Two Premier Prepper Societies

http://modernworldsurvivalists.com/...he-doomsday-scenarios-of-an-orthodox-prepper/

Good morning all,

For celebrants: Happy Easter also

Above link tells of 2 "sub-cultures" of Western society and their preparedness arrangements.

The orthodox Prepper originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Sandy, Utah is LDS country.

Note link's picture with "Tactical Seat Covers".

I had to stop in awe when reading "Matzah, the ultimate prepper food".

Note that these 2 premier Prepper societies consider Prepping being the "holistic" approach - every aspect of life - and not just some extra MREs.

 

Joshua Wander is one serious prepper . A long but worthwhile article to read . Frankly hearing from a serious prepper I find refreshing .

 

I don't see prepping as a life style, it can't be, you need money to fund it so need to work out in society unless your one of the very few who own land and go off grid but even they need the community to supply their gasoline/ammo/clothes/electronics et al

Learn skills, gather knowledge, make your preparations and get on with a happy life until such time your planning and preps are needed. I'd hate to wake up thinking about prepping, lifes to short for that...a bit of hedonism in your life is good for your physical and mental health.

 

Considering that multiple SHTF events are on our doorstep, one had better give serious thought to how one is going to get through it all.

Our gas furnace went out this past week = no home heating. Temps outside were circa 40 degrees (4.5 C). I did a little experiment using my office. I shut my office off from the rest of the house and lit a kerosene lantern therein. This lantern is small and uses a more narrow wick than regular lanterns. Still, this little puppy kept my office at temps around 60 degrees F (15.5 F). Hallway temperature was around 47 F. Wearing thick clothes and a sweater, I was comfy. Just that small kerosene lantern performed like a trooper. This is why I have around 5 lanterns of varying sizes. Too, I always keep clean kerosene out in the backyard shed.

As to those who go about prepping in a slip-shod / half-effort way, let them perish. When they are ambient temperature, they will no longer be in our way.

Arrogance = death = good riddance.

Watching arrogant people get injured is pure delight.

 

Good afternoon Max,

Most Preppers do work in society.

The expression "life style", as used here, allows for workers in an urban, suburban or rural environment to engage in prepping.

I posted an article on Jason Charles, the founder of NYC Preppers. He is a firefighter with NYFD.

Hedonism is not relevant.

 

Good afternoon Old Geezer,

It was an aspect of your prepping that allowed for the office to get the small kero lamp for heat. Ditto re the inventory of the sdditional keroscene lanterns.

I just went through a similiar event. It's minor in my scheme of things. Priority goes to vital signs an EKG like a mountain range and able to walk.

For heat emergencies, to save my alternate fuels, out back, a wood fire if necessary.

Prepping is prepping and the rest translates to trace amounts of mineral content going back into the earth.

 

I found a typical 'Hurricane' kerosene lantern will help in something like my Exped Venus 3 tent in sub zero C camps but in the larger Tipi they just lack the BTU/watts so use a pressure lantern like a Coleman or Tilley kerosene/paraffin lantern which can produce around 5000 BTU (roughly a kilowatt) of heat, over double that of a kerosene lantern. I got 40l of paraffin/kerosene, 20l of Naphtha fuel and 20l of Ethanol at the start of covid last year and its stored in the garage; it'll get used on future trips. I'm breaking the law but as the old saying goes "When needs must" and all that.

A good thing with the hurricane lanterns is they do provide some warmth but they are fuel frugal and throw out a reasonable level of light IMO

 

For me survival and its little brother prepping has been a lifestyle. I moved from where I was raised and lived for nearly all of my life to someplace else. We chose where we now live so that if things continued to slowly collapse that we would not be trapped in an urban hellhole.

We lived for decades in a very rural place backed up to the national forest. Even today if the power went off tonight and never came back on again, we would be fine. If we could never go to a store again, we would survive. We could survive on our existing stocks and local hunting and fishing until we got our first garden in and put up. We are massively prepared to defend what we have.

We gave up some things for this. We left our home and family to be here. We have to drive a 50 mile round trip to go to a big store, the doctor, a mechanic or much else. For a lot of that time, it was almost a twenty minute drive on dirt and mud roads to get to a paved highway. When my Daughter grew up and moved out, we move a little closer to the highway and into the "suburbs" of a tiny town with a population of around 500.

My daughter and her family moved in beside me and we are all pretty prepared for things. I was self-employed for the last 25 years of my working life and worked all over three counties so where I lived was no problem. This area has little towns and one very small city with the majority of the population living in a rural sort of places.

The thing is that this is how I WANTED to live. I didn't want to raise a child in and urban area where I didn't know who she was around. I wanted her to have a horse and room to roam. During the summer when she was a kids we usually went swimming in the pond and cooled off every evening and then I came home and took a shower outside. There were five families in the valley and about ten kids. It was a good place to raise kids. It was also a great place to be if things ever went totally to the pits.

Survival is all about choices. Where I was raised went to hell TOTALLY and I got out before it was too far gone. I had friends that stayed too long and their kids paid for it. The second time my best friend’s son was hospitalized from a beating that the school called “boys just being boys” he moved in with me until he found a job and house here.

THAT IS CALLED SURVIVAL. He waited until he son was nearly killed. I was prepared even then to do what was needed before my family suffered.

