“As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands: one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.” – Audrey HepburnWhen disaster strikes and desperation sets in on your neighbors, friends, and strangers you have never met, your resources could be targeted. Retaining what you need to see your way through a disaster is paramount, but nobody wants to turn people out into the fires or storms or chaos, knowing they have no hope of survival. Still, you can’t take in everyone who comes to your door. It’s possible you can’t take in anyone at all, but is there something you can do to help your fellow human survive another uncertain day?In a recent blog, I covered the issue of how people will react when no help is on the horizon. In this video, I will discuss the conditions of giving, and we will construct what some people have called a blessing bag, a handout bag, or a 72-hour survival kit. I like to call them a Hand-up Kit because it’s just enough to give someone a hand in the worst of situations. Your Hand-Up Kit doubles as an emergency evacuation bugout kit for you, as well. You can’t give someone who shows up at your door everything, but you can give them enough to give them hope in even the direst of circumstances. Hope is the one thing that can help us get through the darkest of times.
OPSEC
Upfront, it’s crucial to establish that giving after a natural disaster has to have some conditions to maintain your operational security or OPSEC. This isn’t to say that your giving is quid pro quo- a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something. That’s a trade. I mean by conditions on your giving that you are not compromising your reserves or your chances of survival by giving to someone else.To maintain your operational security, you should be clear with anyone you are giving to that you don’t have much, and this is all you can spare. You should never reveal the extent of your stores and preps. You should be clear that you cannot take them in or shelter them, but you are willing to help them on their journey. You should never compromise your security or risk being overtaken or someone barging into your safe home. If you feel that your safety is in jeopardy or your secure location could be compromised, it is always the best course of action to turn whoever it is away. Preferably, you can hand over your Hand-Up kit without actually physically handing it off. Instead, you could tell the person to come back in ten minutes, and you will leave a little something for them in front of the door. You could also toss the kit from a second-story window to maintain your security.Much will depend on the disaster at hand. A localized catastrophe that isn’t likely to stretch beyond a few days or a week where relief services are already flowing and everything is on the mend would allow you to be very generous. A very localized disaster like a tornado isn’t likely to create ongoing, excessive civil unrest and lawlessness, so your personal safety will remain high. A large-scale disaster affecting a much larger region where services will be offline indefinitely creates a real threat to your personal security. In this situation, revealing yourself as a source of supplies is not the right thing to do. As the disaster worsens and people lose hope that any relief or rescue will come, humanity will fade, and they will view you more as a resource to be exploited at any cost.If the disaster is not a complete SHTF situation, you have the option and ability to help others should you choose to do so. The uncertainty and estimation of how long the disaster will last will determine both the extent of your giving and your willingness to give. Finally, I wouldn’t advise helping the same person twice. Once is a hand-up. Twice creates a dependency that will have them returning to your door again and again. Assuming that you are in a position to help someone else and send them on their way with a better chance of survival, I recommend the following Hand-Up Kit.HAND-UP KITThe container that your kit is in should have utility. I recommend either a 5-gallon bucket like those available for under $5.00 at your local hardware store or a used backpack that you are looking to repurpose. The pail or bucket with a lid can carry water later or port out waste. A Gamma Seal lid is preferable, otherwise do make sure that the lid can easily be removed without additional tools, something like a reusable easy-peel lid. Whomever you give this to will also find value in the container. With anything challenging to use or cook, you should include a slight note of directions. You don’t want the person returning. So let’s cover the items in this kit.WATER OR A MEANS OF FILTERING WATEREither a few bottles or cans of water, a few emergency packets of water, water purification tablets for water purification, a sillcock key, or even a Mini Sawyer or Life Straw will provide someone with the means to hydrate themselves through the disaster. There is a difference between water in hand and water that can be acquired through purification or filtration. Providing both actual water and the means to purify or filter water covers all the bases. You may want to also print out some basic instructions on obtaining water.FOOD AND SUSTENANCEFor this, I recommend long-term mylar stored rice, beans, dried fruits, oats, hardtack, bouillon cubes, or high-calorie food bars. Think of enough to get a person through 72 hours. Believe it or not, many people can’t cook either rice or beans, so you might also print out and store in the food basic preparation instructions. For sustenance or continued ability to acquire and use food, you might also include a small fishing kit with a map of local ponds and lakes. You could include a small printed guide of edible wild plants in the area. This will depend on the area in which you live, but the idea is to provide the person with the means to acquire other food sources away from you and your generosity. Finally, consider a small cooking pot and a few utensils or a cheap camping cook set designed to be compact and lightweight. A manual can opener with instructions will help a person with long-term survival. You can include canned goods in your kit only if you plan on cycling them out and keeping them fresh, as they can expire and eventually explode.FIRESomething as simple as a lighter packaged in a ziplock baggy along with some basic kindling is enough to help someone light a fire in a disaster’s aftermath. Though you will probably need to provide instructions, a 9-volt battery in a Ziploc baggie then packaged with steel wool in a large pill container or vitamin bottle is another easy-to-light fire medium. If you have never lit a fire with a 9-volt battery and some fine steel wool, you should try it. The nice thing about this method is that the steel wool can be completely immersed in water before you try to light it, and it will still burn with the touch of a battery, hence the need to secure the 9-volt battery in a Ziploc away from the steel wool. A flint fire starter or matches, believe it or not, will have the average person struggling to light a fire. Solid fuel tablets or even a can of Sterno will provide a person with a shelf-stable, ready catalyst to build a more significant fire.SHELTERExposure to the elements is how most will die after a catastrophe. I always think of shelter as the external structure and the garments we clothe ourselves in to protect ourselves from the elements. A simple six-by-eight tarp can be had for less than 5 dollars. Plastic sheeting takes up very little space but will completely protect someone from rain. Emergency mylar blankets are inexpensive. A bundle of paracord is cheap and can be used to build a shelter or a host of other purposes. An emergency or compact blanket will be of great use, but it will also help pack the contents of your kit securely.ADDITIONAL ITEMSWater, food, fire, and shelter are the basics of what you should provide in a hand-up kit. Here are additional items to include that will increase someone’s odds of survival tremendously. A few trash bags and ziplock bags will provide a multitude of waterproof and water containment uses. A fixed blade, pocket knife, multi-tool, or even a razor box cutter will allow for cutting. Sunscreen and insect repellants are helpful. An LED, penlight, or glow sticks will enable the person to navigate and function in low-light situations. Personal hygiene products like toothbrushes, toothpaste, small soap strips, moist towelettes, and alcohol swabs can help a person out. A roll of toilet paper will be a lifesaver. A basic first aid kit with just a few pills of Ibuprofen, Aspirin, anti-acid, and an anti-diarrheal will be a lifesaver for many. BandAids, gauze, and cotton balls are sometimes all you need, along with some antibacterial ointment to prevent deadly infections. A small amount of salt and pepper will take up almost no space. Of course, a roll of Duct Tape will complete the kit. If you’re feeling extra generous, you may want to consider adding the SAS survival guide. With this information, you can prevent them from returning.
CONCLUSION
This kit serves as both an item you could grab if you had to go and a kit that you can give to someone else. Assuming you already have some of the items on hand, a Hand-Up Kit can easily be constructed for relatively cheap depending on how much you want to add. You could build one all at once from new items, or you can repurpose and recycle items from your own inventory to build kits out slowly over time. You can easily store several kits that can be handed out to different people under different conditions. If disaster strikes in a region proximal to you, you could drive the kits over and hand them out to those affected by the disaster. Think of what you would need if you were desperate and needed help. Put that in your kit. Accepting someone into your home after a disaster isn’t realistic in some circumstances. Think of your home as a tiny lifeboat meant to hold four people. A 5th or 6th person would thin resources and reduce the amount of time you could stay afloat. A 7th person or more will completely sink you. A Hand-Up, Grab-and-Go kit that is thoughtfully designed will give a person a much better chance of survival. It will provide them with hope. It’s the same as tossing a life preserver to a drowning man.When you give, you also give hope. It’s inhumane to turn someone away who will die without our help, but that may be the hard reality you face one day. A Hand-Up kit makes your decision easier. What do you think? Have I left something out of the Hand-Up kit? What would you include in yours, or what kits do you have designed to help others? As always, please stay safe out there.
* THIS was advertised on my FB feed. It’s a great price and looks like a winner. Do your own research, but it’s something to think about. 6 in 1 Portable Outdoor LED Camping Lantern With Fan
* Here is a link to download the book called “LDS Preparedness Manual.” Please read the disclosure at the beginning. There is a suggested year’s supply and a calendar to help you purchase this in smaller increments. Lots and lots of valuable information. It’s free, of course. LDS-Preparedness-Manual.pdf. (It is NOT prepared by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
* I got all excited about thermal cooking again (see below) and bought two cookbooks. PLUS, I got all excited about making my own pasta and bought a pasta maker. (Ugh, so many kinds to choose from). I can’t wait to try it.
* I had the opportunity to use my 72-hour kit again. I was with the girls at their Ward Camp activity. It was warm, and no one had sunscreen. Surely, in my pack of everything, I had some. No, no, I did not. I had at least 4 containers of insect repellant but no sunscreen. Don’t worry; I’ll take care of that today when I go shopping.
* Garden news: Do you have leaves that look like this:
A leaf miner causes this. This little worm lives between the layers of the leaf. You can’t spray it with anything because it’s protected. It only takes about 1 week for it to mature and turn into a flying insect, which then bores into more leaves and lays eggs (at night, of course). Be vigilant. If you see this, cut that part of the leaf out and throw it in the kitchen trash, where it will go out into the trash can at the end of the day. OR take it right out into the garden trash can. But don’t just leave it in the garden. I am only beginning to find them now that the weather is really warming up.
I now believe I’m an expert and can’t wait to try out my new pasta maker.
SHORT TERM FOCUS: Pasta Sauce
You can use either store ingredients to MAKE sauce, or you can just store the sauce. I have a really good spaghetti sauce that I love, so I always make that. I also have a recipe for Alfredo sauce, but I tend to just buy it when it goes on sale. I know – go figure. I’m going to include both recipes below. The spaghetti sauce calls for sausage – which I use. But in a pinch, we can get by without it. Plus, if I’m making lasagna or something else that “uses” pasta sauce, it’s easier to just open a jar or can rather than make a bigger mess in the kitchen. This week, just pick up some extra sauce – whatever your favorite kind is. Winco usually has Hunt’s pasta sauce for about $.80. Get 4 or 5, and store them away.
72-HOUR KIT FOCUS: Food
My car has broken down in my emergency scenario, or there has been an earthquake that has closed the freeways, and I have to walk home. I wanted three days of food that would give me strength and energy for that walk (I KNOW this might sound silly, but in MY head, it’s always the worst possible thing, and I want to prepare for THAT thing). I just wandered through the store, looking for what would be easy to cook or eat. Food can be heavy, and I wanted to travel as light as possible. BUT, I didn’t have a ton of money for freeze-dried hiker’s meals. I have packets of oatmeal. But then I knew I would need to cook that oatmeal. You want each pack to be independent.
Here are two of my three-day’s supply of food:
Breakfast: oatmeal, hot chocolate
Lunch: Top Ramen, beef jerky
Dinner: Beef stew, dehydrated pineapple
Snack? 2 granola bars
plastic silverware and napkins
This all fits in a gallon zip lock bag
Breakfast: Cheerios, powdered milk, Tang
Lunch: Lipton soup, dehydrated apples
Dinner: Spaghetti, pretzels
Snacks: 2 granola bars, 1 fruit roll-up
plastic silverware and napkins
Again, everything fits in a gallon zip lock bag.
I bought an emergency ration bar once because I was curious. Ultimate Survival Technologies 5-Year Emergency Food Ration Bar – 2400 calories packaged to last 5 years. It’s pretty good. But I’m not sure that it’s very filling. Don’t want to buy and pack individual meals? Fine. Get a bunch of these. They are lighter and take up a lot less room.
Notes:
* I put some Jolly Ranchers into a pack once, thinking they would be good to suck on. They all melted, and it was a BIG mess! Now, I pretty much vacuum seal everything.
* Next week I’ll share other things that I have so that I can cook and prepare all this food.
* Even though I keep the pack in the car, and it gets really hot in there during the summer, the food stays good for at least a year. I try to replace the food once a year.
If you are not packing for a 3-day hike, then just get a box of granola bars and some fruit roll-ups.
MISC FOCUS: Thermal Cookers
I was first introduced to thermal cooking by Sister Whittier when she did a class on Alternative Cooking. You can watch that class here: Emergency Preparedness.
I was VERY impressed. You can cook a whole meal with just a few minutes of boiling. Think of the fuel you would save!! I bought one and then experimented with lots of different foods. Here is a great article all about thermal cookers and why you might want to think of getting one: What is a Thermal Cooker & How Does it Work? – A Heart Full of Joy. She even tells you which brands she prefers and does a comparison. I haven’t used mine in a while. I’m thinking it’s time to just break down and buy the cookbook and start using it again, especially in the summer.
FOOD STORAGE RECIPES
Spaghetti Sauce
1 lb ground beef (or 1 pint)
1 lb. sausage
Cook and drain meat
1 28 oz. can crushed tomatoes. Sometimes I don’t have this, so I use my immersion blender and stick it in a can of diced tomatoes and make my own.
1 med green pepper chopped (I use dehydrated)
1 med onion chopped (I use dehydrated)
1 c. chopped carrots (I use dehydrated)
1 c. water
1 8 oz. can tomato sauce
1 6 oz. can tomato paste
1 TB brown sugar
1 TB Italian seasoning
2 cloves garlic, minced (I use the kind in the jar)
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
Slow cook for 8-10 hours. I never remember to do this, so I just simmer for 45 min. – 1 hour.
Alfredo Sauce
1/2 c. butter – melted
4 cloves garlic minced
8 oz. cream cheese (THIS ingredient is not shelf-stable)- add and melt and blend till smooth
2 c. milk – add a little at a time
6 oz. grated Parmesan cheese
1/8 tsp black pepper
Chicken Tetrazzini
2 1/2 lbs chicken cut in pieces
2 4-oz jars of mushrooms
1 16-oz jar Alfredo sauce, or recipe from above
1/4 c. chicken broth
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp nutmeg (oddly enough, this gives it a really good taste)
Simmer together. Serve over cooked linguine or noodles.
Top with Parmesan cheese and chopped parsley.
Cheesy Italian Shells
This recipe is one of my 19 food storage recipes
Sauce:
1/4 c. instant powdered milk
1 TB cornstarch
1 TB Italian seasoning
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
Mix into 3 1/3 hot water. Mix If you are using non-instant powdered milk, Mix 1/4 c. powdered milk into 1 c. water and mix with a blender or shake in a jar. (not as easy to mix). Then add the rest of the water.
1 1/2 c. pasta shells
1 pint drained ground beef (or 1 lb. ground beef browned and drained)
1/2 c. stewed tomatoes (only about 1/3 of a can)
Add pasta, beef, and tomatoes to the milk mixture and heat 12-20 minutes. Let stand 10 minutes.
3/4 c. cheddar cheese – If using freeze-dried cheese, add while cooking. If using fresh cheese, then add after.
“With a piece of bread in your hand, you’ll find paradise under a pine tree.” – Russian Proverb.
This is one of the oldest methods of pulling yeast from the air, and it has been used for centuries by our ancestors. You might not ever buy a store-bought yeast again. I’ll run you through the whole recipe and method, and I will give you just enough history. This process will take at least 12 hours or a full day, so you won’t be able to start it and bake bread an hour later. What you get as a reward for your patience is maybe some of the best bread you will ever eat in your life. It will have a better texture and a better flavor than regular bread. I’ll provide you with that recipe at the end of this blog.
You’ll need a potato, potato peeler, small saucepan with lid, 1.5 cups water, and one teaspoon sugar, one tablespoon flour, and a Mason Jar or similar jar with a lid.
Peel the potato, making sure to remove all the skin. I usually give it a quick rinse as well to remove any dirt or dust. The cleaner it is, the better. Cube the potato just like you might for a potato salad in about 1-inch rough pieces. Place them in the saucepan with water and boil. If your water is heavily chlorinated, you may want to purchase some spring water for this process. So much fermentation comes from the quality of your initial water, and yeast hates chlorine. Place them on the stove and let them boil for about 10 minutes. You want them to be easily mashable with just a fork and a little pressure.
Remove from the heat and mash in the water until you have no large chunks. It should resemble mashed potatoes in milky water when you’re done. Here my water boiled off. That’s not a problem. I add some more water and bring it to a boil again. Stir in the teaspoon of sugar while hot, and gently place the saucepan lid on top and set aside. You’ll need it to come completely to room temperature for the next step. Once it has cooled to room temperature in your saucepan or very near to room temperature, give it a swirl and pour it into your Mason jar. Let it cool completely to room temperature with a loose lid on the jar.
What you have created at this point is a semi-pasteurized slurry of starch and sugar that yeast love. This is often referred to as a liquid broth. You want to keep it covered and sealed at this point because both yeast and bacteria will love to move in and start eating up all those sugars and breaking down the starches further. We want to let the yeast have first dibs at the slurry, so we’re letting it come down to room temperature to create the most inviting environment.
Yeast works by eating the sugar and expelling C02 and alcohol. The trace amounts of alcohol cook away, but the C02 is trapped in the dough, imparting tiny air bubbles and providing the grain and light texture to the bread. This same yeast could be used to ferment beverages, and the potato method is used by old-world vodka distillers and some even today.
For making bread yeast, we are more interested in the C02 part of the yeast feast. The bubbling created by the yeast eating the sugars and enzymatically breaking down the edges of starch strings acts as a leavening agent and causes the bread to rise. Without it, you’ll have a dense and hard cracker.
A potato in a standard bread recipe provides more nutrients for the yeast to stay healthy. This will result in fluffy bread with excellent, light grain quality. Store-bought yeast is a couple of different strains that have been isolated because of the particular way they work with dough. Yeast does impart flavor, as well. So bread dough yeast provides a very narrow and specific flavor range. Yeast is a fungus, but don’t think of it as a mushroom. There are approximately 1500 single-cell organisms called yeast. The kind used in brewing and baking is from a group called saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is Latin for sugar-eating yeast.
In the United States, naturally occurring airborne yeasts were used almost exclusively until commercial yeast was marketed at the Centennial Exposition in 1876 in Philadelphia, where Charles L. Fleischmann exhibited the product and a process to use it as well as serving the resultant baked bread. You can imagine the smell of baking bread can sell anyone on about anything, and the faster use of a premade yeast made it highly adoptable and preferable to this longer method. But this widescale commercial adoption caused us to lose a little bit of flavor and a lot of independence.
The fact is that yeasts are one of the most common organisms in existence. If you want to make cider, simply smash the apples, as millions of yeast are on the apple’s skin when it is fresh from the tree. Yeast is wafting through the air. They’re on the surface of any fruit you pick, from apples to grapes to berries. All we are doing with this method is attracting the yeast that loves to eat sugar.
