known. Might there not be at least some deliberate engineering of the current crisis? And, if so, might it not be with a view to facilitating control by the elite? A reduced world population would be easier to control. One desperate for food, shelter, medicine etc. would do some presently inconceivable things – such as surrendering freedom in exchange for those “necessities”. I am speaking here of the Mark of the Beast: subdermal microchips. We might find ourselves fighting against much nastier groups than mere marauders. If I am correct, much of that situation will be out of our hands anyway – it’s the Lord’s battle. But that doesn’t mean we can just sit back and say “I don’t have to do anything.”
Regards, – David in South Africa
JWR Replies: I think that you drew a conclusion about SurvivalBlog without digging very deeply. If you take the time to work your way back through the SurvivalBlog Archives (now nearly 8,000 archived posts), you will indeed find a large number of posts that discuss long term self sufficiency. These articles and letters cover steam power, home-made fuels, photovoltaics, micro-hydro power systems, home-grown herbal medicines, low tech do-it-yourself architecture (including rammed earth, adobe bricks, discarded tire Earthships), blacksmithing, home chemistry, farming, aquaculture, wood and coal heating, saddle and draft horses, primitive weapons, leather working, community organizing, gravity-flow water systems, traditional carpentry (without power tools), and much, much more. For discussions specifically about long term scenarios, be sure to use the search word “multigenerational.”
To provide some ideas on how to fight against a modern army, I wrote “Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse”