"'doomsday' Survival Gear"

https://www.businessinsider.com/doo...his-survivalist-instincts-into-a-lifestyle-12


Good morning all,

Per ... article list some of the most popular items selling now.

One of the featured merchants runs the NYC Prepper's Network.

I have a major "concern" over the virus scares - not just the corona virus but also the flu ones and had just heard on shortwave this AM, there's a mumps outbreak in a Philadelphia area college.

Have little worry about radioactivity / nuclear attacks. If this happens, will drive to Tacoma Park, Maryland - next to Washington, D.C. but if no parking spaces will take a flight to New Zealand. Both places are self-declared nuclear-free zones.

Prep, prep, prep
and factor in safety

 

Survival gear or food I could see being sold but surviving doomsday will require more than what they can mail you .We are talking about complete electrical grid , food stores , or any other kind of store , fuel for transportation and farming gone . Fuel for that chain saw gone . For a guessamated 95 percent of the population running plumed in water gone . I can't see the kind of knowledge and resources needed for doomsday coming in a box . The only means of transportation unless you own a horse " and I am not talking about someone's neighbors horse " will be walking . That bleak outlook is not for two or three months but forever . This is where a bump in the road prepper and the doomsday prepper take different splits in the road .

 

I have always sort of resisted the prepper mentality. I was raised to be self-sufficient and later became a survivalist. The prepper movement came many years later and the problem that I have always had with it is that piling up THINGS may kill you. If your total investment is in huge stockpiles of food and ammo if the best thing to do is bugout and run most preppers may be to tied to their things to leave them.

When it comes to survival I am reminded of an old saying about hungry people. Give a man a fish and you feed him one meal. teach him how to fish and you feed him for life. Rather than piling up huge supplies I think that you are better set to learn as much as possible about how to feed yourself from hunting, gathering and growing your food. I don't mean that you shouldn't have a good stock of food on hand but if that is all you have you better have enough to last a lifetime because when it is gone you may be shortly to follow.

I think that your preparations need to be more like a balanced meal and have more than just lots of stored goods and guns to protect them. that is sort of like a lifeboat. It is to keep you alive and afloat until rescue comes and takes you to safety. The sort of Doomsday scenarios that I am preparing for isn't a temporary problem so much as a lifetime without power or most of our modern things there to help me ever again. If your lifeboat is a rubber raft and nobody ever comes and finds you then you are just putting off the inevitable. The lifeboat of a survivor has a rudder and a sail and that is going to take him someplace where lif is possible long term. A lot of this modern prepper stuff is just a blow-up raft that is just putting off your death.

If you plan on living longer than you supplies then you need to put as much into your mental preparations in the form of knowledge and actual experience as you do in the gathering of physical supplies. THAT is what this place does for you. It offers you both knowledge AND lines of thought on how to best prepare. What is available here for free if you partake of it is far more valuable than a year's supply of freeze-dried food and an assault rifle with ammo...

 

Good morning Lonewolf,

Someone who has a prepper business is usually just in it for the business aspects. There are exceptions. There's someone south of here in Hampton Roads who has a consumer/ citizen prepper store (not industry-focused like I buy from) and also an active volunteer emergency responder. We took a state of Virginia emergency course together some years ago. His store's conference room is routinely used for responder seminars.

The word "prepper" is frequently interchanged with "survivalist" and the old concept of "home economics" and the Civil Defense / Boy Scout-Girl Scout first aid kit. The circumstances must be looked at to see how the term is being used.

When I was a reserve Federal Emergency Manager we laughed at those who did not get the needed immunizations against diseases. We now have industries - eg the oil industry - that, by showing up for work makes one a "prepper" or survivalist. The Ray-Ban folks are the premier. An inflight-emergency's strategic planning might be 10 minutes at most.

In current times, a "Prepper" not affiliated with a group - eg small family, small group, some source for guidance, is not really a Prepper; just using a name that has some status around the Walmart outdoors sporting equipment department.

Wait 'till these self-declared experts learn about available Federal regs prohibiting travel at night, leaving a public road, ... they've NEVER talked to someone who survived a mild SHTF.

