Preparing for Bad Times Thread

Step 1:
Leave the city and find someplace rural.
Seriously.
Any discussion that leap frogs this step is masturbatory and you all know it.

“Leave the city and find someplace rural.
Seriously” – Eric Anderson

^It should go without saying that “just move” is terrible advice but just in case let me just say that you should never “move” without having both a plan and the means to live in the place you are going to.

Also not every city is in some dire state and some might get better as time goes on. I can also tell you the grass isn’t always greener in the country side.

And to make a broader point, if we aren’t going to offer any advice to folks choosing to live in cities for the long term beyond “just move” then we may as well just have Ian remove these threads.

Get on friendly terms with your neighbors and learn their skills and hobbies. Go out of your way to develop good relations with them and share your skill set with them. The classic “prepper” scenario is to have seeds, crops, guns, repair skills, and potable water. But if you have one of them and your trusted neighbors have the others (with the requisite skills to match), you have them all. Plus you might have guns and crops, but you can only fire one at a time and eventually have to sleep.

Trying to survive alone is just yahoo movie stupidity. I’d rather live in a city surrounded by friends than out in the countryside alone. 10x more so in dire times.

I think I can speak a bit to the rural/urban question, having grown up in the Seattle area and then moved to rural Michigan (where my wife has family).

First of all, on the urban side. Yes, there are efficiencies to be taken advantage of in urban areas, but you’re ultimately 100% dependent upon fossil fuels and functional systems to provide life’s necessities (food, water, clothing, heating if you’re anywhere north). That makes it a non-starter if you think things are going to decay significantly.

So I think rural is definitely good, but there are downsides. I’m able to provide for all of my necessities (food, water, much clothing, heat, building materials, fertilizer, many medicines etc) in ways that can’t be done in any urban area, but the downside is mostly cultural. While my neighbors are more capable than my old urban friends, they’re also fossil fuel dependent for cutting wood, growing food, and most transportation.

One good neighbor noted once that “We don’t do any prepping, but we have guns!”, essentially implying that those would allow them to get whatever they needed. They’re likely right, and aren’t alone in thinking that way. Keep that in mind.

Another issue is that people aren’t as well educated, and thus see no problem with burning their garbage and contaminating my organically managed farm with dioxin. The ones who farm invariably use every chemical under the sun; one who started growing corn/soy laced with neonicotinoid pesticides (he was unable to find seed without it after looking at every local source) has killed my bees, which until that point did very well for years.

In the end, the more you prep the more you realize what dependencies you still have, whether that’s files to sharpen your crosscut saw for firewood, or plumbing parts to keep your hand pump in operation, or even something as simple as salt.

Living without the benefits of industrial society will ultimately mean living without large houses or most tools. Another point which I often see overlooked… everything you do for yourself will take about 10x as much time as it would take to work at a decent job and pay for the industrially produced equivalent. It doesn’t take long before you’re putting in 40 hour weeks on top of the 40hr “regular” job, and running yourself ragged.

Another consideration… While the midwest is generally good if you want to grow your own food (Michigan is second only to California in terms of crop diversity), and generally has good soils, the weather in the midwest is becoming unbearable in the summer imho. It seems fine for now when you can retreat indoors with AC (I went without that for our first 10 years here, but finally succumbed), but your livestock won’t have that option. At the wet-bulb temp of 95 degrees, it’s game over for humans, and we’re probably enduring more than most livestock. Chicago is already bumping up against that for brief periods (they’ve hit 93 or 94 if my memory serves).

So where would I live, given complete freedom? I’d go back to where I find the most enjoyment — probably sailing Puget Sound and the inside passage on the west coast. Ultimately, prepping doesn’t seem to me like it offers much benefit, and the cost in terms of time and lost experiences is tremendous, even if much of it is interesting and enjoyable.

To me, finding community, be it friend or family, looks like it will be the most important thing. So I guess that makes staying in touch with those people, and making new friends, the main thing to focus on.

As to where those people are, it varies. One friend is in the countryside well out of the city. We have fallen out of touch, but it is probably time to get back in contact. Others are out of state so the question could become whether an out-of-state destination is better or worse than the current locale. But there are also a few friends right here in the city who may help each other if things get harder for all of us. We could share housing and expenses. Help each other with errands and babysitting.

Beyond that, culling excess material stuff from the household is the main project right now. Get rid of trifles but make sure to hang on to what matters, like tools and books. Be ready to live in less space and less comfort if need be.

Even with covid raging there are still community gardens everywhere here. Getting a patch and starting to work it at one of them is another priority, plus a good way to meet neighbors.

A lot of us are city dwellers or suburbanites who realistically will not move to a rural area or have an entire barnyard of survival prep materials. Perhaps some items in our garage or basement, but not enough to last several years. I am more interested in advice regarding real estate and investing (cryptos, silver, hard assets other than cash saved in a bank). I’ve been reading up watching more YouTube videos on these topics.

My first thought is “what am I prepping for?” and my answer is that event which is most likely to happen. In my town, that’s a power outage from an ice storm. So I have propane heaters, crank radios, batteries aplenty, solar charger for cellphones and tablets, and lanterns. I can hold out for two weeks without power.

What next? Perhaps some kind of urban unrest which would make it ill-advised to leave the house. The above, plus a water supply, canned goods, weapons and ammo for defense. The siege of Vicksburg last 40 days. That’s the mark for me.

After that, I contemplate EMP/loss of electrical grid, nuclear/biologic warfare, extreme natural disasters (extinction levels), and I haven’t the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed for the basic insurance against these kinds of disasters. I own arable land and have potable ground water, but what are we to do once there? Eat the grass? Plow with a trowel (no draft animals). In these type of events, even the Amish will struggle mightily.

@dc

If the conditions you describe come to pass, desperate people aren’t going to be buying food from you. They are going to be stealing and robbing food from you.

@guest,

If I were alone, that would happen. If I were part of a reasonably locally-populous and well-armed/ well-trained community who valued my ability to produce food and water and etc. so much that they would protect me as well as eachother from the stealers and robbers, would that still happen?

Anyway, if someone isn’t planning for things to get that bad, then what are they getting gold and silver for?

Also, someone named Kurt Saxon wrote a little about the ” killers and robbers” scenario.

https://www.survivalplus.com/philosophy/THE-KILLER-CARAVANS.htm

HeyPhil in KC, you just gave me a wonderful inspiration; I am going to learn how to make potato vodka. Oh, and how to grow some killer ganja. I’m getting too old to do strenuous labor, I have great gardening skills, tons of quart jars. No one will mess with their hooch and weed producer. Especially during hard times.

On a slightly more serious note, making and having good relations with neighbors and friends is on the top of my list. We grow and share our organic fruits and vegetables. Everyone loves our jams. In return we get all the help we need in doing around the house repairs,etc. We have no plans whatsoever of moving away from the best neighborhood we’ve ever lived in. People have begun to learn how to help one another, and how to ask for help here.

There is no better place to run away to. Make wherever you’re at the best place to be. Be a good neighbor. Treat everyone with respect. Be willing to help when others need it. You’ll end up with a home you’re happy with in a neighborhood you want to spend the rest of your life in.

Learn medical skills. I don’t want to be flip about it, but it’s not that hard, and there’s a ton of information online and in actual books to get practically anyone conversant with first aid and a lot more.

Learn as much about alternative medicine as you can. But don’t neglect to learn about standard western medicine, too. It’s not going to be a whole lot of good without a lot of equipment, machinery and likely unavailable drugs, but you can become familiar enough with processes and procedures, anatomy and certain quick fixes that are used in standard medicine to be useful.

All of that is an important skill to share when everything goes to shit. Now is the time to learn.

So to the topic on hand, once I had a budget and a bit of savings this was the first thing I bought:

https://www.amazon.com/Cocoweb-PortBlock-Dual-Function-Door-Security/dp/B00PSPSE6E

Now you might not be able to get this exact model but there a numerous equally good substitues. I was still living in an apartment at the time I bought this, I wanted a little extra security without pleading with the landlord to install something on the door. This was the best of my limited options.

I didn’t get it at the time but an inexpensive door alarm that goes off if the door is forced open would have been a good idea. You can find these online for very little.

My last piece of advice for this weeks’s discussion (and one plenty of others have hinted at already) is that all modern conveniences and modern logistics networks are ways of reducing “Time Per Task” (TPT).

When you don’t have these TPT reducers nearly everything you do will take twice as long and that will make you physically/mentally exhausted.

You will either have to piecemeal your projects or set aside large spans of time to completely finish them. The phrase “done in an afternoon” won’t be uttered by you.

Solar power and hot water. Since the house has many hips and gables and solar panels are almost impossible, we are putting metal rooves on the front porch and rear kitchen and installing thin film solar sheets that are almost as effective. Also, we’re exploring solar water heating, which we’ll have to get into the attic spaces at the top of the house. We have many large trees overhanging the house, so the goal is just enough to keep refrigeration going and get water heated. Storms in the last five years have caused numerous three-hour to three-day power outages. Fortunately, in the meantime, my rear neighbor whose street seems impervious to power outages lets me run a power cord into his basement to run our refrigerator and freezer. I hate the noisy generators everyone has now, although we used diesel generators for three hours at night to provide electricity in Nigeria, where I grew up. It’s when we did anything that needed electricity.

None of these limitations bothers me whatsoever. My wife and community are a little perplexed by my advocacy for turning most of the K-12’s school football and baseball fields (leave one, we have four for 350 students) into community gardens and for installing solar panels on their massive roofs. It would take at least three years to get the toxic chemicals out of the soils. So far, we’ve only managed to get a small community garden started for the students to learn how to grow vegetables. Smiling helps. Providing generous support and meals to newcomers and families who have experienced a tragedy or something to celebrate helps. The pandemic has been an eye-opening experience.

Joan’s ideas on using local skills/fabrication/manufacture in preference to getting everything from China are good. Basic machining/woodworking used to be part of education, in the FDRist run city I grew-up in they had various shops* at parks throughout the neighborhoods. Those shops are no longer there, when the neoDs took over the Democratic Party, like good neoliberals, they removed all the publicly owned workshops and…any other traces of government directly helping people help themselves.

Having skills or surplus food to trade is a good thing. Last year when my peaches came in I was able to trade them for Ling cod and snapper. I grow artichokes, blueberries, plums, prunes, Anjou & Bosc pears, alongside chives, basil, oregano, onions on a tiny hillside lot. The pear lasted until Christmas. This year I am going to bring a TIG welder into my small daylight basement/garage/shop. I want to purchase and wire, but not install, solar panel equipment with enough capacity for refrigeration, light and water pump. Water. If you don’t have enough water for a month…you will die. Don’t spend a fortune, use your empty soda bottles or similar such waste items to store water, enough for a month without power. And get keep some incandescent bulbs.

It’s too late now to learn how to use a rifle and get ammo, so forget about it. In urban areas where every hoodlum will have a weapon/ammo and every “liberal/pregressive/lefty” will be without…it will be difficult to survive even something as minor as a thirty day loss of power. Even if you did have a weapon, you’d be likely to face attack for resources on the premise that, statistically, gang-bangers will assume you don’t have firearm. Acting like you do own a firearm, is a defense and deterrence is the best defense.

Not that I am not a big believer in a social shtf, that said, I know how effective even a mild EMP is in destroying an electronic equipment that has an amplification circuit in it…which describes about 99.99% of electronic equipment. Remember, EMPs do not have to come from man-made sources, the sun has repeatedly sent EMPs our way. The electronic age, in it’s present form, is, at best, only 40 years old.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/trump-signs-executive-order-to-make-america-resilient-to-emps/
___________

But as a caution:

Rural land has been bought up…all across the inhabitable west by wealthy urban elites. With interest rates at extreme lows and taxation that encourages people to buy property and not develop there are “bolt holes” throughout rural WA, IA, OR, northern CA where-ever there is water.

Rural space may look empty but, it’s owned and it’s owners can hold the land as a “bolt hole” for many decades due to a poorly developed tax scheme that impoverishes locals at the expense of absentee land owners who will want to make a killing if they sell or, hold it indefinitely as a refuge. Frankly, given the daily harm these personal “land trusts” create, I doubt many of their owners will face a warm welcome when they show up in a crisis.

I should have mentioned earlier the importance of being part of a resilient community, whether its the folks on your block, in your apartment building, your church or club, or any social assembly where people know you and care about you. I just took it for granted, but I shouldn’t have. it is a point that has been made on this site repeatedly, and it is a good point.

If you don’t have a community, then you will have to hunker down wherever you can and maybe wait it out.

In a SHTF situation, gangs bent on plunder are more likely to look for the easiest solution. A well-organized group of folks who know and trust each other presents a more formidable obstacle. A single person, no matter how well armed, is much easier to pick off.

Joan, that’s rapidly changing. Our town amended its ordinances to allow chickens, rabbits, almost anything you can keep in a coop. Also, the town removed all grass and height requirements and strongly encourages native plantings and wild flowers. Everyone with any time is starting to garden, and the place is looking much wilder and more interesting. Of course, the big, stone houses (mostly doctors) on the other end of town still have magnificent lawns and shrubbery all groomed by armies of recent immigrants.

As for the “go someplace rural” notion:

That reminds me of the Minnesotan D Congressmen who, during the Jan. 6th Planned Trump Riot, thought that a good response fro him and his fellow Ds was to join a group of Rs to “blend in”—only to look at some of his fellow Ds and realize (as they were non-whites) that they could never “blend in”.

There is a reason we have the differences in diversity in our rural/urban divides. For some groups, rural America is simply not safe. The reason why they went to the cities and formed communities there was for self-protection. I recall a story in the 1920s, when a group of KKK in Indiana thought they’d travel up to Notre Dame University to ‘beat up some Catholics’ only to get the holy crap knocked out of them by the Catholic students there. In my own university days, I recall some redneck (but privileged) types who went to the gay part of town to “beat up some queers”, and they got beat up by the gays. Moreover, while urban police/minority relations aren’t great, they’re still probably an order of magnitude better than those in rural America. The police did come to that fight provoked by the rednecks, and it was the rednecks, not the gays, who got arrested.

It depends on the dystopia you’re trying to deal with. If you’re talking about the most immediate danger (a civil war breaking out) for some going rural could be very bad. But even if you’re talking about climate change, I’m not sure most rural Americans today will cope very well; they’re not prepared for it well either.

@StewartM,

Those rural people who are manmade global warming deniers will be even worse prepared for it as it overtakes them.

Mary, huh? I don’t know of any town governments like that. That’s a very odd concept, and I’m not sure why a leftist government would want a monopoly on food production. You seem to be channeling Stalin and Ukraine, but he was not exactly a leftist in the way we use it in the US.

I can see trying to manage/regulate distribution to ensure that everyone gets their fair share. My neighbors and I all share garden tools, seeds, you name it. I give bags of surplus tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, and other delights to my neighbors who don’t have the time to garden (too many kids) or the elderly. I would can the surplus in high season, but don’t have the time.

At the moment, with 10″ of snow and ice on the ground, I am starting my seedlings in the basement. I start hundreds of them under fluorescent light and give away 2/3 to neighbors for their gardens when they are 6″-12″ high in early April. Many neighbors don’t plant from seed and seedlings at the local nurseries are very expensive.

@Ian Welsh,

Thank you for starting up a ” surviving the hard times ahead” thread.

@everyone else,

If a commanding majority of us treat this opportunity to stockpile survival information here in one growing place, then any trollish minority who do otherwise can be easily seen and deleted, thus enhancing the usefulness of this growing thread.

If enough people bring enough high value information, concepts, links, sources, etc. to this thread over time, word may spread and this thread may gain more and more readers. Could this thread eventually attract a hundred million readers? Let us each do our small part to make it so.

I don’t know the mechanics of how threads work. So I don’t know if this one thread will be allowed to get longer and longer or whether we might be offered further “start-again” hard-times-survival-threads once every Saturday, as against this post being re-posted every Saturday for the one thread to grow longer and longer.

But since this is the Hard Times Survival/Preparation Thread for now, this would be the place to keep adding more such information.

A few weeks back, Astrid wrote a comment with enough high value information about some good gardening books and other resources, that I decided it might be copying right here on this dedicated thread.

Astrid PERMALINK
January 19, 2021
I’ve probably read thousands of garden books and own hundreds (most from “friends of library” sales but many I paid near full price for). I’m not sure there are many that I regularly refer to. Honestly I’ve came up with a system that mostly works for me. I tweak it every so often and incorporate new ideas I see online or in books. For plant specific advice, Johnny’s Select Seed and Southern Exposure Seed Company probably has the best growing advice for the East Coast. For perennials/shrubs/and trees, specialist growers and specialist boards will likely provide the best advice. For general information, Gardenweb (interface and ads suck now but) still has archives full of opinions and advice on pretty much every garden topic you can think of.

What works for me (keep in mind that I’m only intensively gardening on about 3,000 sqft total) is an initial dig to get rid of turf and tough perennials, ideally followed by a crop of green manure to compete out the annual weeds (I’ve never actually gotten around to planting green manure because I’m that land hungry), followed by building no-dig rows with 4-6″ of compost. I don’t have a lot of problems with weeds, just don’t let them go to seed and they’re easy to control except for bindweeds. I get free compost at my community garden and very cheap wood chip and compost from my municipality, so I top dress my beds every year with compost and/or wood chips in the spring and compost or fallen leaves in the fall. Most other people may have more land and less access to woodchips/compost, so green manure should be more important to their soil building scheme.

For books – I recommend checking these books out from the public library before buying any of them, then sign up for emails on their publisher’s website. Chelsea Green is one of my favorite publishers and runs good sales regularly. Mostly, I like these books because they feel lived in. Not just lists and schematics and solutions, but people who actually experienced triumphs and failures in their gardening/farming:

Timber Press’s Regional Vegetable Garden Guides are pretty good general guide

The Flower Farmer by Lynn Byczynski is good if you’re consider going into business on some scale (I am not)

Carol Deppe’s books are all very good and helpful in practically thinking about self sufficiency

The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier has some excellent innovations on doing things efficiently and writes clearly. Elliot Coleman can also be good, but I feel he’s prosyltizing too much on his ways.

The Backyard Homestead is a good starter guide for thinking about all pieces of a homestead including orcharding, cereals, animal husbandry, etc. But you’ll need to fill in the gaps. Think of it as the updated US counterpart to John Seymour’s Self Sufficient Gardener.

Sunset’s Western Garden Book, if you’re anywhere out west or even if you’re not. Sunset zones make much more sense than USDA zones in the west.

A good book on pruning – Lee Reich’s book is decent

Ed Smith’s The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible is a good one for home gardeners

If you’re interested in orcharding, a couple orcharding books and at least one that covers grafting.

Vita Sackville-West’s The Illustrated Garden Book – comfort reading for me, the reason why I have 150 rose bushes in my yard and 400 rooting cuttings in my bathroom.

An American Cutting Garden by Suzanne McIntire – her observations ring very true to someone who also gardened in DC area community gardens.

Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs – this is the most sensible and practically minded books on the subject

I listen to the Davis Garden Show (Davis, CA), Garden Basics with Farmer Fred (Sacramento, CA), and A Way to Garden (near the Berkshires on the New York State side) on podcast. They have mostly sooth voices and sensible advice.

I suspect that for the first few weeks, many of the comments will be about the “why” and “how much” and “for how long” of survivalism and preparationism and so forth. There will be partially-at-least philosophical discussions of the reasons for these topics, which could well help us all sharpen up our thinking. And that will allow us to bring over here better, more informative, more actionable material-information resources when we all decide to do that.