Here I have to mention that we are also attracting bacteria and other yeast, even sometimes harmful bacteria and harmful yeast like Candida, which can cause infections in humans. With any yeast, you want to create the perfect environment to let your yeast thrive before other yeast or bacteria can move in and compete for the sugar resources. All of the yeast is probably killed off in the cooking process as it begins to die at 140 degrees. However, it only takes a little exposure to the room temperature bread for yeast to settle on the bread and start eating the sugars again. This is why too old of bread will mold from the outside to the inside. You could simply dissolve a piece of homemade bread in water, and you have created a slurry for new yeast to grow.
That’s a lot of science and history to absorb, so let’s return to the wild yeast we are cultivating from the air with a potato. Once it has reached room temperature in the Mason jar, you should see significant separation. The potato is at the bottom, and the milky water is on the top. You will get a slight boiled potato smell from it. If it has a sourdough smell to it, that’s okay. It just means that lactic acid bacteria are in your mix as well. This is what gives sourdough its flavor. Your finished bread will have a sourdough flavor as a result.
At this point, set the jar with the lid off next to an open window or outside in a shaded area with a light breeze for ten minutes. Repeat this open-air exposure 2 or 3 times over 6 hours. Replace the lid loosely each time and return it to your cool spot in the kitchen.
After one day, you should see bubbling at the top of your liquid. It should have a bready, yeasty, or sourdough smell starting to develop. It’s okay if you can’t detect that scent yet. If you don’t have either the bubbling or the bready smell developing, repeat the open-air process for another 10 minutes. If you have any colored mold of any kind, throw it out and start over. Some say to just clear this off and let the yeast growth continue, but I don’t trust molds, so it’s best to start over. The yeast, however, tends to be faster to grow than mold. Once you see bubbling occurring around the surface of the liquid, add the tablespoon of flour. Don’t use any metal utensils at this point so as not to inhibit or dull yeast growth. I just place the tablespoon of flour on top, tighten the lid and shake it until mixed. Each time you place the potato starter in your quiet, cool place in your kitchen, make sure that the cap is loose, and the C02 gasses can escape.
The addition of the flour encourages yeast growth specific to the consumption of the sugars derived from the starches in the flour. So, again, you’re creating an environment that is best suited to saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast. Technically, you could use the potato starter as soon as you see the bubbling, but you will have better results if you let the yeast grow and reproduce. It will work faster when you innoculate your dough with millions or billions of yeast than it will if you do it with a hundred thousand yeast cells.
When you have significant bubbling occurring, or you can see globules floating to the surface on the C02 and dropping back down when the gasses are released on the surface, you’re ready to bake bread. This is what I wait for. Congratulations. You have successfully pulled yeast out of the air and created a colony of millions of single-cell organisms. If you aren’t ready to bake bread, you can treat this as a starter and add another tablespoon of flour. It will keep on your counter for about a day with no problem and a few days if you put it in your refrigerator. Because you are using wild yeast, however, you want to use it when the specific yeast we want is most active, and that’s right now. If you wait too long, you run the risk of the yeast living its full lifecycle and dying off and other bacterias taking hold. That can impart off or sour flavors and result in little to no rising of your dough. Here is the best bread recipe you will ever bake.
My Bread Recipe
To use a potato yeast starter, you simply need to pour off the starchy water at the top and use it in place of the water in any bread recipe. I like to use the whole starter, though, as I think the potato lends a smooth and fluffy texture to the bread. When you do this, though, you have to have a good understanding of bread dough. Make sure it isn’t too sticky and not too dense. You can adjust this by adding and working in 1 tablespoon of flour if it is too sticky. Then, repeat with one tablespoon of flour until your dough isn’t too sticky or too wet.
This will make two delicious loaves– One for you and one for a friend. Add two tablespoons of sugar to 6 1/2 cups of bread flour. Add two teaspoons salt. Next, add one and ½ cups potato water to the dry ingredients. To this, you will add ½ cup milk, as well. Then, add four tablespoons of butter. I measure this out by simply eyeballing it. A little extra butter won’t hurt your mix.
Mix the dough until all the ingredients are combined. Knead in the bowl until a stiff dough is formed. Remember, if it is too sticky, just add and work in flour 1 tablespoon at a time until you have a firm dough that isn’t visibly wet on the surface. Conversely, if your dough is much too dry and won’t come together nicely for you, just add in a tablespoon of water or milk at a time until you get a nice dough ball that feels moist but isn’t sticky or dry.
Knead until smooth and elastic. This will take about 5-8 minutes. Place in a greased bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel, and allow it to rise in a warm area of your kitchen– but not in direct sunlight. Your dough should double in size.
When it has, turn it onto a lightly floured surface and punch it down. Pinch and shape into two equal loaves and place in butter greased loaf pans. Cover and allow them to rise again until they double in size. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. When the loaves have doubled in their pans, place in the preheated oven and bake for 35-40 minutes.
After 35 to 40 minutes, when the tops are a lovely golden, remove your loaves from the oven. When they are baked completely, I like to turn them onto a wire rack and brush the top with some melted butter. If you can’t wait and cut them while hot, be sure to set the loaf on your cutting board with the cut side down so the moisture won’t escape.
Enjoy! That’s all there is to it. If you know how to bake bread and pull yeast out of the air with a potato, any disaster can befall you, and you will have the basic ability to make bread. There are countless variations to both the potato yeast starter and the basic bread recipe. I would love to hear how your loaves turn out and if you have any additions or alterations to the recipe, like using honey instead of sugar, leave them in the comments below. Keep building your skills…
“With a piece of bread in your hand, you’ll find paradise under a pine tree.” – Russian Proverb.Are you still paying big money for store-bought bread yeast? Do you find yourself wanting to bake, but you don’t have any yeast on hand? If so, you’re watching the right video. Our ancestors actually never used store-bought yeast. The first commercial yeast cake wasn’t even invented until 1825. Active Dry Yeast didn’t come into full production until the 1940s. So, how’d they make bread?In this blog, Shawn will run you through the process of pulling wild yeast from the air using only potatoes and a little sugar, and he’ll bake some of the best bread you will ever eat in your life. So, let’s jump in…Pulling From the Air & Using Wild YeastThis is one of the oldest methods of pulling yeast from the air, and it has been used for centuries by our ancestors. You might not ever buy a store-bought yeast again. I’ll run you through the whole recipe and method, and I will give you just enough history. This process will take at least 12 hours or a full day, so you won’t be able to start it and bake bread an hour later. What you get as a reward for your patience is maybe some of the best bread you will ever eat in your life. It will have a better texture and a better flavor than regular bread. You’ll need a potato, potato peeler, small saucepan with lid, 1.5 cups water, and one teaspoon sugar, one tablespoon flour, and a Mason Jar or similar jar with a lid. Peel the potato, making sure to remove all the skin. I usually give it a quick rinse as well to remove any dirt or dust. The cleaner it is the better. Cube the potato just like you might for a potato salad in about 1-inch rough pieces. Place them in the saucepan with water and boil. If your water is heavily chlorinated, you may want to purchase some spring water for this process. So much fermentation comes from the quality of your initial water, and yeast hates chlorine. Place them on the stove and let them boil for about 10 minutes. You want them to be easily mashable with just a fork and a little pressure.Remove from the heat and mash in the water until you have no large chunks. It should resemble mashed potatoes in milky water when you’re done. Here my water boiled off. That’s not a problem. I just add some more water and bring it to a boil again. Stir in the teaspoon of sugar while hot, and gently place the saucepan lid on top and set aside. You’ll need it to come completely to room temperature for the next step. Once it has cooled to room temperature in your saucepan or very near to room temperature, give it a swirl and pour it into your Mason jar. Let it cool completely to room temperature with a loose lid on the jar.What you have created at this point is a semi-pasteurized slurry of starch and sugar that yeast love. This is often referred to as a liquid broth. You want to keep it covered and sealed at this point because both yeast and bacteria will love to move in and start eating up all those sugars and breaking down the starches further. We want to let the yeast have first dibs at the slurry, so we’re letting it come down to room temperature to create the most inviting environment.Yeast works by eating the sugar and expelling C02 and alcohol. The trace amounts of alcohol cook away, but the C02 is trapped in the dough, imparting tiny air bubbles and providing the grain and light texture to the bread. This same yeast could be used to ferment beverages, and the potato method is used by old-world vodka distillers and some even today. For making bread yeast, we are more interested in the C02 part of the yeast feast. The bubbling created by the yeast eating the sugars and enzymatically breaking down the edges of starch strings acts as a leavening agent and causes the bread to rise. Without it, you’ll have a dense and hard cracker.The addition of a potato in a standard bread recipe provides more nutrients for the yeast to stay healthy. This will result in fluffy bread with excellent, light grain quality. Store-bought yeast is a couple of different strains that have been isolated because of the particular way they work with dough. Yeast does impart flavor, as well. So bread dough yeast provides a very narrow and specific flavor range. Yeast is a fungus, but don’t think of it as a mushroom. There are approximately 1500 single-cell organisms called yeast. The kind used in brewing and baking is from a group called saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is Latin for sugar-eating yeast. In the United States, naturally occurring airborne yeasts were used almost exclusively until commercial yeast was marketed at the Centennial Exposition in 1876 in Philadelphia, where Charles L. Fleischmann exhibited the product and a process to use it as well as serving the resultant baked bread. You can imagine the smell of baking bread can sell anyone on about anything, and the faster use of a premade yeast made it highly adoptable and preferable to this longer method. But this widescale commercial adoption caused us to lose a little bit of flavor and a lot of independence.The fact is that yeasts are one of the most common organisms in existence. If you want to make cider, simply smash the apples, as millions of yeast are on the apple’s skin when it is fresh from the tree. Yeast is wafting through the air. They’re on the surface of any fruit you pick, from apples to grapes to berries. All we are doing with this method is attracting the yeast that loves to eat sugar.Here I have to mention that we are also attracting bacteria and other yeast, even sometimes harmful bacteria and harmful yeast like Candida, which can cause infections in humans. With any yeast, you want to create the perfect environment to let your yeast thrive before other yeast or bacteria can move in and compete for the sugar resources. All of the yeast is probably killed off in the cooking process as it begins to die at 140 degrees. However, it only takes a little exposure to the room temperature bread for yeast to settle on the bread and start eating the sugars again. This is why too old of bread will mold from the outside to the inside. You could simply dissolve a piece of homemade bread in water, and you have created a slurry for new yeast to grow.That’s a lot of science and history to absorb, so let’s return to the wild yeast we are cultivating from the air with a potato. Once it has reached room temperature in the Mason jar, you should see significant separation. The potato is at the bottom, and the milky water is on the top. You will get a slight boiled potato smell from it. If it has a sourdough smell to it, that’s okay. It just means that lactic acid bacteria are in your mix as well. This is what gives sourdough its flavor. Your finished bread will have a sourdough flavor as a result. At this point, set the jar with the lid off next to an open window or outside in a shaded area with a light breeze for ten minutes. Repeat this open-air exposure 2 or 3 times over 6 hours. Replace the lid loosely each time and return it to your cool spot in the kitchen.After one day, you should see bubbling at the top of your liquid. It should have a bready, yeasty, or sourdough smell starting to develop. It’s okay if you can’t detect that scent yet. If you don’t have either the bubbling or the bready smell developing, repeat the open-air process for another 10 minutes. If you have any colored mold of any kind, throw it out and start over. Some say to just clear this off and let the yeast growth continue, but I don’t trust molds, so it’s best to start over. The yeast, however, tends to be faster to grow than mold. Once you see bubbling occurring around the surface of the liquid, add the tablespoon of flour. Don’t use any metal utensils at this point so as not to inhibit or dull yeast growth. I just place the tablespoon of yeast on top, tighten the lid and shake it until mixed. Each time you place the potato starter in your quiet, cool place in your kitchen, make sure that the cap is loose, and the C02 gasses can escape.The addition of the flour encourages yeast growth specific to the consumption of the sugars derived from the starches in the flour. You’re creating an environment that is best suited to saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast. Technically, you could use the potato starter as soon as you see the bubbling, but you will have better results if you let the yeast grow and reproduce. It will work faster when you innoculate your dough with millions or billions of yeast than it will if you do it with a hundred thousand yeast cells.When you have significant bubbling occurring, or you can see globules floating to the surface on the C02 and dropping back down when the gasses are released on the surface, you’re ready to bake bread. This is what I wait for. Congratulations. You have successfully pulled yeast out of the air and created a colony of millions of single-cell organisms. If you aren’t ready to bake bread, you can treat this as a starter and add another tablespoon of flour. It will keep on your counter for about a day with no problem and a few days if you put it in your refrigerator. Because you are using wild yeast, however, you want to use it when the specific yeast we want is most active, and that’s right now. If you wait too long, you run the risk of the yeast living its full lifecycle and dying off and other bacterias taking hold. That can impart off or sour flavors and result in little to no rising of your dough. Here is the best bread recipe you will ever bake.My RecipeTo use a potato yeast starter, you simply need to pour off the starchy water at the top and use it in place of the water in any bread recipe. I like to use the whole starter, though, as I think the potato lends a smooth and fluffy texture to the bread. When you do this, though, you have to have a good understanding of bread dough. Make sure it isn’t too sticky and not too dense. You can adjust this by adding and working in 1 tablespoon of flour if it is too sticky. Repeat with one tablespoon of flour until your dough isn’t too sticky or too wet.This will make two delicious loaves– One for you and one for a friend. Add two tablespoons of sugar to 6 1/2 cups of bread flour. Add two teaspoons salt. Next, add one and ½ cups potato water to the dry ingredients. To this, you will add a ½ cup milk, as well. Then, add four tablespoons of butter. I measure this out by simply eyeballing it. A little extra butter won’t hurt your mix. Mix the dough until all the ingredients are combined. Knead in the bowl until a stiff dough is formed. Remember, if it is too sticky, just add and work in flour 1 tablespoon at a time until you have a firm dough that isn’t visibly wet on the surface. Conversely, if your dough is much too dry and won’t come together nicely for you, just add in a tablespoon of water or milk at a time until you get a nice dough ball that feels moist but isn’t sticky or dry.Knead until smooth and elastic. This will take about 5-8 minutes. Place in a greased bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel, and allow it to rise in a warm area of your kitchen– but not in direct sunlight. Your dough should double in size.When it has, turn it onto a lightly floured surface and punch it down. Pinch and shape into two equal loaves and place in butter greased loaf pans. Cover and allow them to rise again until they double in size. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. When the loaves have doubled in their pans, place in the preheated oven and bake for 35-40 minutes.After 35 to 40 minutes, when the tops are a lovely golden, remove your loaves from the oven. When they are baked completely, I like to turn them onto a wire rack and brush the top with some melted butter. If you can’t wait and cut them while hot, be sure to set the loaf on your cutting board with the cut side down so the moisture won’t escape.Enjoy! That’s all there is to it. If you know how to bake bread and pull yeast out of the air with a potato, any disaster can befall you, and you will have the basic ability to make bread. There are countless variations to both the potato yeast starter and the basic bread recipe. I would love to hear how your loaves turn out and if you have any additions or alterations to the recipe, like using honey instead of sugar, leave them in the comments below. Remember to give this video the thumbs up and consider subscribing to this channel for more great, practical, prepping recipes and skills. Keep building your skills…
“The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China.” – FBI Director Christopher Wray.It’s no secret that China wishes to be considered more of a super-power than the United States. China is the world’s second-largest economy and a nuclear weapons state with the world’s second-largest defense budget. In 2017, President XI Jinping laid out his vision to turn China into a “great modern socialist country” by 2050. The Swiss multinational investment bank and financial services company, UBS, surveyed its clients and found that 57% of global investors predict China will replace the U.S. as the world’s biggest superpower by 2030– less than a decade from today. The challenge is that autocratic governments function more swiftly than democracies. While a democracy tends to walk gingerly around its citizens, an autocracy like the Chinese Communist Party just brushes them aside in the name of productivity and progress. There is no denying that China has positioned itself well in many ways to take a prominent place on the world’s stage; however, China poses a significant threat to global stability, and it is worth noting the dangers they pose now and addressing these before the world reaches a point of no return.In this blog, I’ll take a look at four of the biggest threats to global stability that China currently poses, and I will leave you with a few solutions you can plug into your daily lives to make, possibly, a slight difference. At the very least, you will be better able to recognize the trappings of China and work to rid yourself of dependencies before it’s too late.THREAT #1: WARNorth Korea is China by proxy. There’s no denying that. There is a China-Taiwan divide that continues to escalate. At the heart of the divide is that the Chinese government sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be part of the country. The Taiwanese people disagree. They feel they are a separate nation – whether or not independence is ever officially declared. China has said it will “never tolerate” foreign intervention in issues related to Taiwan, a self-ruled democratic island that China claims as its own. Taiwan recently reported the largest ever incursion into its airspace of Chinese aircraft. Beijing has also sent more ships to the South China Sea.China assumes control over the East and South China Seas and ignores other countries’ claims and rights of passage through the international waters. Six countries lay overlapping claims to the East and South China Seas, an area rich in hydrocarbons and natural gas and through which trillions of dollars of global trade flow. From the Tibetan Uprising to Vietnam to the Xinjiang conflict, which is still raging today, China has never shied away from using the threat of its military might as a cudgel to force the outside world into its shape and vision of subjugation to the Party.Anyone of these conflicts is a humanitarian crisis about to happen. China unabashedly and routinely sends people off to work camps and what they call education camps, which are really forced reprogramming camps. The country is the world’s dystopian power that forces compliance from its own citizens. Leading up to the 2008 Olympic games, some 1.5 million Beijing residents were permanently driven from their homes which were bulldozed to make way for the Olympic grounds and stadium. Ask any Chinese person about this forced eviction and you and that person might be arrested. The Chinese Communist Party keeps a tight rein on dissent and controls the information it allows its citizens to know. The Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 is a perfect example. So many people were killed, silenced, or disappeared after this uprising, and so much information was scrubbed from the country’s history books that everyday citizens know nothing about it. Those that do know anything about it dare not break their silence in fear of meeting similar fates of disappearing, imprisonment, or death.Beijing has always kept a tight hold over its people and has looked at the areas around China with an opportunistic and expansionist