Survival Threat: Racial Violence

As preppers were are concerned with the ramifications of a collapse as it pertains to our security and survival. We all intuitively know that any large scale collapse, be it a economic collapse, hyper inflation, terrorist attack with nuclear or biological weapons, disease pandemic and/or large scale natural disasters from which the resulting chaos would eventually pit every "have not" citizen against citizens who "have". This is a flashpoint that could occur with very little prompting and the threats could be along social-economic groups versus another segment of the population,….it could be one community against the other,…..criminal or bandit elements against law abiding groups,……or it could be along racial lines.

Be advised that I am NOT one of the believers that a race war is inevitable. I do think however, that large scale racial violence, short of what we would think of as a war, is probable if the economy tanks or any other survival stressors occur.  I also think a race war or violence between racial groups is much more likely from an economic level or fueled by the collapse based on racial tensions underlying on a thin surface.

We have current examples of this thin surface with the fatal shooting of a young black teenager by a man called George Zimmerman. Rest assured that there will be no assumption of guilt or innocence in this article, but the observations of potential race on race violence created or pushed by perceptions.

In case you have been away, like up in the Artic, this past week, a light skinned Hispanic male, with an anglo name (Zimmerman) reportedly pursued then shot to death a black teenager in the Florida town of Sanford who was in Zimmerman's neighborhood.  It is perceived that Zimmerman uttered a racial epithet under his breath while on the phone to 911 and the perception from the black community and others is that this was a racially motivated shooting with Zimmerman pre-disposing a black teenager to criminal acts in his neighborhood.

While I don’t want to get into the details of the shooting or the investigation, I do want to expose the threat of race on race violence as the local and national black community is outraged, and threats to Zimmerman have been made. Al Sharpton has led media events orienting this shooting as racial motivating and has either, accidentally or purposefully, fueled resentment and retaliation talk.  Barack Obama has also talked about this incident on his campagin tours. 

In fact, the New Black Liberation Militia (NBLM), a group in the mold of the old Black Panthers, led by a man named Prince Najee Muhammad, say they intend to march into Florida and make a “citizens arrest” on Zimmerman.



I think for through our lifetimes, no matter how long or short they will be, that there is a large threat of violence along racial lines occuring, especially during anytype of collapse where the scramble for survival will be significant and perhaps accelerated by the political expediency of using class warfare and pitting the "haves" and "have nots" against each other as this perception of unfairness keeps that socio-economic-racial anger right below the surface.

Insurance Guys Planning and Prep

I received this e-mail: "Urbanman, Just wanted to drop a short note to you. My best friend and I have an insurance business. It’s just us, two desks, small office. We do a lot of our business over the phone or on-line. This makes for time to discuss our planning and preps and time to research sites on the internet. We also have an information age network marketing business which we can also run simultaneously with our main insurance business. We have thought about closing down our office to save rent and utilities and think the savings would probably make up for the loss of the walk in traffic, but decided against it for now. We had some plumbing problems which required the taking down of a cinderblock wall in the back. We made a deal with the leaser for us to do the repair work. We turned the wall into a hidden storage of food and supplies. Not a ton of it, but probably two month’s worth for four people. Our wives are pretty close but not necessarily into prepping like we are. We have taken them to the range to train them, but it is a pain in the ass to get them to shoot anything other than handguns. Shotguns? Fageddabouit. Here’s the scoop. We shoot paintball and took our wives to watch one day. They wanted to try it and now they LOVE it. The shooting training that we wanted to do with them with real guns but couldn’t we are now doing with paintball. We are teaching them how to work as a team and use the obstacles. Sometimes it’s boys versus girls. I know it’s paintball but I think we are getting our wives better prepped maybe other guys are having problems getting their wives or girlfriends involved as this may be a way."

UrbanMan comments: Good for you guys making it as small businessmen in several different endeavors. Wouldn’t it be great to have a larger company, say 30 to 40 workers who all thought alike and prepped? That’s a ready made SHTF Task Force.

As you found out the real benefit is the time you have to plan and control over your lives....being your own bosses. Also, great thinking out the walled cache site. It would be interesting to know how your office fits into your Surviving the Collapse plan such as being a tentative safe site or dedicated Bug Out location, or simply if your cache supports your ability to remain in place if/when a hostile environment makes it impossible to go home.

Cool beans on getting your wives involved in paintball. I have only done a very small amount of it, but can see how it may be attractive to participate, especially for your wives who can now play with their men. Since you have the chance of getting hit with a stinging paint ball, learning to use cover and learning coordinate team oriented fire and maneuver are necessary skill sets for surviving the collapse.