In that vein, here are some items about Teodor Shanin and the sub-discipline he helped found and start . . . “peasantology”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teodor_Shanin
https://www.verdant.net/informaleconomy.htm
https://eng.yabloko.ru/Books/Shanin/chayanov.html
and a bunch of images from here and there around the web . . . images of Teodor Shanin himself. Why? Because I have discovered that when using Yahoo’s All The Web ( before Verizon decides to cancel it), every image has its source-URL clearly noted and clearly clickable.
And some of those URLs turn out to come from interesting sites and blogs and such. Each such URL is a wormhole-portal to somewhere, and some of the somewheres are worth going, and NONE of them would EVER be found by using the crappy Search Prevention Engines we have today. So here is that link too.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A2KIbZzh8CpgKZ4AlxxXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=teodor+shanin+peasantology&fr=sfp

I’ve been very happily delving into Charles Dowding’s YouTube channel recently. I think I’ve ignored his books until now because he is English and gardens in a very different climate from eastern USA, but his general advice on no till and multi-sowing are very reasonable for most gardeners. They’re also well produced and he has a calming and soothing presentation.

I think gardening is a good hobby, but for people who aren’t interested they’re better off with a CSA subscription. I subscribe to one locally that comes out to less than $25/week for good looking organic produce sufficient for a family of 4. It would include a lot of things that are tricky to grow, such as carrots and celery,c and ones that take a lot of space such as sweet corn and winter squash. Even if my labor was free, seeds, water, soil amendment, tools, etc could easily add up to a couple hundred each year.

Different Clue added this helpful reminder during a cold time.

different clue PERMALINK
February 16, 2021
Off thread but . . .

. . . Much of the mid-southern and southern US is going to get 10 degrees or colder Fahrenheit tonight. Many houses there are not built to withstand such cold. Here’s a way to lower the chance of having your pipes freeze and maybe burst.

Turn a cold water faucet on to a slow dripping trickle and leave it running while temperatures are at or under 10 degrees. Do the same with a hot water faucet. Running water is much harder to freeze than still water.

If the heating still works in your house, turn up the heat to about 76 degrees or so and leave it there till the Cold Emergency passes.

@Astrid,

My advice on dripping faucet water would work and does work here in Michigan, where the gas and electric systems have been designed to withstand subzero weather.

But in Texas, the heat itself went off too. In that case, with the houses getting as cold as the outdoors itself, the faucets would have to be run much faster than just a trickle or a drip. I hadn’t thought of the heat itself going out when I offered that advice.

Probably in future such situations in the South or the Deep South, which will happen with our new unstable jet streams wandering around as they do now, people with advice about shutting off and blowing all the water out of in-house water line systems or putting antifreeze in all the pipes or other such measures which I do not know how to apply . . . . would have more to offer than I had.

Of course, in future near-zero events in the South . . . IF the heat stays on, then my drippy faucets advice would be good enough, just as it is up here.

I think there’s a fair amount of discussion here with regard to preserving a homestead in a Mad Max style collapse. Something akin to “prepping” from a discovery channel show, but more benign. There isn’t a tremendous amount of advice on some more practical steps, for instance preservation of wealth, etc. I know that sometimes that sort of advice seems anathema to the spirit of things, and often when it’s heard, it’s that advice spouted by evangelicals of gold or “cryptos”.

To me there has always been something pathetic, anti-historical and anti-human to the notion of post-collapse homesteading. It is something that appears to be defiant, but is rather submissive. How does anyone expect to survive alone. I understand that it’s likely a cultural phenomenon that arose in the wake of the atom. As opposed to previous collapses ours would be the final one. We have enough history behind us to doubt this.

So first off, I characterized what follows as a more practical step because as opposed to preparing for an eventual collapse I am of the opinion that we are undergoing that collapse now. It has all the human misery and tragic comedy, but lacks the dramatics of the cinematic variants were used to. I’m our collapse there is some integrity to some institutions. In our collapse we are like those Soviets at their end of days, our system is failing but the world is moving right along. A sentiment that has been expressed with more frequency these days is Gramci’s “time of monsters.” I agree and the best defense for a monster, as those Japanese movies taught us, is your own monster.

We have plenty here in the USA. Your politicians, your militarized police, your corporations, the list goes on. If you’re charismatic and connected enough to become a politician, chances are you’re not part of this discussion. There is a fair amount of people that consider arsenal gathering a part of collapse preparation. I am a gun owner and see nothing wrong with owning a gun for provisioning or self defense. But if you think an arsenal is going to keep you safe, you may have more than the two biological arms nature endowed me with.

The final monster in the short list above is the corporation. I’ve always sensed an underlying socialist streak to the majority of the participation here, so please note that I characterize the corporation as a monster. In this collapse we are experiencing you see a consolidation of corporate power over government, as a matter of fact the capitulation of our government to corporate power is the root cause of our collapse. The great irony in all this is that the collapse of government power begets a collapse of pesky constructs like legality. Ultimately this renders corporate power null and void. What are all the bankers going to work for, what are all the security guards, cops and soldiers going to break necks for, if there is no full faith and no credit to the US government and its dollar?

To that last question some would say, gold! Or Bitcoin! Both share the one underlying glitch. They are hard to acquire in “physical” form and for lay people even harder to deploy. Sure you can go to the CME and buy gold, take a look at the “delivery” mechanism. Good luck ever getting your hands on your gold. You can do the same for Bitcoin and I’d ask you the same. Both gold and Bitcoin in their “investible” formats are legal constructs that require a government authority to validate their value. Gold in its physical construct at least has some intrinsic value, but crypto value is its dollar denomination; I’ll let you think through that tautology.

This leaves only a specific breed of monster for you to hide behind. One whose authority doesn’t require the protection of the US government. One that you can legally access now. And one that you could access in the future. The first characteristic indicates a foreign corporation or one that is global enough that it will weather the storm. The second characteristic indicates something you can purchase today with few legal restrictions, so Chinese or Russian corporations are out of the running. The third may even mean that you can physically be present to make your claim to the relevant legal authorities.

Now this isn’t speculative investment advice, I’m not saying you’ll get rich or beat some benchmark return. But bearing in mind the notion of collapse and preparation I think Canadian equities, in particular banks, for the mold. I prefer them to gigantic US multinationals that may weather the storm such as Apple. The US multinational may pay a dividend denominated in USD, the Canadian bank in CAD. We aren’t worried about relative performance of currencies, the worry is the collapse of a currency. Ease of purchase is self-evident. And finally depending on where you are in the US, Canada is likely one of two countries that is “nearby”.

I apologize for the tackiness of talking money matters, and I’m definitely not certain of anything so welcome any and all advice. Particularly those suggestions that fulfill the three characteristics of: no need of US legal protection, present ease of access and future ease of access.

There is some really great advice here, and I want to thank you all, especially Ian, for the information provided and the existence and quality of this thread.

To me, it’s not going to be a nationwide overnight crash-and-burn scenario. Too many vested interests still seeking profits. (This situation should, however, be reassessed constantly.) To me, it’s going to be a continual, gradual change/decline in living standards, such as one day no longer having grocery stores full of summer vegetables in the middle of winter (or they are so expensive only the rich can afford them, which is already pretty much true). Ignoring the bleating of the MSM, the real changes have been very gradual, if you think about it, and I think that will continue. Tails they win, heads we lose will also continue.

We’ve been adjusting to change for many years now without really even thinking about it much. I don’t want people to get discouraged or think “it’s too late” because it isn’t. The reality is that support for disaster relief will be withdrawn but over time, some areas will be abandoned entirely in the future, here in the US we are on our own for healthcare, and the focus on profit over life (of any kind) will continue. As gnohgnok noted, there’s variation in how areas are responding to these changes, and replacing what “they” provide is the key. In other words, making “them” irrelevant to our lives in every way possible.

So, the most important thing is to stay vigilant to what is happening in your area in terms of general trends in weather, climate, social, and political activities, in addition to changes occurring at the national level. The other is to keep your own mind and body as fit as possible. Learning a useful (low tech) skill that can be bartered is also a good idea.

One of the things getting me through both the pandemic and everything else has been my study of Taoism, which is really about accepting things as they are and being able to focus instead on what’s really important (to you). It’s much more than that, but absolutely no one will preach Taoism to you, it’s not a religion, it’s more like common sense and what to do when all about you are either losing their minds or driving you crazy. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s probably saved my life, as I’ve been fighting depression for awhile now. What we are dealing with, I think, is loss: of loved ones, of the future that we had envisioned, of our basic understanding of the world and our part in it. Taoism has lots of general good advice. Look for a podcast called What’s This Tao All About, and start at the very beginning.

Speaking of advice, any advice on places to live or what to look for in a place to live are welcome. I’m looking to get away from Swamp Central.

What we are dealing with, I think, is loss: of loved ones, of the future that we had envisioned, of our basic understanding of the world and our part in it.

The last part is the hardest for me.

Trinity, I’ve been framing my “depression” as a sensitive, sensible response to a sick society. It’s not completely debilitating, so I feel fortunate I have the capacity to mindfully take that approach to it.

Ultimately, we’re just here for less than 100 years each. Take it as a privilege to enjoy and learn what you can. Yes, there’s almost certainly going to be great suffering amongst people we know and people we will never know. Although we are all culpable and responsible in the tiniest way, we don’t have to bear all the responsibility and all the pain along the way. Don’t get too attached to life or death, wrongness or rightness.

Whether by intention or not, those remarks could very well been uttered by a multi-billionaire psychopath. Or be the motto of the entire class of them.

If you care to make the effort, make a search for the terms Humans As A Geological Force. Yes, the rock and water of the Earth will remain after we’ve done our worst. But Earth’s biosphere will be finished. A few scattered species may or may not survive. Even a few humans could persist. But not anything which could remotely be defined as “civilization”.

This thread is about surviving the small screwups we might encounter. Within the lyrics of “I dreamed a dream” from Les Miserables is this: “… And there are storms we cannot weather”.

If nothing is done about man-made climate change except for useless exercises like “The Paris Accords”, the coming storm will be one of those “we cannot weather”.

I was once discussing with someone the possibility of enough people within a Power Company’s service area reducing their additive individual electric usages by more than the waste-people could increase theirs by. And maybe attriting the utility’s revenue stream by enough to reduce its political power.

He said, if you could do that, the utility would just raise its prices to restore its revenue stream to what it was before. I thought and said, unintended genius! If the utility company did that, then the waste people might be confronted with a high enough price rise that they too would be forced to use less electricity.

I don’t know if a powerful semicott within a particular utility’s service area would force that response. But it would be an interesting experiment.

I think what Cesar described up above might be what I have read the Air Force refers to as ” degrade gracefully” in its own war-fighting context. I found a similar definition taken from another context.
https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/graceful-degradation
Perhaps if enough people adopt a lifestyle of graceful partial collapse, they may be able to guide society itself ( or at least their own regionalocal parts of society) from the hard collapse path onto a graceful degradation path, leaving many people able to survive usefully at the end of it.

I live on a power grid called DTE Energy. I remember one time years ago, I used little enough electricurrent per day that the bill said basically, ” you did not use enough power this month for us to be able to charge for the power used, so we are charging you the electric hookup fee.”

The bill was pretty small. I gather that most people on DTE use enough power that they can charge enough for the power that they don’t need to charge a hookup fee. ( The gas side charges a gas hookup fee regardless). So they made less off me that month than they make from most people most months. And I don’t mind paying a hookup fee to be able to have power when I need it. The grid and the power are real things.

But the less power I use, the less of my money DTE needs to send along to coal,gas and oil companies to make power with.

Idle thoughts

Few people have a stock of properly stored seeds, so come crunch time they may have to “punt”. Popcorn is corn seed. I’ve ground it into cornmeal with a cheap hand mill, but the work left me dripping with sweat. Making corn flour from the popped kernels would obviously be much easier, but this is something I’ve never tried. Pintos are bean seed. Here in Indiana producing “soup” beans is difficult because of the rotting of the pods in late summer. (I understand the commercial products are grown in irrigated deserts where they just turn off the water and fairly soon can bring in the combines.) I’d plan on trying to go with “hull outs” where the mature bean seeds are shelled from the pods and promptly canned. If no canning lids are available, I’d try drying the beans on sheets of metal – perhaps atop a building with a shallow pitched galvanized roof. As a little kid I watched a relative dry “green beans” that way on the roof of a chicken-house.

Next Halloween consider saving the seeds from the carved pumpkin to add to the rest of the seed stocks. Or scooping out the watermelon seeds next time those are served. Watermelon flesh can be boiled down in giant kettles into a fine sweet syrup. To save the seeds of that fabulous tomato Aunt Millie gave you, spread them on the cheapest type of paper plate and let them dry there. Label it with name and date. Commercial “seed” potatoes are ideal because they were carefully grown to avoid viral contamination, but despite being sprayed to inhibit sprouting, spuds from the produce department will usually (eventually) sprout, and they can be carved up so as to have at least one “eye” to plant. Onions are biennials, but you can produce seed for next year by planting a few large or small bulb in the garden.

Power machinery is awfully nice for preparing a garden spot, but our ancient ancestors made-do without it. Check your supply of long-handle round-blade utility shovels. If you already have a couple, put on some heavy gloves and sharpen them with a file or power grinder! A few people can do a slow-motion “plowing” operation with the shovels. You’ll need some heavy sharp hoes as well. Soils are loaded with what seems like unlimited amounts of grass/weed seeds, and those unwanted plants must be kept from taking over your vegetable plot.

Canning lids prices are currently at unbelievable levels. If you can’t acquire an affordable supply, look into large-scale solar drying. This will require acquiring some materials and locating good plans from the internet or Library. The dehydrated food will need to be kept dry, and that’s a reason to save used canning lids recovered from opened food jars. Though they’re 1-time use for pressure canning, the recovered flats will still be fine for airtight seals on jars of dried foods and stored seeds. Learn how to store turnips and the like in earth pits. I once went with an uncle to his old earth-floor barn where he dug out enough for the coming meal. (The barn roof kept rain and snow from being an issue.)

People might consider contacting a relative in tobacco growing country to get some seeds. Besides the obvious uses of the weed, smoke from much larger burning quantities can de-louse a small building. Old farm books had many other uses for the highly poisonous plant.

Non-standard foods – consider acorns. I’ve never been successful making the things edible, but plenty of other people have! If the stone-age California Indians could do it, why can’t I?

During WW2 the US sent the USSR 36,000 tons of seeds during the Lend Lease program. I assume most of those were vegetable seeds the citizens could plant in their version of “Victory” gardens. The Germans had captured the best farm lands, and every available plot needed to be planted with something which could be eaten. Starvation wasn’t on the scale of the Nazi-occupied lands, but hunger was never far away for the Russian peoples during WW2.

You can reuse canning jar lids, just wash them carefully, precondition them in hot water, and be tolerant of a slightly higher failure rate. They have a dimple that tells you if the seal is good or bad. So not much danger as long as you check the seal before eating. I am planning to buy a hundred boxes once the prices return to normal

For popcorn, I would just parch/pop and eat. Even if you have access to lime and make masa, I imagine it would be pain to grind down popcorn. Better off using decorative Indian corn for seeds, they should be a little easier to process than popcorn but you may still want too learn how to make lime and masa.

Corn would be really low on my survival for list, though above other cereals. Amaranth and quinoa have edible greens as well as seeds. Sunflower is easy to process and highly nutritious. Corn takes a lot of space and nitrogen and water to grow well. I would really hope that even in a partial breakdown, you can get access to bulk food like flour, rice and beans. So hopefully just worry about growing veggies and fruit and protein to supplement.

I would focus on growing sweet potato (vines are excellent greens and they’re not much buggered by disease or insects), organic potatoes (assuming conventional potatoes are sprayed with a sprouting inhibitor), and various beans from grocery bulk bins. Soy beans are probably a good place to start, some they are a good fresh, dried, or sprouted. Blackeye peas are also probably better for high humidity situation. People with zone 7 or warmer weather can grow fava beans, which also has excellent greens. You might be able to grow squash from seeds, but a lot of them are now hybrids so no guarantees there.

For survival food, hard to beat Jerusalem artichoke. It has zero insect or disease issues for me. Yield bountifully with minimal water or fertilizer. Just thin it out so the plants are at least 1 feet apart and preferably have 3-4 square feet each. I have trialed about 10 varieties and Supernova from Oikos and the strain sold by FedCo are by far the best. Large, good tasting, and bear close to main stem. Make sure it’s a separate patch, because there will always be so many volunteers.

You can buy seeds cheaply as sprouting seeds, in the range of about $5-10 per pound. Just be aware that these would just be a stop gap and are likely to have high number of off types. If you can afford the space and costs, buy some basics from Sandhill Preservation Center, Southern Exposure Seed Company, FedCo, Gourmet Seeds,cand Wild Garden seeds. Stored in fridge or freezer in a freezer bag with dessicants, I get good sprouting for about 10 years for most crops except onions and okra, which are probably good for 3 years.

I recommend watching some of Charles Dowding’s YouTube videos. I do no till(aka no dig) and have an easier time with weeds than any of my neighbors in my community garden. There is more and more research that digging is unnecessary and detrimental to soil. Too much soil prep actually prevent the plants from growing into the native soil.

I find that the top 4 tools in my kit are a 5 gallon bucket, an expanding hose, a hand hoe, and a digging fork.

https://www.ianwelsh.net/preparing-for-bad-times-thread/#comment-124530

You can reuse canning jar lids, just wash them carefully, precondition them in hot water, and be tolerant of a slightly higher failure rate. They have a dimple that tells you if the seal is good or bad. So not much danger as long as you check the seal before eating. I am planning to buy a hundred boxes once the prices return to normal

So would I, but when writing things a rank amateur might see, it’s best to stick to The Book. There are a few brands of can lid flats whose rubber seal won’t rebound, but most recover well enough for a second use. The ‘failures’ would be consumed at the next meal. If that “dimple” is still down months later, the food inside is as safe as any other. If not, the contents must be discarded in any event.

Good point about the decorative corn. This would be an instance of storing your corn seed in plain view.
Relying on corn as a main survival food really is problematical. We’ve already seen major waves of crop wipeout from disease, and more could appear at any time. Worse, a new one might have had some “assistance” from an unfriendly nation or terrorist group.
One final problem: a diet consisting mostly of corn can be extremely unhealthy. The Indians of the Southwest commonly known as Anasazi went through some very bad times where a little corn was about all they had to eat. A new theory has an explanation for their behavior:

Niacin Rescues Cannibalistic Hamsters
The Historical Significance of 1940s Mandatory Niacin Enrichment
by W. Todd Penberthy, PhD

(OMNS, Feb 28, 2017) In a newly published research study, Tissier and colleagues at the Universite ‘ de Strasbourg, France, identified wild hamsters that were eating primarily corn monoculture diets and exhibiting siblicide and maternal infanticide. Cannibalism was one of the theories for the decline of their population. Mother hamsters fed exclusively corn would take their pups, place them together with the stashes of corn they had stored in the cage, and start eating their young. Siblicide was also observed. Only 5 percent of the offspring of the females fed corn survived. The rest were eaten. For the other group fed a varied diet, 80 percent of the babies survived. However, supplementation of corn diets with just vitamin B3 (niacin) prevented the aggressive cannibalistic behavior.[1]

Natives in Mexico somehow learned to avoid this problem by treating their corn with lime.

No idea. Never tried making cornmeal from scratch before. I have sprouted popcorn before and did not enjoy the taste, so I don’t think sprouted ground corn would taste good to me.

