Lee Adler: Warning Signs a Stock Market Crash Is Coming
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Advice from Jeff Miller: Stock Exchange: How to Trade an Overbought Market
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Over at Zero Hedge: How Heavy Is This?
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Brick-and-Mortar Stores Are Shuttering at a Record Pace – G.G.
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Congress Considers Taxing 401(K) Contributions – B.B.
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SurvivalBlog and its editors are not paid investment counselors or advisers. Please see our Provisos page for details.
The recent terrorist attack on the Champs Élysées with an AK-pattern rifle has the French on edge, right on the eve of a national election. Joe Dassin is doubtless rolling in his grave. Some pundits suggest that this might sweep Madame Le Pen into office. – JWR
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$128 ticket stands for Roseville man who left car running in driveway.
JWR’s Comment: That decision would be considered absurd here in The American Redoubt. It is common practice here in the winter to leave unattended cars idling in post office parking lots. Oh, and having a “remote start” system for a vehicle is considered a desirable convenience. – JWR
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Stunning Research Videos – Was Berkeley Police Department Supporting Antifa Violence? – L.T.
HJL’s Comment: While the video does a good job of identifying munitions and the media’s characterization of them, I’m not so sure about its conclusions. Evidence of Berkeley police involvement is circumstantial at best. There is no evidence presented that the munitions were supplied or used by police. While flash-bangs may be difficult to get (and certainly illegal for civilian ownership in California), high quality smoke can be had for about $30. However, we are talking about a group of people who are basically criminal in their actions. It’s not a hard stretch that illegal munitions were used by the antifa group without police involvement. There are also other sources of such munitions. If an entity (foreign or domestic) wanted to incite violence, a powder keg like that is the place to start.
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Here’s How Different Chemical Weapons Could Kill You – G.P.
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A recent survey by Aviva (A UK-based insurance company) has revealed that 20% of adults don’t know how to change a light bulb or boil an egg. An interesting read to say the least.
“Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.” – Acts 10:34-35 (KJV)
Today is the birthday of the late Charles Rankin Bond, Jr, who was born in Dallas on April 22, 1915. He was one of the last of the AVG Flying Tiger pilots.
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Please remember that Saturday, April 22, 2017 has been named an international day of prayer for peace and harmony in South Africa. Please pray fervently that the current wave of criminal and genocidal violence will end!
I hope the information I’ve imparted so far—scrutinizing the source of your prepper information and determining the worst-case scenario to prepare for—has the wheels turning inside your head. Maybe you’re not totally convinced that you should abandon your current plans to survive in place yet, but you admit there’s at least an inkling of truth to what I’m saying. Your biggest roadblock may be financial, and that may seem insurmountable. Most of us aren’t millionaire businessmen who can afford a fully-stocked survival retreat to bug out to. I get that! Hopefully, I can convince you that there are alternative options for you and your family.
For those of you who can afford it, having a rural, well-stocked, and professionally designed survival retreat that no one knows about is an absolute no-brainer in surviving a total collapse scenario. Even if you live in an upscale gated community with a security guard, it’s not going to matter. Once the grocery stores are looted, I can assure you that the inner-city population is coming to your rich neighborhood next. Bubba, the rent-a-cop at the front gatehouse is not going to stop them. Rich people are hoarding all the food, right? The main stream media and the progressive left have been promoting class warfare for quite some time. You need to understand that there is a rapidly growing segment of the population that hates rich people. Most media outlets have people believing that the rich are to blame for the poor’s circumstances. For now, these mini-Marxists may just talk tough on their social media posts; however, when they start going hungry, they are going to get angry. At first their anger will be directed towards the government, whom they believed would always take care of them, but they will also act out on their resentment for the rich. My belief is that the hungry and starving will go after the rich neighborhoods first, before looting suburbia.
So, what if you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth? How could you possibly afford to have a bug out location? The truth is that there are hundreds of thousands of effective bug out locations in existence; you just need to locate one of them. The key to bugging out on a budget is having a purposeful Plan of Action in place before the SHTF. Please be aware that the various plans of actions I will propose all come with risks, some more so than others. At the same time, those risks are minor compared to the risk of trying to survive in the city.
My first recommendation would be to join an existing prepping group that already has a full survival retreat. In truth, this is very hard to do. Most people who have survival retreats don’t discuss them in public. If they are discussing it around the water cooler at work, I would immediately rule out their group because their OPSEC is already blown. You can search for existing groups on certain prepper forums, but you need to be careful. While every client I have worked with has been completely sane, there are also a whole lot of crazies out there. Just watch a few episodes of Doomsday Preppers, if you want examples.
I cannot stress enough the precautions you need to take when looking to join a group. You need to thoroughly vet the group you are joining and make sure they are a good fit for you and your family. You need to make sure they have an effective retreat location and know what they are doing. For every good survival retreat group, there are five that don’t know what they are doing. Most importantly, make sure they have at least a year’s worth of long-term food for every one of their members. This is a big issue I see when doing my survival retreat analysis for existing groups. More than half of the retreats only have a fraction of the long-term food they are going to need to make it through the first winter. Most groups rely on each family unit to supply their own food, but they don’t enforce it or make sure the food is purchased and stored on site. While they may have a good location and plenty of skills, that won’t be enough to save them when their food runs out long before harvest time.
For you to join an existing retreat group, you will need to have some sort of skill to bring to the table. Being an emergency room surgeon will likely be a shoe-in for most groups (but most trauma surgeons can afford their own retreat). Experience in electrical engineering, prior-combat military, mechanical engineering, gardening, or some other essential skill will be needed to join one of these groups. Even if you have a vital skill they are lacking, you’ll likely need to bring your own food with you, unless there is a wealthy benefactor running the group. You can’t expect them to feed your family just because you know how to fix cars. I put joining an existing retreat group first because if it works out for you, it is your best option. In truth, unless you know someone already who has a retreat, you are probably going to strike out heading in this direction.
My second recommendation is to make survival plans with someone you know who already lives in a remote location. However, just because Uncle Charlie lives on a farm, that doesn’t mean you should bug out there. It still needs to be in a good location. If it’s only twenty miles outside of the big city, that’s only going to buy you a little time before the city masses flee and head your way. If the farmhouse only sits a few hundred feet off a major two lane road through the country, it’s not a good option.
