Up Your Preps

Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
—Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus,
De Re Militari, circa AD 445

“If you seek peace, prepare for war,” said Publius way back when. Little good it may have done him and his fellow Romans, though. The time of his book, “De Re Militari” was roughly the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. So, you may ask, what does “de re militari” mean in Latin? Roughly, “of matters military.”

“War?!” some casual visitor not used to this publication might exclaim. “We are not at war! What on Earth is this strange conspiracy theorist jabbering about?”

Well, my friend, let me brief you. In 1954 the Bilderburg society (and, no, I don’t care how they spell it) declared war on the people of the United States. In 1963, their henchmen in the CIA organised the assassination of John F. Kennedy, then president of the United States. They followed up almost immediately with their lies about the Gulf of Tonkin leading to a great escalation in Vietnam. In 1974 they arranged the resignation of Richard Nixon and inserted their friend Gerald Ford in the White House. Ford, who was never elected president, was liked by the deep staters because he was very helpful them as a member of the Warren Commission which hid the evidence of the CIA’s conspiracy to murder the president and overthrow the regime that was elected (with shenanigans, to be sure) in 1960. If you don’t think any of these things function as acts of war, then I very much regret that you don’t really understand the concepts. Fast forward through the attempted assassination of Reagan, the miserable “new world order” speech of former head of the CIA George Herbert Walker Bush (son of Prescott Bush, who had been accused of trading with the enemy in 1942 and was a maniacal Nazi enthusiast) and his various lies, and through the deliberate destruction of the World Trade Centre by government action, through the failed occupation of Afghanistan and the lies told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Maybe you don’t regard any of those things as indications of a war against you and the rest of America.

Here we are, though, in the year of our Lord (Anno Domini) 2022 and you are under attack. A virus was cooked up with “gain of function” money and released in 2019, almost certainly deliberately. Bill Gates got a new company started which immediately received a $100 billion contract to perform pandemic contract tracing for the feral gummint. He used some of the money to put together a “simulation” called event 201. They simulated 60 million deaths from a coronavirus release. Of course, God chooses who lives and who dies, not Bill Gates, and we should all be very glad Gates is not in charge of life and death, because he has said repeatedly he wants to see seven billion people die.

Since 2019, a large number of psychological operations or “psychological warfare” actions by governments in the United States and elsewhere have been used against civilian populations. Both these acts, the biological weapon release and the psychological warfare operations, constitute acts of war. Worse, they are advised against by all the people who have ever taught military doctrine.

That’s right, friends, the military knows that you cannot point nuclear, chemical, biological, or psychological weapons, and if you start using them, you are going to experience “blow back.” Blow back refers, in the case of artillery shells full of chemical warfare agents, the experience of many in the war of 1914 to 1918 when the wind shifted direction and the mustard gas (really nasty stuff) or chlorine gas “blew back” over the lines of the men in the trenches on the side where the artillery shells were fired from. I do not say “over the men on the same side” because in warfare, nobody is really on the same side, except as they are trained to work together and help one another. Certainly officers are not on the same side as enlisted men. But that aspect of philosophy can await another day.

Suffice it to say that I believe there is compelling evidence that war has been declared against the American people and that it has moved from a sort of political ideology of the Davos billionaires to a front burner, “we’re gonna kill them now” kind of thing.

Also, if I read the signs and prophecies correctly, as Sarah Hoyt and her associates have suggested in a recent essay on her blog, things are about to, as it were, “pop.” One of the ways in which street fighters thrive is by learning not to “telegraph” their intentions. You never look in their eyes, and you don’t look at their hands. Look at their chest if you want to see where they are going next, because their movements are likely to begin there. The business of having GoFundMe declare the Canadian trucker convoy an “occupation” is a sign that the system is about to go nuts and do an atrocity in Ottawa, Canada.

Your Preps

So, let’s talk about your preps. What are you going to do if you home has no electricity, no natural gas, and no cell signal, for three months? If you are not prepared for those eventualities, if you think you are just going to “call someone” please be advised that things are getting serious. If anyone is coming to help you, it will be because they are people you already know.

So here is a quick checklist to get you started. There are an infinity of videos, web sites, and other information resources. Joel Skousen’s Strategic Relocation is good, and the Organic Prepper is great.