I did assume that grinding with skin would result in a lot of gritty skin pieces that would need to be shifted out, but according to this article, they’re fine to keep in. It seems like grain mill is the way to go.

https://www.seriouseats.com/2013/03/diy-cornmeal-from-popcorn.html

If you have a choice, grow flour corn and it’s much easier to grind. Having said that, In 2019, I grew Cascade Ruby Gold (https://www.adaptiveseeds.com/product/vegetables/corn/flint-corn-cascade-ruby-gold-organic/) and glass gem popcorn. The former was bred by Carol Deppe to provide different flavor dried corn (it has 4 colors from gold to maroon) for different purposes. The latter is ubiquitous online for good reason, it’s really beautiful and fairly easy to grow. I recommend starting with that one if you want to dip your toe in growing dry corn. Their pretty enough to be given as gifts even if the popping wasn’t too good.

Luckily, I am old enough that I can rationally believe that I die a few decades prior to global climate change induced starvation killing billions of people on this planet.

These billions will die because the crops needed to feed them, rice, wheat, corn and soy, each require a narrow band of both temperature and precipitation to grow. In the future, those bands will shrink and disappear.

However, if I were younger and had a family, I would move as far north in North America as I could. Alaska or Northern Canada. I would try to move near a fresh water supply, preferably a lake with fish, that I believed would not disappear during global warming. Make sure there are many trees around for fuel. You are going to have to keep warm during long, very cold winters. I would try to figure out what I and my family could plant and eat that would grow in the shorter growing seasons of the north. I would get some guns, preferably a hunting rifle or two, and stockpile ammunition. Read up on prepper literature, but keep in mind that you are preparing for a world that cannot grow enough food to feed itself for decades and heat that will make large parts of the planet uninhabitable. We aren’t talking about a breakdown of civilization. This will be an extinction level event lasting for hundreds of years.

You and your family will be spending all of your time stockpiling food and fuel to survive each winter. Hope the future wars between starving and waterless India, China and Pakistan don’t use so many nuclear weapons that radiation kills you. Just in case, stock up on those iodine pills that prevent radiation from building up in your thyroid gland.

With luck and skill, you and yours might just prevent the human race from going extinct. Good luck.

https://www.ianwelsh.net/preparing-for-bad-times-thread/#comment-124558

Hope the future wars between starving and waterless India, China and Pakistan don’t use so many nuclear weapons that radiation kills you. Just in case, stock up on those iodine pills that prevent radiation from building up in your thyroid gland.

A nuclear war between India and Pakistan will be a disaster for the rest of the world, but for the most part that won’t involved the radioactive fallout. Headlines:

2013: “NUCLEAR FAMINE:A BILLION PEOPLE AT RISK?” https://www(dot)psr(dot)org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/two-billion-at-risk.pdf

2020: “A regional nuclear conflict would compromise globalfood security” https://www(dot)pnas(dot)org/content/pnas/117/13/7071.full.pdf

If (God forbid) this happens, starvation will be your main problem. But don’t throw away those Iodine pills – Big Corporations are working hard to keep their antique power reactors open WAY past their planned lifetimes. The things were designed for 40 years, and now they’re talking 80 years. Combine that with the cheapskate maintenance of the things, and you’ve got a very good reason to buy even more Iodine pills.

Climate change is affecting the polar regions more extremely than at the tropics. And the polar regions don’t have the fertility or top soil to support any more than their present sparse populations.

Climate change is fast, but human stupidity is faster. So maybe first survive social breakdown in the US in the next 10 year before drawing up plans to join Werner Herzog’s Happy People. You’re assuming that you can survive in the Arctic circle, will be accepted by the local community, and won’t be picked off by the warbands. I would take my chances with temperate non desert northern hemisphere.

Astrid:

I am aware that climate change is effecting the polar regions more extremely than the tropics. However, the reasons for moving to the polar regions are 1) they are relatively under populated and 2) I suspect they will be be cool enough to support human life while the rest of the planet is too hot to do so. “Temperate non desert North America?” Where do you think that will be when we are 6 degrees Centigrade hotter? If it exists, I suspect it will be north of the Arctic Circle.

As far as the polar regions being unable to support more than their present population, I’m sure that’s correct. However, when everywhere else on the planet is suffering from huge depopulation, being part of the sparse, but relatively stable population in the polar regions may be a lifesaver. If our species is lucky, small pockets of people will survive and we won’t go extinct. I’m just trying to point out where those small pockets may be located. Thats the optimist in me.

I also believe if you try to become a member of one of these communities today, you may be accepted by them when the shit hits the fan. I suggest you or your children swiftly marry into the local community.

Society breaking down is of little concern. Civilizations come and go. Rome was sacked. The Aztecs are no more. Yet humans survived. However, climate change isn’t going to spare anyone. We face extinction, along with many, many other species. If you think you have ten years from the first crop failures to live in cities or the suburbs, think again.

TimmyB,

If the Arctic circle is the only survival option within my lifetime, then all hope is already lost. I would not bother to claw for survival in the denuded (and burning) Tiga against hundreds of millions of desperate Russians, Chinese, and others Eurasians.

I am glad you brought this up though. Part of this survival thread should address the terms of survival and making peace with what is possible. I am definitely not interested in survival at any cost. I also don’t have children precisely because I felt it would be unconscionable to bring a child into this unraveling world. So while I’m willing to take precautions to survive some decline and civilization collapse, my solution for the more extreme declines is a relatively painless exit for myself and loved ones.

The other preparation is to live mindfully and relatively happily now. Nobody knows what tomorrow brings, but I think it’s best to try and bring what joy and comfort you can to your life now. Prepare some, but putting yourself through miseries for the extreme outlier scenario that even the best preparation is unlikely to help you survive seems very foolish to me.

I believe that if you and your family can join a community near or in the Arctic Circle that currently has the ability to be self-sufficient, it will improve the chances your genetic material will be passed on to future generations. If that’s not a priority for you, then don’t move.

But, don’t move in the north to a place accessible via roads, rail or ships. You will want to avoid being connected to civilization. Move to a place that you can only get to by a small plane. Away from the coast but on a lake so you have fresh water that may survive climate change. I’d look at the underground water level in case the lake may dry and your progeny will need a well.

I don’t believe that large numbers of people will flood the Arctic and near Arctic because the food they will be looking for isn’t going to be there. And even if millions tried to live in the Arctic, they will not have the food, fuel, shelter, clothing and skill necessary to survive the first winter they experience. Refugees, if they make it to your isolated location, aren’t going to survive.

As far as taking half measures go, why bother? It’s philosophical question, I know. We people currently living can take measures to prolong our lives. But those measures won’t mean shit to our grandchildren and great grandchildren. Those people are fucked no matter how many Krugerrands, solar panels or dried beans you have.

@Astrid via @differentclue, I saw your very good book list — we have many of the titles and look forward to checking into others from your list. Another book with a wealth of information that I didn’t see on the list and that we have found extremely useful is John Jeavon’s How to Grow More Vegetables. It’s specifically about the Biointensive method but the extensive charts regarding the seed starting and planting of dozens and dozens of all types of plants, plus the diagrams and tables are useful no matter how you want to grow food. A more abbreviated version is also available as The Sustainable Vegetable Garden.

A good thing to know about is how to get food that grows without any extra human effort. This could include foraged and hunted food, and we can also be finding out what food-giving plants (native or otherwise) grow unbidden in the specific places we live and planting or otherwise encouraging them on any piece of land that we have access to. Here in Central Texas that would include things like Prickly Pear cactus aka in these parts by its Spanish name of Nopal (Opuntia spp), mesquite, mulberry, dock, dandelion, dewberry (wild blackberry), and yucca, for example.

In our area, a good general resource has been Edible and Useful Plants of the Southwest: Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona by Delena Tull. We own an earlier version by the same author with a slightly different title. A companion volume is How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest by Jill Nokes. I am very sure that a several-minute Google search with the terms “[your region] edible plants” would turn up similar things no matter where you live. To test that statement, I just plugged in “Iowa” (I grew up there) in place of “[no region]” and found a bunch of nice resources. Then just for grins I plugged in “Czech Republic” (cause it seemed random) and still got what looks like useful information.

I imagine the next couple or so weeks of this growing thread will be partly devoted to philosophy of preparation . . . . for what and how much and etc. After those couple of weeks, the comments will hopefully become almost all real-information based, as many already are. Commenters could certainly explain what level of preparation or survivalising their information might be meant to assist.

But as to philosphical discussions which generate their own emotional engagement and investment, I will do my part to avoid that from sinking this thread by not engaging in any. I would not want to see this thread turn into a spinning wheel of hamsters running on meth.

@Astrid,

I was not thinking specifically of you in particular. I was noting an emerging trend toward philosophic-political argument beginning in several directions and I hope we can get it all out of our systems over the next couple or so weeks and then onward to info-dense information.

different clue,

Thank you for that! I seen her referenced by other authors but never sought her out. Just read 2 chapters and it’s fascinating.

Here’s another one in the public domain.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5350 though perhaps not so interesting.

Grow corn by all means, it’s a fascinating subject. Pay attention to where the corn was developed and be mindful that you will likely have greatest success with varieties from a similar climate.

Sandhill Preservation Center probably has a biggest overall collection commercially available (same could be said for their collections of tomatoes, squash, beans, poultry, and sweet potato, vast majority produced by one full time high school teacher – if I ever hit the jackpot I always think I’d buy Glenn Drown out and endown a non-profit expressly for the purpose of preserving and breeding useful plants). J L Hudson will have some interesting oddballs, most of which have been exploited by the savvy marketers at Baker’s Creek (I have very mixed feeling about them – they’re not expensive and the seeds are intriguing, but often underdeliver on quality – in the same tray, I have 95% germination with 2-3 year old basil seeds bought elsewhere and 0-10% germination for 2021 basil seeds from them – they definitely have more off types and low germination issues than any company I still do business with). I think Adaptive Seed has a nice collection for the PNW and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is good for the East Coast. If you want to buy Painted Mountain seeds, buy it from Victory Seeds, they get it directly from the developer of the variety and Victory Seeds is a solid company with an excellent selection of blackeye peas and tomatoes (including great tasting 2-5′ tall”dwarf” tomatoes that are ideal for pot culture and might be supported by your normal tomato cage).

A good beginner’s book on cereal growing (with some coverage of minor grains like buckwheat and sorghum) is Gene Logsdon’s Small-Scale Grain Raising, which also covers some minor grain crops. Do also experiment with minor crops. Most of these will take less work to process and eat, plus sorghum can be used for sweetener and amaranth leaves are tasty. Also, don’t forget potato. Yes, there’s blight and colorado potato beetle, but it’s highly nutritious, tastes good, is easy to grow/process/store. The reason why a million Irish died from the potato famine was precisely because it was so good at letting small poor households feed themselves with a small plot of potato and little else. FedCo and Maine Potato Lady seem to have the cheapest seed potatoes.

https://www.ianwelsh.net/preparing-for-bad-times-thread/#comment-124656

Howard, my memory of Gene Logsdon’s book was that it offered some advice for use in normal times. Another problem (for me) is that I have zero experience with small grains, and don’t own any of the equipment needed for oats or wheat or rye. Not a good combination.

In an old Scientific American article titled “The Year Without a Summer” is an image of a tombstone of a man who died in 1849. On it was a tribute to his somehow managing to grow 40 bushels of wheat in that horrible year – enough to keep his family and some neighboring ones alive. Since few other farmers managed to match his feat, a person has to assume there was a substantial bit of good luck involved.

The 1816 event involved an erupting volcano on the other side of the world, and the world still has plenty of volcanoes! In today’s time a similar event could be on account of a local (or regional) war involving nuclear weapons. If you cannot possibly grow “normal” crops for food, you’re left with a couple of survival choices. 1) have at least a year supply of stored food for everyone. Most of the world is simply too poor to do this. The places which might be able to afford it – won’t. Doing Anything Like This Would Interfere With The Free Market.

This leaves option 2): planting non-standard crops. leafforlife(dot)org/gen/leaf_concentrate.html

Earlier Astrid spoke of plants with edible leaves. Expand that concept to ones with “edible leaf juice”. Problem: I don’t know how to use materials I have laying around – or ones I might reasonably purchase – to squeeze out the leaf juice. Somebody really needs to do some research on the topic of inexpensively grinding and pressing tons of “greens” harvested by everybody in the neighborhood If this could be done, we would have a work-around for super-short growing seasons which don’t come close to producing the edible seeds we normally consume.

@Howard,

Suggestion for this thread seems like a good suggestion. I think I will start headering my comments here.

Some headers I might start using will be . . .Food, Water, Sanitation, Gardening-farming, household energy, any other names people might come up with, and ” Other” for unclassifiable things.

And if someone felt they had a useful comment about “what” we are preparing for or “why” or “what it all means”, that could be given the header Philosophical Thoughts”.

That way, anyone who was not interested in a particular Header/ Headers could bypass that comment.

And hopefully, if anyones start engaging in angry debates, hopefully Ian Welsh can delete those sort of comments fast and hard, so would-be angry debaters are discouraged fast and hard.

https://www.ianwelsh.net/preparing-for-bad-times-thread/#comment-124684

Try making a search for “Leaf Protein Concentrate”. There really is a lot of information out there.

Description

Protein concentrate from plant leaves obtained by extracting the leaf juice and coagulation of the protein. Leaf protein concentrates can be made from many plants, including alfalfa, cereal fodder, beet tops etc.
Processes

Protein synthesis is one of the chief activities of the green part of the plant. Some forage crops produce leaf protein in large quantities of up to 5 tons per hectare – three to four times that of grain crops. The basic technology for separating the leaf protein from the fibrous part or the leaf has been known for about fifty years, but a technology for large-scale production was not developed until the 1970s. The basic steps for the production of leaf protein concentrate (LPC) are grinding the plant and separating the juice by pressing. The protein is dissolved in the juice, after which it is coagulated, usually by heating, and then dried. The machinery needed for large-scale production is expensive, the minimum economical output being about 10 tons of leaf protein per hour – which means that about 5000 hectares are needed for the commercial production of LPC. Smaller machinery has been designed for use at the village level.

This is an unfamiliar technology which also has an expensive startup. As a rule of thumb, you’d pulverize a kilogram (1000 grams) to get an output of 100 grams leaf protein. The finished product would surely supplement whatever other edibles which might be scraped up. Especially if you made it from existing human food crops like kale and spinach. Even now this sort of protein supplementation can make a big difference with babies and little kids in really poor places.

In the past I’ve played around with short-season corn. My Painted Mountain (80-100 days) plantings were all during “normal” seasons, – which may not have been a fair test – for they showed me nothing remarkable. I once planted some Gaspe Flint (70 days) from Quebec, but the productivity here was pitiful. The stuff was very fast growing for sure, but everything about it was also tiny.

Gaspé’s short plants reaching a height of 2 – 2.5 foot. … it tassels within 30 days. The small cobs measure only 3-4″ long.

With cobs being only a few inches off the ground, prepare to defend your crop from critters large and small.

The 1816 volcano event hit the northern parts of the Earth the hardest, but a more substantial eruption – or a series of them – could impact the entire planet. Ditto for mild or major “nuclear winter”. There is no way of predicting how bad a particular event might be. (example: think Jan 1, 2000 covid in US)

With larger seeds like corn and beans a person might germinate them inside, then plant in the still cold June garden soil outside. This might give enough of an edge. A stringless green bean which was allowed to grow till the seeds started becoming prominent in the pods could then be picked, diced into short bits, and dried. (but I’ve found I can ignore “strings” if the bean pods are diced into small enough pieces.)

Schemes to covert wood into edible food require factor-scale operations. I fear that homestead production of mushrooms from dry logs would be nearly a waste of time.

For some situations the best solution is a Government Stockpile, but this won’t happen because anything Government does is evil. Growing numbers say its mere existence is evil. Freezing in the dark isn’t something the Real Men of Texas is afraid of.

Topic: (my) disagreeableness

I’ll pass on the leaf protein. Maybe nettle protein wouldn’t be terrible, but moringa is nasty stuff based on the plants I grew (from Baker’s Creek seeds). I would worry about accumulation of oxalic acid, heavy metal, and pollutants for your scenario. Seems like a lot of hassle for an outlier possibility and hard to do at a household scale. I’ll plan on mealy worms or termites or trapping groundhogs for my end times protein. And it seems like I would still need to figure out a bulk calories source and supplement the missing amino acid.

Early vegetables and cereal will definitely not be impressive. Read the yield guidance for early cauliflower or cabbage versus later ones. The difference can be 3-4x for 3 weeks’ difference. The reason to plant early varieties is because climate, pest, disease, or market conditions justify the lower yield. Still, Abenaki Flint or Cascadia Ruby Gold might be better than painted mountain corn as food, I never grew painted mountain but it had a reputation for not being very tasty.

One of the core responsibilities of most empires is to store several years of cereal against bad harvest years. That lesson was tossed aside since a global supply chain was supposed to protect us from regional poor harvests and market would ensure most efficient distribution. We know that worked out great in 2020 with N95 masks and toilet paper. Now go Marie Kondo your life!

In case of a global food crisis, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have soy/corn pellets going to feedlots while hundreds of millions or billions starved.

So, what would go in your “end of the world” food stash? Sure rice and beans and Spam and canned tuna and dried pasta. What else did you decide you can’t live without in 2020? My answer was apparently a lifetime supply of nduja and spot prawns, which I do believe beats out Nancy Pelosi’s mid market gelato selection (everyone knows Dolcezza is what Washingtonians in the know hoard).

https://www.ianwelsh.net/preparing-for-bad-times-thread/#comment-124704

In case of a global food crisis, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have soy/corn pellets going to feedlots while hundreds of millions or billions starved.

Greed is good. Morality is for the “little people”. No, it wouldn’t surprise me either.

I have this crazy notion of wanting to avoid disasters. Of trying to arrange for everyone possible to live through the unavoidable ones. Notice how little discussion there is these days of how the world is overpopulated. Needless to say, there is even less talk about humanely reducing the numbers. IMO something as simple as paying women quite large annual checks so long as they are childless would work wonders. Slightly lower but substantial payments would be handed out every December when they had only 1 child. I’m talking here about every woman on the planet. Cutting back on the root cause of all the pressure for violence and planet trashing? Surely evidence I’m a mush-brained do-gooder who doesn’t understand the “real world”. Lockheed and others will tell us the money should go for thousands of billions of dollars in new and improved weapons.

What to stockpile? Nobody is alike, and their circumstances vary. Let’s consider what some would call “frills”.

Coffee in Disaster is something you’ll see in the old Civil Defense literature. The main problem is that the stuff is no longer available in the US in vacuum-sealed metal cans. The modern containers are now cardboard with a metallic-looking liner, or flimsy plastic. Both are “sealed” with a thin aluminum top lid held in place with a ring of glue. Unless the modern coffee cans can be frozen, (and they are quite bulky) consider repackaging it in large glass jars with Mason canning lids. Fill the jars by tamping the ground coffee as tightly as possible, then putting on a new canning lid and loose metal ring. Use a vacuum sealer to evacuate most of the air, then finish by tightening the ring. Those lids ought to be usable later for pressure canning if carefully removed. The same system could also keep seeds dry while in a long-term storage freezer. Multi-vitamin tablets don’t need the vacuum, but a tight seal (for the freezer) is a good idea. In situations where food is limited you want to make darned sure your vitamin intake is adequate. It’s been my experience acetaminophen tables are very stable at room temperature, but aspirin most definitely is not. Frozen aspirin is the only way I can see to keep them from spoiling. Having an oversized stock of painkillers seems reasonable, for there are some really awful diseases where pain relief would be about the only treatment available. Shock from extreme pain can kill! Pulling orphan socks over the filled glass jars wouldn’t hurt. Don’t want them to break from inadvertent banging together.

