Prepping

[Whitefang]

Why not bit of both?

Store some loot on secret locations and have experience in hunting/fishing/gathering/herbal medicine, in short survival skills in the wild. Choose a basecamp and be ready to leave when needed.
Make shelter, find fresh water.......have hardly anything to defend but your own impeccability.
Travel with children is slow but you can scout like the indians and hide your family in the woods.
No need to bury yourself and wait it out.

[davep]

From the article:

If you don’t have a community of preppers around you, you have nothing.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. The neighbours don't need to be like-minded preppers. They just need to be practical farming types with guns, chickens etc and enough of a sense of community to start a militia should the need arise.

[davep]

Here's a better article (IMO) on the "Strategic Advantages Of Community Building":

ZeroHedge

[AgentR11]

The neighbours don't need to be like-minded preppers. They just need to be practical farming types with guns, chickens etc and enough of a sense of community to start a militia should the need arise.

Agree. There's no magic associated with a buy-in to doom or prepping, just practical, rural skills, experience, ties whatever. As conditions change for the worse, they'll adjust, lowered expectations, ability to grow sufficient a CALORIE count for family (and often neighbors, gardens scale funny), lack of true need for modern gadgets.. They'll be fine. Maybe they're preppers by default, simply because its what they've always done. My grandmother wasn't a prepper, just an old church going lady, peaches or berries come in, and her dinky kitchen would turn into a food processing plant, putting up a hundred plus jars of delicious goodies; corn, peas, beans, same deal, freezer boxes by the gross filled with calorie laden food. Other stuff dried, preserved, whatever. Its just what she did. A sizable, well stocked and managed pantry was simply core to her way of life, things could be no other way.

[vtsnowedin]

[ My grandmother wasn't a prepper, just an old church going lady, peaches or berries come in, and her dinky kitchen would turn into a food processing plant, putting up a hundred plus jars of delicious goodies; corn, peas, beans, same deal, freezer boxes by the gross filled with calorie laden food. Other stuff dried, preserved, whatever. Its just what she did. A sizable, well stocked and managed pantry was simply core to her way of life, things could be no other way.

I hope you paid close attention to how she did all that. Might save you and yours.

[Pops]

My grandmother wasn't a prepper,

Key point.

Personally I'd rather have a bunch of such grannys and gramps as neighbors than all the camo'd "preppers" you can shake a punji stick at.

Granny canned berries because she had to or she didn't have berries for her waffles. It wasn't a pastime or a hobby. Really, nowadays, anyone who cans berries or grow them for that matter are hobbyists, they make forty bucks an hour at a govmnt job and play act being self sufficient canning some berries.

Don't get me wrong, nothing wrong with that! I said something about people playing homestead on $150k government paychecks on another site and got yelled at as if I were assaulting the integrity of Big Berky herself! A certain former denizen of this board and I got quite the kick out of the stink kicked up by people who got their designer bib-alls all in a knot! LOL



Prepping in my mind is about learning to be frugal, quite the opposite of buying and stocking a "retreat" or following the latest fad in chicken breeds or gardening books. I went from $125k to $25k (down to $12k one year) and it was hard not to just expect to be able to run to the store and buy whatever, whenever. That's why "Don't Buy!" is my first rule, getting used to not having money is hard. It isn't the thing talked about though, 'Oh, look at my new cider press/ AK/ 100 million candlepower sniper scope night vision rangefinding diopter." Buying stuff is cool, that is the only thing cool about prepping in fact, buying stuff.

I think lots of "preppers" are thinking about a scenario along the lines of: the 4-week retreat to sit out the dieoff drinking home made mead (maybe help a few select groups to die off along the way as well) - emerge fat and sassy after the odor has dissipated – then recreate society in the image of themselves and the Like Minded.