My purpose here is to give you a place to start. The list includes:

• Air
• Heat
• Water
• Food
• Shelter
• Community
• Defence
• Mobility
• Trade & Commerce 

I am only going to touch on some of these matters, because I think you already know that your situation is different from mine. Also, you really need to do your own research. Yes, I am capable of doing the research for you, and for a fee would be happy to consult with you. Friends rate of $40/hour for all readers of L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise, don’t pay me but give a gift to Houston Space Society. Email me for details. (Often I charge $125/hr or more so it is quite the savings.)

The reason you should do your own research is that if you find things out for yourself, you are building self-reliance. You know more about your particular situation, including the personalities of the persons in your household. Most of all, if you look for the information yourself, you are more likely to take it seriously. The time to get serious is upon you. It has been, I believe, for several years, but if you are not yet serious, now is a good time to be jumping on these topics with both feet.

Air

Air is first because you have about two minutes before you start being in serious danger if you have no good air to breathe. You need a competent filtration masque, the kind you get at a hardware store, or a full on gas masque like they sell from military surplus. You do not have time to go get these items. So carry one with you when you are out and about town, and carry one in your car, and have one in the house, for each person you are likely to be with. The good news is that most chemical weapons dissipate very rapidly in the outside air. The other good news is that if you have the ability to seal a room in your home you can probably make a working air filter from toilet paper and a cardboard box, according to a design by Jerry Pournelle he put in one of his publications several decades ago.

By all means, get a good filter system for your home heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system. Consider that you need a few months supply of spare filters on hand because when there is radioactive fallout in the air, you won’t want to be driving to the nearest hardware store. Also understand that if your air filter does get clogged with radioactive particles, you want to handle it like radioactive waste, and not casually. Don’t be waving it around. Get the new one in place, have a big trash bag to quickly cover the old one, and get it out of the house immediately.

Heat

It is Winter in North America. I believe some things are about to happen, but the worst of what is to come is going to happen in Spring. Nevertheless, if you have no way to get warm, especially if you happen to get wet at some point and have wet clothes, you can die within a matter of hours from lack of heat. You need ways to make fire. You need places where it is safe to keep a fire burning. You also need warm dry clothes and extra blankets. You should seriously consider storing spare clothes and blankets in big ziplok type storage bags, in your car, in your home, at your bugout location.

If you plan to get by with fire in your fireplace, run a test. Turn off the furnace, start a fire in the fireplace. See how much of the house it heats. Probably the room where the fireplace or wood stove is located, unless your home is very well insulated. You don’t need to let things go too long for this test, so just turn down the furnace to about 55 F. No need to freeze the water pipes. But you will get a good sense of how well that fire heats, and make plans to close off parts of the home where you won’t be able to spend much time owing to the cold.

Got a wood stove? Great. Does it have a pipe connected to the vent at the bottom? Most good wood stoves are able to take cold air in from the outside through a pipe that connects to that vent at the bottom. If you don’t have a dedicated pipe for it, expect the entire house to be drafty as the fire sucks air from everywhere. Got a wood stove? Great. Get a “rocket” for it that burns the smoke. That way it puts out minimal evidence that you are there. It is also much more efficient that way.

There are other ways to make heat. You can get clothing, including boots and gloves, designed to heat up with a small battery. Get the kind where the batteries are rechargeable. You can also get certain kinds of chemicals that produce heat. Consider flameless ration heaters, which come with some military rations. Consider little alcohol stoves which have much improved fuel pellets. But fire is your friend, so get acquainted. If you don’t carry three cigarette lighters on your person at all times, get yourself a few, and get some flint and steel alternatives. Learn what makes good tinder in your area.

Water

You can last a couple of days without water and remain reasonably active. On the third day without water you will experience weakness. You may be mad with thirst, jittery, dizzy, all kinds of things. On the fourth or fifth day without water you are very likely to die. That’s somewhat less true in humid environments and much more true in desert dry air. Get you some water.

You should have, stored, at your home, enough water to last at least three months, assuming that each person in the home drinks and prepares food with about a gallon a day. If you don’t drink your whole gallon, you might use some for washing your skin, washing a dish or so, and the like. But remember, if water is scarce, it is a survival matter. Ration accordingly.

Water is not all just as good. Many municipalities in the USA are paid a fee by the feral gummint if they put fluoride in the water, which is a known brain toxin. It is also a toxic waste that the outfits making nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons want to get rid of, so they do. Reverse osmosis is the best filter.