Disaster chocolate is not to be despised. Keeping morale up in really bad situations could be aided by a tiny daily dole of mini-chocolate bars or bits of larger ones. Or less expensively by hard candy. I avoid the soft candies for very long unless I can freeze them.

For those who have enough a yard to plant something in, and who want their very own self-grown source of caffeine for if/when tea and coffee disappear for good, there is the yaupon holly ( Ilex vomitoria) with caffeine-bearing leaves. It got the unfortunate species name “vomitoria” because the Cherokee would mix it with other vomitogenic herbs for springtime purges to greet the spring.
The Ilex itself is not vomitogenic. It is related to the Yerba Mate’ plant of southern South America.

Here is a link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilex_vomitoria

An NC commenter mentioned that the Canadian government is loosening its points system to make up for missing immigration in 2020. I wonder if Australia is considering something similar. It might be worth considering catching this bus if you have the option to be mobile.

Someone asked why we have this thread?

Risk, No Safety Net, and Uncertainty

We can’t count on the feds or anyone else swooping in to restore whatever was lost, be it a structure, water, electricity, or food.

Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and occurring in places not adapted to them (e.g. freezing Texas), fire, hurricanes, pandemics, etc.

And finally just the uncertainty we live with, which can include loss of employment, loss of mobility, loss of support, loss of an asset, loss of health, etc.

I started stockpiling canned food before the pandemic because I was facing uncertainty at my job at that time. Buying a couple extra cans every time you shop really works. I only buy stuff on sale, even drug stores put their stuff on sale occasionally, dollar stores, just be sure to buy things you will actually eat. Same with beans and rice, stored in the fridge. Start with a goal of 30 days of stored food and go from there. Also flavorings such as bouillon, spices, salt, dry gravies, anything to make canned food palatable, etc. Don’t forget canned and dried fruits, although they are rarely on sale in my area. Thirty days of stock buys you some time, and peace of mind, but don’t stop there. Keep going as time and funds allow. It’s now possible to buy individual packets of the “just add water” long-term-storage dehydrated foods, so I’m testing a couple of these at minimal cost to see if I want to invest more money.

For chocolate I would go with semi-sweet chips. Not only a treat, but mood stabilizer, provides energy, no sugar crash, etc. Great for a treat, just not before bedtime. Can be mixed with nuts or oats or dried fruits or peanut butter for a healthy energy boost.

Once you have a decent pantry going, start rotating your food and replacing what you use to keep your supply fresh. Then you can consider longer term things like learning to grow food.

OR think about learning a low-tech but needed skill you can barter with (if the proverbial hits the fan). Apprentice with someone, take a class, develop a YouTube curriculum, and practice! This not only expands your horizons and gets you out of a rut (and focused on something positive) but again and most important of all, it increases your sense of security.

And that’s really what we are all fighting, isn’t it? I’m starting to notice it at work, people are … different. They may be kinder (than they ever were) or have a shorter temper (than they had before) but there is clearly this feeling of impending doom, or at least feeling that things are very unsettled, and these feelings aren’t diminishing with time or speeches or press conferences or the next news cycle. And I work with well paid people and we all have secure jobs. It’s just that little something in the back of the mind that is just there, and making us all feel uneasy. What is the world going to look like in five or ten years? And looking back we can see how much has changed for similar lengths of time.

And that’s really what these activities are about … doing things that will give you the feeling that you do have a little control over your life. That things are going to be okay because you have a little something set aside for the future, whatever that future turns out to be.

I believe the smarter BOB people do cache stashes in roadless area walkable from their home. I agree that outside of extreme situations like extreme hurricanes, fires, or invading armies, shelter in place is the better bet. Not only do you have more resources and protection, you are also more able to protect your long term resource and shelter from destruction. I think the better solution to BOB, if possible, is to have reciprocal relationships with friends/family nearby, to escape to when things get bad. Now is a good time to mend fences if you can. I know a lot of people have lost their humanity but many more are not beyond saving.

A 3 wheel cargo bike would be a great idea, maybe even better would be an electric assist one? Would be an interest business line for bike/atv/golfcart shop owner.

Freeze dried hiker meals can be bought at REI or Costco (search emergency, you don’t need membership to shop most of their online store). I would only consider them for BOB or if you would use them for camping/hiking. They’re expensive and not exactly tasty or hearty. MREs are another option, but apparently quite expensive and I find them gross and unhealthy. In survival situations, I would just pack in some survival rations, a good water filter, and call it a day. Okay, I would also toss in a couple bags of Kirkland brand precooked bacon bits and some of my lifetime supply of nduja and whatever cheese and dried fruit I have around.

For home in outage situations, just stock up your larder with shelf stable items that you’d want to eat. I find Trader Joe’s has the best nut and dried fruit selection, though they never have sales.

Tornadoes have been always been a fact of life in the US of A. It seems to me that they’re on the verge of becoming something which can happen any month of the year.

Basements are good – if you happen to have one. For those who do not, some thought needs to be given as to what you’d do if the TV starts saying to take shelter instantly.

”Taking Shelter from the Storm: Building a Safe Room for Your Home or Small Business” (FEMA L-233 Brochure)

This is a later version of the instruction book I used when I built a safe room for a relative. The garage was large enough I could squeeze in a small shelter on one end, yet leave enough space for a second car – if that car was a compact. As I recall, the 2×4” wall studs were doubled and on 12” centers. Next exterior layer was some heavy sheet metal – a ‘splinter’ catcher. Atop that, two sheets of 3/4” plywood. The roof was the same. The 36” steel-frame metal door (with three deadbolts) was the weakest point, and I later added an inch and a half of wood to the outside of that door. Entire structure tied with metal connectors and lots of epoxy to the concrete floor.

Upside: very, very strong, and something a determined single person can build. Downsides: it uses garage space and the cost of the materials has nearly tripled on account of the epidemic.

To save money, a sawed-off version of the above Safe Room could be built. Go with 4-5’ ceilings. The door – built to wall specs – would be shoved into place after entry. (The store-bought doors are 4-7 hundred dollars!) The door/plug would be held in position with huge wingnuts and/or crossbars. A person could, if necessary, spend the night there, for it would have electric lights and vent fans. The space above the low shelter could be made into efficient storage space. Or a little kid play area?

A final possibility – install a ‘retro’ garage pit, but not in the garage. (modern code problems with ventilation plus “iffy” resale issues) Partly bury it at the outside edge of an open or closed back porch. Above-ground part would be surrounded by concrete block walls or a lot of earth. “How to install Garage Pits – Classic Car How To Guides and Articles” This would be a modern “slit trench”.

Naturally, there is another “list” of things to have in case your house actually does blow away. “Here’s Your Tornado Shelter Supplies Checklist”

I once walked through a town where an F4 tornado had visited an hour and a half earlier. Strangest sight I saw was a row of three houses where the first and the third were neat piles of kindling. The middle one appeared to be untouched.

https://www.ianwelsh.net/preparing-for-bad-times-thread/#comment-124824

Do you have specific reasons for preferring rabbits to chickens?

Re: chickens vs. rabbits, I keep both, and can see an advantage in chickens as you can eat eggs, or sell eggs, without having to kill the hens. However, I find them finicky. I find even the heritage breeds I keep are not great mums, and that I need artificial incubation to get a decent hatch. I can imagine situations well short of going full Cormac McCarthy where that might not be possible. When I lived in the suburbs, my neighbours kept rabbits “as pets” in a backyard hutch and no one was any the wiser. Can’t be done with chickens. I haven’t tried raising any of my animals without commercial feed as I don’t want to run afoul of SPCA by departing conventional best practices, but have a gut feeling that the rabbits would be easiest to feed on wild sources I have available. Essentially, my ducks and chickens are omnivores and need more protein than they can get off of grass, while the rabbits are pure herbivore. I would like to try something like vermicomposting or black soldierfly to generate the protein, as I know I am not sustainable with the current level of external inputs, but haven’t had the time to implement. Rabbits also function as accelerated composters. Garden weeds and excess produce go into the rabbit house and are almost instantly converted into pelletized fertilizer which can be applied directly to the garden without burning. The downside to rabbits is that it is like eating pets. We call them “pets with benefits”. Also, I have no control on the fertility cycle as I run colonies and don’t separate bucks from does. With birds I can take the eggs or thin a nest to control population, but with rabbits I have to cull. On the plus side, I get rabbits year round, while birds are seasonal. This is also a curse.

A somewhat different take on prepping and survivalism:

I sometimes watch Urbex videos since I’m at home so much and I’ve always been fascinated by ruins of one kind or another. New Mexico, for example is full of them, ancient and modern, but it’s far from alone in that.

One Urbex channel I’m subscribed to is Bros. of Decay, a couple of young Belgian brothers who tramp around Europe (and Japan) exploring abandoned castles and humble farm houses which seem to be everywhere. Many of them are ruins, but some are in nearly pristine condition. What I’ve noticed is that the abandoned country places that were just left as is often have pantries full of canned and preserved foods, much of it no doubt grown on premises. There are wine cellars full of bottles full of wine. These people were prepped up the wahzoo, and at some point, everything was left behind to rot and collapse and go bad. Why it was all abandoned isn’t always clear, but in some cases it wasn’t because the homeowners died. Instead, they just didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

I think this stands as a warning to those who would prep themselves to the gills. They may intend to survive whatever calamity is at hand, and maybe they will, but at the same time, there are plenty of things we can’t prep for, and in some cases at least, all that prepping will be for naught.

Not to say don’t do it, just to give a little perspective.

There is a permaculture guy whose name I forget who has a richsoil.com website and also runs the permies discussions. He has an article about permaculture-raising of chickens, in case it might be interesting or useful.

https://richsoil.com/raising-chickens.jsp

Some people might take survival through hard times only so far as . . . survivalishness or survivalness, or survivalness-lite. And that will be enough for some of the hard times which will emerge.

Survivalness-lite is about as survivalistic as I will realistically get.

I will also, then, lift a finger towards doing things which would enhance collective group co-survival if enough other people also do them. Making some regionalocal areas robust and resilient may enhance survival chances for the people of those areas in the face of some kinds of cutbacks or breakdowns.

https://www.ianwelsh.net/preparing-for-bad-times-thread/#comment-124898

You were not the target of my rant. Sorry for being so vague. It’s just that I get irritated by folks who seem to believe all the world’s problems will magically go away if I buy an electric car, go vegetarian, and support open borders. Sometime I get sort of carried way… 🙂

TEST

dsrcwt: thanks so much for your comments, definitely helped me clarify some of my thinking about rabbits v. poultry. I am curious about why you keep chickens at all, since you are able to keep ducks more easily. Is it because of the food that chicken provides or their specific role in your permaculture guild? Would your thoughts about chickens change if you were buying hatchlings and not keeping a self sustaining flock?

dsrcwt: thanks so much for the information. I am tempted by chickens because of their reputation for eating insects and weeds, so it’s good to get confirmation from someone with first hand experience. Not going to happen in my current suburban yard but maybe that can change one day.

Do you live in an area with any Asian populations? I know Chinese people prefer duck eggs and I imagine that’s a very common throughout East Asia and SE Asia. I think they are tastier than chicken eggs and can be made into century eggs or salted eggs. The few times I’ve seen them in farmers markets they have gone for $1.50-2 each.

There aren’t a lot of Asian people in my immediate vicinity, although I do have one who century eggs and one request for balut eggs (look it up). Some people with allergies find that they can eat duck eggs. We also do a preserved duck yolk which is dehydrated in a bed of salt, and then you grate it over pasta. Mainly though, I don’t sell, because I don’t want to farm. Food is stupidly priced and profit margins so slim that I could bust my hump for chump change. I’ve never really crunched my costs, but I expect that profit might end up being something like $1 or $2 for a whole rabbit or duck. Even if I pushed my systems and land to produce 400-500 hundred of each a year, we’re still talking chump change. On top of that, trying to farm means regulatory compliance which means commercial slaughter. Nobody wants to slaughter ducks, so they charge something like $12/animal for kill, pluck, gut, and the nearest place that does it is an hour away. Better to stay small, feed yourself, and build cheap infrastructure capacity that you can expand if the system ever down-scales.

I am not sure what ” gene drives” is or how it does/doesn’t overlap with genetic engineering. I found a website which could probably explain it with several hours at least of slow careful reading.
It is the Navdanya website which I believe is Vandana Shiva’s eco-agro-activism website. So here it is, the website and its articles about “gene drives” .
https://navdanyainternational.org/gene-drive-extinction-technology/

I sort of understand GMOing itself. After a couple of decades it is becoming a little bit familiar. The responses to the GMO threat could come in two groups . . . . the survival responses which belong on this thread, and the economic combat/ economic counteroffensive responses which might better go on Tony Wikrent’s Weekly Wrapup thread.

So some survival thoughts . . . How do we protect edible freedom crops against the International GMO Conspiracy to pollute the genes of many key crop plants? If we learn which plants reproduce in what ways, we can decide which plants are more defensible against GMO pollution and defend those plants. More highly skilled people can defend the more hard-to-defend plants.

Some of the plant defense methods would be the same as the varieties-of-choice isolation and hand-pollination techniques already used by breeders, seed-savers, etc. In this case just think of ourselves as excluding any GMO polluted pollen grains from landing on any pistils of any flowers of the plants we are personally defending from any other unwanted pollen already. Make our defenses pollen-tight. Amateur seed-saving and plant-breeding books talk about various ways to do this. Growing lettuce for seed saving under alien-pollen-exclusion greenhouse type shelters and curtained cages and so forth. 50 million back yard lettuce seed savers would be running 50 million little bunkers protecting their lettuce-for-seed plants from bioactive frankengenetic fallout, for example. It would keep varieties alive and unpolluted.

Here is an article from the Seed Savers Exchange about hand pollinating corn. These methods would work just as well against GMO pollution of the corn as against clean-genes pollen from other kinds of unpolluted corn which are perfectly fine in their own right, but not what you yourself want. Here is the link.
https://www.seedsavers.org/site/pdf/corn-hp.pdf

Self-pollinating plants like beans, tomatoes, etc. should be even easier to protect from GMO gene pollution.

Some food plants can reproduce either sexually or asexually. Potatoes can reproduce either way. If you are growing a clean-genes frankenfree potato you can keep replanting some of the potatoes year after year after year. Polluted pollen may well land on the potato flower and pollute the seeds, but that gene pollution will not make its physical way through the mother plant to its potatoes under the ground. So by just re-re-re planting some potato tubers each year from initially non-polluted plants, you can grow non-polluted potatoes.

Organic seed breeder-sellers will try doing these same things on a broader scale to keep having non polluted seed to sell to their organic customer bases. The labor involved will make
the seed cost more and if that makes the organic food cost more, customers should accept that as the price of anti-Monsanto defense.

As long as many “minor” crops are ignored by the GMO Conspiracy as being ” not worth the effort” to pollute with GMO-frankengenes, switching your eating over to those “minor crops” will take you out of the line of Monsanto fire.

And there are bush, shrub and tree crops which live for many years, producing some food each year. If the GMO Conspirators begin gene-polluting seeds of these trees, any trees already growing from before the GMO gene-pollution specimens are released would be legacy-GMO-free by virtue of having been planted before their type was GMOd. Tree nuts whose names we all know, tree beans like mesquite, siberian pea shrub, etc. These can become alternative staples if planted widely enough and adopted widely enough starting now.

And there are some breeders working on trying to make some crop plants GMO-infection proof. Blue River Organic breeders have been working on a corn concept called PuraMaize for making some corns GMO pollen-proof. Here is the website itself which can explain better than I can.
http://www.blueriverorgseed.com/products/organic-corn-brands/puramaize/145

So all is not yet lost. It is still possible to defend against GMO pollution or evade it by growing plants not-yet-of-interest to the GMO Conspiracy or by growing perennial plants with too long a lifespan to be immediately vulnerable to genetic infiltration and subversion by agents of the International GMO Conspiracy.

Now . . . . as to how thousands or millions or tens of millions of people can organize their efforts to carry the battle to the heart of the enemy, comments about that would fit better on the Weekly Wikrent WrapUp threads.

The ideal goal of course would be the extermination and liquidation of every GMO conspiracy company and the permanent unemployment and unemployability of all their GMO scientists and technicians, such that those scientists and technicians all starve to death and die, along with their evil knowledge. That is the only route to long term safety of unpolluted plants.

Sorry, I got caught up in exercising some of my more negative emotions last weekend I have really appreciated the comments here and hope they keep coming.

This far, I don’t think GMO is as threatening as its most ardent opponents make it. Europe is mostly GMO free except for for one variety of corn. The contamination issue can be limited by distance and is relatively easy for insect pollinated plants. The problem is more that the production of GMO out compete and forces or traditional varieties, reducing diversity that we may need to rely on to provide in a hotter, less predictable weather future.

The much bigger fear is, of course, manipulation of microbes and animal DNA. All we need is one accident or one determined terrorist, and it’s game over for human civilization as we know it. Considering that there are USian politicians and officials who believe they will literally be raptured up to heaven in the event of an apocalypse, and can undoubtedly rationalize that they are doing God’s will…multiply it by all the other people crazy, desperate, deluded, lazy, angry enough to try.

The bigger problem for now may be the abusive IP regime, which is almost entirely rent seeking. In my mind, no IP should have greater than 10 year life, period. That should be able time for

Header: sale on gardening books/ soil books/ other agri-books.

Every March Acres USA holds its Acres USA Bookstore March Sale. The little blurbo descriptions give an idea of what each book is about.

Acres USA has lately been having some very interesting soil science and soil practice books translated from German into English and having them printed under its own press-name. These books can be seen here and there in the book listings. Those would be very worth owning and learning for soil understanding and soil upbuildment.

Also, Growing Vegetables With A Smile, by Nikolai Kurdyumov, translated from Russian. Very sale price.
https://bookstore.acresusa.com/collections/books-videos/author_nikolay-kurdyumov

Also, The Organic Method Primer, by Bargyla and Gylver Rateaver. This began life as a self-published $250 book and a few years ago Acres USA got an unsold bunch of these books when Bargyla Rateaver died and her business folded. Now being sold at a very very sale price.
https://bookstore.acresusa.com/collections/books-videos/author_bargyla-gylver-rateaver

Header: Solar Energy Cooking

Here is a little article about what the article writers think are the best commercially available solar cookers.
https://cleanenergysummit.org/best-solar-ovens/

It also has some links to solar other stuff.

As someone who regularly use 5 gallon buckets to haul water (and compost and tanbark) in garden settings, I would not do it. They’re a really awkward size when fully filled with water. I would recommend something a bit smaller and not bucket shaped. Also, you have to consider the time to fill and until the buckets, that’s a lot of time waiting for it to fill and (awkwardly) getting water out. Then worry about algae and contamination from multiple uses.

If you were going with such a system, I recommend 1 or 2 gallon jugs, easier to handle and fill/unfill. But it just seems like a lot of wasted time and potential spills waiting to happen.

I’m pretty lazy about my water preparedness. I have a 55 gallon filled food safe barrel in my utility room, and I bought a Water Bob for when bad weather is forecasted.
I store about 10 gallons in 1.33 gallon Heinz white vinegar jugs. I have a pump water filter and iodine tablets for back up situations. In extreme situations, we’re about half a mile walk from a fairly clean creek. If I was starting over again, I would probably go with Water Brick or something a bit more portable.

