Category: Current Events & Politics

It is All About the Means of Production, by Mark. B.

From the beginning of time, ownership and control of quality farm land and raw materials have been closely associated with wealth creation and prosperity. What can you grow or raise? What resources and commodities do you own and control? How much metal, stone, glass, and wood do you own? Do you have the means, knowledge, tools and skills to produce valuable items from this land and these raw materials? As America was settled, the pioneers knew very well the fundamentals of non-electric, independence away from the city and just how critical natural resources were to survival. If a parcel did …


Lest Any Man Should Boast: A Christian Survivalist Perspective on Race, Religion, and Reason

I often get letters and e-mails, chastising me for being an anti-racist. I call these “nasty-grams.” I get several of them each week. Some folks, it seems, are deeply offended that I look upon everyone as equals. The truth is that people should be judged as individuals. (That is one of my core Precepts.) Anyone that makes blanket statements about other races is ignorant that there are both good and bad individuals in all groups. There is no inherent superiority in any skin tone or facial feature, any more than there is in any particular hair color. I have accepted …


Letter Re: Experiencing the Recent Hawaiian Tsunami Evacuation Alert

Jim, I had the recent somewhat surreal experience of going through the Hawaiian costal evacuation during the most recent tsunami alert. It was a near-miss natural disaster scenario that unfolded in slow motion because of the distance from the Chilean earthquake and the presence of tsunami alert sensors and monitoring officials. There are a few observations that I’d like to share. I managed to stay ahead of the Golden Horde phenomena by a few hours and it was interesting to just acknowledge some of the predictable elements: most people were not alerted to the risk of the tsunami until 0600 …


Letter Re: Afghanistan is 7.62 NATO Country

Dear CPT Rawles: I’d like to bring your attention to a paper prepared at Ft. Leavenworth, titled, “Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer.” Essentially, the old M14 rifle has not yet met its demise, even though Jimmy Carter did order the destruction of 700,000 M14 Rifles. As you have known for years, the 5.56 NATO cartridge is not the best cartridge for a Main Battle Rifle. You have written extensively regarding this issue in your books. For some time now, I have witnessed a sizable number of M14 Rifles, in various configurations, from the original …


Three Letters Re: Some Comments and Some Personal Experiences in Haiti

Sir: I thought that you and your family might be encouraged by the following: There was an extraordinary occurrence in Haiti on February 17th. Here is a blog entry with a YouTube link about a nationally declared three days of fasting and prayer in Haiti. Amazing grace. The final sentence in the entry is the most sobering: “The only sadness that I feel today is for our nation. While a nation that has long been under Satan’s domination is turning to God with total commitment, our nation, founded on Godly values, has rejected God and is rapidly trying to forget …


Notes from JWR:

The situation in earthquake-ravaged Chile is still quite tenuous. SurvivalBlog reader “Zed” suggested that I mention this article from the BBC’s Stephen Mulvey: Chile earthquake: Why do people loot. And don’t miss this related article: Chileans protect, feed themselves after quake. Doesn’t this sound a lot like “a neighborhood watch, on steroids”? The conjecture about societal breakdown in SurvivalBlog that was once castigated as “fanciful” is now sounding quite plausible. Get the gear, and get the training, folks. Be ready, willing and able to dispense charity and to help restore order and re-establish free commerce, if and when things go …


Notes from JWR:

The news from Chile keeps getting worse. I’m now of the opinion that there wasn’t more extensive looting in Haiti simply because there were very few things of value available to loot. The country is that poor–desperately poor. But in Chile, there is some loot worth stealing, and my-oh-my has the thin veneer of civility been torn away! SurvivalBlog reader Bob G. sent this from The Daily Mail: Security concerns spread as Chile quake death toll rises. Bob’s comment: “Do you remember the docu-drama After Armageddon? The comment by one the people in that show was that “we are nine …


Letter Re: Just How Ugly Is The Sovereign Default Truth?