Get you some iodine tablets at any camping store. You add iodine to the ditch water, that kills the bacteria and parasitical worms. Then you filter the water to get rid of the iodine taste. Again, a camping store will have a good filter and may offer “life straws” and other expedients.

Know that if you have heat, you can boil water. Boiled water can be cooled. (Set it outside in Winter, for example). If you know how to work with copper pipe, or you are willing to say that it is for personal use and medicinal preparations (tinctures are herbs mixed with alcohol) you can get a distillation rig together. Distilled water is very pure, depending on what pipe material you use. Do not ever use lead pipe for water. Even waste water is better piped in something else, because your waste water may be going on your garden. Feral law sez you can make up to two gallons of alcohol by distillation for personal use. Your local and state laws will vary, of course, so proceed with caution.

Food

You want to eat. Most people can survive on about 1200 calories a day if they are more or less stationary. If you are going to be doing any work, though, expect to use about 3,500 to 5,500 calories a day. If that work involves long periods of digging in followed by periods of heightened awareness followed by moments of sheer terror, aka combat, plan on 5,500 or more calories.

You should have at least three months of food, and twelve would be better. You may be at war a long time. You should get a book on wild edibles of North America. You should get a book on wild mushrooms. You should study up on traps, because you can almost always recover the trap wire or trap mechanism. Even arrows go astray and get used up.

I very strongly recommend you buy a cook book. Nearly anyone who can read will be able to cook if they have a book with recipes. I strongly recommend, and keep with my go bag, a book called The Joy of Cooking. It includes information on harvesting squirrel, rabbits, nutria, badger, beaver, deer, and other animals, including anatomical charts showing their glands. Some animals are very poor food if you cook them without removing all of the glands. Musk rat in particular is quite unpalatable owing to its musk, unless properly prepared.

There is food all around you. So store things like canned goods, bulk flour, sugar, oats, and the like. Sure, freeze some meat, but remember, electricity may be scarce to non-existent. If you have a generator, great, but you may run out of fuel for it.

While we’re on the subject, consider a diesel generator and consider a set of solar panels. Diesel can run on a well-filtered bio-diesel, so you can make vegetable oil if you must. Might want a good quality oil press for that purpose. Solar panels are great, but remember that one of the events you should prepare for is a high altitude nuclear detonation. So do have a spare inverter, because your solar panels are mostly immune from radiation flux, but your inverter has circuit cards that are likely gonna get fried. Keep the spare inverter in a Faraday cage. More on that under shelter.

We’re on food, so be advised that meat can be dried and stored as jerky. Soak it for a while and boil it up and it isn’t too chewy. You can also store meat by salting it. Salt pork, for example. Pemmican is a very fatty food and if it is baked right it can last a long time, providing carbs and protein along with energy dense fats. Made with berries, it can also have some vitamins and phytonutrients.

While we’re on food, get some iodised salt, and also get some potassium iodide tablets. In the event of a nuclear detonation or a major volcanic eruption (if you hear about a volcano in the northern hemisphere, that’s major enough), take some potassium iodide.

Why? Because, my friends, your thyroid loves iodide. It gets some in foods and from random sources. The air you breathe may have one or two iodide molecules. Your body will bring those to your thyroid if it isn’t loaded. Happily, the thyroid stays full of its needed iodide for a few months. But when it is low, your body will supply it. And your body has no idea about what isotopes of iodide are around. So, if there is a bunch of radioactive iodide in the air or on the ground getting onto your garden veggies, and that gets into your body through your lungs or stomach, your body will deliver to your thyroid all the iodide it finds unless your thyroid is full.

Thus the potassium iodide tablets or the use of salt with iodide added. Keep your thyroid full of good non-radioactive iodide and you won’t die of radiation poisoning quite as soon as some.

Shelter

You need not only to have the shelter of your home and the shelter of your vehicle, but also the ability to put together a shelter on short notice. You may need to flee from your home. You may need to walk away from your car. Why? Your car may be immobile. It has circuit boards in it. They will get fried by the electro magnetic pulse from a Carrington event (a coronal mass ejection from the Sun hitting Earth) or from a high level nuclear detonation or from a series of ground level nuke detonations.

Get yourself a tent you can use in Summer and get yourself a tent you can use in Winter. There are good systems available for all price points. I have a $90 tent that will hold three good friends and is comfortable for one. It has two layers of fabric with an air space between, so it is good in cold and hot weather. Remember to get enough tent for yourself, your family, and for your gear. You do not want to have your gear ruined by leaving it in the rain.