Different Clue, while that water regime would make an interesting and useful drill, maybe for a week to see where the weaknesses are, I think that we should revel in the advantages of modern civilization as long as we can. We lose electricity here at least once a year, for a few hours to several days. When the power goes out we lose the well, and the toilets. Buckets of water come out and we economize. When the power comes back I revel in, and am thankful for hot and cold running water. Water is heavy, and dealing with it takes time and energy. While the system persists, use your energy in the most efficient ways. If you wear yourself down before you need to, you’ll fall at the first hurdle.

I would like to hear folks’ thoughts about financial planning, physical safety, and connecting with their respective communities. Also, what sort of disruptions are we planning for? A general decline in income with things becoming harder and harder? Extreme climate impacts (in which case the best option is to leave especially vulnerable area such as the Southwest and coastal southeast ASAP). A panopticon dystopia where BigTech and BigGov pry into every aspect of our lives? Aftermath of social breakdown and war (won/lost/continuing)?

There’s a lot of books on food growing and gardening, because it’s fun and a visceral way to provide safety for ones family. Even things like off grid electrical generation, water sourcing, hunting, animal pasturing and butchering, wood chopping and burning, and nontraditional building, all seem to get a lot written about them because they’re fun and constructive.

But what about just physical safety? Will we be living in a future where everyone has metal bars in their window and doors (would that do any good when the housing stock is largely stick built?). Where the rich will retreat to gated communities with armed guards while the rest are too poor to be worth targeting? What happens when those gun hoarders think it’s time to assume their place at the top of the heap? How will national guard, military, and police act in that situation?

Same for financial safety, what does that even mean?

As for community. The US was already fragmenting based on Neoliberal economics that force people to move far from their family for job opportunities, then separating people based on class and political identifications. Facebook and various media echo chambers are making people who should be bound by ties of family into bitter haters of each other. Are we going to end up like Yugoslavia, but with a lot more guns and bigger trucks?

@Astrid,

Also, the retreat from the man made global warming death zones which you suggest or even maybe just foresee, presents the reality-based global warming acceptance community with a chance to begin a slow quiet stealth sell-off and retreat, covering the cost of retreat by selling off their houses, land, etc. to members of the faith-based global warming denialist community.

Hopefully all the global warming reality accepters will be making their Last Stand on higher colder ground, and all the global warming reality deniers will be ingathered unto the Future Death Valleys and rising sea flood zones of tomorrow. Where they can all live out the true meaning of their beliefs.

And who knows, they might be right and we might be wrong. Lets undertake to achieve the Last Sort, and let Darwin take the hindmost.

@Astrid,

Its a rather bleak subject. People should either prepare or not bother preparing for what they think will happen, will likely happen, might happen, could happen , etc. in that order. Thought doesn’t have to be happy to be reality-based.

People should not worry about not being prepared for things they can not possibly be prepared for. Prepare how one can for what one can and beyond that, hope for the lucky best.
And also, doing things in the meantime which will actually keep some actual society actually maintained and actually viable may reduce the amount of worst cases one might have to prepare for.

And live an okay-life even while preparing for whatever one can and will prepare for. A misery-based life devoted to preparing for some future something won’t inspire any friends and neighbors to prepare for things.

So planting ramps can be a perfectly okayness-building activity for living the okay life in the meantime while preparing ( or not) for this and that.

Header: site with links to various information.

http://www.ranprieur.com/misc.html#readings

The first minute of this video gives a nice insight to resiliency (in addition to being very cheerful and can-do spirited).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ssxwWvjUgKw

It would appear that the US no longer have such a reserve.

I should mention that for USians, the university extension services are of a great resource, far better than the commercial sites often written by people without expertise, friendly with wrong identifications and erroneous basic assumptions.

http://fruitandnuteducation.ucdavis.edu

https://www.ces.ncsu.edu/

https://cals.cornell.edu/cornell-cooperative-extension

Hunter-gatherer societies were able to achieve affluence by desiring little and meeting those needs/desires with what was available to them. It all changed come agriculture, where a surplus was created, which was then taxed, plundered or paid as rent to elites, whether they were princes, bandits or landlords. Since then, only “The “Four Horsemen” of leveling –mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues— have decreased inequality.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
http://www.spearswms.com/book-review-great-leveller-violence-history-inequality/

POOGC,

Thanks so much for the recommendations! Now that I’ve had my two shots, I may soon venture to my local library for some paper based reading. I feel that I have a lot of work ahead of me, yet I’m so tired by everything that I just want to lie in bed all weekend.

My parents just spent the afternoon digging up about 60 lbs of edible bamboo shoots from somebody else’s backyard. So perhaps the best way to benefit from a bamboo grove is to know somebody with one! You can process it for drying, blanch and freeze, or cook it down with soy sauce for a chewy high fiber snack. You might be able to sell it if there are small mom and pop Adrian grocery stores nearby, or have access to a farmer’s market with Asian shoppers.

@Astrid, Re: Irish heritage.

That’s a fascinating idea, and I’m tempted to tell you to go for it. I wonder what the Irish think about this? Are you planning to learn Irish at all? It’s on Glossika and Duolingo, though surely book learning is better.

A friend of a friend is from Dublin and she *hates* it when Americans are like “Omg I’m Irish too!” haha. I know that’s not what you’re saying though. 😉

We are definitely not the sort to study language for fun. My husband, despite 5 years of French and 4 years of German, nearly manages basic restaurant ordering and navigating in Germany and France, though he managed a 3 months internship in Germany once. I’m better with Chinese (though written is very rusty) but my romance language skills are limited to reading a French restaurant menu and counting to 20.

The Portuguese citizenship does require a basic language competency component. We’d have to hope that it’s quite quite basic.

@different clue, LOL thanks for making me laugh! Irishians sound like they appear in the New Testament alongside the Galatians.

@Astrid,

Thank you for pointing this out to me. This has been quite fascinating and sent me around searching for my options. Unfortunately I don’t have any. I am a descendant of 20th century migrants from Europe to the US, but most of them were fleeing WW1, so it’s far enough removed I cannot claim anything.

We are instead doing the long and slow process of “We moved here, and we’ve worked, brought money into the country and spent it locally, we vacation here, we speak the language, we have character references, we pay our taxes on time…and we like it here very much!”

The Chinese actually have a pretty good solution. All people with Chinese ancestry are call huaren (ethnic Chinese person), but citizens of PRC are called zhongguoren (person of the Chinese state). It’s kind of the reverse of the US, where you (blank)-American (haha, which American country). In China, they would identify you as American Chinese, rather than Chinese American. Though it’s interesting to note that the dominance of Han Chinese is overwhelming that it’s rarely mentioned. There are lots of talk about what region you(or even parents and grandparents) are from, but the Han ethnicity is obviously a construct of many many ethic ground over millenniums, so that people from different parts are physically very distinctive from each other but still “Han”.

Did the Irish Americans identify themselves as Irish American or just Irish? I could see the latter being offensive if the Americans have no connection to Ireland being a few trips and not having to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. But the former seems quite reasonable as Irish American was a distinct cultural grouping until very recently.

“If a tower falls in a city and no one hears or sees it, has it fallen?”

Israeli strikes destroy Gaza tower housing media organisations:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/15/israeli-strikes-destroy-gaza-jalaa-tower-media-al-jazeera-associated-press

Joan,

The standards are based on the nationality laws of each country. A qualifying ancestor’s birth certificate or citizenship record, plus evidence tying you to them, should be sufficient. This may mean visiting the parish or church records in the ancestral village to obtain copies, as was done by a friend claiming Italian ancestry. It definitely requires clear lineages of descent and”ancestry testing” would not be meaningful. Wikipedia actually have pretty detailed information on this topic so it’s worth looking there first and then maybe review the actual promulgated law.

The Portuguese golden visa is a 5 year path to citizenship and ability to live and travel in Europe in the meantime. It looks like we can just “invest” in a fund rather than buying property or a business. This would enable us to continue with our current jobs but with an eye to moving to Europe in the future. We are no longer young and don’t have a high demand job backgrounds, so this might be the best option to get out.

The other option is just to move to Latin America. That’s not a great option for us since we don’t speak Spanish and because many of the countries are severely destabilizes by US actions in the past. But they are considerably cheaper options for people looking to get out and don’t have other means.

@Astrid, thanks again for the information. I’ll jump over to wiki and see what I can figure out for myself or my husband.

I definitely concur with a news fast! It’ll do you a lot of good. At some point Ian’s advice kicks in about how our second-hand suffering doesn’t actually help anyone. It’s spring; enjoy the new leaves and sunshine, etc.

Babbel has Portuguese, though from the flag it must be Brazilian. I’ve tried a lot of the language learning platforms online (Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Glossika) and Babbel is by far my favorite. It approaches things the way you’re used to if you went to high school in the US: grammar lessons with mild explanations in English that don’t get too technical with linguistic jargon. I much prefer that to wholly organic methods that only show you the target language and never explain anything. If moving to Europe is still years out for you, you can afford to start casually learning so it’s not overwhelming all at once.

I watched a street stall owner grift an American tourist who couldn’t speak a word of the language here. He took her five euros for a slice of pizza and didn’t give any change, whereas he gave me exact change back (based on the signage) because I can speak the language. Furthermore, I *know* I have an American accent still, so it wasn’t necessarily my nationality, just the fact that I made the effort to communicate with him.

<Short-term survival (6-12 months)

Given the possibility of food shortages and public utility outages very, very soon, what are folks' thoughts on:
–water
My brief thought is to rig some sort of way to distill potable water and, if necessary, figure out how to get it out of the atmosphere if there is no other supply.
–food
Garden where possible (which crops are easy to grow and can serve as staples?) but if you can't garden at sufficient scale (or at all), how can one stock up?

I am sort of turned off by all those youtube prepper vids. Something doesn't work there, can't put my finger on it.

For food. Short run, you’re much better off just having a rotating larder. A couple bags of flour, rice, beans, sugar, salt and multivitamins handles the basics, doable for $100 and storable in a few 5 gallon buckets (Costco online sells food service plastic buckets that I use for storage. Some jams, chocolates, spice mixes, canned tuna, canned tomatoes, etc for variety. Supplement by learning about available wild and forageable foods, maybe hunting/trapping smaller game. I’m a food hoarder certainly.

Safety in growing your own food is pretty illusory for really hard times. How would you be able to defend your possessions from the more desperate? It can supplement in high food scarcity but still relatively stable situations, but not “when all hell breaks loose”. In an all hell breaks loose situation, it’s important to just bunker down, be inconspicuous (which unfortunately may mean not sharing resources with anyone outside a very small trusted circle), and hope it passes quickly (and prepare to run if things don’t look good).

Longer term, take a look at Carol Deppe’s books on surviving hard times. I think she takes a sensible approach and gives good advice. She’s not a prepper but she’s a smart woman who lived through personal hard times. Cereals other than corn are hard to grow, thrash, and prepare, skip them. Winter squash, potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, yams, corn are good staples to grow. With a cold cellar, you can store carrots, endured, Napa cabbage, cabbage, onions, potatoes, beets, and more through winter. Supplement with canned, fermented and dried vegetables.

What grows well is very much location dependent. This is especially the case if you want to venture into fruits. For me in Mid Atlantic USA, collards and Swiss chard are good year around (but need insect barrier fabric to survive late summer bug onslaught). Most traditional fruits will require constant spraying East of the Rockies, for zone 5 and southwards. Orchard fruits are a dicey proposition in hard times anyways, but persimmons, pawpaw’s, jujubes, and pears can bear without spraying. Melons are probably the best bets but they take a lot of room and have their own insect issues.

I believe there is agreement in the thread that the greatest part to surviving whatever is to come is not”prepping” in the conventional sense.

What about things that help us with:

Getting useful information and effectively print it to work

Maintain good relationship with neighbors, family, PTB that we may need to rely on in the future

Physically hardening the home, making it more defensible, energy self sufficient, easier to repair and maintain

Non automotive transportation

Maintaining good mental health in stressful times

Preparing for loss of income and access to savings

Rearing kids and mentoring young people though this uncertain world

>References for getting through hard times

This page is panning one “hard times” book, but then goes on to give recommendations for the best ones in the riewers’ opinion.

Header . . . short philosophical thought.

People living in dense-packed towns or cities are dependent on their collective survival grids. If one or more of those grids goes down for good, thousands-to-millions of people will die. So urban survivalism probably means collective action to secure and protect and defend the functioning of all those grids . . . power , water , gas , fuel , etc.

One element of urban survivalism may then be deep or even extreme personal conservation of resources so as to keep demand on those grids low enough that the grids will not collapse under un-meetable demand. That would require everyone in those urban areas conserving deeply or extremely on water, gas, electricity, fuel, etc.

SUBurban survivalism may involve some individual action in those suburbs where the yards are big enough to produce some aspects of bare survival. Rainwater harvesting systems, waterless toilet systems, super-insulate the house to where minimal power is needed to run minimal stand-alone electric powered survival systems, etc. Of course that’s talking about barely surviving, not truly living. For truly living, SUBurbanites must also defend and protect the viability of all the grids which make true living truly possible. Like the gas, water, power, etc. grids.

Different clue,

I don’t think governments and populaces that can’t get masking right is capable of collective action to save their own skins. Maybe they will after several very harsh lessons, but in the meantime, the best option for the alert resident is to figure out how to shelter in place (with a generator and window unit, in precooled basement with minimum of activity) or run. The temptation to be selfish and cheat in the face of adversity is always strong, and half of this insane country has decided to turn it into a virtue that they’ll defend (with somebody else’s lives).

The Texas freeze this winter tells you how well they can handle any extremely conditions. A bunch of people getting by on generators and the rest not even having enough information/knowledge to prevent their pipes from bursting.

In light of what I just seen posted by Different Clue on the other thread, I’m no longer going to post in response to him here. Anyone who is so biased against peoples whom he has no understanding about, and who can’t judge good information from bad (on China, check it YouTube videos by Daniel Dumbrill as well as reporting by The Gray Zone), is not really worth engaging with.

Historically, when crises came, people flee to cities until the very end. Even though there’s concentration of risks, disease, food scarcity, and other issues, cities are also defensible spaces for populations.

Still, the scale and complexity of modern cities are such, that I wonder if it’s possible to keep up once more than a few pieces come loose. Witness how well Houston handled the freeze this spring or NYC handled COVID. Can these places step up enough when time comes? They might handle smaller warbands but might be targeted by larger warbands and armies.

Suburbs are not defensible or self sustaining spaces right now. But in a slow collapse situation, it may be possible to cultivate more land for food and build security alliances over time. Though there still is the problem getting clean water, bulk calories, and power necessary to keep everything running and within reach.

The very newest Open Thread has a discussion between SomeOfParts and Astrid which offers some very high value very granular advice about several cities which might be promising places to go live in and prepare to Survive In Place in. More than that, the exchange of comments offers a menu of high-value thinking about what to think about when evaluating a town or city for moving to in order to prepare to Survive In Place.

Here is the link to that Open Thread and its discussion.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/open-thread-105/#comments

Naked Capitalism put up this thread for people to share what they see on the ground. I’ve always found this type of temperature taking thread to be fascinating.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/06/how-is-your-economy.html

Adding https://www.ianwelsh.net/way-past-time-to-leave-america/ and https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-unvarnished-truth-about-the-us/ for more discussions about leaving the US

I also found this thread to be helpful for this topic. https://www.city-data.com/forum/retirement/3088626-has-anyone-considered-retirement-location-out-3.html

Adding in the Collapse subreddit here as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/

A lot of the advice seems quite sensible and non-prepper-ish. I’m glad to see that for many, the work is on coping with what can be coped and enjoying the moment.

Well, since Diff Clue linked to the conversation Astrid and I had in a previous thread, I will continue it here. At the very least I want to thank Astrid for all the great ideas and advice. You have been very encouraging and I really appreciate it.

I took a long look at Harrisburg and it seems very appealing. I used google street view to stroll around and it looks pretty and walkable. I also found a charming, affordable downtown apartment with big windows and a river view on craigslist. I worry a bit about snow, because I’ve never lived around it, but I’m a bookworm and a housecat from way back, so it should be fine.

For the time being, I’m going to step up efforts to get my household and personal business in good shape so that I can move quickly if that turns out to be the best plan. There are a couple of dear friends here that I would miss, but neither of them would be able to help me if I got priced out of town.

I read the thread at NC that Astrid linked to where various folks in comments described economic conditions in different parts of the country. It gave me the sense that the upheavals I’m seeing locally are happening everywhere. That makes the calculations about relocating more complicated.

On one hand, it is a big plus that I know my way around this town because I grew up here. The older I get the more that seems to matter. On the other hand, things may be a bit worse here because ruling classes in the New South tend to be prosperous and greedy but come up short by educational metrics. Even within the city (and especially outside of it), it is literally hard for me to communicate with people because they find me shocking if I talk the way I am speaking right now. It is also the case that in this town the quality of healthcare is harshly segregated by economic status. Living in a poor part of the city can easily subject a person to catastrophically substandard care.

The case for moving to a place like Harrisburg is that it may be a much better cultural and economic fit in addition to offering more reliable access to good healthcare. I might get there and wish I had made the move sooner.

I’m just going to keep getting personal things organized and pay attention to the portents. It’s already so hot here that everyone stays inside from mid-morning until early evening. I’m also noticing a dramatic uptick in the tribalism/cluelessness of the liberal associates/relations I’ve spent my life around. They actually think that spending time at this website means I am now in thrall to Q-Anon, so it might not be hard at all to find a town where people are more sensible.

Oh dear! It looks like the new format may not accommodate more than 100 comments, as I now only see the most recent 9 comments. Is this something that can be fixed? I admit that I really prefer the old format over this, inclusive of the Raven, but I supposed this”cleaner” but more opaque look is the new web standard.

About the drought in the west. I think there’s enough water flow plus aquifer tapping, that the stampede isn’t going to start yet. Fire season is bad, yet our friends there, who could literally sell out of their homes for millions of dollars, are still doubling down there. Most people who move are moving for cool places like Austin, Boulder, or Portland, not for the soggy East and Midwest.

Having lived in the CA for a number of years, we both find it incredibly appealing. We always assumed that we would settle there permanently, then that we would move back ASAP, until the reality of high RE prices, climate change, and a couple ready to go major earthquake faults finally locked us out.

When we were young and comparatively poor, we used to take weekend road trips to the national parks and longer driving trips up and down the coast. We would sleep in the car or camp along the way. We were so happy and free. Even now, everytime we vacation west of the Rockies, I am captivated by the mountains, the vegetations, and just the quality of the light. If I grew up with that or lived with that day to day, I’m not sure I can give that up.

The best way to prepare is to act like the worst is already here. I live in a van with few possessions. Any suffering you experience will be temporary and you will become conditioned to it. I have a way to filter water in emergencies and always have a week of some kind of food.

Also, my health. Cannot believe how many obese people I see living this lifestyle. First, how? Second, why? I stopped all my medications as well (I have Bipolar Disorder) and this was only really possible through diet, lifestyle, and knowing my genetics. And meditations, very important. Lao Tzu, Buddha, Christ, they all had a messages concerning suffering.

If you still live in a house you are deluding yourself that you are even close to ready.

It looks like the older comments are there and accessible if you click on”previous” on the bottom, it just doesn’t display the total comment count for each message.

There was some interest in cargo bikes. I recommend looking at a Yuba Boda Boda, if you can find one that is non-electrified. I saw one on sale at REI a year ago for $1200, and I wished I had jumped on it.

It will fit a bike rack on a bus, it has a 200lb cargo capacity, in addition to the rider (I have seldom needed more than 100lbs), the stock gearing on the non-electric version I saw was exactly right, which is highly unusual. And you can add an electric setup later. That way you can get an electrified setup that will suit your needs that is sanely priced.