This is a common fall back plan for a lot of suburban preppers, but make sure you do some research on what makes an effective retreat location first. Your chances of survival are much higher if you can avoid any interaction with the masses. You need to be far from any big cities and at least ten miles from any small towns. It’s best if the location is two or three turns off any secondary roads, preferably on a dead-end road. It’s especially important that the house is far back from and not visible from the road with the least number of neighbors as possible in view. These are just a couple of points to consider, but by no means are they the only ones. Again, do some research on what makes an effective bug out location. If Uncle Charlie’s farm doesn’t fit in well with the requirements of a standard survival retreat location, you need to go a different direction, which I will discuss shortly.
Let’s assume that Uncle Charlie’s farm does meet the requirements of an effective bug out location. What then? First, you need to have a discussion with Uncle Charlie. Then, you need to start storing your long-term food and other survival supplies there and not at your suburban home. You don’t know for sure if you will be able to haul all your needed supplies there if the highways get blocked by people evacuating and breaking down or running out of gas. Also in the aftermath of an EMP, you may not have a running vehicle. Are you going to leave all that stuff behind, and will that decision make you second guess your bug out strategy and convince you to foolishly stay in town with your supplies? Either way, it’s a really terrible situation and decision to have to make. The next difficult decision for those of you with a little more capital to invest in your preparations, is whether to install backup power, secondary water sources, greenhouses, et cetera that you would normally be putting into your suburban home. I realize it’s weird and maybe a little un-nerving to be putting some serious money into property you don’t even own. I get it. But I still recommend you do it. Also, hopefully Uncle Charlie is fully on board and willing to store up his own food and supplies. If he’s not, you need to do it for him. You need to be sure there is long-term food storage for everyone who is going to be showing up there. Otherwise your family’s one year food storage is going to be gone fairly quickly. To minimize this, be sure Uncle Charlie understands the importance of secrecy and isn’t discussing what you are planning with anyone else.
What if your Uncle Charlie has a good location but thinks the idea of prepping is “crazy talk”? That’s fine, just let it go at that and don’t discuss it any further with him. Rent a storage unit close to where he lives and cache all your stuff there. Just make sure it is a temperature-controlled storage building, if you are keeping your long-term food there. One of the worst mistakes you can make with long-term food is storing it in a location with extreme temperature changes. When the SHTF, just show up at Uncle Charlie’s with all your food and supplies. He will then be grateful you were so “crazy” and understand why you were preparing for hard times.
Okay. So you don’t know anyone planning a survival retreat and you don’t have an Uncle Charlie (or his farm is in a bad location), then here is my third recommendation to find a bug out location. Download Google Earth and teach yourself how to use it. After that, use all the “effective survival retreat location principles” you’ve learned, and start looking for the absolute best area near you for a survival retreat. Pretend you are a millionaire and getting ready to purchase property for a survival retreat. Once you find a couple areas that would work, look on Craigslist and perform a general Google search for remote rental cabins in that area. I do not mean large RV parks or campgrounds that offer cabins. I mean singular cabin rentals, preferably ones that are commercially-owned and not rented out when the owners aren’t using it. Make it a priority to spend a couple weekends this summer getting out of the city with your family and spend a night or two at a handful of these locations. See how they match up in person to your survival retreat considerations. Is it well off the beaten path? Is there an area that could be turned into a garden? Does it have off-grid power? Is there a wood stove to heat the place throughout the winter?
Once you have found a good location, do the same thing I mentioned when dealing with a skeptical Uncle Charlie. Rent a temperature-controlled storage unit nearby and cache your stuff there. Now, it’s important that you understand my meaning behind doing this. I am saying when the SHTF that you should go to that cabin and move in, but I am not implying that you steal it from the owners. If they show up there, you will need to have a discussion with them on how it would be beneficial for you to work together with them. You will need to be able to effectively explain the dire circumstances that the country is facing. Explain the benefits of the extra hands to put in the garden and how you already have survival seed. Explain how it will be easier to keep a twenty-four-hour watch over the property with extra people and how you’ve got plenty of guns and professional training to help protect them. A huge recommendation here is to have extra long-term food stored for them as well. If you do all these things, they would have to be idiots not to see the benefits of working together. Again, this all assumes the owners show up in the first place. If you are considering multiple locations, going to a corporate-owned rental cabin will be better than some summer cottage that a wealthy person rents when they aren’t using it.
So, you’ve done an exhaustive search for cabins and maybe even spent a couple weekends with the family at a few of them with no luck. They just don’t fit your needs. My fourth recommendation is to get back on Google Earth and start searching those same rural areas you highlighted as good bug out locations from where you live. Start looking for small farms that are at the end of a dirt road. Farms that sit well off the road and maybe have state game lands or other large farms surrounding them. Find a good ten different locations and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. Write their addresses down as well as highlight their exact locations on a paper map. Take a Sunday drive sometime and drive past these locations. Is the farm clean and well-kept or are they slobs? Is it as good of a location as you thought or is there an OPSEC issue that you didn’t notice on the satellite or terrain view? Don’t forget to keep an eye out while driving around for other locations that might work better. Keep good notes of everything you’ve seen and considered. Find a storage rental in a centralized location and stash your supplies there, like we discussed previously.
When the SHTF, start at the best location at the top of your list. Knock on the door and start a friendly conversation with the owners. Wrap your head around the situation and have a strategy for the conversation going in. Don’t just wing it; have it written down with bullet points. Don’t give away your intentions at first; just try to get a feel for the person. Your line of questioning should give you answers to the following questions:
You really need to plan and practice this conversation in your head beforehand so you don’t come across as too intrusive or suspicious. Smile, be friendly and conversational, and for goodness sakes, don’t wear your plate carrier or carry your battle rifle (though you should have a concealed handgun, just in case). You want to look like a Regular Joe and not too militaristic or threatening. Don’t ignore your “gut feelings”. If you don’t get a good feel from the original conversation, move on to the next location. You can always come back if the other locations are worse.