That is key: "like-minded". This should tell you something very fundamental. Personally, I do not want to be dependent on or even much around "like-minded" people, especially LM people who have been dreaming of remaking the world to suit their own mindedness. One little slip and you just might not be seen as "like" enough anymore. Nope, I do not want to be among LMPs.


Just a little aside, I also think scary is what happened to lots of folks who used to post here in PFTF. We've been on quite the roller-coaster these last couple of years. I think the economic reality took some of the fun out of the prepper fantasies of Peak Oil Doom. I think many of the folks still posting here about such topics are the doers and not the buyers. But that's just my opinion.

[pstarr]

what's that?

PFTF Program for the Future
PFTF Propulsion Flight Test Fixture (US NASA)
PFTF Pining for the Fjords (Monty Python)
PFTF Project Face to Face (AIDS awareness)

[Newfie]

Pops,

That ,exactly, is why I often recommend "voyaging on a small income" by Ann hill. Decades ago she figured it out, how to live frugally.

The book is a about living cheaply, very cheaply, but well. It is also about living on a sailboat, but equally applies to on land.

Not prepping, doing.

P.s. figured out no knead bread making this week. Neat to have fresh bread on a boat.

[AgentR11]

Wow pops. Excellent summary of the world as it is right there. Grandmother didn't really can out of need during my lifetime, it was more just what she did and always had done, as her mother before her had done as well. She was a young adult during the great depression. During my time, she bought store bread and chicken, and my grandfather had a solid job as a laborer, and they lived in town. Didn't stop them from planting a two acre “garden”; as did a good number of my relatives of that generation. You know you have the East Texas version of “garden” when you hire a neighbor to use their full size tractor to plow & till it.

The four week retreat thing is also odd to me, this whole mess is such a grindingly slow slide down to poverty, that I can't imagine there ever being this abrupt dislocation that causes otherwise reasonably well fed and housed humans to go wanderer / raider. People point to riots here and there, but there were riots a hundred years ago, there were riots at the beginning of the end of British colonial rule; those are all political failures that are as common as dirt in human history, and require nothing of the peasant but to keep working, or maybe get drafted. That is not the definition of apocalypse.

I think the economic reality took some of the fun out of the prepper fantasies of Peak Oil Doom.

I helped my grandfather with that two acre garden... Nothing will make me happier than to NOT have to plant an acre or three of corn, peas, and potato, and pray it doesn't get flattened or diseased so me and mine don't starve to death. I'm prepared to go there, and have the land and equipment if the world requires it, but there was never any belief that it would be “fun”. Laying in the hammock is fun, sniffing tbone smoke is fun. Keeping a subsistence garden and source of income for the tax man going... not fun.

I guess I did get lucky in that buying is NOT fun, it feels very destructive and depressing to me.

[smiley]

I guess I did get lucky in that buying is NOT fun, it feels very destructive and depressing to me.

What do you know, we actually have something in common.

Prepping in my mind is about learning to be frugal,

well said. And I hope you're right.

Because if you aren't I'm in trouble. I find most of the prepping stories actually pretty depressing. I can understand that for some people living in a remote cabin somewhere in the woods seems pretty appealing. Good for them, but for me it would be akin to a slow and prolonged death.

I have no business there. I mean plants hate me, (my gardening experience has told me that much), so growing food would be out of the question.

Hunting-gathering: well the gathering part I might accomplish, but my fishing excursions have only made me the laugh of the local fish population, so I gather that I can forget hunting .

That doesn't mean I'm a total idiot (I hope), I do have some skills. Although my main occupancy these days is managing stuff, which is loosely defined as having a lot of meetings and writing flashy powerpoints, I actually am an experienced craftsman, and I make sure that I regulary sneak down the workshop after working hours to make sure that I don't loose my skills. Because it is genuine fun to make something, but also because it always leaves me something to fall back on.

And for me that is another form of prepping. These days are for me characterised by uncertainty. And that level of uncertainty will in my mind only increase. When faced with an uncertain threath there are two options, one is to dig in and take shelter, the other is the diametrical opposite, namely to be flexible and adapt. That means to create alternatives and options for yourself.