I have been unwilling to try electrified bikes, because I think they are ridiculously over-priced, especially since the stock setups look under-powered.
Another potentially fabulous tool for poor people priced to be a fashion accessory.

I have spent long periods of my life without a car. The best transportation I have ever owned was a Yuba Mundo. The forest service uses them for back-country trail maintenance.

I bought it as a bare frame and built it from that. I had intended to electrify it but I decided to ride it without for a while, and never got around to electrifying it.

It rode like a hard-tail mountain bike. I had no problem taking it, loaded, anywhere I would have taken a mountain bike. Bearing in mind I rode it as transportation, not as a dirt bike without an engine.

Rated cargo capacity is 400lbs in addition to the rider. With 50lbs of cargo, you barely noticed. With 135lbs on the back, you knew you were pulling some weight but it was still no problem. At 185lbs, I was glad I didn’t have far to go, but that could have been because I needed to distribute the load better.

I installed the beefiest front fork racks I could buy, and almost never used them.
I bought a bicycle trailer as well (a good one) and if I had a choice, I left the trailer home, because the Mundo carried weight that much better.

Before I rode one, it never occurred to me to ask why poor people don’t just build trailers and attach them to regular bikes.

This was one of the very few things I have ever owned that really made my life better. The difference between a cargo bike and a regular bike, is like the difference between a mountain bike and everything that preceded it. I can’t understand why cargo bikes haven’t had more impact.

On anything I peddle, I throw out the stock drive train and install a mountain triple crankset in front and a rear cassette with the biggest rear sprocket I can find. I only ever use bb7 disc brakes if possible.

I hope this is useful. Please don’t be offended if I can’t reply.

Hey Astrid, I do not know if you will hear my voice much on NC, it seems that Yves is not publishing my comments suddenly. Censorship is everywhere. I tried again today, we will see.

Regarding your comment “I want to try to live it as well, happily, and with as much self determination as I can. For me, that means I will cling onto showers, indoor plumbing, air-conditioning, and gardening for as long as reasonably possible. ”

To me this is just Nihilism, and I am fine with that if that is how you want to approach it. But your assumption is that one cannot be happy without, or with less, of the things you mentioned. That is just wrong. It is our conditioning that makes us cling, that fills us with desire, and that keeps the planet and society the way it is; horrible.

I live the future I want. And not just for myself, for everyone.

“Housing offers shelter and stability.” That is just fear talking. While I am offering possibilities, that statement confines. For me, I have just as much shelter and stability in my van than I had in any apartment.

somecomputerguy,

Thanks very much for sharing your knowledge about cargo bikes. It looks like REI is selling a non-electric Yuba cargo bike for $1,200.

https://reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/1689ot/if_you_run_into_an_asshole_in_the_morning_you_ran/

Also, does it ever snow in your part of New Mexico in the winter? Because if it does, and if you live on an acre or so of land, perhaps you can plant “windbreaks” designed to make snow fall out into drifts targeted to where you want them to be. Such drifts would hang around longer than flat-on-the-ground snow, and might last long enough to put some of their meltwater into already-thawed-out soil, thereby solving some water problems.

Thanks for looking, but the ad is not real. I have been keeping an eye out for a year. Yuba appears to be getting rid of their non-electrified line.

That is why I have been kicking myself; that sale was the last time that model is going to be easy to find. Used versions are going to stay hard to find and expensive.

I am currently riding a recumbent tadpole tricycle. I have owned and used two different models. My review of these is more mixed.

If you have trouble riding an upright or a two-wheel for some reason, they are flat-out awesome. With no qualifications.
They may be the best human-powered option for long-distance touring.

However, I have found tricycles to not be as practical as they look.

They are bulkier and heavier than cargo bikes.
Most of the conventional upright Trikes I have seen are not very well made, heavy, and not as stable as the design would make you think.

Most recumbents have the same poor cargo capacity as upright bicycles, which is frustrating, because they should be able to carry more.

If you are interested in recumbent trikes, the first company to look at is Terratrike. I have one of their Rover models.
The Rover was the most easily adapted to carrying cargo or similar uses, for the cheapest price. I paid about $900 for mine new.
They aren’t being made anymore either, but they should be a lot easier to find used.

I am not a bicycle expert. So I can only say that this company “seems” interesting. So for what it is worth, Worksman Cycles.

https://www.worksmancycles.com/

I’m reluctant to comment, not because I think people don’t deserve the ability to choose their exit, but due to this society’s liability culture and Christianity derived taboos on the topic. I don’t want get Ian in trouble so he’s free to delete even this veiled comment. I’d say make sure the gun caliber is sufficient to do the job and get some aid to ensure targeting the primitive brain.

@someofparts, one solution is to befriend your local undertaker. They’ve seen and embalmed the ones who did it effectively. I have one in my family who has mentioned such things before (while still being respectful of the dead). It’s not like they sit around at a bar laughing about stuff like this, just more like they end up with all kinds of stories from their job.

Anyone that helps the local first responders also knows this. A lot of people who go missing in the mountains are later found as having taken their own life. I knew a guy who helped with local search and rescue as an EMT. Half the time, those calls were people who went into the mountains for that purpose. It really depressed him. I too think that people deserve an ethical death, but someone has to then find you.

Also, just in the process of getting licensed to handle your handguns safely, you’ll probably learn what you need to know about that.

(And of course if Ian chooses not to post this, I understand.)

Since my military service, I make it a point to try to own at least one firearm. I wouldn’t use a gun for ending my own life, if I had access to any other means, and there are almost always other better means.

A gun is one of those things that you have to learn how to use, regardless of how or when you intend to use it. Saving one, and learning how to use it on the day that you need it, is already halfway to disaster.
It nothing like as hard as learning to drive, but it is required.

I would encourage you get some instruction (call a range or a gun store), do some shooting, and then decide what you want to do.

If you decide to sell; take them to the largest real gun store you can find, and explain that you want them appraised for insurance purposes, then ask the store what they would retail them for. Anything inherited is potentially more valuable than it looks.

Header: short term heat wave survival.

A usually-political You Tube channel-caster named Beau of the Fifth Column has this little video-cast with some most basic elementary fire-risk-reduction and deep-heat-survival advice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAsRg7_z7ds&list=PLQDS8YKa2B0kkdfbs6x8dMPdm6u-XxWs6&index=2

Now is probably a good time to stock up with N95 masks, zinc, Ivermectin, and alcohol based hand sanitizers. On Amazon, I see bulk 3M N95 masks going for less than $1 each and zinc tablets going for $6/100 tablets. If I have to go back to the office, I plan to be masked and eat my lunches outside until at least next spring, when we should get a better sense of variant development and vaccine effectiveness.

I have found the KN95s to be pretty unsecure on their own, but they are okay if I pull up the loops with a small hairclip.

I’m buying a lot, since I figure they will eventually get used for something (even if it’s to give to West Coast friends for their fire seasons) and should last a couple years. I would rather have too much than not be able to share my stash with friends and family if there’s another shortage.

Reposting here as it summarizes a lot of my evolving thinking on the topic.

There’s some discussion about location in the survival thread. Generally, access to water and lack of natural disasters risks good, but as PNW and European heat waves show, all bets are off once climate gets weird. Eastern NA and temperate South America looks the best so far, but no guarantee that nature won’t flip a switch and turn our lives upside down going forward. Don’t expect it to be just like before, but X degrees warmer year around.

Local population is another wild card. Having a system where you can establish an active support system or at least seamlessly blend in is better than not. Think about how your neighbors might use their guns and skills when time gets tough, will it be to protect you and share venison? Establish a protection racket? Or do they expect to do the “taking” without reciprocity? Is moving to a place with higher social trust and cohesion an option?

I think if you can afford it, it does make sense to think about defensibility and flexibility in your home. My current home contain enough space to house my parents and in-laws, should they lose the ability to live independently Space for friends and family, if they need shelter. Nice neighbors are worth seeking out and helping out. Your resources may be best expended to help people who will remember your help in time (don’t count on reciprocity, just expend your limited resources on good people).

If you can, stay away from new construction even if it’s more energy efficient, it’s all made of plywood and foam boards. Pick something made out of brick, concrete, stone, or cinder block. Weatherproof and insulate as much as possible, secure weatherproof roofing, metal shutters or metal bars on windows and doors, dig a well and install a small scale home power grid as a backup, install passive cooling such as outside shutters and slats to optimize seasonal solar exposure. Be really careful about big trees near the house, I have several near my home and if I stay here, they will be severely trimmed back or cut down, as I do not want to worry about one of them falling on my roof once things get tight. Think about digging a cellar or making a safe room, for your respective climate (heat, cold, flood, tornado, fire) emergency. Get your power and plumbing system as much up to date as possible, you might not have the chance to upgrade later.

And don’t just think in terms of one breakdown situation as it can come in many forms. Could be everything from inflation and higher unemployment, to post Katrina NOLA. Be prepared for as many as possible but know you can’t prepare for them all.

Che, it’s not only the push to “buy, baby, buy” i think. I found this little nugget this morning, and a lightbulb went off:

‘I have contempt for the culture of the American consumer, in which people have no confidence in their ability to do anything for themselves, or to recover from a mistake, but have religious faith in institutions and “experts”’.

I think this is yet another area of persuasion they deliberately instill in us, and this kind of woke me up, relative to a particular problem I’ve needed to solve. It resonated with me, and may with others.

But more related to this thread, and something I wrote for Che’s discussion on permaculture in a different thread:

Permaculture is about working with what’s already there, like building a pond in the low spot of the yard that fills with water anyway after every storm. It’s about working with nature as it is, instead of forcing nature into something it can’t sustain (industrial agriculture).

It’s a really good philosophy of life as well: work with what you’ve already got, where you are. Identify your strengths and play to them. Identify what’s working in your area that’s valuable, and encourage it.

It’s about working with what’s already working (very Daoist), and also about learning what works where, and what doesn’t. Its about recognizing that both nature and people operate in a cyclical environment and this does affect people, not just diurnal, but seasonally as well. It’s about NOT forcing issues and instead learning and recognizing the right time and place that will make someone or something “bloom”, whether it’s a relationship, a garden, a business, or a project.

For permaculture, it’s about soil and water and vegetation, natural cycles in both space and time, but it works just as well as a “how to live” philosophy. And maybe something worth learning more about.

There is nature’s way, which in itself is not kind or friendly to humans, it just is and we should work with it. But that gets hidden and distorted under human ways. And most of us don’t have the luxury of stripping away the human ways, we simply can’t live if we don’t abide by human ways of getting a job, paying taxes, and following the orders of the police and judges and politicians.

Modern western human is so alienated from national that they wouldn’t even know where to start. Even traditional societies with time tested ways to live along side nature (to a degree, the moas and giant ground sloths did not go extinct because of Western capitalism) must deal with new challenges that they don’t have folkways for managing.

I do suggest studying what’s happening right now in South Africa very carefully.

@ Che’ Pasa,

Header: High altitude smallholding dryland management example in New Mexico.

Copy-pasted from Naked Capitalism.

“The orchardist rescuing fruit trees in New Mexico” (photo essay) [High Country News]. “Tucked into the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it’s not just trees that matter on the small 15-acre farm. Tooley’s land is lively: The rich soil is home to diverse species of grasses, insects, pollinators — and, of course, trees. Crucially, no ground is left uncovered, the groundwater level is kept at high levels, and bats and birds feast day and night on would-be pests. Everyone plays a role, and Tooley uses his encyclopedic understanding of the land to teach others how to work within the ecosystem…”

Here is the link itself.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/photos-agriculture-the-orchardist-rescuing-fruit-trees-in-new-mexico

And the source itself of certain New Mexico adapted trees.
https://tooleystrees.com/

Just adding in a random thought bubble I added to a different post. Getting the right level of collaboration and resistance with PTB is likely very important going forward.

I understand the impulse to inflict pain to enforce better conduct in others, but with a low trust society such as the US and where avg people need to conserve their resources for the hard days ahead, a sensible person really need to be careful with where to expend their resources.

The safe basic strategy is to keep a low profile, be on as good terms with friends/family/neighbors/colleagues/bosses/authority as possible, and conserve your resources. You should be on as good terms with everyone as possible, but also notice who is helpful and reasonable, who isn’t in one or more ways, and who is a disaster area that you need to carefully maneuver around. Be careful with sunk cost fallacy with your own identity, your relationship with others, and things that you’ve invested aspects of your life into. But at the same time, realize that what you have built in your life this far has value and shouldn’t be ditched lightly

In some ways, navigating Ian’s comment section is a low stakes way to learn about interpersonal interactions. I definitely wouldn’t say what I’m doing is best practices, but I’d like to think I’m learning about myself.

@dc

Thanks for the Tooley’s reference and links. They’ve done good and long-lasting work as have numerous others in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. The great thing is that they all learn from one another and share their knowledge and experience with everyone else.

Most of them, I think, would ask me, “Why the hell do you live there??” Because they know, as we do, that our area is a harsh land, a hard land for any sort of agriculture. We’re much drier than the areas up north, we don’t have good soil, there’s no surface water, and Natives never settled here. There were pueblos south and north, west and east but none here abouts. We’re told that buffalo and raiding tribes passed over this land, we still see pronghorn, coyotes and even elk now and then, and they say there are bears in the nearby mountains, but other than that…

There were no permanent settlements in this area until after 1900, and only after wells were drilled to bring water to the surface was reliable agriculture beyond cattle and sheep ranching possible. (There are no sheep here now, but there are goat, emu, and ostrich places.)

Dryland (unirrigated) farming is only possible with reliable rainfall, and this we do not have. Some years it’s great, other years there’s essentially no rain. We visited a pueblo to the north one summer, long since abandoned — well before the Spanish came — probably due to drought. Very little remained of the pueblo buildings but low mounds and ridges marking their outlines; millions of decorated pottery sherds littered the ground but not much else. Some of what remained, though, showed how water was captured and stored and how gardens — they weren’t really farm fields — were irrigated. There was, for example, an earthen dam across an arroyo, quite a large dam holding back a large reservoir when rains were good enough. The gardens were irrigated from this reservoir together with rainfall, and given the large size of the pueblo, it must have been very successful in good years. There were other catch basins and smaller reservoirs within the pueblo and just outside it. They captured as much water as they could. But then when the rains didn’t come… as too often they didn’t… eventually the pueblo had to be abandoned. Even when the rains came back, the people didn’t. By the time the Spanish arrived, there was almost nothing left. The archaeologist/guide said the dam was probably breached after the pueblo was abandoned, but how long after he couldn’t say. He pointed out that settlers tried to make a go of it in among the ruins in the 19th Century but failed. Their abandoned efforts sit among and on top of the Native ruins. This is reality in New Mexico. We all should know it.

I’d dearly love to grow fruit trees on our place and will probably try it next year, but it’ll be tough, we know that. One of the local farmers has a row of apple trees on the edge of his property. They’ve been there for 30-40 years, and some have given up the ghost. But others are doing OK. And he planted more this year that look to be doing wonderfully. But then I look across the road from his place, and all of the trees planted around the cemetery about 10 years ago are frizzled, dried up and dead. Almost all the pine trees planted around here in the last 10 years have died. The last 10 years have been really dry, and there’s not a lot we can do about it. On the other hand, the Future Climate Maps suggest this dry spell may be ending thanks to Climate Change, and it should get much wetter for the foreseeable. We’ll see. The weather people are very skeptical about that!

Header: heat wave preparation

Having a feeling about what kind and how much heat waves to prepare for can help the heat-wave prepper to prepare better.

So here is an article about one possible scenario for kind and amounts of near-future heat waves, worth considering and preparing for. Individuals preparing individually AND all-the-individuals co-preparing collectively at the same time would be the best way to prepare. But people will pick what they will do, together and/or separately.

Here is the link.
https://www.axios.com/record-shattering-heat-waves-becoming-far-more-likely-study-e13fde50-45d8-4bcd-bc86-efecba6c5217.html

Before making any big changes, make sure your personal (and family, if applicable) need/want meters are calibrated and up to date. This is especially true if this comment makes no sense to the reader.

DIY air purifier using box fans and either MERV (at least #13) or HEPA filters.
https://youtu.be/aw7fUMhNov8

Header: Coronavid Infection management for the personally infected.

NaCap has just had an interesting couple comments on possible things to do and take if you are early in the Coronavid infection process. I will copy paste them here.

Don Midwest
August 8, 2021 at 2:39 pm
IM Doc, do you use the protocols posted by FLCCC – Front Line Covid Critical Associates?

Their preventive and early treatment phases have other off the shelf drugs — vitamin C, vitamin D, mouth wash, etc.

There is a lot of excellent information on their web page flccc.net

Including a 50 page manual for doctors which has important graphs of phases of the disease and treatments for various phases. 15 pages are references.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/FLCCC-Protocols-%E2%80%93-A-Guide-to-the-Management-of-COVID-19.pdf

Reply ↓
IM Doc
August 8, 2021 at 4:29 pm
The answer is yes.
In my opinion, when all the dust is settled – those brave folks will be the heroes of this entire situation.

Because copy-pasting may lose the clickability of a link, I will again offer the above link its own self in a hopefully clickable form.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/FLCCC-Protocols-%E2%80%93-A-Guide-to-the-Management-of-COVID-19.pdf

Unfortunately, I heard that the Math+ protocol is not as effective in late stage against the delta variant as against the alpha. This underscores the need to get treated early.

Also, it’s worth noting that for some reason I can’t fathom, even doctors who are bravely standing up to the medical mafia never seem to show the least bit interest in hydrogen peroxide treatment. It’s almost as though even they have a pharmaceutical oriented mania.

As per a post I made quite a while ago, it was known that using heat (“fomentations” in sanitariums; nowadays called hydrotherapy) drastically cut the death rate from the Spanish flu. While I could see such knowledge being forgotten, since a layman like myself can lean about it, the honest medical professionals should have learned about it, sooner.

You can approximate a “fomentation” by doing prolonged saunas and/or hot showers, to the point of discomfort. OK, that needs to be made more scientific, but it has to do with core body temperature. I think you can get a rough estimate from just body temperature. (“fomentations” involved keeping the head cool, while the rest of the body was heated)

One can also buy liquid cooling systems for PC’s. I think rigging up a couple of them should not be a big deal.

Ah-h-h, you have to heat meat in order to sterilize it.

But to what temperature? And for how long?

I don’t know how long the fomentations were done, for, but that’s a clue to what minimum length of time is needed.

BTW, my father got a body heating therapy as an alternative approach to treating cancer, back in the 70’s. I’ve never heard of anything, since, about this, so I assume it wasn’t very effective.

An NC comment led me to this rather interesting book review. I wish I read it twenty years ago. But I probably would not have appreciated it properly at the time.

https://angelanagle.substack.com/p/america-against-america

Overall, as many great comments as this post started with, it does feel quite spent. I’m enjoying the Collapse subreddit’s weekly signs of collapse thread. At least it makes me feel less alone.

Gary Null, who started the Progressive Radio Network, prn.fm, is having a program this Sunday, Aug 29th,j on “Surviving COVID”. Among other topics, he will be discussing drug therapies, of which he was one of the early advocates. But also, legal means of dealing with vaccine mandates, including moving to states (and maybe countries?) that respect personal choice and human rights with regard to medical treatment.

I don’t see anything on his website about this, But, if you listen to his recent podcasts on prn.fm, he mentions details. I think, maybe, if you’re in the NYC area, you can also attend a live event, but it’s also online. Null has 2 shows on prn.fm. One is called “the Progressive Commentary Hour”, and the other one is “The Gary Null show”.