The absolutely most important part of going with this scenario is bugging out of the city immediately and approaching the farmers right away! I have lived in the country most of my life, and most rural country farmers are “salt of the earth” types. However, if you wait too long to approach them and they are watching the evening news each night and seeing the world fall apart on TV, you just might be greeted at the front door with a shotgun. Don’t wait until things fall apart, if this is your fall back strategy. This is also not a good strategy to try on a whim. If you are working on an extreme budget, don’t have anywhere to go, and don’t have much money to put into prepping, you need to put this plan of action into effect immediately. It’s not the best option for bugging out, but looking on Google Earth and taking a drive past these locations is free! If you were really smart, you might even approach them ahead of time and feel them out. Doing so will be very weird and uncomfortable, I’m sure. What if they think you are crazy and kick you out of their house? How embarrassing would that be? But don’t forget you are working on a budget and you don’t have a lot of options. Alternatively, you could just ride it out in town with the other five hundred thousand starving and desperate people and see how that works out for you.
Putting together a well thought out and well-crafted Plan of Action from the beginning is the key to you and your family’s survival. It will take a lot of the stress off you when one of these long-term SHTF scenarios comes to pass. It will be a stressful enough time as it is; not having a plan of action to follow and trying to wing it will make the situation incredibly worse. You will not be thinking as clearly as you are right now. You will make mistakes. Making mistakes in a SHTF situation could ultimately mean your life and the life of a family members. So, if you plan to prepare for hard times, please do the planning first and tailor your preparations to that plan, not the other way around.
Are these strategies easy and without risk? No. There are lots of things to consider and wrap your head around. There will be obstacles to overcome. Are they going to make you uncomfortable? Absolutely. In a perfect world we’d all be millionaire preppers with multi-million dollar survival retreats to bug out to. Would it be a whole lot easier and more comfortable to ignore that small voice in your head that’s telling you my warnings are warranted…and to just continue your preparations at your suburban home? Sure, it would. Please don’t. What if you are wrong about how bad it’s going to get? What if that prepper expert you follow is wrong about “hiding in plain sight”? If you do the research I recommended on human desperation and starvation, I think you will understand where I am coming from. If people in this country truly begin to starve, regardless of the SHTF culprit, please believe me that it’ll likely be ten times worse than I described.
At some point in the future, you may find yourself huddled in your basement in suburbia next to your crying family members while a large raiding force is breaking down your front door upstairs. Sure, you have a battle rifle in your hands, but most of the looters do too, and there are just so many of them…. “How could that many desperate people be so well-armed and working together so well?,” you’ll wonder to yourself. You know your fate. You’ll put up a good fight, but deep down inside you know you’re a dead man. “What’s going to become of my beautiful wife and daughter once I’m gone?,” will be your next thought. That’s a horrible thought that no one wants to have, and prepper experts don’t usually discuss. I promise you, at that moment, you are going to think of this article and wish you hadn’t buried your head in the sand. You are going to wish you had put together a bug out strategy and gotten your family out of harm’s way when you had the chance. I hope that’s not the case, but are you willing to take that risk? It’s just so much easier and a whole lot more comfortable to ignore the truth and make your plans around surviving in place at home. It may be easier, but it sure is a whole lot deadlier.
If you live in a big city, or an area with a lot of people in your proximity, I hope that my three-part article has given you a solid reason to include a plan for bugging out in your preps. Do your research from qualified sources, decide what SHTF scenario makes the most sense to prepare for, and find a bug out location. Make sure you have an effective plan of action in place before spending a lot of money on preparedness supplies. Don’t wait for the right moment; start now. Plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Jonathan Hollerman is a former military S.E.R.E. (Survival) Instructor and best-selling author on preparedness. Hollerman is a full-time Emergency Preparedness Consultant specializing in Survival Retreat Design through Grid Down Consulting.
Stop federal funding for universities and police that tolerate left-wing violence – D.S.
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The last time this happened the market crashed
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Gold Price Forecast: The Correction Into May Has Begun
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The Great Retail Apocalypse: Americans spend more at bars and restaurants than at grocery stores.
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SurvivalBlog and its editors are not paid investment counselors or advisers. Please see our Provisos page for details.
How To Practice Drawing a Pistol From Concealment
JWR’s Comment: This is an important but overlooked skill to practice! I agree with Tam that using a “Blue Gun” for draw and holstering practice is wise.
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Human trafficking – Notice that Turkey, a NATO member, is mentioned in this pamphlet.Do You Know How Much It Costs To Buy A 9 Year Old Girl? The Sickness Of ISIS Has Just Informed Us – H.L.
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Venezuela On The Brink – Images and Video… – B.B.
HJL’s Comment: Socialism at its best. Notice the military/police person shooting a woman for no other reason than she is filming the officers walking down the street randomly firing at buildings.
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In Venezuela, the ‘Mother of all Marches’
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“Preparedness Is A Biblical Concept“: Pastor Joe Fox Has Some Hard Words For The Doritos Denomination Of Christianity…Starting With Proverbs 6:6 – GJM
“And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord.” – Leviticus 10:1-2 (KJV)
April 21st is Aggie Muster Day, for all Texas A&M Corps of Cadets graduates. Aggie Muster celebrations/meetings are held as far away as Japan, Germany, and Afghanistan. I should mention that Jim’s grandfather (a U.S. Army Cavalry LTC) was an Aggie– something mentioned so often that everyone in his family felt like de facto Aggies, too. Other than the officers that matriculate though West Point, the four institutions that seem to have the greatest ongoing esprit de corps for graduates are Texas A&M, The Citadel, Norwich University, and VMI. Jim felt almost obliged to include an Aggie character in his novels Survivors and Founders, even though his connection to Texas A&M is two generations removed.
In part one, I cautioned you to be diligent to only follow the advice of credible prepping experts with real-life experience and a true understanding of human psychology in desperate circumstances. Before I can give my advice on the Bug Out/Survive in Place debate, we must first determine what scenario you are preparing for.
In my opinion, the most likely threat today is a natural disaster, like a hurricane or tornado or maybe a days-long blackout in a localized area. However, preparing for these things is common sense and being able to survive them does not make someone a prepper. Anyone can easily buy a few cases of water, two cases of MREs, and a few other basic survival supplies, put them in their basement, and be “good to go”. Most preppers, even if they lost all of their supplies in the storm, could easily brainstorm their way through a few days without food and water. (This would be a good example of where those wilderness survival skills could come into play.) Alternatively, they could literally just recline against a moss-covered tree stump and wait it out. It would be unpleasant and they’ll likely get really hungry while they wait, but the rest of the country will band together and the FEMA trucks will arrive in short order. This type of “prepping for natural disasters” is one of the main reasons why there is so much conflicting information on how to prepare for a total societal collapse scenario and whether or not to bug out.
