Preparedness Notes for Tuesday — March 24, 2020

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March 24th is the birthday of Dr. Art Robinson, who was born in 1942.

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The bloodbath on Wall Street is continuing. Alarmingly, this is taking place soon after the Federal Reserve pledged to make “unlimited” stock purchases. This will be through a new round (or rounds) of Quantitative Easing (QE) –they’re already talking $4 trillion worth of stock buys! How’s that for yer “plunge protection? On Monday (March 23, 2020) the S&P 500 fell 2.9%, closing at 2,237. The S&P is now down 34% from its all-time high on February 19th. Meanwhile, the DJIA closed down another 3.04% to 18,591. This ongoing equities market rout is now rightfully being called The Crash of 2020. We are living through a turning point in history, folks.  Someday, your grandkids will ask you: “What was that like?”  I hope and pray that my readers took my advice and exited stocks early or at least had stop loss orders in place. One last thing: This is not yet the bottom. I predict that won’t come until the depths of the nascent recession or depression.  So be ready to sell your remaining stock shares into any market rallies between now and early December.

SurvivalBlog Writing Contest

Today we present another entry for Round 87 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The prizes for this round include:

First Prize:

  1. A gift certificate from Quantum Harvest LLC (up to a $2,200 value) good for 12% off the purchase of any of their sun-tracking models, and 10% off the purchase price of any of their other models.
  2. A Gunsite Academy Three Day Course Certificate. This can be used for any one, two, or three day course (a $1,095 value),
  3. A course certificate from onPoint Tactical for the prize winner’s choice of three-day civilian courses, excluding those restricted for military or government teams. Three day onPoint courses normally cost $795,
  4. DRD Tactical is providing a 5.56 NATO QD Billet upper. These have hammer forged, chrome-lined barrels and a hard case, to go with your own AR lower. It will allow any standard AR-type rifle to have a quick change barrel. This can be assembled in less than one minute without the use of any tools. It also provides a compact carry capability in a hard case or in 3-day pack (an $1,100 value),
  5. Two cases of Mountain House freeze-dried assorted entrees in #10 cans, courtesy of Ready Made Resources (a $350 value),
  6. A $250 gift certificate good for any product from Sunflower Ammo,
  7. American Gunsmithing Institute (AGI) is providing a $300 certificate good towards any of their DVD training courses.

Second Prize:

  1. A Front Sight Lifetime Diamond Membership, providing lifetime free training at any Front Sight Nevada course, with no limit on repeating classes. This prize is courtesy of a SurvivalBlog reader who prefers to be anonymous.
  2. A Glock form factor SIRT laser training pistol and a SIRT AR-15/M4 Laser Training Bolt, courtesy of Next Level Training, which have a combined retail value of $589,
  3. A $300 purchase credit for any of the products from EMPShield.com
  4. A Three-Day Deluxe Emergency Kit from Emergency Essentials (a $190 value),
  5. Two 1,000-foot spools of full mil-spec U.S.-made 750 paracord (in-stock colors only) from www.TOUGHGRID.com (a $240 value).
  6. An assortment of products along with a one hour consultation on health and wellness from Pruitt’s Tree Resin (a $265 value).

Third Prize:

  1. Three sets each of made-in-USA regular and wide-mouth reusable canning lids. (This is a total of 300 lids and 600 gaskets.) This prize is courtesy of Harvest Guard (a $270 value)
  2. A Royal Berkey water filter, courtesy of Directive 21 (a $275 value),
  3. Naturally Cozy is donating a “Prepper Pack” Menstrual Kit.  This kit contains 18 pads and it comes vacuum sealed for long term storage or slips easily into a bugout bag.  The value of this kit is $220.
  4. Two Super Survival Pack seed collections, a $150 value, courtesy of Seed for Security, LLC,
  5. A transferable $100 purchase credit from Elk Creek Company, toward the purchase of any pre-1899 antique gun. There is no paperwork required for delivery of pre-1899 guns into most states, making them the last bastion of firearms purchasing privacy!

Round 87 ends on March 31st, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.


9 Comments

  2. JWR,
    In the spirit of avoiding groupthink, I offer a dissenting view of our economic future.

    After staking the legacy of his presidency on markets that he once called “fake”, “rigged” and “a big, fat, ugly bubble”, heading into the election, I see nothing but an explosive upward movement in the markets for Trump. Assuming the same peak and downward trend of the virus that other countries are experiencing now, the optics would be an absolute masterstroke. Imagine being the politician that saw the country through a pandemic AND the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression, only to turn it around with the greatest recovery in the history of humanity, just in time for the election. Priceless…(sort of).

    With our great-grandchildren saddled with Trillions in new debt destined for the swirling toilet of government spending, I see this whole ordeal as an uncontested victory for banks and the Too-Big-To-Fail corporations at the expense of taxpayers and personal liberties. While locked-down Americans clung to armfuls of toilet paper and N95 masks during medical martial law, TPTB got a bailout that most of us swore would never happen again. I believe history will show The Toilet Paper Apocalypse of 2020 to be the largest swindle of all time. The rich got richer and the rest of us paid for it.

    1. I think we will be paying for the bailout for many years to come. At best, some of us may see a small amount of money . Many who earned very little will get nothing; just why sending higher amounts to higher earners makes sense is beyond me. As usual, it’s the large corporations and the TBTF banks and finance companies that will get the lions share of the deal and we all get to pay for it. And yes, we will see further reductions in our civil liberties and people will be scared enough to let it happen.

    2. DD… this is a win for FED …uncontested…I believe the “ virus “ is being used to further an agenda…now we are being told what is “essential/ non essential “ … the Constitution and Bill of Rights are being trampled and one might say flushed down the toilet… being 65 years young with children and grandchildren this is sooooo disheartening to watch… yet I KNOW that The Lord has won and that we have our reward if we remain true to Him…. I find great comfort in the old hymn “ God Will Take Care of You “…

  3. Bail out or not bail out? Well if you work for a living and don’t have a fat bank account where do you think the money will come from to live? The companies that hire you and provide the necessities for life will be severely negatively impacted by this economic collapse. The bailout is not to make the rich richer (I can see why that is such a popular belief especially for people who do not understand economics). The bailout is to prevent that total collapse they we know as a great depression. If successful within a few months the economy will begin recovery and will once again be expanding and we will all be free to criticize those who made that happen. IMHO the problem is that we don’t teach economics in K-12 AND that we don’t teach the true history of the great depression. The great depression lasted for over 11 years and only ended when WW II broke out. IF they had bailed out the banks and businesses too big to fail the great depression would have been a great recession perhaps less than a year long. Your choice is to put the money where it will do the most good even if you don’t like that OR suffer for years and years because of not having learned anything from history.

  4. Republicans want to earmark staggering amounts of money for yet another corporate bailout (looking forward to the inevitable stock buybacks and obscene CEO bonuses?), and Democrats want to hold the country hostage in order to push their pet projects through (or as Pelosi’s minion James Clyburn recently said “This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”).

    And as per usual, who loses? We, the people do.

    1. Many people will think they haven’t lost anything when that one thousand, or whatever the final number is, dollar check arrives. It will be a convenient distraction from business as usual.

      Carry on in grace

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