intent. Beijing doesn’t debate with other countries either. For example, in 2014, China began massive dredging operations to build artificial islands around seven reefs claimed as their territory in the South China Sea. The artificial islands have been transformed into significant military facilities, including three runways that have been used for the deployment of Chinese fighter jets. This area is between Vietnam, the Philippines, and the island of Borneo. An incredible one-third of the world’s global shipping passes through this waterway each year, and China has converted seven reefs to operational military bases. The United States routinely flies over the area to dispute China’s claim and emphasize international rights; however, it’s not just this maritime challenge. China has maritime disputes with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, to name just a few.The threat that any conflict on land or at sea could draw countries into a more significant war with the communist nation is genuine and grows more likely as each year passes without China’s expansionism checked by the global community. It is worth noting here that the U.S. military is significantly larger and better equipped than China’s. Though China might find itself in an altercation because of its inability to back down from a fight and because it aggressively assumes both its might and right, a conflict isn’t their desired goal. Their goal isn’t to fight a war, as this will hurt their growing economy. They would rather have their factories cranking out products rather than bombs. It boils down to simple economics. That’s the front they are waging their war upon.THREAT #2: ECONOMICSOne reason China remains unchecked in its expansionist and regional strong-handed assumption of control is purely economics. China provides cheap labor and globally unrivaled output. Made in China is labeled on everything from electrical machinery, computers, furniture, plastics, medical equipment, vehicles, textiles, iron and steel, and clothing. Those nine exports alone account for 1.7 trillion US dollars in Chinese global shipments. It’s not just America who buys these products and takes advantage of the cheap labor by outsourcing jobs. When the trade war between the U.S. and China escalated recently, China inked new trade deals with Europe, Russia, Asia-Pacific nations, and even Brazil. When the two countries found an agreement in late 2019, China pledged to buy 200 billion dollars of US goods and services in 2020 and 2021. China was never, ever on pace to even remotely meet that commitment.What has given China an edge in the cutthroat global economy is that they may promise one thing but rarely honor their obligations. The news is riddled with stories of China walking away from financial obligations to the rest of the world. In one instance, they bilked global investors in 22 golf courses in the country out of over a billion dollars. China defaulted on what is by today’s accounting 1.6 trillion dollars owned by America in bonds on a century-old debt. It isn’t likely the communist government will ever make good on the previous government’s debt. At the same time, China holds 1.1 trillion dollars of American debt in 2021. That may not be as much of a problem as Japan’s ownership of almost 1.3 trillion dollars of American debt. The global economies are difficult to explain, but China’s demand for Treasury helps keep U.S. interest rates low. It allows the U.S. Treasury to borrow more at low rates. Congress can then increase the federal spending that, hypothetically, spurs U.S. economic growth. But these bonds issued to borrow against an uncertain future and the printing of money are a house of cards. Any rising conflict could result in the house of cards collapsing.Add to this that the rumors of a Chinese cryptocurrency backed by the country’s fiat currency, the renminbi, and China’s intent to control financial markets are clear. For many years there have been strained relationships because China pegs its currency instead of allowing it to float freely. It’s akin to market manipulation. With the introduction of a cryptocurrency, they provide an avenue for direct payments outside of American sanctions. To underscore this point, they have squeezed out cryptocurrencies mining and operating within their borders in favor of their own central bank’s cryptocurrency, which has caused cryptocurrencies to plummet in price. Many people dismiss cryptocurrencies because they see the stories of fraud, see no practical value to it, or they simply don’t understand it. The reality is that de-financed cryptocurrency outside traditional banking systems will become an ever-increasing share of global transactions. Recent years have witnessed a surge in the number of people handling digital payments, with the figure growing from 2.7 billion in 2017 to over 4.6 billion in 2020. In the next four years, the number of users in the digital payment segment is set to touch 6.4 billion. It’s expected to grow an additional 84% in the next four years. This will result in consolidation into any digital asset capable of handling those transactions en masse. That will likely end up being a fiat currency-backed cryptocurrency. Despite not trusting the central bank of China and its blatant market manipulations in its favor, it may very well be China’s cryptocurrency. If you don’t understand that, you don’t have to in order to understand the threat. Think of it this way, if your paycheck was deposited in your account from your employer, you paid your bills online, and you swiped your card for your gas, groceries, and entertainment, when did you have a physical fiat currency in your hand? When did you pull greenbacks from your pocket and carry around a pocket full of change from the transactions? So would it matter if you got paid in dollars or a digital coin by some other name? You kind of are already being paid and transacting digitally.Between China’s manufacturing output and global dependence upon this output, and its recent long vision of the future with cryptocurrency, it is establishing economic control over international economics. And, China doesn’t have a track record of wielding power for the greater good. The fact is that we are already engaged in an economic war with China, and many countries are losing by continuing to import the bulk of their products from China and exporting their debt and labor needs to the communist country.THREAT #3: THE PLANETBeing a manufacturing powerhouse and ruling with an iron fist over your people comes at an environmental cost. Even with a pandemic raging worldwide, China’s C02 emissions reached a record high of 12 billion metric tons. Unfortunately, health and mortality data is never accurately reported from behind the red curtain, so we can only wonder what effect the toxic chemicals and air have on people. China’s emissions exceeded all developed nations in 2019. The country accounted for nearly 27% of the world’s greenhouse gasses. Though China has vowed to reach net-zero emissions by 2060, they neither have a track record of meeting their global responsibilities nor does a consensus of scientists believe that is soon enough. The country is currently running 1,058 coal plants – more than half the world’s capacity. The emissions leading to climate change argument aside, this is a damaging and toxic level of pollutants rising into the air and seeping into the world’s oceans. That can’t be good for the planet, even thousands of miles away.A string of incidents, often caused by lax safety standards and criminal negligence, has resulted in widespread loss of life over the past five years from industrial accidents in the country. There was a blast at the Jinshangou coal mine in 2016, killing thirty-one people. Seventy-three people died in a 2015 Shenzhen landslide of a 20 story high pile of industrial waste. The Tianjin port explosion of 2015 killed 173 people, and one of the warehouses was found to have illegally contained 49,000 tons of highly toxic chemicals. Most recently, there is an “imminent radiological threat” from the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant. The French company that partly owns and operates the plant issued the warning. The US has been unable to get information from the tight-lipped Chinese government. Is this the next global nuclear disaster in the making? That remains to be seen.In times of uncertainty and anxiety, it’s always nice for some people to have someone to blame. In times of COVID-19, the culprit seems abundantly clear–the People’s Republic of China. While I don’t subscribe to any conspiracy theories that lack hard evidence, I find it difficult not at least to acknowledge the possibility that COVID-19 did get unleashed on the world accidentally from a scalability study of viruses centered at the Wuhan labs. The fact is that the US pulled out of supporting that lab and that very specific research because of safety concerns. The incubation phase of the virus appears to exceed the standard quarantine safety protocols, and the epicenter of the origin point of the virus is located in the same city. There is an active investigation into the possibility, and given China’s other lax safety policies, we may be foolish to simply dismiss the possibility. Only time will tell what the truth is.There is no denying one thing, however. China’s lax safety measures and industry at any cost approaches are having lasting global impacts. It’s just a matter of time before China has a large-scale accident that we will not have enough information about because of their need to save face and not be embarrassed. Nuclear, biological, or simply toxic air and water, we just can’t know what threat we face from China and what lasting effect it will have. It is difficult to protect yourself from things you can barely detect until it is too late. The global community is in a textbook abusive relationship with China. The country provides cheap labor and cheap goods, yet it abuses our greatest finite resource–the very planet where we live.THREAT #4: CYBER-WARFAREChina, unlike Russia, is not as interested in destabilizing countries in a ransomware cyberwar, but they aren’t entirely out of the game either. There have recently been several such attacks that had a sophistication that far exceeds an individual hacker’s capability. The techniques used were more akin to state-sponsored attacks. In March, Microsoft warned the world that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group called Hafnium had infected what would turn out to be tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange servers in a weeks-long hacking blitz. The hackers in this particular attack left keys and backdoors to come back later. China is less interested in ransom. They are just interested in taking information. It has long been known that the nation has hacked multiple corporations’ research and development departments to steal trade and technology secrets.The FBI has clearly stated, “The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States. To be clear, the adversary is not the Chinese people or people of Chinese descent or heritage. The threat comes from the programs and policies pursued by an authoritarian government. The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.”Foreign Policy magazine estimated China’s hacker army to be anywhere from 50 to 100 thousand people. Their aggressive espionage efforts have attacked corporate and infrastructure systems. They have even gained some access to American military systems. It’s not just the U.S, though. Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Taiwan all claim to have been hacked by state-sponsored Chinese hackers. Just last year, the Vatican, of all places, reported that Chinese state-sponsored hackers operating under the name RedDelta hacked the Vatican’s computer network ahead of negotiations between China and the Vatican. These are just the many attacks we know of right now. Hundreds of thousands more go unreported or unnoticed. From secrets to information to espionage, China is collecting droves of data worldwide. It is very likely that, at some point, nations will clandestinely retaliate. This could cause a World Cyber War, as nation attacks nation, as they search for the culprit and victimize each other.How many keys and backdoors are out there waiting for a zero-day cyber attack? The possibility of a cyberwar between Russia, China, and the United States is more probable than a physical military altercation. As evidenced by the Colonial Pipeline and other recent cyberattacks, one attack can have dramatic effects. Orchestrated attacks can have a crippling impact in a matter of seconds.WHAT CAN YOU DO?So, what can you do to lessen the effect of and combat the four significant threats from China: war, economics, pollution, and cyber-attacks? The answer is you can’t do much individually. You could purchase fewer Chinese products. You could fight to keep jobs in your own country and buy local if you can, but that’s probably not enough for you to have any real impact. As a prepper, you would be far better off to concern yourself with approaching each threat as a threat to you. You can’t do much about a possible physical war with China, but you can reduce your consumption on which China depends. You can’t lessen the impact that Chinese manufacturing and disasters have on the planet’s pollution. Still, you can decrease your dependence on the mechanisms of a just-in-time manufacturing and shipping system that is repeatedly failing by becoming more self-sufficient. Though your latest virus protection software may keep you safe from some hackers, it won’t be enough to prevent state-sponsored hackers from attacking and shutting down your regional infrastructure systems. So, you should prepare to insulate yourself from them and function without them.We prepare for natural disasters that may befall us because we see them as imminent. Well, we face at least four imminent threats from China right now. You should prepare to face them. Start by securing food and water to sustain you for 3-days, then 3-weeks, then 3-months, then a year or more. Increase your survival skills. Prepare your disaster kits and medical kits. Secure your energy sources outside of grid dependence. Learn from the videos on this channel and others channels like this one. Keep a clear head and prepare for these genuine threats. The grid will be attacked again, and one day it will go down. Supply chains that bring you food and medicine will fail again. The attacks on our systems won’t simply go away. They will increase in intensity, frequency, and magnitude.
Conclusion
The country of China won’t win any humanitarian or good global citizen awards anytime soon. In reality, conflicts with the communist country are likely to increase until they reach a point of boiling over. The resultant war, both overt and covert, could have a dramatic impact on your daily life. You would be wise to prepare for this possibility now.What do you think? Which of the four threats we face from China do you feel is most likely to escalate out of control? Tell us in the comments below so other members can share in your insights. As always, please stay safe out there.
* Someone shared this link with me. Azure Natural Organic Foods, Recipes & Healthy Living • Azure Standard | Natural Organic Foods, Recipes and Healthy Living – Azure Standard Looks like they have some really good deals, especially if you are looking to buy some grains not found in grocery stores: quinoa, hard white wheat (from $.90 a pound), buckwheat, spelt, cornmeal, barley, oats, rice. Also baking supplies: vanilla 16 oz. same price as Costco, powdered milk, honey, and much more. Check it out.
Bean leaves look like this.
Tomato leaves look like this.
* Garden updates. Some of my beans and tomatoes look “sick.” I’ve been searching everywhere to find out what is wrong. My bean leaves were all shriveled up. Looks like aphid damage or some other kind of insect. Also my tomato leaves were all shriveled. Looks like they’ve been burned. I finally found the answer here: How to Recognize and Address Herbicide Damage in Urban Container Gardens – YouTube. Her pictures match mine exactly. Looks like it’s overspray from the weedkiller we used on the lawn. Mystery solved. Hoping if I baby those plants, they’ll stay alive.
* Most plants do NOT like our extreme heat. You need shade cloth if you want your plants to avoid sunscald, and keep producing. This is what I have. Vensovo 40% Sunblock Shade Cloth Net Black Resistant – 12X20 Ft Garden Shade Mesh Tarp for Plant Cover, Greenhouse, Chicken Coop, Tomatoes. You don’t want to “block” the sun, just tone it down a bit. Sun cloth comes in different sizes and different strengths. I like the 40%. I’d buy white if I could find it, but all I have so far is black. You’d THINK it would be hotter under the black cloth. Surprisingly, it’s nice and cool under there. I start shading at 90˚. I kept my lettuce growing all summer long last year. I have my lettuce on the northernmost side of my house, so it shades first. Also, I use a shade cloth on the lettuce if it’s warm even in the morning. Once the house shades it, you can take the shade cloth off if you want. I like the lettuce to have SOME early morning sun. Not too hot. Lettuce is fussy that way.
One more thing: Shading broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, celery, leafy vegetables, and root vegetables, is fine. But anything that has to be pollinated: squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers – THESE vegetables need pollinators: bees, insects. So, you can’t cover them and leave them like that. It’s a pain to be sure. You can position the shade cloth up high so the pollinators can still get in, OR you have to cover and uncover. Cover in the morning at about 10 when it starts getting hot, and uncover at night when the temps drop. Most of the insects are active in the early morning. I literally left the ladder in the garden and climbed up every morning and again in the evening. Your alternative to this is to do the pollinating yourself. It’s not that hard, but you have to do it every day—then again, you don’t have to climb ladders. This year, I have a “sweet” set up and can leave the shade cloth in place.
* What to do in and for the garden this month. If you enter your zip code here Kellogg Garden Products, you will find a checklist for your specific zone. I am in Zone 9B.
LONG TERM FOCUS: Pasta
This is a good time to start making a list of recipes you can cook with only food on your shelf. Start with 7 recipes. ( Technically, you COULD just make these 7 things over and over). Not sure “I” could, but it’s a start. Then think about getting a 3 week supply of these ingredients. Three weeks. You can do that. Every time you make something, think, “Can I adjust this?” Example: pizza. Can you buy the ingredients for pizza and keep them on a shelf? Sure. Learn how to make the homemade crust (need yeast). Buy pizza sauce. Invest in some dehydrated cheese (it’s pricey, but it’s available), or in the short term, just freeze some. Get some sausage “bites” that are freeze-dried. OR learn to can ground beef, OR use canned chicken. You probably won’t want to use your freeze-dried mozzarella cheese and sausage bites. But you’ll have them on hand and you’ll be eating pizza when everyone else is eating Top Ramen. heh heh heh. Okay, so this doesn’t have a lot to do with pasta, but I talked about pasta last week AND some of your easiest recipes could just be spaghetti and tuna casserole.
SHORT TERM FOCUS: Mac & Cheese
Go ahead and buy some boxes of mac and cheese. (You should be able to get them on sale for about $.79) Then you can doctor it up with one of these recipes: 25 Mac ‘N’ Cheese Recipes
72-HOUR KIT FOCUS: Food
I’m not sure about you, but I want FOOD in my 72-hour kit. You have to decide what a good fit for you is. Is your kit for…….
*when you are stuck in traffic on the freeway and your kids are screaming and tired?
* when there is an earthquake and the freeway closes and you have to walk home from San Diego?
* when you have to evacuate at a moment’s notice and drive 10 hours to Grandma’s house?
Your answer will determine what you will want to pack.
If you anticipate walking any distance, you will want something you can eat for energy. And what if you have to walk for a couple of days? It IS a 72-hour kit after all. But if you are going to cook something (instant oatmeal), now you need a small stove, and matches, and a pot to cook in.
If you are just thinking freeway traffic, well you probably only need granola bars and fruit roll-ups.
Maybe brainstorm with your kids and spouse. Next week, I’ll tell what “I’ve” done and how it’s worked out for me.
MISC FOCUS: Camp Stove
Let’s pretend you are at home. There is no food in the grocery stores, AND there is no power. Yeah. Do you think THIS could happen? Ever? After last year, I think ANYTHING could happen.
You should think of THREE alternate cooking scenarios. Here is one choice.
A Camp stove. You can get them from Walmart for about $60.
You can see that it is impractical to stove enough propane canisters to cook for several months, much less a year. But it is a good short-term solution – say 1-2 weeks. Stay tuned for next week’s email for suggestions on how to address this problem for the long term.
FOOD STORAGE RECIPES
Today’s recipes are from “30 Minutes or Less” compiled by Professional Home Economics Teachers of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah
Penne Pasta With Sausage
12 oz. penne pasta
2 TB olive oil
1/2 pound Italian sausage
1/2 onion, chopped
1 tsp minced garlic
3 oz. red bell pepper, roasted, chopped
1 26 oz jar marinara sauce
1 1/2 c. fresh spinach
Garnish: Parmesan cheese, grated
Bring a large pot of water to boil; cook pasta 10 minutes. Meanwhile, saute olive oil with sausage, onion, and garlic in large skillet for 6 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain off excess fat. Stir in peppers and sauce and bring to a boil. Simmer about 4 minutes. Stir in spinach and cook 1 minute longer, until wilted and heated through. Drain pasta and pour onto serving platter. Pour sauce over pasta and sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese.
Spanish Noodles
2 slices bacon
1/2 c. celery, chopped
1 pound ground beef
1 28-oz can tomatoes, quartered
1/2 c. green pepper, chopped
1 tsp salt
dash pepper
4 oz.. noodles or macaroni
Cook bacon until crisp; drain, reserving drippings. Crumble bacon and set aside. Add celery to drippings in skillet and cook until tender. Add ground beef, brown slightly. Add tomatoes, green pepper, salt and pepper. Stir in uncooked noodles. Cover and cook over low heat for 25 minutes or until tender. Stir in bacon.
Chili Ravioli Bake
Serves 4
1 can ravioli
1 can corn, drained
1 can chili, no beans
1/2 c. cheese, grated
1 c. corn chips, crushed
Preheat oven to 350˚ In a casserole dish, layer the ravioli, corn and chili. Top with grated cheese and crushed corn chips. Bake in oven 10-15 minutes, until hot and bubbly.
Creamy Chicken Fettuccini Alfredo
8 oz. cream cheese, cut into cubes
3/4 c Parmesan cheese, grated
1/2 c. butter
1/2 c. milk
1 can cooked chicken
1 c. broccoli florets, steamed
8 oz. fettuccini noodles, cooked
In a large saucepan, stir together cream cheese, Parmesan, milk and butter over low heat until smooth. Stir in chicken and broccoli; heat through. Serve over warm fettuccini noodles.
“Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!” – Thomas Carlyle.In one afternoon, wildfires swept through the quiet suburban homes of Coffey Park, Santa Rosa, destroying almost every home, tree, car, and structure in its path. Choking smoke blew into adjacent neighborhoods. Twenty-three people died, and thousands fled to safety and were rendered homeless. These suburbanites weren’t in a traditional fire zone. They had irrigation, fire hydrants, and the latest fire-resistant construction.The fact is that we barely can contain the nature of fire. It truly knows no boundaries. It consumes whatever is in its path. Whether you live on five acres away from anyone, you live in a skyrise that stretches to the clouds, or alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean; you are susceptible to fire, lethal smoke from the fire, or the efforts to combat and contain it. Lightning, arson, electrical malfunctions, other people’s failure to contain their fires, even concentrated sunlight are all potential ignition sources.Fire season is starting early this year and is predicted to be far worse than in previous years. In this video, we will examine the Ready, Set, Go plan outlined by CalFire. Though you may not be in California or even in a wildfire zone, the same principles apply to any environment, from woods to farmland, to population-dense cities, to well-manicured suburbs.READYWhen it comes to something as unruly as a fire, every bit of planning you do in advance of the event will pay off for you. You should prepare as though a fire or smoke will be either in your home or rapidly approaching your home. The first part of that preparation is to create a defensible space around your property. Defensible space is the buffer you create between a building on your property and any natural or artificial combustibles surrounding the building or property. For some, that may mean clearing brush, dead leaves, and other vegetation. For others, that may mean clearing debris, trash, or other combustibles in and around their property. Keeping green or hardscaped areas around your living area will distance your living area from sparks and embers traveling on the wind. It will provide firefighters a place to combat any flames. If you have vegetation around your property, make sure that dead material is removed. Even the lushest and greenest bush can be burned if the surrounding vegetative fuel is sufficient enough to create enough heat. Trim branches of trees to at least six feet off the ground. Clear dead material from under bushes. Make sure any combustible materials are not near structures or under trees, or near bushes. Consider vertical spacing of flammable trees and shrubs, the small to tall fire spread potential, and the horizontal spacing, the distance between combustible trees and shrubs. Remember, fire will burn out from its source in all directions. It will be guided by wind and the rising heat. It will climb up a hill faster than it will descend a hill. It will burn up a tree from a low bush unless enough space is between them.Think of your property in terms of zones. Zone 3 is the whole area outside your outside property lines. You don’t have much input or control over this far lying area, so you will want to plan according to these threats. If you live near a manufacturing facility, try and familiarize yourself with the chemicals they use in their processes. If the building a few blocks from your location uses combustible or toxic chemicals in its processes, you should plan to have some means of safe breathing. Gas masks do not provide oxygen. They will afford some protection from toxic fumes and filter harmful elements enough to get you to safety, but they do not provide oxygen that a fire will readily consume. They will afford little protection if the fire is all around you but can provide excellent protection if you move laterally or away from a fire through smoke and toxic fumes. Toxic smoke inhalation causes more fire-related deaths than do the fires themselves. If you live near woodland areas, choking smoke could eliminate vision and create a breathing hazard for many blocks or miles away. Some areas have relatively consistent wind patterns. Sometimes a breeze comes from one direction in the morning and another direction in the evening. Sometimes the wind typically blows up from a hot, dry area or down from a high cold area. Sometimes it comes in off the water, and so forth. Pay attention to these wind patterns and understand their basics. This will determine your actions and escape from any fire in Zone 3.Zone 2 is the immediate structures buttressing up against your property. Don’t let the neighbor’s deep-fried Thanksgiving turkey on his wooden deck threaten your safety. Survey your property lines and alert your neighbors or officials or help with any cleanup efforts to create a safe fire zone around your properties. Make sure you have hoses that stretch to the perimeters of your property. If you have a pool or other large contained body of water, make sure you have the means to pump that water onto the fire. An above-ground pool can be opened in the direction of the fire. An in-ground pool or pond can be pumped through hoses onto the fire or the potential fire zone. Just as you have a generator for disasters, if you have a large body of water in your Zone 2, consider a chemical and clear water transfer pump. This will provide you somewhere around 150 gallons per minute to combat a fire in Zone 2 or douse the zone to protect it from a fire moving through Zone 3 towards you. In a grid-down situation or after a disaster, a transfer pump of this nature will also allow you to move floodwaters, irrigate crops, or move large bodies of water to where you need it.If you live in an apartment and your neighbor is a reckless hoarder, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. This is where an electronic barrier of protection is beneficial. Having both fire and carbon monoxide protectors through your house or apartment and, in particular, on the most dangerous areas of your perimeter provide you an alert system that will allow you to either spring into action or flee. Consider putting a fire alarm in your garage if the ambient heat of your garage in the summer won’t trigger it. The garage is often sealed off from the rest of the house but contains many of the house’s combustibles.Finally, Zone 1 is contained within your walls. Take out your papers and trash. Make sure you have fire extinguishers on hand. The fire extinguishing balls you may have seen are, actually, not very effective, and I don’t recommend them. Even a 13 ounce Cold Fire spray canister https://amzn.to/3w2e0gA will be enough to put out your typical kitchen or small debris fire. Consider having one fire abatement device like a fire extinguisher or fire blanket for every room of your home, including wet areas like your bathroom, and make sure you understand how to use them. You don’t want to be fumbling for reading glasses when you need to be springing into action. Have a fire ladder if you live on a second story, and always have at least two means of egress from every room of your house.SETThe set phase of the Ready, Set, Go can be summarized in a single phrase, “Have a plan.” Have a plan for when your structure is on fire. Have a plan for when a fire is approaching your structure. You can’t outthink an unpredictable fire, but you can think and develop solutions for potential fires. Walk around your home and have the family review what they would do if a fire were in that room. Walk around your yard or property and decide what you would do if a fire were anywhere 360 degrees around your property, above you, or below. Fire raining down from the floor above, or even the sky, isn’t improbable. An explosion can send flaming debris hundreds of yards away, and a fire on just the floor above you may not be noticeable until it has opened a hole in your ceiling because the heat, flames, and many of the gasses will be rising. +Map your property. Walk it, and decide the best actions for both putting out fires and escaping the flames. Make an evacuation checklist, so you can just check the boxes and get out, if you have to, instead of wandering your property and wondering if you have everything while a fire races towards you.Don’t forget your pets. If you can’t take them with you safely, set them loose. Animals have been escaping fires since they first roamed the planet. If you can take them with you, make sure you have pet food in reserve for when you get to safety. Evacuating with pets can be very complex, and there is much to consider. That’s why I did a whole video on it. I will link to that at the end of this video. For right now, just don’t forget that getting your pet to safety is an essential part of getting set.Understand your building, community, and local area evacuation plans and emergency communication channels. Find out in advance the critical websites and media you will need to remain alert with the current up-to-the-minute reports. If you do have to flee your home, you can’t rely solely upon a general idea of where the fire is, as it may have spread around you and across your anticipated evacuation routes so staying informed could mean the difference between life and death.Have a family communication plan in place. Pull out a map and determine family rendezvous points away from known fire zones. Download apps that make location and offline communication possible. Plan out evacuation routes many miles from your location and in every direction. Pull all contact information and routes onto a central source and place copies in your home, vehicles, Emergency Bugout bags, and Every Day Carry bags. Have important documents like social security cards, birth certificates, deeds, pink slips, wills, medical information, meaningful pictures, digital image files, digital files, even cash in a central place so you can grab them if you have to quickly evacuate. Walk around your house with a digital camera and fill the card with pictures of every single thing in your home, especially the things of value. Photograph essential documents and receipts. Put that digital card in your evacuation bag or upload all the files to a secure data storage platform like Dropbox. If you need to file an insurance claim, you will be glad you took this one afternoon to photograph everything as they will only replace exactly what you can prove you own. If an expensive T.V. gets destroyed and you add T.V. to the list you submit to them, they’ll get you the cheapest T.V. they can buy unless you can prove otherwise. You want to be able to grab anything you may need and get to safety quickly. Many people perish as they scramble around an area on fire, struggling to grab that one last thing, or because they have grabbed something they truly didn’t need and struggle to get to safety.If you do just one thing to prepare yourself for a host of disasters that might befall you, make sure you have a go-back or bugout bag for each member of your family. I have several videos on these and what to include in them. At the very least, have a backpack with face masks, a three-day supply of non-perishable food, and water containers you can grab in a central location. Specific for fire, if you are asthmatic make sure to have any inhalers or needed medications in your bag. Smoke will easily irritate bronchial tubes and impair breathing. Have three gallons of water per person or a personal filtration straw https://amzn.to/3x3j6cn. Have a map marked with evacuation routes, prescription medicines, and a change of clothes, especially footwear. Have extra eyeglasses, a first aid kit, and a flashlight. Have an extra set of keys and chargers for your cell phones. Put these bags somewhere safe and easily grabbable on your way out of your home structure.GO!Go is the proper action if you feel unsafe. You do not have to wait for officials to tell you to evacuate. The time to escape an out-of-control fire was a few minutes ago; the next best time is right now. If possible, grab your evacuation checklist. If you can, load your emergency supplies into your vehicle. Here, your advantage is having all these supplies ready to go from one place rather than having to run around a burning home to try and gather them up and load them. If you have a preset plan, family members can take charge and be responsible for certain parts of the plan. One person might be in charge of getting everyone’s packs into the vehicle. Another person might be in charge of getting the pets. Another person might be in charge of the crucial documents envelope. In this way, if someone is away from home, another person can easily know that the away person’s responsibilities will need to be covered.Dress to prevent damage from high temperatures, falling ash, or embers. Natural fibers are better than synthetic fibers. Head protection, a dry bandana over the mouth and nose, and a hat are all important to wear when making your escape to safety. Here, too, the can of Cold Fire https://amzn.to/3w2e0gA I mentioned earlier will be helpful. Its compact size allows for easy, lightweight portability, and it is non-toxic. A person can be doused in it if need be.As you head down the road, be aware of your surroundings, and obey the directions of law enforcement. Law enforcement and firefighters work around the premise of containment. When you move past their roadblocks and barriers as you move to safer environments, you can breathe a sigh of relief but go a little further. You don’t want to merely stay a mile ahead of a fire. A fire can move in forests at around 7 miles per hour and double that rate across grasslands. A fire in a city can spread even faster as combustibles and explosions can carry flaming debris hundreds of yards from their source in a matter of seconds. Keep moving until the flames are a distant pillar on the horizon. Your life and the lives of those you care for are more important than any property or physical possession.Most importantly, if you don’t feel safe, you need to go. Don’t delay or put off your decision. If you have the time and the means to fight the fire before it consumes your structure, do so; but don’t sacrifice your ability to escape in the process. Hosing down your roof or property can have some effect but won’t do too much if the flames are raging and fanned by strong winds. Your gut will tell you when to escape. If there isn’t a chance of stopping the fire or it’s reached your neighborhood or building, it is time to go.If you have to flee on foot, try to head to lower geographical areas away from the known fire direction. Never flee uphill, as fire will more rapidly travel uphill. Heading into the wind is a preferred path if it is away from the fire as well, as the fire will travel faster with the wind. If the wind is traveling in your direction from the fire and the smoke is thick, start moving away from the fire in the direction the smoke is traveling and keep moving until the visibility improves. Then begin moving forty-five degrees into the wind to get to clearer air. Remain upwind or perpendicular to the direction the fire is moving. Don’t stop moving until the air is clear and the fire is visible on the horizon in full scale. Try to put as much distance between yourself and the fire as possible.
Conclusion
There are disasters you can plan and pack a little for in advance of it befalling you. For instance, you know a hurricane may be heading your way days and hours ahead of time. Fires, however, don’t provide any advanced warning. They’re dangerous and deadly. A single spark can create an enormous disaster zone that can easily escape even the best efforts at containment. Before fire strikes, review this Ready, Set, Go system and make sure you are ready. I talk quite a bit about preparing for the most logical and pressing disasters first and the other disasters after that. Fire is the most pressing disaster you face. It is even more likely than natural weather disasters. Failing to prepare for fires both large and small is surrendering to them. A little preparation on your part goes a long way toward your future safety.What do you think? What was the most recent fire that threatened your safety? Tell us in the comments below so other members of the channel can understand how serious of a threat fire really is. As always, please stay safe out there.
“The potential for the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyber-attack.” – Leon Panetta.Maybe you’ve only slightly been inconvenienced by the higher fuel cost and higher prices for your Memorial Day barbeque meats. Ransomware attacks like the Colonial Pipeline and JBS meat processing plants are just the early shots fired in a much larger conflict that’s approaching on the horizon. This video is my warning to you that your minor inconveniences because of ransomware attacks are about to get very real and will soon have profound impacts on you. Future attacks could threaten your safety and even your survival.I work in IT and when people ask me why I am a prepper, for me, this is easily on my top 3 items that I see as a very current, major threat. Unfortunately, most people are completely unaware of how devastating a coordinated cyber attack would be to our survival in this modern society that is increasingly reliant upon automation and systems working behind the scenes.This video has four distinct parts. The first will examine how all of these systems are interconnected. The second will look at who is responsible for these attacks and address some fallacies of reasoning within our own community. I think this is important to address and while it will upset some, we need to discuss the issue of who is behind these attacks. The third part will look at the five ways cyberattacks will directly affect you. And, finally, the last part of the video will explain some of the things you can do today to protect yourself from the inevitable attack dawning on the horizon. This video is longer than my typical video, but there’s a lot of important things you need to hear and I encourage you to stick to the end as this video is both a warning and a call to action. Now is the time to get prepared for what is unavoidable and already happening.HOUSE OF CARDSImagine your electrical system going out. You would call the providing company, right? Maybe you’d check the internet for outages. If the internet were down on your home computer and your phone, what would you do? Would you pull out your phone book and call someone assigned the job of answering the phone at your electric company? Do you have a phone book? Is your phone working? An automated system replaced the position that answered the phone at the electric company. That’s down. Even if you got through, there’s no one there who can manually look up your 16-digit account number. Besides, they have a slightly bigger problem than your residential need.Grocery stores are about to lose all their expensive meat, poultry, fish, and eggs. The USDA has indicated that the food will only stay safe for 4 hours after a power outage. Most grocery stores have some short-term backup power and a plan for when the power goes out. Store employees will move cold dairy and meat into a large cooler in the back that will keep food cold for a while. The store can’t sell you anything anyways if all their transaction processing systems are powered off. In the recent Texas outage this last winter, grocery stores had to dump their food in some areas. Like a vision from a dystopian nightmare, the police were deployed to protect the disposed of product in the dumpsters.Beyond your supply of food, there’s no gasoline because stations can’t pump or transact. Your water may become unsafe if water plants can’t regulate the treatment and flow of water and sewage. Deliveries to your area of any products or services almost entirely have to stop. Routers, computers, phones all require electricity. Communication stops.How long do you think the unprepared average person of the masses will simply sit at home? Will the looting start almost immediately, or will it take a few hours or days? And this is just a slice of the possible systems that can be affected. If more than one even seemingly disconnected system is shut down simultaneously, imagine how devastating the effect could be. What if electrical systems are locked up on one coast of the country and air traffic on the other coast? How crippling would that be? How long could that last? How many other systems might have to stop as a result? Obviously, those air travelers would have to rent cars or take trains. Neither the rental companies nor the railway companies are prepared for that level of demand. I could go on and on. From catering services to travel to communication, thousands of industries can grind to a halt with one or more system failures.These systems, too, haven’t kept pace with technology. The adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t work well in the information technology industry. IT has to continually stay a step ahead of hackers with their security. They have to do more than have users update their passwords every 60 days. Still, many meat processing plants are using systems running Windows 98. That’s 98 as in 1998–23 years ago. To understand why this is a technology problem, try and remember the computer system or cell phone you had in 1998 compared to what you are using today.Some recently hacked water plants were running Windows 7. That was released in 2009–12 years ago. From a security standpoint, any software that old is like having an open door and an open garage on your house when you’re not home. Software from 1998 is like handing known burglars a list of items in your house and the schedule of when you’ll be away. Microsoft doesn’t even support these old systems anymore. Nobody is spending their programming hours creating fixes and patches for these systems, but I guarantee you thousands of people have been trying to exploit and hack into these systems for many years and they’ve gotten quite good at it.Even if a company’s IT is top-notch with the latest and greatest security protocols, hackers can find the one weak link. One employee visiting their Facebook page and clicking on a link could provide access to the company’s network. A hacker can just sit there and start documenting keystrokes until a new password and system are revealed. The most recent data breach of Facebook exposed the personal data of 533 million users. The data exposed included phone numbers, DOB, locations, past locations, full name, and in some cases, email addresses. All it takes is one employee to open that spoofed email from the CEO and click on the file as the CEO instructed and…poof…all those millions of dollars spent on security systems and IT personnel are suddenly as useless as the Maginot Line was for France against Germany’s armies. I have owned and operated a web-based company for many years. I have witnessed firsthand that companies often don’t want to spend the money to upgrade their systems when technology is changing quickly and a piece of software that is not properly maintained can be hacked in a short time.Even systems wholly disconnected from the internet are vulnerable. Stuxnet, which was believed to be developed by the CIA, was deployed into the Iran uranium centrifuges through a thumb drive. It set the Iran nuclear program back for years by causing the centrifuges to spin at different rates. All systems, everywhere, are vulnerable. So, what happens when those systems are our military, satellite, or infrastructure systems? What happens when the attacks are combined and occur in clusters at the same time. What we have seen in 2021 with the Colonial Pipeline, Water Plants, JBS meat processing, and the 290-plus other enterprise attacks from just six ransomware groups should only be considered the tip of the sword. These attacks will occur with greater frequency and with greater magnitude. Multiple systems will be coordinated to fail at the same time.One of the questions in the comments on a City Prepping video about the JSB meat processing attack asked, “How could this shutdown a whole plant. After all, isn’t it one guy with a knife and a slab of beef?” That one guy with the knife is part of the equation, and he probably doesn’t need a computer to tell him where to cut; however, the belt that moves those slabs along runs on a computer. Computers run the receiving part of the plant that takes in the live cattle. The billing, quantities, cuts, packaging, and orders are all run by computers. The shipping is all run by computers. We are far, far away from the rancher with a cow who does his butchering, and you pick it up in your truck. Do you say you don’t know a rancher, a butcher, or own a truck? Well, then, you understand the problem. Our world is utterly dependent upon these automated and computerized systems. They are all interrelated like parts of one giant brain. Ransomware hackers seize up parts of that brain. If the parts of your brain that controlled your speech, left hand, and right leg suddenly stopped working, you’re not going to do too well. If you imagine our society as one big body, you may understand what a threat these ransomware attacks are. WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?Ransomware hackers are primarily about profit. Governments supporting them are primarily about disruption. Whether they are a small-time operation calling from India to guide you through an emergency repair to your system hoping to dupe you into revealing your username and password, or they are a Nairobi Prince trying to send you a secret inheritance outside the banking system to trick you into getting access to your bank account, these hackers have been around for a long time. Just one person falls for one of these low-level scams, and they make a considerable profit. One US Dollar is worth over seven thousand Indian Rupees at the time of this video. It’s easy to dismiss this level of scammer, though, because we take our own responsibility for our security. We may be smart enough to always remain out of their snares.The next level up is the hackers who hack systems to get large chunks of data, but they may lack the means to further process or exploit the data. This group profits by selling the data, be it password and username combination, telephone numbers, bank account numbers, or other information, to hackers bent on using that information to get more information or enter systems to get more information.Out of this desire for profit came the ransomware hacker. Ransomware hacks used to be just individuals. A computer user clicked the wrong link, and suddenly it will cost them a few hundred dollars to unlock their computer. In recent years, the ransomware attack has realized that the real money is in companies. Their reputations are on the line. Their services are vital. There’s a more significant pain inflicted on the captive, so more money will be paid.Not all ransomware hackers are state-sponsored, supported by Langley, Moscow, Pyongyang, London, or Beijing, but to assume that Putin doesn’t know what happens within his borders when a ransom gets paid to the tune of several million would be naive at the least. To think that Kim Jong-un doesn’t know what computer clusters are working in North Korea would be naive. To think Washington, Langley, and the CIA don’t know who here in America is using international systems to hack foreign entities would be naive. The fact is that when a government finds a person or group responsible for a significant exploit or ransom within their borders, they arrest, interrogate, and then either hire the individual or group to help them defend their systems, to exploit other countries, or allow them to work unabated at specific countries or targets. In many cases, they supply them with better equipment and resources. In some cases, governments may take a cut of the profits.One baseless theory that has gained some internet traction despite having no evidence to support it is that governments are doing this to create desperation in the people. The theory posits that people will become so desperate that they will then allow governments, communists, socialists, corporations, or insert a villain of your choice into allowing ourselves to be subjugated and regulated. I find this humorous, and I’m shocked at how much traction this theory gets in the prepping community. Ardent supporters of this theory are only playing out a fundamental error in reasoning and accepting a logical fallacy as truth. To take this theory as truth, you have to accept these truths as well: First, the villainous corporation, government, or unorganized political philosophy thinks it is better to profit off you when they already are profiting off you. And 2) you aren’t already willingly being regulated, controlled, and tracked by a system when you swipe your card, accept a call, place a call, get in your car, search on the internet, make an online purchase, buy a movie ticket, and so on and on and on. Here are two facts for people who believe that governments are self-inflicting these attacks on their people versus weaponizing these attacks to strike other countries. First, they don’t need to corral or cajole willing participants. Your consumerism already makes you a willing participant. Second, and this one is hard for many people to understand, you aren’t that important. These more conspiratorial fringes that buy wholeheartedly into some of these theories despite there being zero actual evidence are not some organized, uncontrollable, and completely free people. There isn’t any hacker interested in your small bank account enough to sit out in front of your house, stakeout-style, until you log in to pay your bills online that month. It would be far more profitable to pursue the easier mark who willingly believes that the social security administration just locked their benefits and requires them to log in immediately. At the same time, that other person watches them on their computer. In the big scheme of things, you’re not so important that massive, unprovable theories have to be invented to subjugate and enslave you. They just need you dependent, underpaid, and persuadable by their marketing. If a person can’t see it or doesn’t understand it, it isn’t automatically the most outlandish conspiracy they can seize upon.But, let’s return to the core question here: Who is responsible? People interested in profits and disruption. If governments don’t directly support these ransomware hackers, they are often indirectly supported by governments knowingly allowing them to operate within their countries. Do you really think Putin, who is known to have ordered the poisoning, imprisonment, and assassination of political rivals, isn’t wholly aware of a 4.8 million dollar ransom being paid to hackers hailing from an Eastern Bloc country he controls? That’s how much Colonial Pipeline company paid. JBS paid $11 million to ransomware hackers in Eastern Bloc countries to get their plants open again. When oil demand surges, so do Russian oil profits. When ransoms are paid, maybe some of that flows up to the big bosses. It may prove similarly challenging to shut down a criminal software industry that’s also making its perpetrators millionaires. When America suffers, it does drive the people to seek solutions to a destabilized country and a faltering infrastructure. If one of those solutions is for the American government to step in and begin controlling utilities and infrastructures, that’s the very definition of communism– state-controlled utilities and the means of production. So, Kruschev wins the long game. SunTzu said it best, “The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting.”The fact is, through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, server addresses, logins, and a country’s internet structures, any action online can be traced back to a general area. Complete deletion isn’t possible. Even spoofing the systems by going from one country to another can eventually be tracked to the point of origin. Digital forensics is time-consuming, but it is nothing like the old movie scenes where you have to keep the bad guy on the line long enough for the trace of the phone. Every action online or through a computer system leaves some type of digital fingerprint. When enough fingerprints are collected, you tend to have enough to point a singular finger of blame. In the case of the 4.8 million paid to free the Colonial Pipeline, the FBI obtained access to the crypto wallet because the company in charge of the wallet was under U.S. jurisdiction so the Feds were able to retrieve it. If the wallet hadn’t been held in the United States, which the perpetrators probably assumed would be the last place U.S. forces would look, and it was held in another country, you wouldn’t have heard about it in the news. No court order would have been sought, but the CIA would have seized the money and funded some other operation somewhere. Governments are all over these attacks and on both sides. The new cold war is digital. It’s just the motivations some people don’t have right. They aren’t out to subjugate you by attacking your infrastructure. They are looking to profit monetarily from your loss and destabilize your economy and country in the process.So while some operations are small-time, many are big-time. All the big-time operations are state-sponsored, directly or indirectly, in some way. Ransomeware attackers must select targets big enough to pay up but not so big that governments intervene to shut the ransomware operation down. They have to choose ransom amounts carefully. They want a big payoff, but they also don’t want to demand so much that victims just throw up their hands and decide to take the data loss. And supporting governments benefit in big and small ways from the chaos inflicted on their enemies and competing markets.5 WAYS CYBERATTACKS WILL IMPACT YOUHow bad can it get? Put the words large-scale in front of anything to acquire an understanding of how bad it could get. Large-scale industries have enormous infrastructure, raw materials, high workforce requirements, and significant capital requirements. It’s everything from the large-scale computer, communication, and data networks to large-scale manufacturing and commercial farming operations. Any operation or system that is consolidated and large in scope can have dramatic failures and a lasting impact on how we live our lives.