So, what are the big threats that you should really be preparing for? I realize that the next points are debatable, but in my years of research today’s most likely culprits for a complete collapse of society, where you will need to put your preparedness skills to use, include the following events:
Now I realize that some of you have been preparing for nuclear war, biological warfare, global warming, food shortages, and many other scenarios for a very long time. I have researched those threats, and I do acknowledge there is legitimacy to most of them and would never judge you for wanting to prepare for them. My question is, what is the biggest and most likely SHTF threat, today? The world is constantly changing, and while prepping for all-out nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis made perfect sense, today there are more probable SHTF scenarios to be concerned with. This goes back to my point in Part 1 about most preppers “latching on” to the first SHTF scenario they learn about. In my opinion, the most dangerous of these threats is a long-term grid down scenario brought on by an EMP attack, a cyber-attack on the electric grid, a Carrington-sized solar flare, or a good old-fashioned physical attack on the electric grid. (Google the dry run attack a few years ago at the Metcalf Substation in California.) To some, it may be easy to dismiss the grid-down threat if you only research one of those four scenarios at a time. If you do your research and add up the risk likelihood from all four scenarios, a national grid-down event is likely to happen in our lifetime.
I have the research and documents to back up my assertion, but that would be too much information to share here. For now, let’s assume you have read about a grid-down scenario and you do believe there is at least some legitimacy to it. However, you believe that a financial collapse, pandemic, or (insert your SHTF Scenario X here) is more likely to occur in the near future. You are convinced, by God, that the dollar is going to collapse in six months and that’s what you are getting ready for. Great! You might be right.
But what if you are wrong? See, here’s the thing…. If you plan and prepare for a grid-down event, a financial collapse or pandemic will be a walk in the park. But if your plans strictly revolve around bugging in, boarding up your windows in town, gardening in your back yard, forming a security team with your neighbors, and fighting off the looters brought on by the coming financial collapse, and then instead of a financial collapse we end up getting hit by an EMP attack from North Korea or Iran, you and your loved ones are in trouble.
While I know that my next point is debated on a lot of prepping forums, I am going to solidly and firmly plant my flag on the following mountain: There is very little to zero chance of surviving a long-term grid down scenario in the city surrounded by tens or hundreds of thousands of starving and desperate people who will eventually search and loot EVERY single store, every single building, and every single house…even yours. When the on-demand food delivery infrastructure that most Americans rely on to feed themselves shuts down from lack of electricity, there will be no way to keep 300+ million Americans fed. It cannot happen, regardless of what the government or other prepping experts tell you! In today’s world, electricity is crucial to keeping our population fed. When the masses haven’t had a crumb to eat for weeks, there will not be a single rock left unturned in the city and surrounding areas during their search for a scrap of food. That includes the very rock you are hiding under.
But what about a pandemic or financial collapse? Do I still need to bug out? In the case of a massive financial collapse, I believe it may be possible to survive in suburbia. I can’t give you a definite answer to that question until the financial collapse plays out and we see how bad it really gets. (The most importantly question: does the food delivery infrastructure shut down?). By the way, neither should any other prepping expert give you a straight-forward answer to that question. I can assure you of this: if you base your survival plans around bugging-in and the situation becomes far worse than you anticipated or planned for, it is too late at that point to get out of the deadly situation you are in. I hear this a lot on forums: “I’m planning to survive in place, and if the rioting and looting gets too bad, then I’ll just bug out to my Uncle Charlie’s farm.” Sorry, you’ll be too late!
If you go this route and have all your prepping plans, like off-grid power, roof water collection system, a large productive garden growing, and thousands of pounds of other supplies, like food, blankets, guns, ammo, et cetera all tucked away and hidden at your suburban location, you are not going to want to leave all the assets behind that won’t fit in your car! It’s not like you can take your massive prepper garden that you spent weeks of blood, sweat, and tears building and fold it up into a suitcase and throw it in your trunk. Are you really going to leave all that half-grown food behind? What if you used up most of your survival seed while planting the garden? What if it’s now too late in the growing season to start a new garden? Do you have the know-how to disconnect your off-grid solar system and hook it up somewhere else, or did a professional install it for you? You’ll likely have limited room in your bug out vehicle, especially if you have family members to take with you. Do you take your bulky solar power system or some extra food instead?
Most people will also cling to the perceived safety and familiarity of their personal home for as long as possible. Most that go with “survive in place unless it gets too bad” plan will stay in their home way too long. They will wait until they are forced to kill a desperate or hungry home intruder in self defense and can no longer deceive themselves into believing that it is safe for their family to stay in suburbia. If you wait till things get “too bad”, then travelling on the open road with your bug out bags or a vehicle laden with food and supplies makes you a target of opportunity.
So, am I saying that you have to bug out to survive a massive financial collapse? No. Yes. Maybe. What I’m implying is that it would be better to be safe than sorry. Isn’t that the whole point of prepping? If you designed your prepping plans around bugging out of the city to a safer location from the get-go, you won’t find yourself in the crappy scenario of sitting in your house while the city around you tears itself apart and wondering, “Did I wait too long to leave?” or “Is it too late to travel through town and get my family out of here safely?” That would be an awful situation to find yourself in.
Where I allow you a little wiggle room to survive in place during the early throws of a financial collapse, I won’t allow it in the case of a deadly pandemic. During a financial collapse, even during a rapid downward spiral, you will still have the ability in the initial days to hit up your local stores and buy extra food, ammo, gear, or other prepping items that you may need to survive. These last minute purchases may be of items that maybe you didn’t get around to purchasing beforehand or couldn’t afford earlier. Depending on the severity of the financial collapse, it may take multiple days, weeks, or months before businesses start closing or get completely looted.
