The North American electric grid is what I worry about. whether from EMP or CME, no electricity means nothing works.
I look for tools or equipment that can be made from the refuse that will be laying around.
White or black?
Coarse or fine?
.....oh, sorry.
I thought it was weekly pepper thread.
My mistake.
Prepare for the worst. It's the cheapest/easiest preps you can make initially. Think about what you would need to live like native Americans did 500 years ago. Let that be your starting point and then add other items from there, as you can afford them.
“Not everyone here is friendly to our/your cause or self”
Good, let’s flush em out and ban em.
I *just* posted a big related post to another thread, this might be a better place for it:
Just a practical observation for you prepper-folk.
I am going through a SHTF situation in my personal life, and I am eating reserve food, and am almost out of that.
SAMPLE YOUR FOOD STASH. I have had to throw all kinds of food away because it didn’t last as long as I thought it would, or because I didn’t actively manage it for expiration dates.
Stuff that held up well: Mountain House freeze dried backpacker food. I’m sodium sensitive and it’s a bit much for me, but if that’s what you have, you eat it. Canned Campbell’s soups. Dried rice.
Stuff that held up OK enough to use, but tasted a bit funky: Kraft brand Mac and Cheese in a bulk pack, with individual plastic-wrapped servings, marketed as ‘Easy Mac’. Store brand canned peaches. Edible, but kind of mushy.
Stuff that polluted the whole kitchen trying to prepare it and got thrown away: Store brand instant mashed potatoes. Store brand Mac & cheese, some off-brand freeze dried soups. Some civvie-copy MREs. Never again. If you’re preparing something and it looks a bit more orange than it should, it’s probably bad.
When the smoke clears in my life and I am building a reserve again, no off-brand anything. Packaging is important. Rotate and manage. Common sense stuff to be sure, but sometimes life gets in your face and there are bigger things to deal with than fiddling around in the cabinet. Until you need it, that is.
Doesn't matter which of the above happens, the result to how we live post-event is pretty much the same.
My oft-recounted tale of prepping:
As the year 2000 was approaching (gack, kids born after it are voting this year?), there was much fear of the “Y2K Bug”, there was much concern about computers thinking it was 1900, screw up, and send us back to that age (system crashes, etc). I described this impending problem to my retired engineer father. He listened attentively, understood the problem, and responded: “so I’ll throw another log on the fire and go back to my book.”
THAT is prepping: living a comfortable mostly-normal life where total grid failure is nothing more than a minor inconvenience for a prolonged period. Heat with wood. Get water from well or rain. Have a year’s worth of food stored. Etc. ...not that it’s sitting idly by waiting for SHTF, it _is_ your daily life, so normal and comfortable that nothing changes (at least until vast supplies run out).
The hardest part is that most of us have bought completely into the dependency lifestyle, and so look at “prepping” as a traumatic event frought with extremes. Worse, many of us are married to someone who just doesn’t view it with the same axiomatic urgency & dedication.
Short term prep I do is for power outages due to storms such as heavy snow. I can hunker down for awhile if an epidemic would prevent contact with other people. I fear economic problems with grid down a close second. Medical/dental would be a big deal in any scenario.
Most people forget how much water is readily available inside their own hot water heater. A 30 gal water heater contains enough water for a family of 4 for a week.
Step 1 isolate the valve.
Step 2 secure and preserve that potable water.
After time it may still require boiling or purification depending on your storage medium, but some is better than none.
Here’s an interesting photo collection/article about a tribe in West Sumatra. If/when the SHTF, these people will be way ahead in the game, living as primitive as they do. They must grow their own tobacco, because it seems like half the people in the photos were smoking cigarettes, but where do they get the rolling papers? Maybe they use the thin pages out of the books that missionaries drop off. A person could learn a lot about survival from people like this.
Which is easy in the short term, not so easy in the long term.
Real simple. People who band together in pro-2nd amendment, Christian communities will survive when TSHF.
Lone wolves living out in the bush won’t. They’ll be nothing more than canaries in the coal mine.
Hi Mike, I think you need to look at Kartographer’s home page. He has a a ping list there. I think you just have to Copy and Paste in the To: field. Otherwise, some of us can miss the posts specially when we are in different time zones like, in my case, South Africa. I’m just picking up on this one because it’s Saturday morning and I have time to check back a bit more than usual.