PRICES
The first way cyberattacks will impact you is the most obvious– prices. Even if no shortage occurs, but there is a stoppage in the flow or a threat of a bottleneck in the flow, prices will go up. When prices go up, they rarely, if ever, go back down. We aren’t short of gasoline, yet the price soared on perceived supply line threats. We weren’t short of toilet paper until people panicked and bought enough in a day to last them a year. A shortage that is either actual or perceived drives prices up and increases market volatility. One price increase in large-scale operation ripples to other, seemingly non-related, price increases. A gasoline increase results in higher costs for trucking and shipping. That ripples over to price increases on everything you buy. I assure you, the captains of industry will not just absorb those costs and hope prices drop again. Those costs will be passed on to we consumers. And watch for greedy and under-handed captains of industries to orchestrate attacks on their own systems to pull revenue out of the company’s pockets and into their personal offshore, untraceable accounts. Insurance fraud is a real thing. Logically, the same fraud is possible here.
SERVICE INTERRUPTIONS
Service interruptions are not just your utilities. If your health insurer’s computer systems are locked up by ransomware, your doctor isn’t likely to see you. Your surgeon isn’t expected to do that operation you need. If ADP gets locked by ransomware, millions will go unpaid. It’s not likely the grocery store is just going to lend these poor victims the food they need to get by until systems are restored. Even if something as seemingly innocuous as a cloud computing company is victimized by ransomware, it could cause 1000s of service interruptions from social media to your news feed to your ability to do a transaction at the convenience store to your digital credentials. Even the most isolated of ransomware incidents can have far-reaching service interruptions in your life.
ECONOMIC DECLINE
When a ransomware attack is big enough, we suddenly become aware of how incredibly interlaced these systems are. The failure of one results in another having to stop as well. Sure, you could hand process all that beef because it is, after all, a person with a knife. But, the system is built on computerized conveyors, computerized packing, computerized shipping, computerized safety inspections, computerized reporting, computerized receiving, computerized invoicing, and accounting. When the flow of beef stops, the truckers are sidelined. 1000’s of people are suddenly without work. That means 1000’s of people are not making money the days or weeks after a ransomware attack. That means fewer dollars circulating in the economy and more people clutching their purses and adopting a “let’s wait and see what happens” attitude. Even one successful ransomware attack is like a solid punch in the gut to a nation’s economy.
GOVERNMENT OVERREACH
As these attacks become more frequent and with greater magnitude, so too will the public demand for the government to step in and fix the problem. This, as I mentioned earlier, is the very definition of communism: “the major means of production, such as mines and factories, are owned and controlled by the public”– the public being the government of the people. 80% of our grid is owned and operated by private companies. When those companies fail to harden off and defend themselves from cyberattacks properly, the people will demand the government step in with meaningful consequences and solutions. Again, here is where some of the thinking derails, and people suggest governments and big businesses are self-inflicting these attacks on themselves to gain control over you. As pointed out earlier, the flaw in that thinking denies two proofs. One is that profits outweigh people. It’s not in a corporation’s best interest to jeopardize its revenue and reputation in exchange for government control. And, second, you and every other consumer is already a willing revenue-generating participant who voluntarily allows yourself to be tracked and regulated. Still, the possibility of government overreach overshadowing our everyday lives is very, very real as it struggles to stay on top of a technological world seemingly out of control with cryptocurrency, information, and automation. The FBI recently attempted to subpoena records from USA TODAY to identify readers of a February story about a southern Florida shootout that killed two agents and wounded three others. The request was rightfully denied, and USA Today stood its ground. Still, the government sometimes formally asks and sometimes just takes what it wants clandestinely, as was the case with the operation PRISM surveillance program exposed in 2007. Expect as these ransomware attacks continue and the government struggles to stay ahead of them, and on top of the tech explosion, your rights will, at some point, be trampled over.
ORCHESTRATED FAILURES
As large and harmful as these attacks may have seemed to many, what we have seen today is just the beginning. Like in any industry (and ransomware is an industry), there will be a coming consolidation of attacks. Don’t be surprised if both the water company and the phone service go out simultaneously, or rideshare companies and your local electricity provider, or multiple utilities at the same time, or an automaker and a steel company. As is the nature of all things, the attacks will start to combine to increase the more significant effect and increase the pain and pressure on would-be ransom payers. In a way, we have been lucky with these smaller tests of the systems. Governments will weaponize the minor weaknesses their ransomware hackers have discovered and will launch a more significant, all-out, retaliatory strike at some point. That’s when things will get very bad, very fast. These early attacks are unsophisticated tests of our systems compared to the coming orchestrated Cyber Pearl Harbor of attacks still to come. Then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a large-scale coordinated attack on critical infrastructure that “would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability.” That was nearly ten years ago, and here we are now at dawn on the day of that battle.WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TODAYYou need to examine the fundamental aspects of your survival. Today, take steps to reduce your complete dependence on water, food, power, sewage, fuel, medicine, police, fire, and all of the just-in-time systems that provide all these. Make a checklist of these systems and determine your level of dependence and determine your Plan B. If the sewer system fails, what’s your plan. It’s less than desirable, but what plan can you implement to get by while maintaining your health and safety. If the water system fails or a boil order is given simultaneously as the gas or electricity is off, what’s your short-term Plan B to keep yourself in the essential life-giving element of water? If more than one just-in-time delivery of food stops along with any other ransomware attack, do you have enough food to survive for 3-weeks, 3-months, or longer? Are any of your plans dependent on a quick run to the store like a million other desperate people? You might want to rethink your plan if it does.Your medical, police, and fire services might not be available. What’s your Plan B to get the help you need? Could you extinguish a fire burning towards your house or in your home? Could you treat someone or yourself if you had the flu, a dislocated joint, a broken bone, or a damaged tooth? Could you defend your home against an invasion of the desperate and unprepared? Get a Plan B for each of the critical systems. If you never have to implement your plan, you will be assured that you can survive better than the general masses.You can look at some of the other videos on this channel to understand how things will unravel rather quickly after a cyber-disaster of more than 90-days. I will link to other videos at the end of this one. Once people run low on their own supplies and see little hope of the government restoring systems, things will descend into chaos rather rapidly. You will want a Plan B ready for when it does.
Conclusion
These ransomware attacks are just the early few shots in a much larger cyber-cold war. We can either be the innocent casualties of that war, or we can take steps today to insulate ourselves from utter dependence on systems that will be brought down. There isn’t a piece of antivirus software or a quick patch IT can put on our country’s infrastructure. When these attacks start attacking more than one system simultaneously, our barely functional just-in-time systems will fail in a stunning collapse. Your best hope is to prep today for this genuine threat.What do you think? What’s the most vulnerable system you see, and what effect will it have on us when it fails? Let us know in the comments below. As always, please stay safe out there.
In this blog, we’re going to take a look at solar panels. Solar panels offer an infinitely renewable energy source that can provide power to critical devices if the grid were to go down. This channel primarily focuses on emergency preparedness and we’ll look at solar panel choices from this perspective: what are the best panels if there was a disaster and you had to generate your power? I’ve tried to boil down the options to the basics to help give you the essential information you need without getting overly technical, so you can decide which of these is best for you. All solar panels essentially work the same. They capture the sun’s light energy and then transform that energy in their cells to create DC–or direct current. That current is typically then routed to charge a battery or solar generator, which can power many of your household plug-in devices.When it comes to solar panels, you do get what you pay for. The cost goes up with efficiency, wattage, portability, hardiness, and the versatility of deployment. You want the highest wattage in the broadest range of sun exposure scenarios, and you want to have the right panels for your situation and budget. Some panels won’t work if even one section of their cells is covered or completely shaded. Others will still output after being filled with bullet holes. If you are looking at the possibility of heading out during a disaster, some of these options will work better than others. In this blog, I want to lead off by looking at newer solar panel technology — foldable panels and solar blankets. After that, we’ll jump into the considerations when shopping for solar panels, and I’ll do a brief run-through of typical solar panels with the benefits and detractors of each.
Foldable Solar Panels
When it comes to solar and mobility or deployment anywhere, a foldable, spreadable, solar blanket can’t be beaten. All that efficiency and versatility come with a heftier price tag though. These are made for durability and portability, so it’s the best option if you are on the move—the lightest option and with the best power output to weight ratio. The real bonus to the flexible solar version is that it will perform better in low light or partial shading. They are wired in series, so if one of the sections of cells is covered, it will still collect energy. These Off-Grid Trek solar blankets use Sunpower Gen 2 Solar cells with a 23.5% efficiency rating that also work extremely well in low light conditions. A significant advantage to these is you can spread it over non-flat surfaces. If a sharp rock dropped onto a section of the panels, the whole panel isn’t ruined. So, they are super hardy. These 120W Powerfilm and 120W Solar Blanket, both, are under 8 pounds. That is amazing when you consider that a 200-Watt monocrystalline panel that will produce roughly the same output in watts weighs in at around 25 pounds, over three times the weight. Obviously, the ability to fold a solar blanket up and put it in your pack and go is a massive advantage to maintaining mobility after a disaster. Your typical rigid 200-Watt monocrystalline or polycrystalline panels can be over five feet long and two feet wide. That makes them difficult to bug out with when time is of the essence. The Solar Blanket and PowerFilm will work better in low-light situations compared to monocrystalline or polycrystalline solar panels, something we’ll cover momentarily. The Solar Blanket is one-fourth of the size of the Power Film blanket. It’s completely waterproof versus water-resistant, and it produces more electricity than the large Power Film and at a lower price point. These are your best options for overcast days as they will still work when a rigid panel cell will not.Both the PowerFilm and the OffGrid Trek Solar Blanket are solid choices. They’re both lightweight, easily portable, and easily deployable in most terrain and situations. These are built with rugged military usage in mind. They’ll both sustain damage and keep working, though they’ll drop in their efficiency. The Off-Grid Trek Solar Blanket represents the next generation for these products. Compared to the PowerFilm, it has a smaller footprint, is waterproof versus water-resistant, and is about 2/3rd the price. I’ll be doing a more in-depth video on Off-Grid Trek’s products in the coming months as their products check a lot of boxes for me when it comes to prepping: lightweight for mobility, durable, and efficient. I’ll post a link in the description section below along with a coupon code if you want to check out their products.
Basics of Solar Panels
Monocrystalline vs. PolycrystallineYou’ll hear these terms a lot when it comes to rigid solar panels. Monocrystalline solar panels have solar cells made from a single crystal of silicon, whereas polycrystalline solar panels have solar cells made from many silicon fragments melted together. Polycrystalline solar panels, also referred to as “multi-crystalline,” or many-crystal silicon, generally have lower efficiencies than monocrystalline options, but their advantage is a lower price point. Both are good choices for your home and other fixed permanent or semi-permanent locations. This is going to be your most affordable option without sacrificing too much on output. You can’t take these on a hike, but it’s going to be ideal to mount to a vehicle, RV, or structure. In low light, you will see more significant decreases in output. In partial shade, their performance suffers greatly. While a parallel connection is possible these panels are most commonly designed to be wired in series, so if one of the cell sections is completely covered, the entire panel will cease to output energy.WattageSolar panel wattage represents a solar panel’s theoretical power production under ideal sunlight and temperature conditions. Wattage is calculated by multiplying volts times amps where volts represent the amount of force of the electricity and amperes–amps–refers to the aggregate amount of energy used. Even a 20-watt panel will charge a battery, but it will take significantly longer, maybe days, to charge a large battery. A 20-watt solar panel might be suitable for charging small electronics and 12-volt batteries. The basic math here is the panel’s wattage times the number of hours of sunlight times the number of panels. That’s going to give you the total watts. One thousand watts is 1 kilowatt. The more wattage the panel produces, obviously, the more electricity you have to work with and the shorter amount of sunlight needed. For this reason, the higher the wattage of the panel, the greater the cost. For wattage, you need to circle back to the question considering your energy needs. Are you going to need to power a refrigerator or just charge up small devices? Are you going to need power tools or simply provide light through the night? The wattage, size of the system, and solar panels required all hinge upon these questions.EfficiencyA 6-12% efficiency rating means that 6 to 12 percent of the sunlight that falls on it gets converted to energy. 20% efficiency means that 20% of the sunlight is captured and converted to electricity. The average solar panel efficiency is between 10 to 12%. The solar panel market is not regulated so solar companies advertise like auto manufacturers stating you will get up to a certain MPG that you never see unless you are driving downhill with a strong gust of wind at your back. So when you see the “up to” symbol or between a certain range you know it is not actually a true efficiency rating. Also, be aware that all solar panels will degrade in performance for every degree over 77 degrees Fahrenheit, 25 degrees Centigrade. ScalabilityOne panel that produces 100 watts connected to four similar panels will provide you an array producing 500 watts. The ability to connect multiple panels into your system will give you more electricity to work with. So with any component or panel, you want to make sure that you can scale it up, and you want to be aware of any limitations. Some systems might be completely closed. Some might allow you to connect up to a limited number of additional panels, but that’s it.DeploymentThe next consideration is how you expect to deploy the panels. If you’re going to affix it atop a structure permanently, your rigid panels will give you the best performance and are the most resistant to annual weather. They’ll hold up better. If you expect to be mobile but have limited pack room, a foldable panel will allow you to pick it up and transport it in and out of a vehicle much more easily than non-foldable panels. Plus these foldable panels have legs you can adjust to ensure you’re getting the best angle for maximum sun exposure. At the ultimate end of deployability is the foldable or solar blankets. These have a minimal footprint in your backpack and the options on the market can go up to 215 watts. They will work even if several cell sections are damaged or covered. The PowerFilm option is water-resistant and the Off-Grid Trek solar blanket is waterproof. You can quite literally fold them up, go, and then redeploy them in a matter of seconds in almost any terrain. All that versatility and efficiency do come at a price. They’ll be the most expensive of the bunch, as well.LightWill you be able to get direct, unobstructed sunlight, or do you live in an area where overcast days are the norm? If sunlight is a rarity in your area, you will want to get panels wired in series which increase voltage and operate best in low-light conditions. Panels connected in parallel increase amps which work best in bright light conditions. Your out-of-the-box rigid, aluminum-framed panel will not perform at peak on cloudy days, but with the help of some parallel branch adapters, you can be up and running. In a series-connected array, even the passing shade of a tree as the sun transits the sky can zero out your energy production by dropping the efficiency too low to be of consequence.StorageFinally, you need to consider what you will do with all that free energy you’re pulling out of the sky. If you don’t have a battery or solar generator system, all your energy needs to be used in real-time, or it’s simply wasted. I have done several reviews on solar generators, so I’ll let you take a look at those videos to find out more. I’ll post a link to the playlist in the description section below. These solar generator systems typically range from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. This, too, is going to depend on what you think your energy needs will be. Their prices will vary by multiple factors including their allowed input, kilowatt-hour storage, continuous output, and weight as well. Many people find it easier and more affordable to buy a whole kit that fits their needs, which is a good strategy for beginners.