However, during a serious and fast-growing pandemic, commerce will likely shut down much quicker. As the infection rate grows, more and more people will stop venturing out, even for work. The threat of contracting the virus and bringing it home to loved ones will override most people’s fear of losing their job. At first it will likely be the minimum wage employees that stop showing up for work. They have little to lose by risking their job at the local supermarket, sporting goods store, or gas station; they rationalize that they can easily find another minimum wage job after the threat has passed. To them, it’s just not worth it to run a cash register all day while standing face to face with potentially infected people. This will result in supermarkets and other stores quickly growing understaffed. At some point, the big box store managers will be under so much stress trying to make the understaffed store function despite long checkout lines filled with frustrated and angry people, they will likely throw up their hands and stop coming in to work themselves. Middle management typically has little vested interest in the store anyway, and it’s just not worth the hassle and the risk of infection. The only people with a real vested interest in that corporate store are the board members in some far-away city who can’t do anything about the situation anyway. This will result in desperate and sick people getting angry at all the stores they rely on now being closed, and the rioting and looting will escalate.
As the rioting and looting escalates during the early days of the pandemic, it will be splayed across TV screens around the country by a shameless media ecstatic to show the sensationalized coverage. As a result, more blue collar and white collar workers will stay home. Vitally important interstate truck drivers will see the never-ending video loops the media are playing and think to themselves, “Do I really want to leave my family alone and drive my food-laden truck two hundred miles away from home and into that insane city with all that violence?” I suspect a lot of them will start using up sick days and vacation days. As more grocery stores and gas stations close from lack of employees and the dwindling re-supply shipments, things will get even more chaotic. Add this to the growing number of people infected, and more people will question whether their job is worth the risk.
This applies to hospital workers, policemen, firefighters, and employees responsible for maintaining our nation’s infrastructure, like the electric grid, gas lines, sewer companies, and power plants. Please don’t think I am disparaging the people in those career fields. Like any other industry, it will just be a few at the beginning. But as the chaos and pandemic spreads, fewer of these people will show up for work over time. At some point the remaining individuals who are desperately trying to pick up the slack for their missing co-workers and keep our nation’s infrastructure functioning, will throw up their hands in frustration and head home themselves. No amount of forced intervention or government edict will convince someone to risk their life and show up for work if they believe it’s no use or the threat of infection is too high. There are exceptions to this rule, but there likely won’t be enough people risking their lives to keep these vital industries and our nation’s critical infrastructures afloat. Depending on the severity of the pandemic and how long it persists, I believe it is possible to result in rolling blackouts and maybe even a total loss of the electric grid throughout various parts of the country. That means a pandemic could result in the worst-case scenario of a grid-down event. Add that to the spreading illness and you’re in a world of hurt.
I am not saying that a pandemic will result in a grid-down event. I am just saying that it is a very real possibility, depending on the severity of the virus and how quickly the government can find a cure for it. So, if you decided to survive in place for a pandemic and it grows seriously out-of-control, it may be too late to travel; however, travel will be limited for different reasons than the financial collapse. First, there will be a rapidly growing number of hungry and starving people as the nation’s infrastructure and on-demand food delivery systems shut down. While the risk of getting the virus will mean less people out and about coordinating ambushes on travelers, you still run a big risk of contracting the virus during your bug out. You waited too long and there are just too many people infected now. Anyone with whom you cross paths on your travels could lead to you or a family member getting infected.
Second, you need to do some research into the government’s response to pandemics. They have strict plans in place to try and slow the spread of a serious pandemic. Those plans include shutting down means of travel. You may get stuck in a quarantine zone against your will, especially if your initial plan is to bug in as long as possible. Remember, the government will not announce when they are going to quarantine your town, so you won’t get a heads-up to leave beforehand. In my opinion, for a massive pandemic, it’s best if your initial plans revolve around bugging out and getting away from the mass population areas as soon as possible.
On a side note to the second point, please don’t assume you are going to four-wheel your way around a military roadblock like they did in the classic movie Red Dawn or evade your way through their lines at night, on foot, with your bug out bag. With today’s drone technology and their forward looking infrared cameras, it’s very unlikely that you will be successful in sneaking your family through the quarantine lines. If captured, you could end up in an overstuffed holding zone of other captured escapees, and this could significantly increase you and your family’s risk of getting infected.
So now I’m just going to come out and say it. In the aftermath of a long-term SHTF scenario where there is even a risk of widespread food shortages, you need to bug out (away from mass population areas) and do so quickly. I’ll explain how to do so in Part Three. But for now, please promise me to get off the “Urban Prepper” websites. The term Urban Prepper is an oxymoron. Those two words go together like a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a severe case of jock itch! Those urban prepper experts will tell you that hitting the open road and travelling from place to place like they do in The Walking Dead is a really bad idea. It is a straw man argument. I actually agree with that statement. No one is telling you that bugging out and wandering around the countryside is a good idea, least of all me.
Some urban prepping experts will tell you about all the abundant resources that big cities have to offer for scavenging. What hogwash! You put a few million, or even tens of thousands, of starving people in a small land area and they are going to pick that place clean in no time! You aren’t the only one who is going to be scavenging for rapidly disappearing food sources. Ninety-nine percent of the surviving population will be doing the same thing as you. The idea of scavenging for survival in some city should scare the living crap out of you. It’s understandable to me how some people might store up a lot of food in their suburban basement and believe they can ride out the storm by hiding and keeping their head down. I disagree with that plan, but I can understand their thought process. If you don’t have long-term food stored up and your plans involve sneaking around the city at night scavenging for your food like everyone else, you’re a special kind of stupid. You think that’s too strongly worded? I don’t think so.
I don’t care about how many guns you plan to carry, your hand-to-hand combat skills, or the fact that you think you have perfected the foolish “grey man movement” techniques, you’re still going to die eventually. You’re in a city full of starving people who are wandering around day and night desperate to find the same stuff you are looking for. They are going to be raiding the same distribution centers and stores you plan to hit and fighting with you over every scrap of food. Sure, you might get away from an ambush a time or two and maybe kill off a few of your attackers, but eventually you’re going to get yourself shot in the back from some dark second story window. Some Holocaust-skinny dude who’s too sick now to leave his house and join the scavenging parties just shot you from a distance on the off chance that you may have a scrap of food in your pack. Heaven forbid you have a family at home depending on you to bring food back. On one of those scavenging trips, you’re not going to make it home, and that’s a fact, Jack!