What about storm shelter, as it were? Yes, have some. If there are caves near you, find them and explore them. You will want to have shelter and that may mean shelter against a nuclear blast wave. It may mean shelter against a tornado. Think about your area and your needs and plan.

What is a Faraday cage? Simply put it is a metal box which is grounded. You can use a mesh depending on what wavelength of radiation you expect. You can buy a Faraday bag which is more flexible than a metal box. You can make do with a microwave oven, by the way. A steel barrel, with a steel lid, strapped closed, also works. You want one of these. A fire proof safe or gun safe might do. Check it out by putting your cell phone inside and call it. If it rings, you don’t have a working Faraday cage. If it is working, it will protect against electromagnetic pulse whatever you put inside. Consider that when you have meetings, nobody should have a cell phone in the meeting, because the microphone can be turned on remotely. The FBI did that to some people in the mafia way back around 2002, so it is a proven issue.

Community

No, you are not going to get through these coming years alone. You will be surrounded, you will be singled out, you will be destroyed, unless you are part of a community. If you are in a big city, you need a community of friends. You also need to sell your home and get out, get uphill, to rural land in or near mountains. I suggest the White Mountains, the Catskills, the Alleghenies, the Appalachians, the Ozarks, and the Cordilleran or “Rocky” mountains. Cities are the grave yards of armies, but also of civilians.

You should work with people you know who are near enough to help you. Form a mutual aid society. I have written about this topic for over 12 years, ffs, so look up “Sovereign Mutual Aid Response Team” with my name site specific to ncc-1776.org and read about it. I’ve started mutual aid groups, I’ve been in them, and more recently I’ve been part of several tribes or “phyles” to use a term from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Diamond Age books.

You should be able to call these people, but you should also know how to locate them if there is no phone network. Your phone may become a paper weight if there is an electro magnetic pulse. The Internet may become unavailable.

For the purpose of community, get a radio. Get radio receivers for as many parts of the spectrum as possible. Police band, citizen band (CB), and short wave are the major ones to receive. Get a walkie talkie for each person in your family so you can travel short distances and still be in communication. You may need to send a few people out foraging and searching for food, and you do not want anyone out of touch very long. Rechargeable batteries are a good idea, keeping in mind the above thoughts on generators. While your car is still running, get a power inverter for it. That way you can recharge batteries. A friend has a small solar charger for his cell phone which he can leave on his car’s dash. Get an external battery that you can use with your USB devices, and keep it charged up as much as you can. Okay, get several.

You should identify some specific places where you can meet others. Might be a home, might be a garden, might be a place in a public park. If there is no other communication, visit that place. Try to make it clear ahead of time that you’ll try to be there at noon (to allow time to get there and time to get home before dark) the first few days after the event that makes communication difficult. Schedule a meeting every week at noon (perhaps on a weekend) on some designated day, and start this gathering now, so that you are used to it.

Talk about what is going on, talk about who knows what skills. You know how to sew? Great. Get some curved needles and some biodegradable thread. You may be doing surgery in an emergency. Get a book on anatomy and study up. Cooking, metallurgy, blacksmithing, plumbing, construction, all kinds of things are useful skills. Someone you know can weld. Find out who. Remember that community is about helping others and others helping you. Figure out who can be trusted now, before your life depends on knowing.

Defence

Yes, I could spend twenty pages on this topic, but I won’t. You could do worse than me, as I have actual training in military strategy, military history, and extensive networks of contacts in militaries in various places.

You want basic home defence tools. Pistols, a shotgun, and a rifle for each member of your household. Try to pick an ammo and use it for everyone. So, everyone can help reload while someone else is shooting. Maybe 9mm or .38 for handguns, 12 gauge for shotgun, and .308 for rifles, but don’t worry about which ammo I recommend, because all I recommend is that it be interoperable. If you run out of ammo for your gun, it is a club, or, with a bayonet, a crude spear. So, if your spouse has some ammo for her rifle and it fits yours, you can still make a cross-fire. Think it through.

You want some vests. Good kevlar, with chest plates. You want helmets. Kevlar. You want gas masques. You want night vision gear. You want maps. You want as detailed local maps as you can get. Talk to the chamber of commerce and get a county map. Go to DeLorme and get their gazetteer for your state and for each state adjacent to you. Know your geography. Know three routes from your home to your bugout location. Know which is best on foot.