[Revi]

I think there are always ways to adapt. The situation is getting dire, but there are still a lot of ways around the place we're in. In a survival situation there are a couple of things that people do. First is to not sugarcoat the truth. The second is to keep trying to figure a way out of what seems to be an impossible situation. What do they have to lose?

I think prepping is just a longer term version of that. We have done a number of things that prepare us for what could come. If we don't need them they are still useful right now. There is no downside.

[Pops]

"Prepping" is a good thing, don't get me wrong. I was the first person on this site to talk about "doing something". I used to go on a lot about starting with just a little prep, maybe just the 72 hour kit FEMA now talks about all the time, just so you aren't completely dependent on FEMA. I think it comes from living so long in CA where people never give a passing thought to the weather; or maybe its my age, most boomers never give a passing thought to going without. Probably it's my upbringing, my folks were shipyard Okies whose oil wells ran dry and never forgot being refugees, I've never not been a "Prepper".

Sometime after the duck and cover drills stopped in the '60s, the gov decided to gloss over all the scary stuff. It's only recently they admit that some things can get scary –– the weather service didn't say "tornado" until just a few years ago, only after Joplin did they change the warnings to say that an impending tornado could actually hurt you. Maybe it was Katrina because that's when the Ready.gov site went up but I think it had a lot to do with Cheny and his much hyped "undisclosed location" and preoccupation with the Continuity Of Operations Plan. I mean when the VP is in the bunker it is bound to trickle down.

So yeah, plan for doom, hope for cornucopia.

[Loki]

The notion of a rural retreat to wait out the apocalypse is a relic of the Cold War and nuclear war paranoia. It has little relevance to the kind of slow economic decline we’re facing. Having a vacation home, er, “rural retreat” often amounts to little more than prepper conspicuous consumption, same mentality as buying $2000 night vision device that will never be used.

Pops $25k is a king’s salary, I lived on $16k last year and still managed to save money. But I have the advantage of having already acquired a lot of stuff I need for a frugal semi-self-sufficient lifestyle. An RV peasant hovel, canning supplies, how-to books, tools, etc., etc., not to mention the usual prepper stuff just in case (guns, generator, Big Berkey, MREs, etc.). Buying some “stuff” for preparedness is necessary, but I agree that our consumer mentality can often overshadow what’s really important: community, skills, and mindset.

I really have no idea if cultivating rural self-sufficiency skills and practicing semi-voluntary poverty is really the right response to the rather bleak future I think we have in ahead of us, but it’s the strategy I’ve been pursuing. It’s actually quite a satisfying lifestyle despite the income (or lack thereof), much more so than just buying stuff to be squirreled away in a basement never to be used or buying a rural retreat that you visit once a year. Hard work, yes, but far more fulfilling than wasting one’s life chained to desk waiting for "balloon to go up" so you can play with your survivalist toys.

[AgentR11]

I really have no idea if cultivating rural self-sufficiency skills and practicing semi-voluntary poverty is really the right response to the rather bleak future I think we have in ahead of us, but it’s the strategy I’ve been pursuing.

The response one makes has to be right for them and its effects on extended family. Pops' farm creates a future safe-haven for his kids' families. You are working on a farm getting skills that weren't part of your early childhood. I'm living in town, with as few mandatory expenses as possible, and soon to see even the bulk of those expenses go away, leaving little but an annual property tax bill that must be paid in order to stay in place.

The responses are all different, but appropriate to each persons' family situation.

If things do get much worse and the rate of decline speeds up, adjustments can be made if necessary if one is flexible in their planning; but you have to survive the present and the near term first. If the taxman takes your rural retreat and sells it to someone else for delinquent taxes because your near term plans didn't involve enough income or savings; what does it matter if that rural retreat was the perfect bunker against apocalypse.