Some prepper experts will try and scare you into surviving in place by insisting you are better off in the suburban location you know well than hitting the open road. They’ll explain how dangerous it will be to wander around the countryside post-SHTF. That’s true, and I would never advocate for aimlessly wandering around post-SHTF, like they do in the popular movie The Road. However, you must realize that trying to survive in town surrounded by thousands of desperate and starving people will be much harder to do than surviving in a remote location. Before making a final decision to survive in place, it is imperative that you are only doing so if your current residence is already in a remote location. Do some research and see how well your home location fits in with survival retreat considerations. Very few locations are perfect, but if you are not checking off more boxes than you are leaving blank on the survival retreat checklist, you need to seriously reconsider staying in place.
There are far better options on the table for someone, even on a tight budget, than just riding it out in town waiting for a large band of looters to kill you and take all your food. I will be discussing these options in Part Three. In the meantime, remember to scrutinize the source of your prepper advice and determine what SHTF scenario you are preparing for.
Jonathan Hollerman is a former military S.E.R.E. (Survival) Instructor and best-selling author on preparedness. Hollerman is a full-time Emergency Preparedness Consultant specializing in Survival Retreat Design through Grid Down Consulting.
Cash Crisis in India, ATMs Running Dry
JWR’s Comment: Currency “reforms” like these are all about control of the populace and tax revenue. Governments want full transparency of all private transactions—and thus the ability to tax everything.
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Video: Hidden Secrets Of Money Part 7 – Mike Maloney
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50 Great Jobs for Retirees – H.L.
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17 Reasons Why You Should Own Gold – DSV
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Troubling Signs At Bakken As Oil Production Growth Stalls
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SurvivalBlog and its editors are not paid investment counselors or advisers. Please see our Provisos page for details.
Venezuela braces for ‘mother of all protests’ – B.B.
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Courts are Using AI to Sentence Criminals – B.B.
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An article by Benjamin Baruch over at News With Views: The March To World War III
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From the people who brought you beheadings, burning alive, and other atrocities for no other reason than they don’t like you: Taliban Decry Environmental Impact of U.S. MOAB Explosion – G.M.
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I ran across this on YouTube today. Too bad they don’t make them anymore: Rare Gas-Powered Circular Saw [Rescue]
“Survivalists are not the people living in bunkers that the media makes them out to be. Above all their primary goals revolve around self sufficiency.” – Jack Spirko
On April 20th, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, leased by BP, killed 11 workers and began spewing an estimated 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months, creating the worst known offshore oil spill.
April 20th is also the day that we remember the victims of the Columbine High School tragedy, where two students stormed into a suburban high school in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, at lunch time with guns and explosives, killing 13 and wounding dozens more in what was, at the time, the nation’s deadliest school shooting.
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I just heard that fellow blogger Kevin O’Brien (aka WeaponsMan) has passed away at age 59 of a heart attack. Our condolences to his family. Kevin was a great guy and and served his country well as a Special Forces weapons man. (An 18 Bravo, he also worked in Ops and Intel capacities, including a tour in Afghanistan.) Starting in 2011, he began sharing his knowledge in one of the best blogs I’ve ever read. He was also the primary author of the Firearms Design Library. Kevin will be greatly missed! – JWR
Should I try to survive in place or should I bug out? This is a hotly debated question in the prepping community with many people firmly entrenched on both sides of the aisle. There are numerous articles discussing the topic, but most are only a handful of paragraphs that never really explain how or why they arrived at their recommendation. To answer the “Bug Out” or “Bug In” question effectively, we must discuss essential background information and context. I will break down the discussion into three sections: your source for prepping advice, what SHTF scenario you are preparing for, and how to bug out if you don’t have a survival retreat. So, grab a cup of coffee, find a comfortable chair, and put on your seat belt as I get ready to challenge a good bit of commonly embraced ideas and “prepper theology” that are dangerous to you and your family surviving a long-term SHTF scenario. On a side note, if your idea of “prepping” revolves around getting ready for the next hurricane and storing up enough food and water in your basement to last a couple days until FEMA shows up, well… this article probably won’t apply to you.
Your plan to either bug in or bug out depends on what SHTF scenario you are preparing for. Some of them seem silly and unlikely, but most of the scenarios that could lead to a collapse of our society have at least some legitimacy. What should you be preparing for? Should you plan to bug in or bug out? These are the two most fundamental questions to wrap your head around before making any plans for surviving a SHTF scenario. When getting started, I always recommend my clients apply the age-old philosophy, “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best!” At the same time, you need to find a balance between the worst-case SHTF scenario with what is most likely to occur in your lifetime.
So what are you preparing for? Pandemic? Financial collapse? Nuclear war? Long-term loss of the electric grid? I have noticed that most preppers typically “latch on” to the first SHTF scenario they were introduced to and become overwhelmed by the thought of that event coming to pass. Consequently, they focus all their energy on preparing for that particular scenario. They think about how it would affect their family’s chances of survival and dive head first into the confusing Internet world of preparedness. A lot of them start by Googling the word “prepping” or by spending countless hours watching some popular YouTube prepper channel. Unfortunately, what follows is a long, confusing string of bad information, deadly advice, and Top 10 Prepping Tips from “experts” who, quite frankly, have no earthly idea what they are talking about and have no background in surviving a world full of starving and desperate people.
This is why I am starting the discussion by asking “Where are you getting your prepping advice?”. The source of your knowledge will literally make the difference between whether you live or die, should a total societal collapse occur. I see a lot of preppers spending boat loads of cash on the wrong survival supplies and, more importantly, on the wrong plan of action. Part of the confusion on “how to prep” comes from the plethora of prepping advice available at the click of a mouse. I’ve read many “how to” prepping articles on major websites and magazines that literally made me spit out my morning coffee and laugh out loud. I’ve also read over a hundred prepper-fiction novels, some of them extremely popular. Most of them I can’t even finish, due to instance after instance of unbelievably stupid actions the main character takes that he miraculously survives. My most common frustration with most survival fiction authors is how they very rarely explain with any believability how the main characters stay fed in the post-apocalyptic world they are living in.