 

Before you had prepping and before you had survivalists you had people like my Dad. He was self-sufficient. He had lived through TEOTWAWKI when his Dad died in the middle of the great depression leaving a young wife with two boys debts and no visible means of support. He commented one time when the prices kept going up from inflation that while a loaf of bread costing a dollar was a lot to someone that remembered when it was 5 cents, he has a dollar now but remembers when bread was a nickel and he didn't have a nickel.

To him being self-sufficient meant that you knew how to provide for your basic needs from SCRATCH. Grow it can it cook it. Hunt it fish for it kill it butcher it and cook it. If you don't have a knife you make one. When I was a kid we made all sorts of things not because we didn't have any money but because he wanted me to know how to do these things if I ever needed that ability.

I took that to heart and pretty much anything that I want I may buy but then will or have made one for myself. I can build a house from the ground up. Bought my first car not running from a farmer and we rebuilt it motor interior and body. I love to fish and have wrapped and made rods, I have built two boats. My Dad introduced me to someone that taught me the basics of making leather things and I make belts, holsters and sheaths. My Mom made most of her clothes and I learned how to sew. Yhe more things you learn the better you will be able to adapt to changing situations.

Don't put your total reliance into THINGS when it comes to survival, prepping and self-reliance. You can lose all of those things more easily and faster than you can imagine and all that you will have left is your KNOWLEDGE. There is food in every environment that has abundant animal life. They survive and you can too. You just have to know what is good to eat, how to harvest it and prepare it and THAT is your survival food supply. You don't have to know what is good anywhere except the areas that you will be so the knowledge base that you will need isn't all that vast.

 

I've said the following a hundred times: Based on what people are calling "prepping" and "survivalism", then all of my ancestors were preppers. They were self-sufficient and they put food back for the hard winters. They were good with firearms due to having to hunt and being called up to fight wars.

In this day and age, it would appear to others (city folk) that I'm a strange person. I am not. Compared to my ancestors, I've gone WAY soft.

Today's urbanites are not just unprepared for hard times, they have lost their minds. They are sitting ducks for a totalitarian takeover of centralized government. They are "getting on the trains" and don't even know it.
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We who prepare must stay away from these pathetic lemmings, these professional victims. They are spiritually diseased. They are doomed.
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"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet." -- J.C.
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We are the last of a dying breed. You and I have a connection to our ancestors and understand their ways. Now, most kids are stored in daycare while both parents work and many don't even have a connection to their parent's much less to their ancestors. So many one-parent families. Most families now are scattered from any other family member. Kids hardly know their Grand Parents. It things get bad who will have their backs? The modern culture is basically no culture at all. No close family and most people don't even have friends or know their neighbors.

 

I for one do not have a problem with people going into the "Prepping" business. It is capitalism at its roots. They are selling products for which there is demand. Whatever the reason. The corona virus is just the latest fad that has created demand.

I do have a problem with the people selling these items making outrageous, and untrue statements about safety, and preparedness in general. When they are misleading they should be taken to task. The sheeple will spend their money however they want. " A fool and his money are soon parted." If they are to lazy to do the proper research on what is needed it is their money to waste.

 

For the vast majority of people you are right on target . Here I have all my kids and grandkids living within a half mile radius . That is what I consider my survival group . Foot paths soon develop between houses through the woods as the kids float from house to house . Raising kids is a team effort here . Come fall of the year like Native Americans we form hunting parties ,camping for days and gathering meat for the winter . Like the Amish help each other build houses . The survival group my property join , the situation seems to be much the same .

 

I gave the acre next to me to my kids and see my kids and Granddaughter every day and play a daily part in her life. My wife or I pick her up from school every day. When she was born, after my daughter's family leave ran out and she had to go back to work to get bills caught up, I shifted my business to evenings nights and weekends and kept my baby from 6 to 5 for the first year of her life.

My Parents did much the same for me and were a big part of my kid's life. I learned a long time ago that how you live is a choice. When my daughter was born my wife stopped working outside of the home. People said that you can't live like that anymore. It was simple we lived just like our parents had in the 50s and 60s. We didn't eat out much. We didn't have a color TV until you couldn't buy anything else. We played a lot of cards and spent a lot of our time with friends, family and at church functions. We didn't go to movies we had one phone and one car and one truck and didn't go anyplace. We camped for vacations and I fed us a lot of meals fishing and hunting.