I have always suggested for guys who wives did not like shooting big bore guns, was to try and get them involved with events like rimfire competition. This would teach firearms safety and core weapons handling competencies as well as basic marksmanship.

Good luck to you and your families.

The Cost of Preparing for Doomsday

The cost of preparing for doomsday.

With the Walking Dead – SHTF Zombie television series, as well as the Doomsday Prepper and Doomsday Bunkers reality television series, not to mention several on-line news articles, it seems that Survival Prepping is in the news quite a bit lately. Additionally, the reality television series “Wife Swap” had a suburban family swapping their soccer mom wife for a preppers wife. Pretty damn funny, watching the prepper’s wife chewing on the suburbanites about their lack of prep or planning for the collapse and making this clueless family do radiation and gas maks drills.

Then there is the recent article on CNN Money, posted on the on-line Yahoo! Finance site titled “The Cost of Preparing for Doomsday”, by Blake Ellis of CNN Money.com

The Cost of Preparing for Doomsday. The cost of preparing for doomsday isn't cheap.

First you have to stock up on the appropriate gear, ammunition, food and shelter to survive a nuclear meltdown, asteroid, earthquake, solar flare or some other catastrophe. Then there's acquiring the materials you'll need to rebuild a community after the dust settles.

The bottom line: Some self-described "preppers" are plunking down hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So far, Patrick Geryl estimates he's already spent more than $130,000 on his survival preparations. Author of "How to Survive 2012" and eight other books about a catastrophe destined to occur this year, Geryl believes that a shift in the Earth's poles is going to result in solar flares, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes that will throw the world into a nuclear meltdown. The dreaded event will occur on December 21, when the Mayan calendar allegedly ends, he said.

Geryl plans to survive the turmoil in a small wooden bunker far from the nuclear radiation in South Africa, where he can live off the grid for about a year and rebuild a community with other survivors.

In order to do so, he has spent years stocking up on nearly 100 survival essentials, including guns and ammunition, water purification tablets, waterproof matches, a drafting table for charting stars in the sky - even condoms to use for carrying water.

Books with survival tips, like a guide to edible plants, herbs and mushrooms, are also crucial, because he won't have access to the internet when disaster strikes, he said. He's still accumulating all of the necessities he'll need and is constantly adding more items to the list.

To get to South Africa from his home in Belgium during a worldwide catastrophe is another issue. Geryl said he is currently considering sailing there in an "unsinkable yacht," which is made by a company called Etap in Belgium . However, he said the yachts, which have double walls and are insulated with foam so that they are supposedly unable to capsize, cost more than $100,000, so he doesn't know if he'll be able to afford one.

Robert Bast, 46, is a prepper who works in Internet marketing during the day and runs an online community called Survive2012.com when he's off the clock. Bast, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and three children, has spent more than $350,000 preparing for "the end of the world as we know it."

The end of the world, he says, could come at any time and result from any type of disaster. "What is certain is that in my lifetime, there is a strong likelihood that there will be a catastrophe of some kind -- the sun destroying power grids, a flu pandemic that kills millions, an asteroid or meteor or comet striking earth or a magnetic pole shift," said Bast.

Bast has spent about $5,000 on stockpiles of food and water, and $11,000 on equipment including gas cookers, generators, batteries, water purifiers and solar power. He also purchased roughly an acre of land that's a 75-minute drive from Melbourne and 1,500 feet above sea level (in order to stay high and dry in case of a flood or tsunami). He has built a house there, as well as a bunker to serve as his "safe spot" in the event of an emergency. Together, the land, buildings and bunker have cost him a total of about $330,000.

He's also spent $10,000 on an 8-year old Toyota HiLux pickup truck to drive to his safe spot. To afford all of this, Bast has been saving money from his job for years. He has a mortgage on his primary residence, and he took out a second mortgage for the home he built as his safe house.

Phil Burns, a co-founder of the American Preppers Network and the subject of "Meet the Preppers" on Animal Planet, is preparing for all types of disaster scenarios.

Among the more ominous: A natural disaster or economic collapse that causes mass starvation, causing people to become so desperate for food and shelter that they lose their minds and resort to violence. In the preparedness world, these people are often referred to as "zombies."