Rigid Solar Panel Considerations
Here’s a quick rundown of the rigid solar panels I’ve collected for us to look at here today. I don’t want to delve too deep into the science, but I do want to highlight the practical aspects for emergency preparedness of each covering what you should look for when shopping these options.The Solar Storm Rigid Polycrystalline 100-Watt Solar Panel is a good choice for getting the most power per dollar. It is a rigid panel and is very affordable at a price point of just over 100 dollars. The polycrystalline PV cells are encased in tempered glass and framed in aluminum. It has limited portability for mobile applications but it would be your best choice for permanent exterior mounting. I’ve used these panels in the past where I won’t move them much and know they can handle the elements.The Ascent 100-Watt Solar Panel is a happy compromise between the rigid and flexible solar panels because it folds in half like a suitcase. That makes it much more portable than the other two and less susceptible to damage. It’s an excellent mobile choice, but not as suitable for permanently fixed use. This panel includes a rugged kickstand that allows you to adjust the angle to optimize charging.I’ve also received other solar panels over the years reviewing these and a few worth mentioning are the Jackery and EcoFlow solar panel options.The Jackery SolarSaga 100W Solar Panel takes portability seriously and has an even more rugged design. It also weighs just 9 pounds, so it is lightweight, foldable, and with an easy-carry handle. It has a built-in kickstand to help you adjust the angle for maximum sun exposure. While this panel is fine for charging smaller devices, its connection type definitely limits its capabilities. The EcoFlow 110W Solar Panel is built to be scalable and portable. You can chain several panels together to generate power more efficiently. It’s foldable and waterproof. You simply need to unzip it, unfold it, angle it towards the sun, and plug it into the battery system. The built-in kickstand allows you to angle it from 0 to 180 degrees.
Conclusion
I live in the southwest of the United States in sunny Southern California, so all these panels will work for me on any of the many sunny days here. Rigid solar panels all share one major drawback over solar blankets: they all require very direct sunlight. That’s not always possible. If you are frequently in overcast situations, though, these solar panels either won’t work at all or will barely work. Here is where the foldable sort of solar blanket instantly increases your options. The PowerFilm and the Off-Grid Trek will both work on cloudy days. Their energy production will drop, of course, but paying a little more to have the security of reliable power may be worth it to many in the long term. I’ll do a future blog going into more technical details about series versus parallel, voltage, amps, and low lighting conditions. This blog is meant to be more of an introduction or primer blog if you’re currently shopping solar panel options for emergency preparedness.Hopefully, understanding the fundamentals of solar panels and systems and understanding your true post-disaster or off-road and camping power needs will be enough to let you determine a solar system that is right for you. While I think the ultimate from a survival perspective is the foldable blanket type, specifically the OffGrid Trek solar blankets, they do come at a cost. Assess your needs and go from there. Having a solar solution or two in your prepping inventory is a game-changer.What do you think? What’s your power solution? As always, please stay safe out there.
* Garden Battles. I have this one pot. Last year, whatever I put in that pot got eaten – and I mean EVERY leaf, one by one until only stumps were left. So this year I took out all the dirt. Yeah. All of it. Put in new dirt and plants. I got some lovely broccoli, and then two days ago I got this:
Literally, every leaf was eaten off the broccoli plant. Last night I went out at about 11 PM with a flashlight. I looked over and under EVERY leaf. Nothing. Ugh. This morning, another 2 leaves off the other broccoli plant were stripped. Friday, I declared war. First, I smeared the entire broccoli stems (2 plants left) with Vaseline. What the heck? I read it someplace and why not? Then I encircled the stem with a toilet paper tube. THEN for extra measure, I encircled THAT with a cut-up water bottle. AND to top things off, I sprinkled crushed eggshells all around the plant.
Next day – more eaten leaves.
Do you see that stripped leaf? Poor thing. This is the biggest mystery. I’ve already tried the Sluggo Plus which is supposed to kill cutworms, earwigs, snails, etc. Whatever it is, it’s happening between 11 PM and 5 AM. I need a surveillance camera.
Update: My cat captured a 6-in grasshopper. AND I covered my broccoli with a fine net. All was good for 2 days. Then today, another leaf is missing. Ugh. I noticed that the netting was not secured at the bottom. It is now. But, the stump IS starting to show signs of new leaves. There is still hope. The saga continues.
Update: No missing leaves for the past 3 days. Mesh is secured. All stripped plants showing signs of regrowth.
* I ran out of cumin and knew I had some store somewhere. I found it in the back of a closet, vacuum sealed and dated 2016. Herbs are only supposed to be good for 1-2 years. I opened it. It was as fragrant as ever!!!! Yay!
* If you are growing broccoli or cauliflower for the first time (and they are SUPER easy to grow), be sure to submerge the heads in salty water for 5-10 minutes BEFORE you cut and cook. My first broccoli years ago had little green worms that wriggled out and floated to the top. Ewwww. Since I’ve been using Capt Jack’s Dead Bug Brew I have not had worms. BUT, when I brought in 2 cauliflowers and submerged them. I had at least a dozen earwigs float up. Ewwww again.
I’m pretty sure I do NOT save money gardening. But I look at it like I’m practicing gardening. Plus, fresh veggies taste SOOO much better. Just saying.
LONG TERM FOCUS: Grains & Pasta
I like pasta. I like the taste. AND I like how it can extend a meal to be filling and feed more people. So… I store pasta. You can purchase macaroni in #10 cans here: Macaroni | United States Store $32.35 for 6 cans that will keep for 30 years (3 pounds). AND you can buy spaghetti bites (short pieces of spaghetti so it will fit in a #10 can) here: Spaghetti Bites | United States Store $31.90 for 6 cans (2.7 pounds). Of course, buying pasta at the store, especially when it’s on sale, is MUCH cheaper, and you have a much bigger variety. BUT, you have to be able to store your pasta without pantry moths or weevils getting into it. Me? I vacuum seal it and it lasts 5-6 years easy. I’m currently trying to eat up all the pasta I sealed in 2016. I don’t recommend just stacking the pasta on a shelf or under the bed. You have to repackage it somehow. Mylar bags are an option. Sealable buckets and oxygen packets are another option. Either of these choices will STILL be cheaper than purchasing the #10 cans. But some people like convenience. So you choose.
Mostly, I buy and store what I like to use: spaghetti, fettucini, ditalini (small salad pasta). I don’t use macaroni very often, but I do have a little on hand. I also have lasagna noodles because I like to make Skillet Lasagna. I try not to buy pasta when it is around $1 per pound. You CAN find it on sale less than that, sometimes at $.50 a pound, but you have to watch and be patient. If you want to get a head start on pasta, just buy 2 next time you need 1.
SHORT TERM FOCUS: Natural Yeast
Natural yeast is how you get sourdough bread, waffles, pancakes, and other baked treats. (My favorite are blueberry muffins). Set out a jar filled with 1/2 water and 1/2 flour. Cover it with a cloth, or a coffee filter so it doesn’t get dust or whatever in it. At night, pour out 1/2 of the jar, then add 50% water and 50% flour. Let it sit on the counter overnight. In the morning, pour out 1/2 of the jar, and add your water and flour again. Wild yeast is everywhere in the air. After several days, you may begin to see bubbles forming. Keep at it. You can put a rubber band around the jar and see if it “rises” during the day or night. When it consistently doubles in size, it is ready. At this point, you can keep it in the refrigerator and only feed it about once a week. AND, you can start baking with it. Because you have to “discard” so much of it in the beginning, don’t start with a lot. Maybe 1/4 -1/3 c. water and flour. Once you have a healthy jar of bubbling yeast, you can start making delicious bread and other treats. It might be a fun experiment for your kids this summer. Then, if you don’t want to keep your yeast, you can just use it and not replenish it. BUT, you will have learned something!
72-HOUR KIT FOCUS: lighters
An easy thing to store in your kit is a cigarette lighter. Pretty cheap. But, they do NOT last forever and will need to be replaced. Google says that if you keep your plastic lighter out of the sun it will last for many years. Burn time: for full-sized Bic lighters – about an hour. Mini Bic lighters will burn for about 20 minutes.
FOOD STORAGE RECIPES
Today’s recipes are from a Food Storage Cookbook, by the South Jordan Utah River Stake, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2003
Tuna Casserole
Everyone probably has a recipe for this already. Mine includes tuna, Cream of Mushroom soup, and macaroni. That’s it. Although I used to make it a lot when my children were young, I seldom make it now.
Here is another version.
1 package 16 oz. noodles or macaroni
1 can Cream of Chicken soup
1 c. sour cream
1/2 c. mayonnaise
2 cans tuna
2 c. frozen peas
Cook pasta until done. Cook peas until tender. Mix soup, sour cream, mayonnaise, and tuna together. Mix all ingredients together and heat in oven at 375˚ until hot, or warm on top of the stove.
Chili Spaghetti
1 can (30 oz.) Hunt’s chili beans
1 lb. hamburger
1 large onion, diced
1 pkg spaghetti
1 can (28 oz. tomato juice) OR 1 can (16 oz) tomato sauce and water to make 28 oz.
salt and chili powder as desired.
Brown hamburger and onion; drain all fat off. Combine with chili beans and tomato juice. Add salt and chili powder to the desired taste. Cook on medium heat for 15-20 minutes. Cook spaghetti in another saucepan till tender. Drain all water from spaghetti and add to chili mixture. Heat well and serve. Can top this with grated cheese or sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.
Spaghetti Pie
6 oz. spaghetti
2 TB butter or margarine
1/2 c. grated Parmesan cheese
2 well-beaten eggs
1 c. cottage cheese
1 lb. ground beef, cooked and drained
1/2 c. chopped onion
1 bottle Prego spaghetti sauce
1/2 c. shredded mozzarella cheese.
Cook the spaghetti according to package directions; drain (should be about 3 cups spaghetti. Stir margarine into hot spaghetti and then add parmesan cheese and the well-beaten eggs. When spaghetti is well coated, form spaghetti into a crust in a buttered 10-inch pie plate. Spread cottage cheese over bottom of spaghetti crust. Mix ground beef, onion, and spaghetti sauce together and spread the sauce over cottage cheese. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 20 minutes; then sprinkle with mozzarella cheese and bake 5 more minutes. Let pie stand for 5 minutes before cutting into pie shapes.
Taster’s Note: It was really good and different. My kids really liked it!
I hope you have committed to getting your family ready? Food first!!! Get 2 weeks, then increase to 3 months. Now you will begin to feel peace of mind. Increase that to 6 months. NOW you will feel really good about what you have.
Start small. Little by little.
This week, do something!
Marti
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Hi Everyone,
just buy it when it goes on sale. I know – go figure. I’m going to include both recipes below. The spaghetti sauce calls for sausage – which I use. But in a pinch, we can get by without it. Plus, if I’m making lasagna or something else that “uses” pasta sauce, it’s easier to just open a jar or can rather than make a bigger mess in the kitchen. This week, just pick up some extra sauce – whatever your favorite kind is. Winco usually has Hunt’s pasta sauce for about $.80. Get 4 or 5, and store them away.
lends a smooth and fluffy texture to the bread. When you do this, though, you have to have a good understanding of bread dough. Make sure it isn’t too sticky and not too dense. You can adjust this by adding and working in 1 tablespoon of flour if it is too sticky. Then, repeat with one tablespoon of flour until your dough isn’t too sticky or too wet.
North Korea is China by proxy. There’s no denying that. There is a China-Taiwan divide that continues to escalate. At the heart of the divide is that the Chinese government sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be part of the country. The Taiwanese people disagree. They feel they are a separate nation – whether or not independence is ever officially declared. China has said it will “never tolerate” foreign intervention in issues related to Taiwan, a self-ruled democratic island that China claims as its own. Taiwan recently reported the largest ever incursion into its airspace of Chinese aircraft. Beijing has also sent more ships to the South China Sea.
China assumes control over the East and South China Seas and ignores other countries’ claims and rights of passage through the international waters. Six countries lay overlapping claims to the East and South China Seas, an area rich in hydrocarbons and natural gas and through which trillions of dollars of global trade flow. From the Tibetan Uprising to Vietnam to the Xinjiang conflict, which is still raging today, China has never shied away from using the threat of its military might as a cudgel to force the outside world into its shape and vision of subjugation to the Party.
Anyone of these conflicts is a humanitarian crisis about to happen. China unabashedly and routinely sends people off to work camps and what they call education camps, which are really forced reprogramming camps. The country is the world’s dystopian power that forces compliance from its own citizens. Leading up to the 2008 Olympic games, some 1.5 million Beijing residents were permanently driven from their homes which were bulldozed to make way for the Olympic grounds and stadium. Ask any Chinese person about this forced eviction and you and that person might be arrested. The Chinese Communist Party keeps a tight rein on dissent and controls the information it allows its citizens to know. The Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 is a perfect example. So many people were killed, silenced, or disappeared after this uprising, and so much information was scrubbed from the country’s history books that everyday citizens know nothing about it. Those that do know anything about it dare not break their silence in fear of meeting similar fates of disappearing, imprisonment, or death.
Beijing has always kept a tight hold over its people and has looked at the areas around China with an opportunistic and expansionist intent. Beijing doesn’t debate with other countries either. For example, in 2014, China began massive dredging operations to build artificial islands around seven reefs claimed as their territory in the South China Sea. The artificial islands have been transformed into significant military facilities, including three runways that have been used for the deployment of Chinese fighter jets. This area is between Vietnam, the Philippines, and the island of Borneo. An incredible one-third of the world’s global shipping passes through this waterway each year, and China has converted seven reefs to operational military bases. The United States routinely flies over the area to dispute China’s claim and emphasize international rights; however, it’s not just this maritime challenge. China has maritime disputes with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, to name just a few.
The threat that any conflict on land or at sea could draw countries into a more significant war with the communist nation is genuine and grows more likely as each year passes without China’s expansionism checked by the global community. It is worth noting here that the U.S. military is significantly larger and better equipped than China’s. Though China might find itself in an altercation because of its inability to back down from a fight and because it aggressively assumes both its might and right, a conflict isn’t their desired goal. Their goal isn’t to fight a war, as this will hurt their growing economy. They would rather have their factories cranking out products rather than bombs. It boils down to simple economics. That’s the front they are waging their war upon.
THREAT #2: ECONOMICS
One reason China remains unchecked in its expansionist and regional strong-handed assumption of control is purely economics. China provides cheap labor and globally unrivaled output. Made in China is labeled on everything from electrical machinery, computers, furniture, plastics, medical equipment, vehicles, textiles, iron and steel, and clothing. Those nine exports alone account for 1.7 trillion US dollars in Chinese global shipments. It’s not just America who buys these products and takes advantage of the cheap labor by outsourcing jobs. When the trade war between the U.S. and China escalated recently, China inked new trade deals with Europe, Russia, Asia-Pacific nations, and even Brazil. When the two countries found an agreement in late 2019, China pledged to buy 200 billion dollars of US goods and services in 2020 and 2021. China was never, ever on pace to even remotely meet that commitment.
What has given China an edge in the cutthroat global economy is that they may promise one thing but rarely honor their obligations. The news is riddled with stories of China walking away from financial obligations to the rest of the world. In one instance, they bilked global investors in 22 golf courses in the country out of over a billion dollars. China defaulted on what is by today’s accounting 1.6 trillion dollars owned by America in bonds on a century-old debt. It isn’t likely the communist government will ever make good on the previous government’s debt. At the same time, China holds 1.1 trillion dollars of American debt in 2021. That may not be as much of a problem as Japan’s ownership of almost 1.3 trillion dollars of American debt. The global economies are difficult to explain, but China’s demand for Treasury helps keep U.S. interest rates low. It allows the U.S. Treasury to borrow more at low rates. Congress can then increase the federal spending that, hypothetically, spurs U.S. economic growth. But these bonds issued to borrow against an uncertain future and the printing of money are a house of cards. Any rising conflict could result in the house of cards collapsing.
Add to this that the rumors of a Chinese cryptocurrency backed by the country’s fiat currency, the renminbi, and China’s intent to control financial markets are clear. For many years there have been strained relationships because China pegs its currency instead of allowing it to float freely. It’s akin to market manipulation. With the introduction of a cryptocurrency, they provide an avenue for direct payments outside of American sanctions. To underscore this point, they have squeezed out cryptocurrencies mining and operating within their borders in favor of their own central bank’s cryptocurrency, which has caused cryptocurrencies to plummet in price.
Many people dismiss cryptocurrencies because they see the stories of fraud, see no practical value to it, or they simply don’t understand it. The reality is that de-financed cryptocurrency outside traditional banking systems will become an ever-increasing share of global transactions. Recent years have witnessed a surge in the number of people handling digital payments, with the figure growing from 2.7 billion in 2017 to over 4.6 billion in 2020. In the next four years, the number of users in the digital payment segment is set to touch 6.4 billion. It’s expected to grow an additional 84% in the next four years.
This will result in consolidation into any digital asset capable of handling those transactions en masse. That will likely end up being a fiat currency-backed cryptocurrency. Despite not trusting the central bank of China and its blatant market manipulations in its favor, it may very well be China’s cryptocurrency. If you don’t understand that, you don’t have to in order to understand the threat. Think of it this way, if your paycheck was deposited in your account from your employer, you paid your bills online, and you swiped your card for your gas, groceries, and entertainment, when did you have a physical fiat currency in your hand? When did you pull greenbacks from your pocket and carry around a pocket full of change from the transactions? So would it matter if you got paid in dollars or a digital coin by some other name? You kind of are already being paid and transacting digitally.
Between China’s manufacturing output and global dependence upon this output, and its recent long vision of the future with cryptocurrency, it is establishing economic control over international economics. And, China doesn’t have a track record of wielding power for the greater good. The fact is that we are already engaged in an economic war with China, and many countries are losing by continuing to import the bulk of their products from China and exporting their debt and labor needs to the communist country.
THREAT #3: THE PLANET
Being a manufacturing powerhouse and ruling with an iron fist over your people comes at an environmental cost. Even with a pandemic raging worldwide, China’s C02 emissions reached a record high of 12 billion metric tons. Unfortunately, health and mortality data is never accurately reported from behind the red curtain, so we can only wonder what effect the toxic chemicals and air have on people. China’s emissions exceeded all developed nations in 2019. The country accounted for nearly 27% of the world’s greenhouse gasses. Though China has vowed to reach net-zero emissions by 2060, they neither have a track record of meeting their global responsibilities nor does a consensus of scientists believe that is soon enough. The country is currently running 1,058 coal plants – more than half the world’s capacity. The emissions leading to climate change argument aside, this is a damaging and toxic level of pollutants rising into the air and seeping into the world’s oceans. That can’t be good for the planet, even thousands of miles away.