In one such immensely popular book, the main character is forced to walk home after being stranded by an EMP attack in another state. He completes the journey over multiple weeks and survives out of his get-home pack that he had in the trunk of his car at the time. Nearly every day, the author explains how “Macho Man X” pulls out an MRE to eat when he only had a half dozen or so to start out with. Halfway through the story, I am screaming at the book, “How many freakin’ MREs does this guy have?!” It must be a miracle, like the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand. This character has eaten nearly four dozen MREs over the course of his travels, and I was only halfway through the book. I couldn’t help but envision a Sherpa carrying nine MRE cases on his back, stacked four feet high over his head while following a climbing team to the base camp on Mount Everest. Is no one else picking up on these important discrepancies? How in the world does this guy have a four-and-a-half-star review average on Amazon? That is just one of a hundred things I could point out about this unnamed book. Unfortunately, this author has sold an insane number of novels in his never-ending series, and therefore he’s sold thousands of terrible ideas and recommendations to unsuspecting readers along the way.
Please do some research on who you are getting your advice from. If the bio reads “…an experienced outdoorsman who loves to hunt and fish, [Author X] has had numerous articles published in [X prepper forum] and [X prepper magazine],” or “[Author X] lives off grid in the Great Northwest with his wife and nine children,” that means he can hunt and fish; it does not necessarily mean that he has the experience to tell you the best way to prepare for a SHTF scenario. It’s your and your family’s lives that are at stake! What’s the point of spending your time and money on prepping if you are following bad advice and doing it wrong? Most of the more “experienced preppers” reading this are vigorously nodding their heads in agreement right now. They are thinking back to when they first got started and something specific they spent a lot of time or money on. They eventually had to re-do or re-buy whatever it was, when they realized the original suggestion from “X Prepping Expert” was bunk.
Another bad place to get your advice is on the thousands of Internet prepper forums where everyone is an expert on everything. At this point, you are likely bypassing any semblance of reliable and experienced prepping advice. In fact, you are potentially subjecting yourself to some nameless, faceless, self-proclaimed prepper typing away at his computer in downtown Chicago. You have no way to verify the information you are reading and whether or not the person has actually done what he is recommending. There are exceptions to this rule, however. SurvivalBlog is one forum that does a good job of vetting its articles and authors. The main reason behind this, I believe, is because the website is run by James Wesley, Rawles. While Rawles and I don’t always see eye to eye on every aspect of prepping, he has still lived the prepper lifestyle for decades and has the life experience to back up his advice and recommendations. Most other forums seem to be run by people who are experts at Internet marketing that will post any story to get a Facebook share or another follower.
I will give you two examples of very bad prepping advice. Normally, I don’t drop names, but in this case I am going to make an exception because I believe this first guy is going to be responsible for tens of thousands of preppers dying (when their family’s food runs out sooner than they had planned). His name is “Frank Bates” (Google “Frank Bates Charlatan,” if you like). “Frank,” a pseudonym of course, is the owner and profiteer of Food4Patriots. If you have been running in the prepping circles for any length of time, you’ve surely clicked on a link that took you to one of his infomercials where he tells you that “the government is buying up all the long-term food and if you don’t act quickly, you won’t be able to buy any freeze-dried food in the near future.”
“Frank” is nothing more than an Internet marketing guru who has made a lot of money off those infomercials. The problem is, much of the information he is peddling is provably false or misleading, and it is designed to scare you so that you will “act quickly” to buy his product. It’s the oldest trick in the book for scam artists. If you have made a long-term food purchase from him, please realize that all he has done is re-labeled freeze-dried food from another company and made a quick buck off you. You could have purchased the same exact food from the original company for ten or twenty percent less. You also need to realize that the one-year food plan you purchased is only four or five months’ worth of calories for the average adult. I am bringing to light one of the biggest scams in the prepper industry: most long-term food companies are guilty of deceitful serving size recommendations to one degree or another. Never, ever, ever buy long-term food based off a freeze-dried company’s serving sizes or meal counts. The only way to purchase long-term food is by knowing your personal caloric needs (based on your height, weight, sex, and activity level) and buying your long-term food based on the food’s caloric count. But that’s an article for a different time.
The second example is a popular prepping author who wrote seven different prepping guides and books that were peddled online. The guy isn’t even a prepper. He admitted to having zero background experience in prepping and to just writing those books to make money off the “prepping craze”. He believes most preppers are crazy or gullible rednecks. Google his article called “Confessions of a Former Apocalypse Survival Guide Writer” and read it, if you’d like. He refuses to give his name or the names of the prepping guides and books that he wrote. He pokes fun at the entire “paranoid prepping industry” and boasts how he made money ghostwriting for another “prepping expert” who also remains un-named. The moral of the story here is that you need to be extremely careful where you are getting your prepping advice from, especially if you are new to the concept. Just like any other industry on the Internet, charlatans abound. Unfortunately, the prepping industry seems to be overflowing with them.
Now, I realize that it seems like I have just painted the entire prepping industry as a bunch of idiots or scam artists. That really isn’t the case. The truth of the matter is that most legitimate prepping experts are honest, upstanding people who have spent years prepping and truly want to help others follow in their footsteps. However, a lot of them just plain don’t know what they don’t know. They have spent years following bad advice and forming opinions on recommendations from other prepping experts who also don’t know what they don’t know.
One of the biggest problems is that the term “prepping” is used to encapsulate a wide array of SHTF scenarios. A lot of these writers are purely focused on short-term solutions for minor inconveniences to our way of life (like preparing for a natural disaster). Some even travel around the country putting on seminars and have hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube. While I strongly recommend researching the person’s background and qualifications as a prepping expert, I also recommend you research what type of SHTF they are suggesting that you prepare for. A prepping expert whose entire thought process revolves around how to survive the next hurricane is NOT going to offer relevant guidance on how to survive a long-term grid down scenario. His advice will assume that phones, Internet, banking, food distribution, hospitals, the military, and your local police will still be functioning as normal, and his position on looting or rioting will be that it will be mostly contained to the inner city.
Regardless of where any expert falls on the SHTF spectrum, the answer to the question of whether to Bug Out or Survive in Place comes mainly from the on-demand food delivery infrastructure in this country. Can America keep its citizen’s fed under “X” SHTF scenario? Are people going to start starving? The vital take-away from this entire article is this fact: Once people begin starving, they become desperate, and the playbook for surviving such a scenario changes dramatically. This is a key point that a lot of prepping experts don’t understand.