How to survive a zombie apocalypse

To ensure his survival in the event of a disaster like this, Burns, 38, has been prepping for years. He now has a year's worth of food in storage, including 4,000 pounds of wheat, beans and rice that cost about $5,000. He even has 20 bottles of different food flavorings, so that "one day I could have vanilla rice and the next I could have orange rice -- because just plain rice gets old."

He also has an RV and trailer to use as a "bug out vehicle" to get to his "bug out location,"which is a fully-stocked 40-acre retreat tucked away in the mountains of Idaho.

To protect himself from any attackers and to be able to hunt for food as a family, he has purchased several guns for each of his eight children (who learned how to shoot at age 4). Burns declined to disclose the number of guns he and his wife have, nor how much money they have spent on them.

While Burns has spent a pretty penny on his own preparations - about $20,000 on food and guns alone -- he says that preparedness is a lifestyle and doesn't believe everyone should start spending huge amounts of money getting ready for the end of the world.

Financial apocalypse 2012

Instead, Burns advises beginning preppers to start by setting aside up to 20% of their income for preparations - whether it goes toward supplies, emergency training classes or shelter.

Anyone can become a prepper if they are willing to dedicate the energy and resources to it, he said. "A lot of people say preppers are paranoid, scared, pessimistic, always believing that there's going to be a disaster," said Burns. "But if you look at it with open eyes, we're actually optimists - we're saying,

'I don't care what you throw at me, I can survive it.'"

The article ends with this: Are you concerned that a disaster is imminent? What are you doing to prepare? E-mail blake.ellis@turner.com for the chance to be included in an upcoming story on CNN Money.

UrbanMan’s comments: Now what prepper wants the publicity? Whether it’s on television or as part of a CNN Money article?

Economic 9-11

The Blaze posted an article on 28 February 2012, titled: "Buy a Gun & Keep Your Powder Dry: Economists Warn of Looming Economic 9/11", with economic collapse warnings from three noted economists: Harry Dent, Robert Prechte, & Gerald Celente. Click on the link to read the original, full article, otherwise what these three advise us is as follows:

Harry Dent, author of “The Great Crash Ahead,” believes that the global debt bubble is going to burst and when it does, there will be a massive market crash. Dent previously predicted a collapse in 2012 but has since modified it as the global central banks have been pumping the markets with so much money, stocks have been given a temporary boost. But Dent warns that as soon as the short-lived boost comes to an end, the crash will be hard. “This will be a repeat of 2008-09, only bigger, when it finally hits,” Dent says.

Gerald Celente, a market analyst at the Trends Research Institute, believes Americans should brace themselves for what he calls an “economic 9/11.” He blames the inability of policymakers to solve the world’s financial and economic woes. Once the meltdown hits, he says, it will lead to social upheaval, anti-government sentiment, a devalued U.S. dollar, and skyrocketing unemployment.

Celente won‘t rule out another financial panic that could spark enough fear to cause a run on the nation’s banks by depositors, which could cause the invoke ‘economic martial law’ and call a ‘bank holiday’ and close banks as it did during the Great Depression.

He has been warning of economic disaster for years, believes that the national debt and “income inequality” has put the U.S. in a very dangerous place. Celente says that bank runs, brought about by social unrest, will wreak severe economic havoc as well as could easily transform into real violence. He believes the markets will be turned upside down by not only the eurozone crisis but also by an increase in oil prices due to the standoff between Iran and the West.

“2012 is when many of the long-simmering socioeconomic and political trends that we have been forecasting and tracking will climax,” Celente wrote in his “Top 12 Trends 2012” newsletter.

“When money stops flowing to the man on the street, blood starts flowing in the street,” he added in an interview.

Celente advises investors to buy gold – it won’t lose its purchasing power when the dollar tanks. Also, he says, buy a gun to protect yourself from marauders in search of food and money. He also advises people to plan a getaway to places with “more stable finances and governments.”

Robert Prechter, author of “Conquer the Crash,” is being described as “still bearish.” Because he believes there is a frightening amount of similarities between today’s economy and the one preceding the Great Depression, he warns that America should brace for “1930s-style deflation.” “The economic recovery has been weak, so the next downturn should generate bad news in a big way,” Prechter said

Prechter’s advice? Simple: keep your powder dry and buy when the economy starts to get out of hand.

Particular troubling to me is the common theme of a societal collapse and violence. With 46.5 millon Americans already dependent upon the U.S. Government for subsistence, what would America look like with 100 million hungry people, either not getting checks or getting checks that would not begin to feed their families because of hyper inflation or the unavailbility of products?