Hi Jim, I noticed this article on Zero Hedge today that I think you will find interesting, if you haven’t seen it already. This is regarding the fiat system and how it the assumptions it is build upon are probably faulty. This, coupled with human nature, make collapse of the fiat system very probable, if not a certainty. Lots of good data in this article as well. Thanks for all you do. I am learning much from you. I am now re-reading “Patriots” (after just finishing a stint that included ‘Alas, Babylon’, ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’, ‘Tappan on Survival’, your new book …


The Money Market Managers Unleashed–An End to the Road to Redemption

Last week, SurvivalBlog reader Noah C. sent me a link to piece by Dan Denninger: SEC Tightens Rules for Money Funds. Noah made this comment that amplified Denninger’s observations: “Here is the most interesting part: That a Money Market Fund’s Board of Directors can now ‘inform’ the SEC (instead of request) that they are suspending fund redemptions.” I also heard from our friend Darrin in Wyoming about same topic. He wrote: “A Wall Street Journal report mentioned that the SEC voted Wednesday (1/27/10) to allow money market fund managers to freeze redemptions, in an effort to ‘make your investments more …


An Insider’s View of the Real Estate Train Wreck, by David Galland, The Casey Report

The first time I spoke with real estate entrepreneur Andy Miller was in late 2007, when I asked him to serve on the faculty of a Casey Research Summit. As John Mauldin, a former faculty member himself, knows, we’re very selective with our speakers. And there was no one in the nation I wanted more than Andy to address the critical topic of real estate. My interest in Andy was due to the fact that he has been singularly successful in pretty much all aspects of the real estate market, including financing and developing large projects – such as shopping …


Letter Re: Food Handouts Turn Chaotic in Haitian Capitol

Dear James: I came across article today titled Food Handouts Turn Chaotic in Haitian Capitol. I find it quite amazing that still to this day and age that the government and social aid organizations are so unorganized. I think that they should use the novel One Second After [by William R. Forstchen] as a guide for food distribution. I’ve just finished reading that novel, and it just justifies that all preppers (including myself) are not crazy thinkers we are just making sure that we can take care of our families when something either natural or governmental disaster happens. – A …


Letter Re: Hyperinflation Appears Certain for the US Dollar

Jim, During many years of “hiding, prepping and watching” I’ve tried to determine what series of events may lead to TEOTWAWKI. There are many, but not obvious to most. Hurricane Katrina and Haiti are examples of either predictable events or unpredictable instantaneous events as would be a single nuclear event such as a “suitcase bomb” . Each of these has a number of things in common, but the most significant is the limited geography associated with each. The biggest difference between Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake is the lack of adjacent unaffected land. In the case of Hurricane Katrina …


Eight Letters Re: Earthquake Aftermath in Haiti

Dear Jim, Thank you for the blog. It has helped my family and I to be more prepared than we had ever imagined. I found this Fox News article and thought you might be interested. There are a few things here that have been discussed at length in SurvivalBlog and in your books, but it is good to look at them [actually coming to pass] in real world situations. These include: 1) The police chief can get less than half of his force out. That is probably because they are trying to fend for themselves. 2) They are asking “what …


America is More Like Haiti than We’d Like to Think

The recent earthquake in the island nation of Haiti illustrates the fragility of all societies. While Haiti is unusual in its lack of infrastructure and its high dependence on foreign aid–more than half of its annual government budget comes from foreign aid–it is still similar in many ways to other nations: From the 1960s to the turn of the 21st century, as in many other nations, Haiti became an urbanized nation. Before the 1960s a substantial portion of Haitian society still lived on rural semi-self sufficient farmsteads. But as urbanization and specialization went on, fewer and fewer people lived off …


Letter Re: Advice on Convincing a Spouse to Prepare

Mr. Rawles, I am not sure if you can help me, however I was not sure who else I might be able to turn to for advice. I have always been a “prepared” type person, that stems from growing up relatively poor and living/working on a cattle ranch in southern Arizona, for a good portion of my life. We had to be prepared, living so far away from town! My wife and I were married almost three years ago, and currently live in southern Idaho. Being quite a few years my junior, eleven to be exact, she grew up with …