Here is a comment about a protocol of nutritional supplements and phytochemicals which may confer resistance to initial infection by coronavid viruses. I will copy-paste it here.

Condottiere says:
August 31, 2021 at 8:55 pm
Back in March 2020 While every lemming was hoarding toilet paper, Clorox wipes, hand sanitizer, and N-95 masks I bought two years supply of Resveratrol, quercetin, pterostilben, and turmeric. All these are simple antioxidants you can buy off Amazon or your local vitamin store. I flew all over the country all during the heat of the pandemic sitting next to coughing passengers. At times I was even the only passenger on the whole aircraft. I did not catch it once. I took an antibody test a while back and it was negative. I was even exposed recently to carriers that were fully vaxed. Others around me coughs it. I had a Negative test.

Resveratrol has been already proven (pre-COVID19) stop SARS and MERS in its tracks by blocking the virus RNA replication and downgrading the cytokines storm. Post COVID19 studies show promising results as well.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5307780/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32985211/

Other studies show pterostilbene, a more bioavailabe and longer half life cousins of resveratrol, to work as well.

https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/viruses/viruses-13-01335/article_deploy/viruses-13-01335-v3.pdf

Another study used an IBM supercomputer to determine substances that could help block entry of COVID19 by binding to the virus s-protein or ACE2 receptor. Two of the top five substances you can buy at the grocery store were quercetin and turmeric.

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202003.0226/v1/download

Another way to look at this is COVID19 comorbidities are all inflammatory illnesses. The virus kills you through inflammation (cytokines storm) All four of these are powerful anti inflammatories.

@Different Clue

I’m a little concerned about a side effect of using pterostilbene: Elevated LDL. If one has cholesterol issues, you might end up facilitating heart disease in spite of knocking out the covid-19. Maybe a combo of resveratrol, along with some vitamin D, C, zinc, and quercetin may suffice.

https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(18)32477-4/fulltext

Very recently Naked Capitalism ran a post called . . . Jackpot Readiness: The ( Literal ) Pressure Cooker.

It is about pressure cookers, their uses, various varieties of them, and thoughts in the comments about how they can be used to conserve fuel and time and even food ( the bones you wouldn’t even try to eat otherwise can maybe get softened down to where you can eat the ends off the bones).

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/09/jackpot-readiness-the-literal-pressure-cooker.html

I just wanted to post an update that I am teaching myself a new skill relating to preparing for bad times ahead/industrial supply chain breakdown and such. It is really fun! I’ve been focusing on gathering supplies locally and stocking up. In case there are winter lockdowns, I will have enough to work with and practice through the winter. But I really hope there aren’t lockdowns! Anyway, here’s me encouraging everyone to teach themselves a new skill that will be useful in the future ahead.

Header: speculative thought . . .

Ian Welsh’s most recent posting about thawing/melting permafrost and rising sky methane point to there being two basic sorts of hard times to prepare for ( or not).

One is the short sharp shocks which last a little while and then more-or-less normal returns. Things like particular storms or fires or heat waves or power blackouts or water shutoffs or etc. If you are prepared to withstand a week to a month of such passing hardship, you will survive the hard time and then get back to living or existing or whatever you did before the short sharp hard time.

Then there is the long grinding decline ahead of us. Post-peak everything (except for disasters. Disasters will just keep peaking and peaking and then peaking some more.) The limits to growth getting firm and then hard. The Revolution of Falling Expectations. Big Heat Rising. The long slow slide down the far side of Hubbert’s Peak till we come to our final rest at the bottom of Hubbert’s Pit. The Long Emergency. The Long Jackpot. Etc.

That kind of hard times will require a different kind of perma-preparation of knowledge, skill, social-interaction capacity, inner resignation and acceptance, and so forth. The skills required for that long-term survival will be much more the pre-digital and even pre-Power-Age technologies which can function without the big grids of today.

Part of such long-term survival preparation will involve buying today the tools and instruments produced by our modern civilization so you will have them when the civilization no longer exists to produce them.

Krystyn Podgajski

I was wondering what happened to your voice at NC. I’ve close to being banned there and I have a lot of comments never make. Stay safe.

I’ve been taking Vit. C, D, and Zinc since the beginning it i did get sick for just 3 days. I did buy Ivermectin online and it got rid the side effects I was having.

Oh, this is easy. Food and water sufficient for a few days (temporary emergency) plus cyanide capsule (breakdown of authority or Red State rebellion). I’d rather be gone before they come to get me — and in my part of the country, on the basis of, umm, certain demographic features of mine I know they’d be coming to get me. And even if not, is it a world I’d want to live in anyway? Now if only there were a safe and sure way to get hold of that capsule . . .

Potatoes will be an important subsistence/ survival crop for some people going forward. Controlling insects in them will remain a problem. Here is a video of someone who has invented a device to capture Colorado potato beetles from off of potato plants without using any chemicals. Here is the link. The mechanically-inclined could perhaps study the hand-pushed beetle catcher in this video and figure out how to make one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/q8yh9i/the_farmer_who_found_a_way_to_get_rid_of/

@Astrid

After looking at the moon of alabama link, I’m thinking:

If I had millions of dollars, I would try to convince my wife to emigrate to Canada to escape this festering right wing crazyhouse–We’re too old and we’re not young high earning professionals who could pay more into their safety net than to take from it to earn our way into citizenship or legal alien status or whatever.

However, we do have cash reserves for emergencies, if need be.

Given our reserves, we don’t have much of a choice but to age in place, hopefully with some old age living facility if we need it and can afford it.

We live in a condo as opposed to a SFH, so planting our own food is out, lest we get a hydroponic garden.

We have some food and water reserves to hopefully survive the eruption of the Seattle Fault, assuming it happens in our lifetime.

The best I can say is that we don’t live in a red or purple state, for the right wing forces in those places are so much stronger and they would attempt to assert their armed clout on everybody else if things went to shite, economically and politically.

I just saw in a Naked Capitalism comment a reference to a website with some legacy Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly material archived on it. A lot of that material is very survival-relevant. Here is the website for people to mine for information before the Internet goes extinct.
https://archive.org/details/wholeearth

Beau of the Fifth Column has a video where he explains why he thinks that Texas is not prepared for another Deep Winter outburst like last year. If it happens this winter in Texas, Texas will have another large scale power outage. He then gives advice to any listener who cares to take it on how to be personally survival-prepared to endure several days of Deep Winter without any power in Texas, just in case another Deep Winter like last Winter causes another power failure like last Winter’s power failure.

Here is the link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6q4zo0BNjI&list=PLQDS8YKa2B0kkdfbs6x8dMPdm6u-XxWs6&index=2

Somecomputerguy,

Thanks for the reminder about Linux. We have a 10 year old Thinkpad that’s still going strong but uses a version of Windows that will soon be out of support, which incidentally is why we had to ditch our last, also functional and well loved, Thinkpad from the early 00s. I’m used to the new Windows OS for work but it’s unpleasant. Might be time for the OS switch.

I do wonder about Tor. I heard various accusations of USG putting backdoors in it and that having it on your computer is just painting a bullseye on yourself. But I never seriously considered it and did not investigate those accusations for validity. I’ve been using a mix of Chrome and Duckduckgo on my phone.

I am thinking about VPN. It’s ubiquitous amongst the Chinese in my acquaintance and both my husband and I used VPN for accessing our work environments from home. Is the security worth the trade-off in cost and performance penalty, if we don’t travel a lot?

DC

My understanding of everything “Linux” is that it is for devoted computer and programming hobbyists who enjoy working around inside the programming to do this and that and make all kinds of custom adjustments and so forth.

As someone who migrated from Winders to Linux many years ago, I think you are mistaken. There are versions (“distributions”) of Linux which are easier to set up than a Windows installation (something most people don’t realize as they never installed Windows by themselves; they bought a computer where someone else did it for them).

Linux is certainly very customizable, much more so than WIndows (or Mac) which may contribute to the impression that it’s solely for “tinkerers”. But hasn’t there been things about your Windows computer(s) that you’d like to change, but couldn’t? With Linux, you usually CAN change them, thought some things are trivial to change and some things not-so-trivial. But with most of the popular distros, the things that most people want to do (email, browse the web, etc) work out-of the-box. I’d recommend Mint over Ubuntu now if you want the additional security/privacy of the /home encryption option, which encrypts all your files and protects your data (though with the caveat from Bruce Schneier that if the government really really wants to crack your box, they probably can, if they can target you in advance). Both distros have encryption, but the full-disk encryption option of Ubuntu (and Mint too) is much more a pain to set up and customize than the /home encryption option still offered in Mint.

Most of the things that somecomputerguy said was true. I ran my 13-year old desktop on it until the motherboard died, then I bought a new desktop. My 13-year old laptop still runs on a supported version of Linux. You couldn’t do that with WIndows and probably not Mac either. Just from the money perspective, it gets me off “give us more money” never-ending merry-go-round of deliberately enforced obsolescence (the goal of MS and Apple) that not only saves me money but also generated less hardware e-waste.

@StewartM,

I don’t have a computer of my own. Or a laptop or an IPad or a smartphone or even a cellphone.
I use the computers at my place of work when I am on break, or I use the computers at the public library on my day off.

Some day I hope to have my very own personal computer which squats proudly on the center of its very own computer desk. But I am going to have to de-hoardify and clear up my dwelling space enough to fit one in. If/ when I reach that happy place, I will hope you are correct about the existence of Linux-derived systems which can be super-easy installed and then used without my having to “love computers” or “love programming”. In the meantime, I will think/ am thinking about what you have written here.

Speculative hard times for me are of two kinds:

1: Tens of millions of poor Latin Americans swarm the border “wall” like a scene out of WWZ after the climate change methane release spirals out of control, panicking to escape a wet bulb death. Makes me wonder what insulae romans did after Rome’s aqueducts were cut and they had to live under barbarian rule.

2. “Republicans” go full fascist and take over. Francoist Spain, or Pinochet, or some other unpleasant history all over again. Ratting on neighbors, death squads, political rivals being disappeared… I suppose I could directly ask somebody like Badempenada who might personally know people who were targeted yet survived.

Something tells me that trying to defend a little garden from starving well-armed zombies could be a bit of a chore.

DC,

There are lots of different kinds of Hard Times. Anyone offering a survival and/or preparation idea here might want to say what kind or level of Hard Times they are trying to prepare for.

That was just my point. How and what you prepare for is driven by what you think will happen, and will happen first.

To me, the first thing that will happen is likely the end of American democracy and the rule of law. This too could end in progressive stages, with both the “norms” of democracy and the rule of law deteriorating as the quality of American life deteriorates. The latter will drive the former, as the Trumpists (and movement conservatives) have always interpreted any failure of their ideology to be not a sign of any flaw in their ideology, but to their lack of doubling-down even harder. Eventually these will decide that “democracy” is standing in the way of that doubling-down even harder and (like Hitler) that the fault lies in the American people being ‘unworthy’ of conservatism, not in their ideology.

The first step of this will be felt by (visible) minority groups, as police protection is removed for them (i.e., militias/vigilantes will kill or torment them aka like the KKK did with the police being “unable” to solve those crimes). That is why I mentioned that for some, moving to the countryside is a non-starter. Eventually, though, as at least some in the white lower classes realize they’ve been had, this repression will spread.

The very worst case would be a Stalinist Q-anon terror with people condemning their friends and families as secret members of the Satanist pedophile cabal. I don’t know if this would last, nor do I think a “Proud Boys” reign of terror would last, as a society where everyone is in terror or being beaten up on whim is in the long run unproductive for our Wall Street lords and masters. Hitler did end up neutering his SA for that reason.

Climate change and economic collapse and masses of refugees will hit too, but at a slower pace. By the time they hit, we’ll be in the die-off period. I fear, based on previous world history political instability (including war) will start killing off people long before they are killed directly by climate change.

@Willy,

I remember way back when the ReaganAdmin was sponsoring a guerilla-terrorist war against the Sandinist government in Nicaragua. I remember that at the same time but in separate parallel, the Spanish language government of Nicaragua began behaving like classical Spanish conquistadors against the Indian Nations of Eastern “Nicaragua”, and large groups of those Indians began insurging. Apparently CIA contacts offered them assistance and apparently those groups politely declined the CIA assistance as not being compatible with their goal of Indian Nation Autonomy or maybe even Sovereignty as an antidote to Sandinista Colonialism.

The Sandinists tried concentration-camping as many of them as it had the partial power to concentration-camp. But it couldn’t concentration-campify enough of them to stop the rest from still insurging. So the Sandinista Colonialists tried to find and destroy all their foodgrowing and foodstorage capacity. But the Indian Nations also had a parallel perennial polyculture food-growing system hidden in among the tropical forest itself. So they could avoid starvation with the Sandinists ever quite figuring out how they avoided starvation in the teeth of Sandinist efforts to starve them into submission.

I read about this ongoingly in the Iroquois League Sovereignty Newsletter “Akwesasne Notes”. I remember once beginning to discuss these things with a Sandinist sympathiser on campus where I was at the time and was about to tell him about this rain-forest-based “parallel food system” until I realized that if he didn’t already know about this, and I told him about this, he would immediately try to tell his Sandinist soul mates about it. So I said nothing just in case silence was still golden.

https://rozsixties.unl.edu/items/show/873

Going back to short term preparation for likely Omicron derived supply chain disruptions. I will say what I’ve been doing recently:

Buy N95 masks (in my case, 3M Auras from the whipcrackers at Amazon. I haven’t been able to find a good alternative source. They’re more comfortable and better fitting than any other I’ve tried (and I’ve tried probably 7-8 in the last year plus more from Ebola scares a couple years ago) and works for my glass wearing spouse. At about $370 for a box of 440, it’s not expensive and I’ve repacked them in ziplock bags to gift to friends and family.)

Shopping infrequently at nonbusy times – usually this translates to once a month on Tuesday or Wednesday near closing time at my local Costco. Costco closes by 7 here, so it’s an awkward time for most people to shop. For produce, onions, potato, carrots, turnips, fennel bulbs, celery, brussel sprouts, cabbage, apples, citrus, Asian pears, fuyu persimmons, and winter squash will easily last 4 weeks under refrigeration or in a dark cool cupboard. This can be extended with frozen fruits and veggies for more fragile produce. The only thing this doesn’t work for is lettuce, which typically has 2 weeks of shelf life in optimal circumstances, but cabbage slaws are a tolerable substitute (we prefer them, especially with Kewpie roasted sesame dressing) and we don’t eat lettuce salad often except in May-June.

Mail order – in the past year, I’ve been buying most of my meats and seafood online. It’s not cheap, but not more expensive compared to supermarket prices and the quality is far better (even compared to Wegmans and Costco and Karns, who tend to have the best quality meats in my area). D’Artagnan’s has 30-40% sales pretty regularly that knocks their grass fed beef and heritage pork into about $10 a pound range. Shipping is remarkably cheap for me because I probably live within 100 miles of their distribution center, but probably much higher outside of New England or the Mid Atlantic.

Costco.com (available to those without membership to the warehouse) sells NZ lamb for about $10 a lb, bacon for about$5.50 a lb, and elk medallions for about $22 a pound. I understand that any meat is becoming luxuries for a good chunk of the population, but these are options that might be better than what is locally available for you. For seafood bought locally, I buy pretty much exclusively frozen as the thawed quality is better than”fresh”.

All this is harder to do if you don’t have a free standing freezer. Though the Costco.com meats come with free shipping and not particularly large quantities, so it might work into a monthly buying schedule.

I found some of the comments in this NC post to elucidate some helpful information regarding N95s. Also a possibly pretty good source for the masks if you’re in Canada. The hard shell 3M masks are excellent for secure fit and durability, though not very comfortable for long duration wear. It’s what we used before we tried 3M Auras.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/12/as-omicron-surges-sanders-says-congress-must-ensure-mass-distribution-of-n95-masks.html

Some helpful suggestions for downloading wikipedia and other useful information:

https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/rw12rg/im_one_of_the_people_stranded_on_i95_for_the_last/

Gnaw debt eye ding abutt id, hairs bench murre tails ridden wit Anguish Languish, together hung avid.

https://www.crockford.com/anguish.html

An article about preparing for effects of climate change run on the most recent Wikrent’s Weekly Wrap-up was so fitting to this thread that I will copy-paste it here.
( If Ian Welsh disapproves of the practice of moving a link from “there” to “here”, then I suppose this comment will quietly not appear).

Here is the link. And the linked-to article itself contains an internal link to a place of further information.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-prepare-climate-change-now/

Part of the problem is one has to let one’s imagination roam freely to anticipate what possible strange new events might impact you so you can think about how to reduce the sharpness of that impact. For example, if you live outside one of the old normal traditional tornado alleys, a new-normal tornado might not respect that and might visit your very own house. And it might be an F6 or F7 tornado ( numbers which have not yet been created or assigned, but which tomorrow’s global warming ultra-super hyper-mega tornadoes might call for). If a tornado with 400 mph winds parked itself over your house for a while, throwing cinder blocks and bowling balls and other big things at it, how would you stay safe? Preparing for things like that might enhance one’s survival chances.

Warning about Seedsnsuch. Just found out that it’s now owned by the same people who owns Jung’s and RH Shumway, who have a mixed at best reputation. Still, they have some of the lowest prices on good hybrid seed varieties and in the past I’ve bought from another of their companies, Totally Tomatoes, without any problems.

If you want reputable seedhouse that supplies hybrids, Fedco and Pinetree are probably your best options, price and selection-wise. Johnny’s Select Seed is the gold standard and reasonably priced for larger lots, but very expensive for single packets.

Growing your own food is probably never going to be worth it in terms of return for time, money, and effort. Do it because it’s fun and challenging. But finding the right Farmer’s market or CSA will do more for your food security (my organic CSA works out to be less than $25 per week for enough food to feed 4 adults, stay away from Farmer’s market that charge more than $5/lb for tomatoes. Farmer’s markets should be priced to support farmers, but they don’t have to charge you $7/lb for tomatoes to make ends meet. If they are, they’re either vastly overcharging you or doing it wrong).

At seedsnsuch, I notice that the one same photograph illustrates both the Mr. Stripey or Tigerella tomato seeds and also the German Johnson pink tomato seeds.

Preserving local societies and economies can pre-make certain coming hard times less hard when they actually come.

Buying food locally and hyper-locally can keep some local society alive against the day when local society may keep its members alive when they would all die off if they were a mere bunch of lone wolves.

Maybe personal gardening of some things can enhance one’s ability to pay for some other things and if that is so, gardening may allow one to strengthen the local society one lives in.

Also , many farmers still don’t know all about soil-mineral buildup and maintainance and balancing, and therefor don’t know all about growing food as high-density nutravitamineral rich as it could be. If the home gardener can learn more about this than the regional farmers know so far, the home gardener can grow food with more high-density nutravitamineral content-value, which over the long run could help the home gardener maintain his/her health ( and family’s health) at a higher level than what relying on nutrient-free virtual vegetables alone can maintain.

Here is a website seeking to explore and spread that concept.
https://highbrixgardens.com/

If this is as valid as I think and hope it is, it might over time come to seem that way to others as well. If so, those others might want to prepare for garden-impacting hard times in the form of soil-ammendment shortages by pre-buying and stockpiling a couple-decades worth of the relevant soil ammendments for maintaining high nutra-dense gardening ability in their own gardens. And Fedco, for example, has a very wide range of tasty goor-may garden soil ammendments. And so do some others.