In honesty, most preppers have done little research into and never fully wrapped their heads around what American society will look like in a serious SHTF collapse situation. They began their prepping journey with an incomplete and incorrect understanding of what type of world they are even preparing for. How can you make plans to prepare for something that you don’t understand?
Most prepping experts are Americans. They grew up in the greatest land of opportunity, and the vast majority have never experienced true desperation or starvation. At the flick of a switch, their lights always come on and with the turn of a faucet, clean water flows endlessly. Their life experience and knowledge base of a world in societal collapse is severely lacking. Most “prepper experts” have never been to third-world countries experiencing a famine. They don’t understand that if the same food shortages were to happen in America, the response from the public would be drastically worse than the famine in Mogadishu or the current food shortages in Venezuela. They have likely never seen the effects of true hunger or starvation on America’s shores, and have probably not studied the human psychology behind it.
I highly recommend everyone reading this to research the various works of Philip Zimbardo for a better understanding on the utter insanity and evil atrocities that will ensue when people are desperate and starving and when the laws of the land are a moot point with no functioning law enforcement. Zimbardo is a world renowned social psychologist; his life’s work revolves around studying how good people can turn evil. (You may be familiar with his work during the 1970s—the Stanford Prison Experiment.) His main focus since then has been studying the atrocities that average and everyday people can commit when there is no law and order, or when they are driven to desperation. It will likely have a radical transformation on your overall preparedness plans.
The other prepping experts you need to be careful of are the cross-industry “Wilderness Survival Experts”, who sometimes don the prepping label as well. Don’t get me wrong: learning wilderness survival skills is a vitally important tool in your prepper’s toolbox. Knowing how to start a fire in the rain and build a shelter is very important, and they are life skills that most Americans have lost over the last fifty years. I am not saying that all wilderness survival preppers are wrong, but if their advice is to bug out to your nearest National Forest and live off the land with the skills they are teaching you, then I say, “Run, Forrest, RUN!” The wise point of that advice is the fact that they promote fleeing the major cities after the SHTF. Where they go wrong, however, is their plan to survive off the land like the Legend of Mick Dodge. If you plan to follow their advice and become a “Lone Wolf,” I can assure you there is a 99.9% chance that you are going to end up dead, period. I’ve personally “lived off the land” in the mountains of Washington State for a month straight in January with six feet of snow on the ground. That was during the initial phase of my military training to become a SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) Instructor. I was a budding expert in wilderness survival at the time, and I still lost fifteen pounds during that single month. (That’s a lot for a lean nineteen-year-old in peak physical shape.)
Now I realize that a few of you reading this are feeling pretty livid towards me right about now. You are sharpening your knives, about to go off on me in the comments section below, explaining how you were left on the roadside as an infant and raised by a pack of wolves or other wildling creatures. It…doesn’t…matter! I still hold to the belief that you will die. Most people that claim these skills on the Internet forums have never actually done it, or they did so in a controlled environment. Even “if” you could prove to me that you had the necessary background to survive and “live off the land” in some wilderness area for an extended period of time, you are not taking into account that the other 99% of Lone Wolves running around the mountains post-SHTF don’t have our skillset.
While you are successfully surviving, the woods will be chock full of unprepared yahoos who fled the big cities and are totally desperate and starving. At some point, you will need to build a fire to cook the occasional squirrel you snare or to warm your hypothermic body; the smoke and light from your fire will bring the other starving Lone Wolves like a moth to a flame. At some point, they will stumble across your camp, or you will stumble into the crosshairs of someone who is so desperate that they will kill you with their deer rifle from a distance, long before you see them, just on the off chance you might have a morsel of food in your pack. At some point, the hungry masses and the rural folk who live around your forest will have killed off every living creature in the woods to feed their family. Your idea of surviving the SHTF next to a fire with venison on a spit will evaporate.
I could go on for hours about the hundreds of scenarios that would get you killed while living off the land post-SHTF. The biggest take-away here is that while you “may” have the ability to survive in the wilderness for a long period of time during normal times, in a post-SHTF world, with starving and desperate people running around the forest, those wilderness skills are not going to save you. Again, the prepper experts that will lead you down this path are offering advice from their personal life experiences of a “surviving in the woods during normal times” mindset. They’ve never wrapped their heads around what life looks like after a SHTF scenario, or more importantly, what their favorite forest bug-out-location is going to look like.
The last piece of bad prepping advice I see often is to grow your prepping slowly when working on a budget. That advice typically goes something like this: start preparing for a hurricane first and then slowly work your way up to surviving the bigger threats. That’s great if you have all the time in the world to slowly build your preparations and you know nothing big will happen until you are done. While I realize that most people are working with a limited budget, your plans for survival should not revolve around your budget. Now listen… I do not mean you should cash in your kid’s college fund. What I mean is that you need to set up your plan of action first to survive the worst-case scenario, taking into consideration your limited supplies. If you start out by preparing for a hurricane and something big happens, you might not have time to re-evaluate your current situation and put in place a better plan of action to deal with it. You are stuck surviving a total collapse scenario in the city with a couple boxes of MRE’s and some candles.
The other problem with this philosophy is that you could get stuck in the small-minded, hurricane prepper community. The websites you visit to help you prepare for these minor situations typically don’t have the needed experience or mindset to help you get prepared for anything bigger. The more you read their advice and recommendations, the more you will begin to believe that the “survive in place” mentality will actually work for something big. Again, prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Don’t prepare for the least and die if it’s worse.
So, before you jump on board the prepping train, even if you’ve been on board for years, please do some research on human psychology. That way, you will have a much better understanding of true human nature and people’s true response to starvation and desperation. You’ll know whether “prepper blogger X” knows what he is talking about or is just offering suggestions from his narrow, pre-SHTF life experience and mindset. Think about who you are getting your advice from, and then ask yourself, “Why?”
Jonathan Hollerman is a former military S.E.R.E. (Survival) Instructor and best-selling author on preparedness. Hollerman is a full-time Emergency Preparedness Consultant specializing in Survival Retreat Design through Grid Down Consulting.