Consider the dragoon. They rode horses into battle, dismounted, and fought on foot. Consider the motorcycle. A good dirt bike, with a kevlar blanket. Lay it down and it becomes some concealment and, if you have that kevlar blanket, some cover. Check it over though to make sure it starts without electronics. Because electromagnetic pulse.

Here is where your community comes into much application. You will need to make plans for field hospitals if there is combat, because there will be wounded. You need to figure out what to do with dead bodies, because even if you win the battle you won’t want to leave the evidence around. The enemy has many drones.

You can get drones, by the way, so think about having some. And you can get someone to weld steel plates onto a truck or onto a bulldozer. Think about combat applications for basics like gasoline or diesel.

A good recipe is a glass bottle filled three quarters with petrol, a bit of brake fluid, and a bit of motor oil to make up the rest, then jam in a length of clothes line for a fuze. Use a tampon to seal the mouth of the bottle. Don’t have too many of these set up long in advance, though, as the fuel will leak out and evaporate away. But do have the supplies on hand. Remember that Molotov wanted the bottle to break open while the fuze was lit.

Mobility

Consider the humble donkey. It will go places that a horse will balk, it has a lower centre of gravity, and it can haul quite a bit. You might want one. Their food is grass and some oats and you can get them anywhere that is rural enough to be survivable come the collapse.

Sure, you want to be able to move faster. Ultralight aircraft, helicopters, jets, speed boats, cars, trucks, motorcycles, whatever. But you may be walking, or riding a bike, or riding a horse or donkey. Nearly every vehicle you can buy today has at least one circuit board in it. So it may become a sculpture after an electromagnetic pulse.

Now, we happen to have generations of men and women who have worked on cars and trucks that had carburetors, points, solenoids, distributor caps, and timing chains. So it is possible to get such a car or truck together, and it will survive when the electromagnetic pulse or pulses happen. Might need to swap out the solenoid, so keep a spare in a Faraday cage.

The maps I mention under defence are important. Get a few good compasses, both magnetic and drawing sorts. Get a good T-square for use with your paper maps. Get some pencils. Land navigation is easy to learn, tricky in bad weather and low visibility situations, and you may not have any Global Positioning Satellite tools available. Those satellites can be re-encrypted to be useless to you, by the way.

Trade and commerce

Getting through the collapse is only part of the way there. We need to have trade and commerce to recover. You don’t know how to do everything, nor do I. So we depend on a complex system of trade, commerce, training, and expertise, to make everything in products and services possible. We can only find market clearing prices with trade and commerce.

So think about not only what you must have, to survive, but what you would accept in trade in order to sell or buy whatever it is that you like to have around. Suppose you like chocolate. What would you offer in exchange to someone who was willing to sell some, perhaps someone bringing it up from Mexico on donkeys?

Consider 90% silver coins from your local coin store. Buy all the dimes and quarters you can, anything with a date 1964 or earlier because after that Johnson took the silver out of the coins. Consider small silver bullion rounds, one ounce or so. Gold bullion rounds too, but realise that you may need to buy a lot with one gold ounce because your trade partner might not be able to make change.

You will want a good system of weights and measures. Trust, but, of course, verify. Yes, that nice little battery operated scale that works both metric and American measurements is great, until there is an electro magnetic pulse. So get a balance scale.

Get a small balance scale for groceries and a larger one for people. Sears used to sell a good “medical” scale for weights up to 400 pounds. Someone still does.

Consider copper coins. Before 1982, the American penny was 95% copper. Today it is 97.5% zinc with a very fine copper coating. Okay, zinc is useful for galvanised steel, so it is a possible trade good. Spices, chocolate, cigarettes, coffee, silk cloth, all kinds of things are useful as money, and in the long history of mankind, all of these have been used for trade and commerce.

Remember that a willing seller and a willing buyer make a market. You will find a way to thrive. But to do so, you must, first, be able to survive.

God bless you, every one. Amen.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, actor, dancer, and teacher. He is working on OzarkHerbalAcademy.org and other business plans. The Academy has a home near Eureka Springs, Arkansas on about 35 acres. We’re seeking to bring together teachers not only of herbal healing but also of other topics to maintain knowledge in the coming collapse. Support our work by getting in touch with the author at the email address at the top of this essay. Find some of his essays at FreedomLandDAO.com and IglooLuau.com among other places. You can also connect with him on Gettr, Twitter, Failbook, and Flote.app looking for user planetaryjim