 

Act-ual-ly, kerosene lamps were a part of my childhood. Two of my grandparents were born before 1900 and the other two were born before 1910. My parents were born in the 1920s and born into P-O-V-E-R-T-Y writ large. As a child, all around me were devices and machines from a bygone era. I stoked the coal furnace and built fires in our fireplaces. Smelling coal or kerosene takes my mind back to my youth. I've got kerosene lamps from hurricane to fancy. I like wooden stick matches.

In my world, "prepping" was business as usual. There was never any decision on my part to be a prepper. To me this is simply how things are. I cannot understand how weak these young people have become. I'm always glad to see the young people in gun stores and places like tractor supply stores. When I see farmer tans and callouses on young healthy people, my heart is made most glad. The sun sets on my day, but these strong independent young people will carry on the traditions of self-sufficiency after the useless weak have perished.
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Good morning TexDanm,

You've described an ideal philosophy and it's exercise. I did something similiar.

I've got an accordian file folder (and it's still overpacked with notes, articles) with many examples of this philosophy and how it gets expressed in actual life by only the few in our national population.

The label on my accordian file folder: "Genesis 22" - the section about the prohibition of child sacrifice.

 

Good morning Old Geezer,

Here, too, prepping is just the continuation of what was called "home economics", the Boy Scouts' philo of "Be Prepared" and Civil Defense efforts that mesh in with routine living.

From the saved Peter Pan peanut butter glass jars of yesteryear, saved containers are now plastic (I do not reside in California) and serve well as shelter in place containers for repair hardware, sewing supplies and etc.

 

Common sense and logic seem to going down the pan these days thats for sure.

Re: paraffin lamps in tents. I grew up using them with my parents, they are very safe; I usually hang them and in winter in the Tipi using pressure lanterns; the lamp is at floor height for max heat distribution and although they are very stable I secure the hanging bale to the centre pole. The only real danger is off fumes if you don't ventilate the tent. I use liquid fuel stoves like the Primus Omnifuel and MSR XGK in tents and this is where common sense come in........be careful how you light them and keep them well serviced and you'll have no problems.

 

In warm weather camping I use LED lights, I've various types battery and solar but mostly solar powered. I use white xmas tree lights in the big Tipi in summer couple, string of 100+ plain white LEDs and four AA batteries will light that tent for a couple of weeks in summer during shorter nights and at least a week in the winter. Not had any luck with hand crank gear.

 

in the civil war re-enacting events we use a candle inside a base , it looks like this . On cold nights it will keep the tent warm, where as people with out one will wake up to frost on the inside of the tent .

 

I've got one set I've not used yet, run off a USB power bank and you can adjust light output low to high...flashing if you want You find the even the 100 LED string don't throw off bright light, in the big Tipi they throw off a decent amount of evenly spread light but you'd struggle to read a book from them. Cree emitters = fantastic inventions. I've a couple of old 'D' cell Maglites and I fitted LED bulbs.

 

Lonewolf, there are basically two very different types of camping. One is a very isolated, usually minimalist solo camping. I used to go out and carried no food and no water and spent up to a week alone and at peace.

The other sort is for family entertainment. We used to go out and camp along the Frio River with the kids. The Frio is a crystal-clear spring fed river that is great for kids to tube and play in the water. We stayed in a nice camp that had bathrooms, power and water at each site.

We would have lights up all over the camp. At night we would play games and listen to the music that always seemed to fire up in the evening. I'm not talking about loud boom boxes here. About half of the campers were families of Hispanic origins and they made their own music. We always had a just great time.

We also often camped when we went someplace rather than stay in motels. There are KOAs in almost every city and they are also very family based and the kids enjoy it. This was fun for the kids and saved us a lot of money. This was a place for families and there were a lot of kids. I enjoy both sorts but taking the kids on a primitive camping trip would not have been a pleasure for anyone.

 

Different styles of camping suit different people.

Glamping (glamorous camping) where you take absolutely anything you want or even hire it, arrive and its all there waiting for you.

Family camping, frame tents/airbeds/gas stove/BBQ, kids and load up the car and head for a site with toilets/showers and maybe a shop and a bar.

Base camping, where you've transported you kit by vehicle/quad/pulk so usually more and bigger tentage and extra's like lights, good cooking equipment and food stocks...thumbs up from me

Then you have my favorite, backpack camping where if you want it then you carry it. Backpacking is great all year round but winter time, <0c camping is when I'm happiest

You can wild camp easily in the UK if you get up into the hills of Wales, the Lake District and best of all Scotland, as LW said there are not many spots to wild camp in most of England

 

I gather then that you don't have kids. Kids just don't get much out of the peace and quiet type camping that people like you and me appreciate. My wife liked the more civilized camping too. If you try and drag kids along out into the woods there will be no peace and quiet.

The campground/park camping for us was at least in part a financial thing. We could go someplace with a couple of kids and stay in a campground and it cost us very little. We cooked rather than eat out three times a day.

Many of the campgrounds offer all sorts of things that kids enjoy. One place in San Antonio that we have stayed at several times has a walk in and have a seat outdoor movie theater that runs kiddie movies from sundown to about 11. They have great playgrounds and two pools one for the kids and an adult only pool and hot tubs. All day we would do the tourist thing and then come back to the camp and cook dinner and then chill out and let the kids run wild for a while.

They even had a small lake that I could fish in. Eventually we got a small caravan/travel trailer and just left it out in west Texas at our favorite campground. Good times and lots of fun that you could have without having the urge to kill the children.