I have read that corn seed is supposed to remain viable in personal amateur storage for about 3-5 years. And yet Hickory Cane corn I grew in 2010 and still have seed-on-the-cob ears of is still viable for planting. Did I know what I was doing? Or did I just get lucky? Either way, I will plant seed from those ears every year until it is no longer viable, and in that way select for “longer viability of seed” in homedweller amateur storage.

Spotted this morning. Looks like plenty of good ideas/tips.

https://offgridworld.com/

For those looking for an exit, I came across Portugal’s D7 visa scheme, popular with retirees and”digital nomads”, which allows people with rather modest fixed income (can be wages) to move there and provide an avenue to citizenship after 5 years. It’s probably still more expensive than moving to Latin America or SE Asia, but has excellent cheap healthcare and transportation. It sounds like 2,000 euros a month should be quite comfortable for a couple in Lisbon or Porto, and the other locations should be significantly cheaper.

Just figured that I would pass this along. We’re still looking at the golden visa option because it allows for a pathway to citizenship with minimal residency requirements.

Thanks for the Portugal D7 information, Astrid!

On blending and avoiding in regards to differing strong opinions, I use the “space case” method. If you are spacey, people tend to give you a free pass. I walk right by people sometimes, and don’t realize they’re trying to talk to me. At first it was accidental, but now I do it on purpose if someone is trying to take advantage of default social courtesy, like a petitioner. Of course I would help an old lady across the street or stop for someone if they were genuinely lost, but this is for those trying to push you into buying or signing something.

Even if someone comes up to you and wants to tell you something, if you space out really hard, they’ll think you’re not even hearing them. You get to edge out of their way, and they don’t even take it personally and just go find someone else. (This is probably more effective in a multilingual city where people assume you might not understand them.)

If you are trapped somewhere and someone is talking at you, I employ what I observed from someone who was “Minnesota Nice.” She listens like she’s not quite sure of the situation and doesn’t know enough to add anything, and then if the person pauses long enough to force a response, she just goes “Ooh…” and then doesn’t add any substance. Then take your exit when you can! If you’ve cultivated your space-case persona, you can even excuse yourself in the middle of their chat without a reason. Just smile and say “Oh okay, bye,” and give a wave and go. They’ll think you’re spacey, but they won’t think you’re trying to insult them. It’s effective and neutral.

Header: coping with higher gas prices.

The USGov has decided to forbid any US buyers from buying any Russian oil. Beau of the Fifth Column expects this will cause gas prices to rise and he made an advice video about how to cope as an individual and how social-minded individuals can do things to have an additive collective restraining impact on how high gas prices can go.

The video is called . . . ” Let’s talk about Russian oil and American costs . . . ” Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3YtOnpTYH8&list=PLQDS8YKa2B0kkdfbs6x8dMPdm6u-XxWs6&index=1

I’m sure some (most) of what I’ll say has been said, nonetheless. One must garden. Self-sufficiency is unlikely for all but a select few for many reasons. But every little bit helps a lot. To build a garden bed:

Dig the bed out as deep as your energy will allow. 2’ is a good target. Set aside all the soil, if there is turf, separate that from lower levels of soil. Now begin filling the bed with yard waste. Large limbs and even stumps can go in the bottom. Fill in spaces with green waste and smaller trimmings, even some brown leaves. Flood it. Lay in the turf, green side down. Flood it. Continuing layering with leaves, twigs, green waste, wood chips and the soil pile you set aside. Make everything finer grade as you move up. It may go above the level of grade and that’s great. You can put a perimeter of wood or stone around it to hold shape.

The top 2” or so should be compost, finely chopped green waste and finely chopped brown waste (shoot for 1:3 of these. You can juice the top layer with simple fertilizers that are cheap. Kelp meal is fantastic. Alfalfa meal in small quantities. There are lots of others, search “no-till” gardening for lists.

Seed this with cover crops like crimson clover, winter peas, etc. (this can be done in the fall if you pre make the bed or even in the spring before serious planting). If it’s a new bed in the spring, go ahead and seed in cool weather crops too. Mulch it well either with straw or chopped leaves. If you can, this is a great time to put in a mixture of red wiggler and nightcrawler worms. Even works from a bait shop will be fine.

Stand back and watch. Never pull any weeds. Same goes for cover crops. Cut them at the crown of the plant and let the plant material fall on the mulch. The same goes for finished production plants. Do not pull out the roots. Cut the stem just above the soil and leave it. The most you’ll ever dig this bed is to put in transplants.

I use production crops as cover crops in the growing season. So I’ll scatter leafy greens, peas, etc (mostly fairly fast crops, not tomatoes or peppers) randomly. If something comes up where it’s in the way, chop it. If it can stay for a while and produce a little, leave it and chop it when it’s really in the way. You want the bed to be wall to wall green all the time. I plant some flowers like marigolds and annual poppies too and let some of them go to seed.

At the end of the season chop everything and leave it where it falls. I prefer to chop, gather, mulch with the lawn mower and scatter (because mastication is the first step of digestion) but it’s unnecessary. You can add a bit of compost at the end of the season. This is also the time to add any new amendments like more kelp meal. Mulch it again and plant cover crops. Winter peas and crimson clover will usually come up and establish before being killed by frost.

The next spring most of the cover crop will likely come back. Let it go, add a bit too it and start your planting. The bed will get better every year with almost no new labor beyond planting/harvesting. I have tested this pretty rigorously and grown vegetables just about every way one can (except massive commercial production). This is the best way I’ve found.

It’s low cost, high initial labor and very low operational labor. Excellent results with vigorous, healthy plants resistant to stress. It also minimizes water usage. For the most part, pest pressure will be taken care of naturally because the pests are prey. Biology is doing all your “work” with this method. Seriously, you’ll find that you chop down plant material and two days later look to find it gone.

2 feet is admirable but probably unnecessary unless you’re building a heck of a hugelbed. I start beds by digging maybe 4 inches down to get rid of the perennial weeds, mixed back with maybe 4 inches of compost, then do a top dress of 2 inches. I also use glysophate for killing lawns in preparation (usually takes 2 passes 2 weeks apart). Then dump 4 inches of compost on top, the grass rots away during the season. I’m a pretty lazy gardener and usually the soil more than a foot down just isn’t very nice and tend to get rocky, so I focus on top dress and no till.

I have 2 plots in a community garden and every year, the rototiller gardeners have great looking gardens until about mid June, then eventually gives way to weeds patches for the rest of the year. Tilling brings up weed seeds whereas no till and being vigilant about weeding means less weeds each year…or rather, it would mean less weeds if my neighbors kept up with their weeds.

Subsequent years, I weeds and clean up in early spring and dump 2-3 inches of compost on top. Getting a sunny spot, watering deeply once a week, and compost is really magic.

On buying property, as the interest rates are still very low for 15 year, I recommend putting no more than 20% down rather than paying lumps sum. While the future of the dollar does not look good, you might as well give yourself the flexibility of having the cash around and potentially putting it towards insulation, energy efficient improvements, productive farm land and well, if you can. One thing that my paranoid self constantly considers is putting secure metal bars and shutters for windows and doors. This is pretty much universal for poorer countries and I see property crime on the increase as people get more desperate.

It sounds like your rural acres are going unused, in which case you may want to assess what you want to it for and if it’s not much, it might be better to sell it and use the money towards property that’s more convenient or productive. If you do have plans for it, perhaps put in the groundworks to help those future plans to fruition.

@Hickory,

I am a bi-weekly wage worker and so have very little conceptual knowledge of what to do with “money” beyond storing it in a safe place or buying things with it.

So here’s some well-intended free advice, even if it is worth every cent. Land once surrendered will never be gettable-back. Never. Ever. That land is survivalist safety for the future.

What if the dollar goes to zero? What if “money” itself goes to zero? You will be left holding a hundred thousand worthless dollars. The chances of that are low but still . . . why not spend some of those dollars now on a lifetime supply of every single survival input and pleasant living input you and your garden will need for the rest of your life on your land? Soil ammendments and fertility-restorers will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no soil-ammendments and fertility restorers.

Why not buy all the tools and inputs and facilities you would need to create the kind of gardens and food-zones which you could still work if-when you become old and partially disabled? That would allow you to retire and survive in place rather than have to go to a nursing prison if nursing prisons still exist by that time.

If I was in your position having what you describe yourself as having, I would invest in every aspect of survivalism-in-place. A super-insulated super-fortified house ( looking like an ordinary house on the outside), home-generated survival electricity, water, etc.

And I would rigidly exclude any trace of glyphosate from any aspect of my operation. In fact, I already rigdly exclude glyphosate from my tiny yard and garden and avoid glyphosate-tainted food every which way I can.

Here is a video of Don Huber discussing some of the problems which have emerged due to glyphosate use. There are others.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&p=Professor+don+huber+glyphosate#id=1&vid=6186dc0107642c0ae6037d2b266fb4e5&action=click

Here is a metalink-site to a whole lotta buncha Don Huber interviews and papers.
https://paradigmchange.me/huber/

Here is a fairly extensive Curriculum Vitae for Professor Don Huber so you can decide if his material is worth your time.
https://www.nvlv.nl/downloads/Dr_Huber_bio.pdf

In my purely amateur science-buff layman’s opinion, glyphosate will compromise your survival every day in every way. The damage will take time to manifest, as with smoking. If you haven’t permitted glyphosate to taint your land, I would suggest forbidding glyphosate from tainting your land throughout the future as well.

Those who believe otherwise should feel free to go right ahead and use all the glyphosate they want, as long as they share that fact with anyone they give or sell their glyphood to.

Hickory,

Sorry to have misunderstood your situation. I do think keeping some cash aside and getting a fixed rate mortgage is a no brainer right now. You always have the option of paying up later. Income property, maybe in the form of a trailer (or even small parking lot to provide a safe place for folks living out of vans and cars) may be good investments and an opportunity to build a community. Besides all the obvious improvements, do also consider your food storage options. A large hidden cellar can be very helpful for many things including severe weather events, bandits, and storing valuables (including potatoes). I just broke down and bought a basic 25 cubic foot fridge, both as backup to my primary fridge and to store more food. Chest freezers are relatively cheap and energy efficient, and an easy way to store excess garden produce compared to canning. Buying food safe 5 gallon plastic buckets (some people can source them from restaurants and cafeterias), water collection and storage solutions, etc.

On use of glysophate use. I’m not surprised that I’m in the minority but my thinking is that this is a chemical with a very short life, with significant usage over decades, and there is no convincing evidence of significant toxicity to humans. It’s frankly so overused that exposure to a single use to clear out land seems minimal compared to everything else in already exposed to. The main thing is to keep it away from water sources as one of the round up additives is extremely toxic to amphibians, but you can buy pure glysophate without additives for less money and then add in a safer sticker for your application. Or not. Folks that can manage organic are awesome and I am pretty much 100% organic except glysophate in turf removal, using chemical fertilizers to grow seedlings and houseplants, and applying premethrin on myself and my clothes to reduce tick risks (I also wear a full body swimsuit when gardening in overgrown areas and shower/tick check tight afterwards, and still find ticks attaching, seriously consider guinea hens if you can tolerate the screeching).

Also, if using glysophate means minimizing soil disturbance, use of heavy machinery (you can rent lawn cutters to remove the grass), and throwing out my back, it’s worthwhile for me. Alternative of just putting up cardboard and mulching can work as well, you just have to deal with more perennial weeds for the first couple years.

Another thing to consider, if you have the money, is to spend some of it enjoying yourself. If it means travelling somewhere high on your bucket list, hike the John Muir trail, buying yourself a nice car or bike or chipper shredder, a good pair of shoes, etc., do it now. YOLO is a stupid concept as typically applied, but you don’t want to look back in the future and regret not getting to do something that you really want to do.

Psh, spend the money on myself? Now that’s hard! Thanks for the reminder.

I notice I often feel stressed about a harder future, and wanting to resist it by preparing. I then resist instead of enjoying the present, and instead of generating the future I want, still given the full awareness of our present situation.

@Lex,

Have you looked into which garden or garden-adaptable plants have the deepest strongest taproots? Tap roots that don’t turn aside if they hit a stiff clay-rich layer but slowly and patiently bore into it and maybe through it, still going straight down?

Header: local nature observation for better yard-garden management: an example . . .

There are two apricot trees near where I live. One bears fair apricots and one bears good apricots. I gather a few of the unwanted apricots from off of the ground before they can rot because nobody else cares or even notices them.

A “problem” with apricot trees is that they bloom very early in the season, often before pollinator insects have warmed up enough to be active, sometimes before the last kill-frost which will burn off all the blossoms. I don’t know how to make them bloom later than they naturally bloom.

This year we had two early hot days coinciding with the flush-of-bloom on the apricot trees. I noticed some ( not a lot) of various pollinator insects at them. Then it got cold again . . . down to low 30s at night. The next chance I got to see the trees, it was about 60 degrees out, and the flowers had zero pollinators exCEPT for a few bumblebees. At 60 degrees out, bumblebees can generate enough of their own body heat to get out there and pollinate apricot flowers.

What could someone with a yard and some apricot trees do to have more bumblebees at apricot blossom time? The only thing I can think of is to figure out what bumblebees like and need to eat all through the season and plant enough all-season bumblebee-food plants so as to have maximum bumblebee survival by winter.
That might offer more bumblebees in existence by next spring to do more pollinating of the apricot trees.

@Howard,

If the blog-platform that Ian Welsh operates on does not allow Ian Welsh to do this, there may be a way to ” reverse-do-it” for one’s own self. The comments are already in chronological order. They are in what could be called “ascending” chronological order.
The very top comment is the very first comment that was published. Each comment after that in the thread was the comment that was sequentially next-in-time after the comment just before it. So instead of having the very newest comment at the “top”, the very newest comment is at the “bottom”.

So all one has to do is to go to the very bottom and read that comment first, and then scroll back up one comment at a time to read the next newest, and then the third newest, and then the fourth newest comment just above that, and then the fifth newest comment just above that, and so on back upstream in thread and in time.

( I am one of what is possibly a majority of people who are used to the concept of the “first” comment to appear at the top of a thread being the “first-in-time” comment that got written and sent in. I personally hope that our host does not rip up and destroy the whole mainstream near-consensus placement of first-comments-in-space being first-comments-in-time, because that would work a hardship on me and perhaps most of us. And on our host if he were to try ripping up the whole thread architecture and try re-engineering the whole pile of disconnected comments. If might be easier all around to just simply begin reading from the “bottom” in order to start with the “most recent comment”.)

if anyone is wealthy enough to build or carry out extreme modification their home, here’s an article dropped from the Journal of Light Construction on passive house construction in fire zones.

https://www.jlconline.com/projects/disaster-resistant-building/a-passive-house-in-wildfire-country_o

thumbnail guide for ” how to self-regulate using neuropsychology” . . . for short-term relief of certain short term mood or attention or thinking problems . . .
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/v8508p/self_regulate/

Agree that the scrolling is rather annoying on smartphones. What I do is do a find for “leave a reply”, which will take me to the bottom of the page, right after the last comment.

I do feel like this thread may have ran its course, though the first 200 comments contain a lot of great thoughts. Permaculture or paid off mortgage or NZ bolthole can help at the margins, but what can we do living in a system so determined to stupid itself to death? Maybe the Chinese can succeed but I kinda doubt it, they’re trapped in their own ideas about modernity as well.

I’m not sure how tagging and atomizing information, thus greatly increasing complexity and administrative overhead, is helpful for a blog that gets maybe 30 comments per day. Even websites with highly knowledgeable and dedicated moderators can often fall behind and have regular commentators ignore rules because they introduce barriers to participation.

In addition, when the information quantity is not overwhelming (and a couple hundred comments over the course of many months is not), I personally enjoy reading through all the comments and learning about things that did not occur to me, that I wouldn’t have sought out if they were narrowly ghettoized into their discrete threads.

I was once an participant in a bulletin board where people made comments about good dining experiences they’ve had in a particular city. That system worked great, people can scan to the latest comments for some ideas about good places to hit. People wanting something specific from a city or location can ask questions and have others respond as generally or specifically as they like. The owner of the bulletin board took it upon himself to break out the comments into individual restaurants. Massive undertaking from someone who didn’t have great follow through on the best of days, and what he did made the information extremely annoying to access and supply, and blocked the native conversational flow on the site. Eventually most of the people on the board stopped commenting and went off to live their lives elsewhere. Maybe something that would happen anyways as text based bulletin boards have been dying off in the last 15 years, but the own goaling over the advice of many contributors certainly didn’t help in this case.

Here lies possible general rules about organizing. Have as few rules as possible, be a lumper, so everything you can to minimize administration because it will always go wrong somehow.

” How to stay cool in hot weather”.

That’s an eye-grabbing header which says what the comment will be about.

Naked Capitalism just recently ran a post called ” How to Stay Cool in Hot Weather”. It contains valuable information and also some valuable links. If it is left at Naked Capitalism, it will disappear under the ever-flowing mudslide of millions upon millions of words. So I will offer the link here. People who remember that Ian Welsh has offered a One Single Place where people may come to hunt for survival information will come here to this One Single Place and if they are patient enough, they will find it among the thousands of words that are here. Better chance of finding it among thousands of words here than finding it among millions of words over there.

Here is the link.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/how-to-stay-cool-in-hot-weather.html

removing ticks ( including disease ticks) from the body . . .

As the global warms, various disease ticks ( Lyme Disease, Powassan Fever, etc.) will spread north including deeper into East Canada. Someone sent an intriguing note on how to detach ticks in to a recent Naked Capitalism thread. Here it is . . .

Slick Tick Trick:

A few years ago I watched in amazement as a friend removed a tick by merely swirling a wet q-tip around it half a dozen times and off it came.

Anyone who spots a tick on a body could try this to see if it works. If it does, here is a tick-removal method.

I find it easy to get to the “bottom” of the threads too, even though I am just an old analog refugee in this new digital world.

What I do is . . . one right click on the title Preparing For Bad Times Thread. When that opens, I find just below the top of the thread the words in red letters . . . add comment ->
I left-click on that with just one left-click and it drops me right down to the comments field where I can leave a comment. The “bottom” of the thread is right above that comments field area.

Header: Keeping warm in winter.

Lambert Strether of Naked Capitalism recently wrote an article on wood stoves and how he upgraded his house and wood stove. The article and subsequent thread are information-rich enough that I have decided to offer the link here. ( Yes, they banned me over there but at some point one swallow’s one’s bitterness and moves on).

Here is the link.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/07/an-ode-in-praise-of-the-wood-stove.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/vyflir/what_are_your_plans_for_the_near_future_indepth/

Long ago, I was shown a house by a realtor. Exurban acreage, beautiful detail-crafted custom house owned by a talented finish carpenter. Behind a thick laurel hedge I could hear what sounded like a pirate convention. Lots of course manly laughter, loud swearing, and the occasional “Arrrr!” going on back there. I pushed through the hedge to investigate. What I discovered was a biker gang having a wild party. Needless to say, I didn’t buy the place. Plus there’s no way I could live large today.

As my little story relates to this thread, I rather like the idea of knowing my edible weeds. Hell, edible anything. In case you’ve been kicked off your exurban homestead by a well-armed biker/pirate gang sent by your mortgage bank. Building safe, warm/cool, dry, and concealed dugout shelters seems another good skill worth having.

Not entirely on topic, but this seems like a useful list for people still reading through internet comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialEngineering/comments/b5ncr0/seventeen_techniques_for_truth_suppression_by/

BTW – my parents excitedly called me up to say that they booked a cruise for November, because nobody is masking for Covid anymore so it’s totally fine. At least I discouraged them from booking a December cruise in addition.