A string of incidents, often caused by lax safety standards and criminal negligence, has resulted in widespread loss of life over the past five years from industrial accidents in the country. There was a blast at the Jinshangou coal mine in 2016, killing thirty-one people. Seventy-three people died in a 2015 Shenzhen landslide of a 20 story high pile of industrial waste. The Tianjin port explosion of 2015 killed 173 people, and one of the warehouses was found to have illegally contained 49,000 tons of highly toxic chemicals. Most recently, there is an “imminent radiological threat” from the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant. The French company that partly owns and operates the plant issued the warning. The US has been unable to get information from the tight-lipped Chinese government. Is this the next global nuclear disaster in the making? That remains to be seen.
In times of uncertainty and anxiety, it’s always nice for some people to have someone to blame. In times of COVID-19, the culprit seems abundantly clear–the People’s Republic of China. While I don’t subscribe to any conspiracy theories that lack hard evidence, I find it difficult not at least to acknowledge the possibility that COVID-19 did get unleashed on the world accidentally from a scalability study of viruses centered at the Wuhan labs. The fact is that the US pulled out of supporting that lab and that very specific research because of safety concerns. The incubation phase of the virus appears to exceed the standard quarantine safety protocols, and the epicenter of the origin point of the virus is located in the same city. There is an active investigation into the possibility, and given China’s other lax safety policies, we may be foolish to simply dismiss the possibility. Only time will tell what the truth is.
There is no denying one thing, however. China’s lax safety measures and industry at any cost approaches are having lasting global impacts. It’s just a matter of time before China has a large-scale accident that we will not have enough information about because of their need to save face and not be embarrassed. Nuclear, biological, or simply toxic air and water, we just can’t know what threat we face from China and what lasting effect it will have. It is difficult to protect yourself from things you can barely detect until it is too late. The global community is in a textbook abusive relationship with China. The country provides cheap labor and cheap goods, yet it abuses our greatest finite resource–the very planet where we live.
THREAT #4: CYBER-WARFARE
China, unlike Russia, is not as interested in destabilizing countries in a ransomware cyberwar, but they aren’t entirely out of the game either. There have recently been several such attacks that had a sophistication that far exceeds an individual hacker’s capability. The techniques used were more akin to state-sponsored attacks. In March, Microsoft warned the world that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group called Hafnium had infected what would turn out to be tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange servers in a weeks-long hacking blitz. The hackers in this particular attack left keys and backdoors to come back later. China is less interested in ransom. They are just interested in taking information. It has long been known that the nation has hacked multiple corporations’ research and development departments to steal trade and technology secrets.
The FBI has clearly stated, “The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States. To be clear, the adversary is not the Chinese people or people of Chinese descent or heritage. The threat comes from the programs and policies pursued by an authoritarian government. The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.”
Foreign Policy magazine estimated China’s hacker army to be anywhere from 50 to 100 thousand people. Their aggressive espionage efforts have attacked corporate and infrastructure systems. They have even gained some access to American military systems. It’s not just the U.S, though. Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Taiwan all claim to have been hacked by state-sponsored Chinese hackers. Just last year, the Vatican, of all places, reported that Chinese state-sponsored hackers operating under the name RedDelta hacked the Vatican’s computer network ahead of negotiations between China and the Vatican. These are just the many attacks we know of right now. Hundreds of thousands more go unreported or unnoticed. From secrets to information to espionage, China is collecting droves of data worldwide. It is very likely that, at some point, nations will clandestinely retaliate. This could cause a World Cyber War, as nation attacks nation, as they search for the culprit and victimize each other.
How many keys and backdoors are out there waiting for a zero-day cyber attack? The possibility of a cyberwar between Russia, China, and the United States is more probable than a physical military altercation. As evidenced by the Colonial Pipeline and other recent cyberattacks, one attack can have dramatic effects. Orchestrated attacks can have a crippling impact in a matter of seconds.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
So, what can you do to lessen the effect of and combat the four significant threats from China: war, economics, pollution, and cyber-attacks? The answer is you can’t do much individually. You could purchase fewer Chinese products. You could fight to keep jobs in your own country and buy local if you can, but that’s probably not enough for you to have any real impact. As a prepper, you would be far better off to concern yourself with approaching each threat as a threat to you. You can’t do much about a possible physical war with China, but you can reduce your consumption on which China depends. You can’t lessen the impact that Chinese manufacturing and disasters have on the planet’s pollution. Still, you can decrease your dependence on the mechanisms of a just-in-time manufacturing and shipping system that is repeatedly failing by becoming more self-sufficient. Though your latest virus protection software may keep you safe from some hackers, it won’t be enough to prevent state-sponsored hackers from attacking and shutting down your regional infrastructure systems. So, you should prepare to insulate yourself from them and function without them.
We prepare for natural disasters that may befall us because we see them as imminent. Well, we face at least four imminent threats from China right now. You should prepare to face them. Start by securing food and water to sustain you for 3-days, then 3-weeks, then 3-months, then a year or more. Increase your survival skills. Prepare your disaster kits and medical kits. Secure your energy sources outside of grid dependence. Learn from the videos on this channel and others channels like this one. Keep a clear head and prepare for these genuine threats. The grid will be attacked again, and one day it will go down. Supply chains that bring you food and medicine will fail again. The attacks on our systems won’t simply go away. They will increase in intensity, frequency, and magnitude.
When it comes to something as unruly as a fire, every bit of planning you do in advance of the event will pay off for you. You should prepare as though a fire or smoke will be either in your home or rapidly approaching your home. The first part of that preparation is to create a defensible space around your property. Defensible space is the buffer you create between a building on your property and any natural or artificial combustibles surrounding the building or property. For some, that may mean clearing brush, dead leaves, and other vegetation. For others, that may mean clearing debris, trash, or other combustibles in and around their property.
Keeping green or hardscaped areas around your living area will distance your living area from sparks and embers traveling on the wind. It will provide firefighters a place to combat any flames. If you have vegetation around your property, make sure that dead material is removed. Even the lushest and greenest bush can be burned if the surrounding vegetative fuel is sufficient enough to create enough heat. Trim branches of trees to at least six feet off the ground. Clear dead material from under bushes. Make sure any combustible materials are not near structures or under trees, or near bushes. Consider vertical spacing of flammable trees and shrubs, the small to tall fire spread potential, and the horizontal spacing, the distance between combustible trees and shrubs. Remember, fire will burn out from its source in all directions. It will be guided by wind and the rising heat. It will climb up a hill faster than it will descend a hill. It will burn up a tree from a low bush unless enough space is between them.
Think of your property in terms of zones. Zone 3 is the whole area outside your outside property lines. You don’t have much input or control over this far lying area, so you will want to plan according to these threats. If you live near a manufacturing facility, try and familiarize yourself with the chemicals they use in their processes. If the building a few blocks from your location uses combustible or toxic chemicals in its processes, you should plan to have some means of safe breathing. Gas masks do not provide oxygen. They will afford some protection from toxic fumes and filter harmful elements enough to get you to safety, but they do not provide oxygen that a fire will readily consume. They will afford little protection if the fire is all around you but can provide excellent protection if you move laterally or away from a fire through smoke and toxic fumes. Toxic smoke inhalation causes more fire-related deaths than do the fires themselves. If you live near woodland areas, choking smoke could eliminate vision and create a breathing hazard for many blocks or miles away. Some areas have relatively consistent wind patterns. Sometimes a breeze comes from one direction in the morning and another direction in the evening. Sometimes the wind typically blows up from a hot, dry area or down from a high cold area. Sometimes it comes in off the water, and so forth. Pay attention to these wind patterns and understand their basics. This will determine your actions and escape from any fire in Zone 3.
Zone 2 is the immediate structures buttressing up against your property. Don’t let the neighbor’s deep-fried Thanksgiving turkey on his wooden deck threaten your safety. Survey your property lines and alert your neighbors or officials or help with any cleanup efforts to create a safe fire zone around your properties. Make sure you have hoses that stretch to the perimeters of your property. If you have a pool or other large contained body of water, make sure you have the means to pump that water onto the fire. An above-ground pool can be opened in the direction of the fire. An in-ground pool or pond can be pumped through hoses onto the fire or the potential fire zone. Just as you have a generator for disasters, if you have a large body of water in your Zone 2, consider a chemical and clear water transfer pump. This will provide you somewhere around 150 gallons per minute to combat a fire in Zone 2 or douse the zone to protect it from a fire moving through Zone 3 towards you. In a grid-down situation or after a disaster, a transfer pump of this nature will also allow you to move floodwaters, irrigate crops, or move large bodies of water to where you need it.
If you live in an apartment and your neighbor is a reckless hoarder, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. This is where an electronic barrier of protection is beneficial. Having both fire and carbon monoxide protectors through your house or apartment and, in particular, on the most dangerous areas of your perimeter provide you an alert system that will allow you to either spring into action or flee. Consider putting a fire alarm in your garage if the ambient heat of your garage in the summer won’t trigger it. The garage is often sealed off from the rest of the house but contains many of the house’s combustibles.
Finally, Zone 1 is contained within your walls. Take out your papers and trash. Make sure you have fire extinguishers on hand. The fire extinguishing balls you may have seen are, actually, not very effective, and I don’t recommend them. Even a 13 ounce Cold Fire spray canister https://amzn.to/3w2e0gA will be enough to put out your typical kitchen or small debris fire. Consider having one fire abatement device like a fire extinguisher or fire blanket for every room of your home, including wet areas like your bathroom, and make sure you understand how to use them. You don’t want to be fumbling for reading glasses when you need to be springing into action. Have a fire ladder if you live on a second story, and always have at least two means of egress from every room of your house.
SET
The set phase of the Ready, Set, Go can be summarized in a single phrase, “Have a plan.” Have a plan for when your structure is on fire. Have a plan for when a fire is approaching your structure. You can’t outthink an unpredictable fire, but you can think and develop solutions for potential fires. Walk around your home and have the family review what they would do if a fire were in that room. Walk around your yard or property and decide what you would do if a fire were anywhere 360 degrees around your property, above you, or below. Fire raining down from the floor above, or even the sky, isn’t improbable. An explosion can send flaming debris hundreds of yards away, and a fire on just the floor above you may not be noticeable until it has opened a hole in your ceiling because the heat, flames, and many of the gasses will be rising. +Map your property. Walk it, and decide the best actions for both putting out fires and escaping the flames. Make an evacuation checklist, so you can just check the boxes and get out, if you have to, instead of wandering your property and wondering if you have everything while a fire races towards you.
Don’t forget your pets. If you can’t take them with you safely, set them loose. Animals have been escaping fires since they first roamed the planet. If you can take them with you, make sure you have pet food in reserve for when you get to safety. Evacuating with pets can be very complex, and there is much to consider. That’s why I did a whole video on it. I will link to that at the end of this video. For right now, just don’t forget that getting your pet to safety is an essential part of getting set.
Understand your building, community, and local area evacuation plans and emergency communication channels. Find out in advance the critical websites and media you will need to remain alert with the current up-to-the-minute reports. If you do have to flee your home, you can’t rely solely upon a general idea of where the fire is, as it may have spread around you and across your anticipated evacuation routes so staying informed could mean the difference between life and death.
Have a family communication plan in place. Pull out a map and determine family rendezvous points away from known fire zones. Download apps that make location and offline communication possible. Plan out evacuation routes many miles from your location and in every direction. Pull all contact information and routes onto a central source and place copies in your home, vehicles, Emergency Bugout bags, and Every Day Carry bags. Have important documents like social security cards, birth certificates, deeds, pink slips, wills, medical information, meaningful pictures, digital image files, digital files, even cash in a central place so you can grab them if you have to quickly evacuate. Walk around your house with a digital camera and fill the card with pictures of every single thing in your home, especially the things of value. Photograph essential documents and receipts. Put that digital card in your evacuation bag or upload all the files to a secure data storage platform like Dropbox. If you need to file an insurance claim, you will be glad you took this one afternoon to photograph everything as they will only replace exactly what you can prove you own. If an expensive T.V. gets destroyed and you add T.V. to the list you submit to them, they’ll get you the cheapest T.V. they can buy unless you can prove otherwise. You want to be able to grab anything you may need and get to safety quickly. Many people perish as they scramble around an area on fire, struggling to grab that one last thing, or because they have grabbed something they truly didn’t need and struggle to get to safety.
If you do just one thing to prepare yourself for a host of disasters that might befall you, make sure you have a go-back or bugout bag for each member of your family. I have several videos on these and what to include in them. At the very least, have a backpack with face masks, a three-day supply of non-perishable food, and water containers you can grab in a central location. Specific for fire, if you are asthmatic make sure to have any inhalers or needed medications in your bag. Smoke will easily irritate bronchial tubes and impair breathing. Have three gallons of water per person or a personal filtration straw https://amzn.to/3x3j6cn. Have a map marked with evacuation routes, prescription medicines, and a change of clothes, especially footwear. Have extra eyeglasses, a first aid kit, and a flashlight. Have an extra set of keys and chargers for your cell phones. Put these bags somewhere safe and easily grabbable on your way out of your home structure.
GO!
Go is the proper action if you feel unsafe. You do not have to wait for officials to tell you to evacuate. The time to escape an out-of-control fire was a few minutes ago; the next best time is right now. If possible, grab your evacuation checklist. If you can, load your emergency supplies into your vehicle. Here, your advantage is having all these supplies ready to go from one place rather than having to run around a burning home to try and gather them up and load them. If you have a preset plan, family members can take charge and be responsible for certain parts of the plan. One person might be in charge of getting everyone’s packs into the vehicle. Another person might be in charge of getting the pets. Another person might be in charge of the crucial documents envelope. In this way, if someone is away from home, another person can easily know that the away person’s responsibilities will need to be covered.
Dress to prevent damage from high temperatures, falling ash, or embers. Natural fibers are better than synthetic fibers. Head protection, a dry bandana over the mouth and nose, and a hat are all important to wear when making your escape to safety. Here, too, the can of Cold Fire https://amzn.to/3w2e0gA I mentioned earlier will be helpful. Its compact size allows for easy, lightweight portability, and it is non-toxic. A person can be doused in it if need be.
As you head down the road, be aware of your surroundings, and obey the directions of law enforcement. Law enforcement and firefighters work around the premise of containment. When you move past their roadblocks and barriers as you move to safer environments, you can breathe a sigh of relief but go a little further. You don’t want to merely stay a mile ahead of a fire. A fire can move in forests at around 7 miles per hour and double that rate across grasslands. A fire in a city can spread even faster as combustibles and explosions can carry flaming debris hundreds of yards from their source in a matter of seconds. Keep moving until the flames are a distant pillar on the horizon. Your life and the lives of those you care for are more important than any property or physical possession.
Most importantly, if you don’t feel safe, you need to go. Don’t delay or put off your decision. If you have the time and the means to fight the fire before it consumes your structure, do so; but don’t sacrifice your ability to escape in the process. Hosing down your roof or property can have some effect but won’t do too much if the flames are raging and fanned by strong winds. Your gut will tell you when to escape. If there isn’t a chance of stopping the fire or it’s reached your neighborhood or building, it is time to go.
If you have to flee on foot, try to head to lower geographical areas away from the known fire direction. Never flee uphill, as fire will more rapidly travel uphill. Heading into the wind is a preferred path if it is away from the fire as well, as the fire will travel faster with the wind. If the wind is traveling in your direction from the fire and the smoke is thick, start moving away from the fire in the direction the smoke is traveling and keep moving until the visibility improves. Then begin moving forty-five degrees into the wind to get to clearer air. Remain upwind or perpendicular to the direction the fire is moving. Don’t stop moving until the air is clear and the fire is visible on the horizon in full scale. Try to put as much distance between yourself and the fire as possible.
Imagine your electrical system going out. You would call the providing company, right? Maybe you’d check the internet for outages. If the internet were down on your home computer and your phone, what would you do? Would you pull out your phone book and call someone assigned the job of answering the phone at your electric company? Do you have a phone book? Is your phone working? An automated system replaced the position that answered the phone at the electric company. That’s down. Even if you got through, there’s no one there who can manually look up your 16-digit account number. Besides, they have a slightly bigger problem than your residential need.
Grocery stores are about to lose all their expensive meat, poultry, fish, and eggs. The USDA has indicated that the food will only stay safe for 4 hours after a power outage. Most grocery stores have some short-term backup power and a plan for when the power goes out. Store employees will move cold dairy and meat into a large cooler in the back that will keep food cold for a while. The store can’t sell you anything anyways if all their transaction processing systems are powered off. In the recent Texas outage this last winter, grocery stores had to dump their food in some areas. Like a vision from a dystopian nightmare, the police were deployed to protect the disposed of product in the dumpsters.
Beyond your supply of food, there’s no gasoline because stations can’t pump or transact. Your water may become unsafe if water plants can’t regulate the treatment and flow of water and sewage. Deliveries to your area of any products or services almost entirely have to stop. Routers, computers, phones all require electricity. Communication stops.
How long do you think the unprepared average person of the masses will simply sit at home? Will the looting start almost immediately, or will it take a few hours or days? And this is just a slice of the possible systems that can be affected. If more than one even seemingly disconnected system is shut down simultaneously, imagine how devastating the effect could be. What if electrical systems are locked up on one coast of the country and air traffic on the other coast? How crippling would that be? How long could that last? How many other systems might have to stop as a result? Obviously, those air travelers would have to rent cars or take trains. Neither the rental companies nor the railway companies are prepared for that level of demand. I could go on and on. From catering services to travel to communication, thousands of industries can grind to a halt with one or more system failures.
These systems, too, haven’t kept pace with technology. The adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t work well in the information technology industry. IT has to continually stay a step ahead of hackers with their security. They have to do more than have users update their passwords every 60 days. Still, many meat processing plants are using systems running Windows 98. That’s 98 as in 1998–23 years ago. To understand why this is a technology problem, try and remember the computer system or cell phone you had in 1998 compared to what you are using today.
Some recently hacked water plants were running Windows 7. That was released in 2009–12 years ago. From a security standpoint, any software that old is like having an open door and an open garage on your house when you’re not home. Software from 1998 is like handing known burglars a list of items in your house and the schedule of when you’ll be away. Microsoft doesn’t even support these old systems anymore. Nobody is spending their programming hours creating fixes and patches for these systems, but I guarantee you thousands of people have been trying to exploit and hack into these systems for many years and they’ve gotten quite good at it.
Even if a company’s IT is top-notch with the latest and greatest security protocols, hackers can find the one weak link. One employee visiting their Facebook page and clicking on a link could provide access to the company’s network. A hacker can just sit there and start documenting keystrokes until a new password and system are revealed. The most recent data breach of Facebook exposed the personal data of 533 million users. The data exposed included phone numbers, DOB, locations, past locations, full name, and in some cases, email addresses. All it takes is one employee to open that spoofed email from the CEO and click on the file as the CEO instructed and…poof…all those millions of dollars spent on security systems and IT personnel are suddenly as useless as the Maginot Line was for France against Germany’s armies. I have owned and operated a web-based company for many years. I have witnessed firsthand that companies often don’t want to spend the money to upgrade their systems when technology is changing quickly and a piece of software that is not properly maintained can be hacked in a short time.
Even systems wholly disconnected from the internet are vulnerable. Stuxnet, which was believed to be developed by the CIA, was deployed into the Iran uranium centrifuges through a thumb drive. It set the Iran nuclear program back for years by causing the centrifuges to spin at different rates. All systems, everywhere, are vulnerable. So, what happens when those systems are our military, satellite, or infrastructure systems? What happens when the attacks are combined and occur in clusters at the same time. What we have seen in 2021 with the Colonial Pipeline, Water Plants, JBS meat processing, and the 290-plus other enterprise attacks from just six ransomware groups should only be considered the tip of the sword. These attacks will occur with greater frequency and with greater magnitude. Multiple systems will be coordinated to fail at the same time.
One of the questions in the comments on a City Prepping video about the JSB meat processing attack asked, “How could this shutdown a whole plant. After all, isn’t it one guy with a knife and a slab of beef?” That one guy with the knife is part of the equation, and he probably doesn’t need a computer to tell him where to cut; however, the belt that moves those slabs along runs on a computer. Computers run the receiving part of the plant that takes in the live cattle. The billing, quantities, cuts, packaging, and orders are all run by computers. The shipping is all run by computers. We are far, far away from the rancher with a cow who does his butchering, and you pick it up in your truck. Do you say you don’t know a rancher, a butcher, or own a truck? Well, then, you understand the problem.
Our world is utterly dependent upon these automated and computerized systems. They are all interrelated like parts of one giant brain. Ransomware hackers seize up parts of that brain. If the parts of your brain that controlled your speech, left hand, and right leg suddenly stopped working, you’re not going to do too well. If you imagine our society as one big body, you may understand what a threat these ransomware attacks are.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
Ransomware hackers are primarily about profit. Governments supporting them are primarily about disruption. Whether they are a small-time operation calling from India to guide you through an emergency repair to your system hoping to dupe you into revealing your username and password, or they are a Nairobi Prince trying to send you a secret inheritance outside the banking system to trick you into getting access to your bank account, these hackers have been around for a long time. Just one person falls for one of these low-level scams, and they make a considerable profit. One US Dollar is worth over seven thousand Indian Rupees at the time of this video. It’s easy to dismiss this level of scammer, though, because we take our own responsibility for our security. We may be smart enough to always remain out of their snares.
The next level up is the hackers who hack systems to get large chunks of data, but they may lack the means to further process or exploit the data. This group profits by selling the data, be it password and username combination, telephone numbers, bank account numbers, or other information, to hackers bent on using that information to get more information or enter systems to get more information.
Out of this desire for profit came the ransomware hacker. Ransomware hacks used to be just individuals. A computer user clicked the wrong link, and suddenly it will cost them a few hundred dollars to unlock their computer. In recent years, the ransomware attack has realized that the real money is in companies. Their reputations are on the line. Their services are vital. There’s a more significant pain inflicted on the captive, so more money will be paid.
Not all ransomware hackers are state-sponsored, supported by Langley, Moscow, Pyongyang, London, or Beijing, but to assume that Putin doesn’t know what happens within his borders when a ransom gets paid to the tune of several million would be naive at the least. To think that Kim Jong-un doesn’t know what computer clusters are working in North Korea would be naive. To think Washington, Langley, and the CIA don’t know who here in America is using international systems to hack foreign entities would be naive. The fact is that when a government finds a person or group responsible for a significant exploit or ransom within their borders, they arrest, interrogate, and then either hire the individual or group to help them defend their systems, to exploit other countries, or allow them to work unabated at specific countries or targets. In many cases, they supply them with better equipment and resources. In some cases, governments may take a cut of the profits.
One baseless theory that has gained some internet traction despite having no evidence to support it is that governments are doing this to create desperation in the people. The theory posits that people will become so desperate that they will then allow governments, communists, socialists, corporations, or insert a villain of your choice into allowing ourselves to be subjugated and regulated. I find this humorous, and I’m shocked at how much traction this theory gets in the prepping community. Ardent supporters of this theory are only playing out a fundamental error in reasoning and accepting a logical fallacy as truth. To take this theory as truth, you have to accept these truths as well: First, the villainous corporation, government, or unorganized political philosophy thinks it is better to profit off you when they already are profiting off you. And 2) you aren’t already willingly being regulated, controlled, and tracked by a system when you swipe your card, accept a call, place a call, get in your car, search on the internet, make an online purchase, buy a movie ticket, and so on and on and on. Here are two facts for people who believe that governments are self-inflicting these attacks on their people versus weaponizing these attacks to strike other countries. First, they don’t need to corral or cajole willing participants. Your consumerism already makes you a willing participant. Second, and this one is hard for many people to understand, you aren’t that important. These more conspiratorial fringes that buy wholeheartedly into some of these theories despite there being zero actual evidence are not some organized, uncontrollable, and completely free people. There isn’t any hacker interested in your small bank account enough to sit out in front of your house, stakeout-style, until you log in to pay your bills online that month. It would be far more profitable to pursue the easier mark who willingly believes that the social security administration just locked their benefits and requires them to log in immediately. At the same time, that other person watches them on their computer. In the big scheme of things, you’re not so important that massive, unprovable theories have to be invented to subjugate and enslave you. They just need you dependent, underpaid, and persuadable by their marketing. If a person can’t see it or doesn’t understand it, it isn’t automatically the most outlandish conspiracy they can seize upon.
But, let’s return to the core question here: Who is responsible? People interested in profits and disruption. If governments don’t directly support these ransomware hackers, they are often indirectly supported by governments knowingly allowing them to operate within their countries. Do you really think Putin, who is known to have ordered the poisoning, imprisonment, and assassination of political rivals, isn’t wholly aware of a 4.8 million dollar ransom being paid to hackers hailing from an Eastern Bloc country he controls? That’s how much Colonial Pipeline company paid. JBS paid $11 million to ransomware hackers in Eastern Bloc countries to get their plants open again. When oil demand surges, so do Russian oil profits. When ransoms are paid, maybe some of that flows up to the big bosses. It may prove similarly challenging to shut down a criminal software industry that’s also making its perpetrators millionaires. When America suffers, it does drive the people to seek solutions to a destabilized country and a faltering infrastructure. If one of those solutions is for the American government to step in and begin controlling utilities and infrastructures, that’s the very definition of communism– state-controlled utilities and the means of production. So, Kruschev wins the long game. SunTzu said it best, “The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting.”
The fact is, through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, server addresses, logins, and a country’s internet structures, any action online can be traced back to a general area. Complete deletion isn’t possible. Even spoofing the systems by going from one country to another can eventually be tracked to the point of origin. Digital forensics is time-consuming, but it is nothing like the old movie scenes where you have to keep the bad guy on the line long enough for the trace of the phone. Every action online or through a computer system leaves some type of digital fingerprint. When enough fingerprints are collected, you tend to have enough to point a singular finger of blame.
In the case of the 4.8 million paid to free the Colonial Pipeline, the FBI obtained access to the crypto wallet because the company in charge of the wallet was under U.S. jurisdiction so the Feds were able to retrieve it. If the wallet hadn’t been held in the United States, which the perpetrators probably assumed would be the last place U.S. forces would look, and it was held in another country, you wouldn’t have heard about it in the news. No court order would have been sought, but the CIA would have seized the money and funded some other operation somewhere. Governments are all over these attacks and on both sides. The new cold war is digital. It’s just the motivations some people don’t have right. They aren’t out to subjugate you by attacking your infrastructure. They are looking to profit monetarily from your loss and destabilize your economy and country in the process.
So while some operations are small-time, many are big-time. All the big-time operations are state-sponsored, directly or indirectly, in some way. Ransomeware attackers must select targets big enough to pay up but not so big that governments intervene to shut the ransomware operation down. They have to choose ransom amounts carefully. They want a big payoff, but they also don’t want to demand so much that victims just throw up their hands and decide to take the data loss. And supporting governments benefit in big and small ways from the chaos inflicted on their enemies and competing markets.
5 WAYS CYBERATTACKS WILL IMPACT YOU
How bad can it get? Put the words large-scale in front of anything to acquire an understanding of how bad it could get. Large-scale industries have enormous infrastructure, raw materials, high workforce requirements, and significant capital requirements. It’s everything from the large-scale computer, communication, and data networks to large-scale manufacturing and commercial farming operations. Any operation or system that is consolidated and large in scope can have dramatic failures and a lasting impact on how we live our lives.
The first way cyberattacks will impact you is the most obvious– prices. Even if no shortage occurs, but there is a stoppage in the flow or a threat of a bottleneck in the flow, prices will go up. When prices go up, they rarely, if ever, go back down. We aren’t short of gasoline, yet the price soared on perceived supply line threats. We weren’t short of toilet paper until people panicked and bought enough in a day to last them a year. A shortage that is either actual or perceived drives prices up and increases market volatility. One price increase in large-scale operation ripples to other, seemingly non-related, price increases. A gasoline increase results in higher costs for trucking and shipping. That ripples over to price increases on everything you buy. I assure you, the captains of industry will not just absorb those costs and hope prices drop again. Those costs will be passed on to we consumers. And watch for greedy and under-handed captains of industries to orchestrate attacks on their own systems to pull revenue out of the company’s pockets and into their personal offshore, untraceable accounts. Insurance fraud is a real thing. Logically, the same fraud is possible here.
Service interruptions are not just your utilities. If your health insurer’s computer systems are locked up by ransomware, your doctor isn’t likely to see you. Your surgeon isn’t expected to do that operation you need. If ADP gets locked by ransomware, millions will go unpaid. It’s not likely the grocery store is just going to lend these poor victims the food they need to get by until systems are restored. Even if something as seemingly innocuous as a cloud computing company is victimized by ransomware, it could cause 1000s of service interruptions from social media to your news feed to your ability to do a transaction at the convenience store to your digital credentials. Even the most isolated of ransomware incidents can have far-reaching service interruptions in your life.
When a ransomware attack is big enough, we suddenly become aware of how incredibly interlaced these systems are. The failure of one results in another having to stop as well. Sure, you could hand process all that beef because it is, after all, a person with a knife. But, the system is built on computerized conveyors, computerized packing, computerized shipping, computerized safety inspections, computerized reporting, computerized receiving, computerized invoicing, and accounting. When the flow of beef stops, the truckers are sidelined. 1000’s of people are suddenly without work. That means 1000’s of people are not making money the days or weeks after a ransomware attack. That means fewer dollars circulating in the economy and more people clutching their purses and adopting a “let’s wait and see what happens” attitude. Even one successful ransomware attack is like a solid punch in the gut to a nation’s economy.
As these attacks become more frequent and with greater magnitude, so too will the public demand for the government to step in and fix the problem. This, as I mentioned earlier, is the very definition of communism: “the major means of production, such as mines and factories, are owned and controlled by the public”– the public being the government of the people. 80% of our grid is owned and operated by private companies. When those companies fail to harden off and defend themselves from cyberattacks properly, the people will demand the government step in with meaningful consequences and solutions. Again, here is where some of the thinking derails, and people suggest governments and big businesses are self-inflicting these attacks on themselves to gain control over you. As pointed out earlier, the flaw in that thinking denies two proofs. One is that profits outweigh people. It’s not in a corporation’s best interest to jeopardize its revenue and reputation in exchange for government control. And, second, you and every other consumer is already a willing revenue-generating participant who voluntarily allows yourself to be tracked and regulated.
Still, the possibility of government overreach overshadowing our everyday lives is very, very real as it struggles to stay on top of a technological world seemingly out of control with cryptocurrency, information, and automation. The FBI recently attempted to subpoena records from USA TODAY to identify readers of a February story about a southern Florida shootout that killed two agents and wounded three others. The request was rightfully denied, and USA Today stood its ground. Still, the government sometimes formally asks and sometimes just takes what it wants clandestinely, as was the case with the operation PRISM surveillance program exposed in 2007. Expect as these ransomware attacks continue and the government struggles to stay ahead of them, and on top of the tech explosion, your rights will, at some point, be trampled over.
As large and harmful as these attacks may have seemed to many, what we have seen today is just the beginning. Like in any industry (and ransomware is an industry), there will be a coming consolidation of attacks. Don’t be surprised if both the water company and the phone service go out simultaneously, or rideshare companies and your local electricity provider, or multiple utilities at the same time, or an automaker and a steel company. As is the nature of all things, the attacks will start to combine to increase the more significant effect and increase the pain and pressure on would-be ransom payers. In a way, we have been lucky with these smaller tests of the systems. Governments will weaponize the minor weaknesses their ransomware hackers have discovered and will launch a more significant, all-out, retaliatory strike at some point. That’s when things will get very bad, very fast. These early attacks are unsophisticated tests of our systems compared to the coming orchestrated Cyber Pearl Harbor of attacks still to come. Then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a large-scale coordinated attack on critical infrastructure that “would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability.” That was nearly ten years ago, and here we are now at dawn on the day of that battle.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TODAY
You need to examine the fundamental aspects of your survival. Today, take steps to reduce your complete dependence on water, food, power, sewage, fuel, medicine, police, fire, and all of the just-in-time systems that provide all these. Make a checklist of these systems and determine your level of dependence and determine your Plan B. If the sewer system fails, what’s your plan. It’s less than desirable, but what plan can you implement to get by while maintaining your health and safety. If the water system fails or a boil order is given simultaneously as the gas or electricity is off, what’s your short-term Plan B to keep yourself in the essential life-giving element of water? If more than one just-in-time delivery of food stops along with any other ransomware attack, do you have enough food to survive for 3-weeks, 3-months, or longer? Are any of your plans dependent on a quick run to the store like a million other desperate people? You might want to rethink your plan if it does.
Your medical, police, and fire services might not be available. What’s your Plan B to get the help you need? Could you extinguish a fire burning towards your house or in your home? Could you treat someone or yourself if you had the flu, a dislocated joint, a broken bone, or a damaged tooth? Could you defend your home against an invasion of the desperate and unprepared? Get a Plan B for each of the critical systems. If you never have to implement your plan, you will be assured that you can survive better than the general masses.
You can look at some of the other videos on this channel to understand how things will unravel rather quickly after a cyber-disaster of more than 90-days. I will link to other videos at the end of this one. Once people run low on their own supplies and see little hope of the government restoring systems, things will descend into chaos rather rapidly. You will want a Plan B ready for when it does.
Hi Everyone,
* Garden Battles. I have this one pot. Last year, whatever I put in that pot got eaten – and I mean EVERY leaf, one by one until only stumps were left. So this year I took out all the dirt. Yeah. All of it. Put in new dirt and plants. I got some lovely broccoli, and then two days ago I got this:
Update: No missing leaves for the past 3 days. Mesh is secured. All stripped plants showing signs of regrowth.
Hi Everyone,
just buy it when it goes on sale. I know – go figure. I’m going to include both recipes below. The spaghetti sauce calls for sausage – which I use. But in a pinch, we can get by without it. Plus, if I’m making lasagna or something else that “uses” pasta sauce, it’s easier to just open a jar or can rather than make a bigger mess in the kitchen. This week, just pick up some extra sauce – whatever your favorite kind is. Winco usually has Hunt’s pasta sauce for about $.80. Get 4 or 5, and store them away.
I was first introduced to 
This is one of the oldest methods of pulling yeast from the air, and it has been used for centuries by our ancestors. You might not ever buy a store-bought yeast again. I’ll run you through the whole recipe and method, and I will give you just enough history. This process will take at least 12 hours or a full day, so you won’t be able to start it and bake bread an hour later. What you get as a reward for your patience is maybe some of the best bread you will ever eat in your life. It will have a better texture and a better flavor than regular bread. I’ll provide you with that recipe at the end of this blog.
problem. I add some more water and bring it to a boil again. Stir in the teaspoon of sugar while hot, and gently place the saucepan lid on top and set aside. You’ll need it to come completely to room temperature for the next step. Once it has cooled to room temperature in your saucepan or very near to room temperature, give it a swirl and pour it into your Mason jar. Let it cool completely to room temperature with a loose lid on the jar.
A potato in a standard bread recipe provides more nutrients for the yeast to stay healthy. This will result in fluffy bread with excellent, light grain quality. Store-bought yeast is a couple of different strains that have been isolated because of the particular way they work with dough. Yeast does impart flavor, as well. So bread dough yeast provides a very narrow and specific flavor range. Yeast is a fungus, but don’t think of it as a mushroom. There are approximately 1500 single-cell organisms called yeast. The kind used in brewing and baking is from a group called saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is Latin for sugar-eating yeast. 
After one day, you should see bubbling at the top of your liquid. It should have a bready, yeasty, or sourdough smell starting to develop. It’s okay if you can’t detect that scent yet. If you don’t have either the bubbling or the bready smell developing, repeat the open-air process for another 10 minutes. If you have any colored mold of any kind, throw it out and start over. Some say to just clear this off and let the yeast growth continue, but I don’t trust molds, so it’s best to start over. The yeast, however, tends to be faster to grow than mold. Once you see bubbling occurring around the surface of the liquid, add the tablespoon of flour. Don’t use any metal utensils at this point so as not to inhibit or dull yeast growth. I just place the tablespoon of flour on top, tighten the lid and shake it until mixed. Each time you place the potato starter in your quiet, cool place in your kitchen, make sure that the cap is loose, and the C02 gasses can escape.
lends a smooth and fluffy texture to the bread. When you do this, though, you have to have a good understanding of bread dough. Make sure it isn’t too sticky and not too dense. You can adjust this by adding and working in 1 tablespoon of flour if it is too sticky. Then, repeat with one tablespoon of flour until your dough isn’t too sticky or too wet.
the basic ability to make bread. There are countless variations to both the potato yeast starter and the basic bread recipe. I would love to hear how your loaves turn out and if you have any additions or alterations to the recipe, like using honey instead of sugar, leave them in the comments below. Keep building your skills…
North Korea is China by proxy. There’s no denying that. There is a China-Taiwan divide that continues to escalate. At the heart of the divide is that the Chinese government sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be part of the country. The Taiwanese people disagree. They feel they are a separate nation – whether or not independence is ever officially declared. China has said it will “never tolerate” foreign intervention in issues related to Taiwan, a self-ruled democratic island that China claims as its own. Taiwan recently reported the largest ever incursion into its airspace of Chinese aircraft. Beijing has also sent more ships to the South China Sea.
One reason China remains unchecked in its expansionist and regional strong-handed assumption of control is purely economics. China provides cheap labor and globally unrivaled output. Made in China is labeled on everything from electrical machinery, computers, furniture, plastics, medical equipment, vehicles, textiles, iron and steel, and clothing. Those nine exports alone account for 1.7 trillion US dollars in Chinese global shipments. It’s not just America who buys these products and takes advantage of the cheap labor by outsourcing jobs. When the trade war between the U.S. and China escalated recently, China inked new trade deals with Europe, Russia, Asia-Pacific nations, and even Brazil. When the two countries found an agreement in late 2019, China pledged to buy 200 billion dollars of US goods and services in 2020 and 2021. China was never, ever on pace to even remotely meet that commitment.
Being a manufacturing powerhouse and ruling with an iron fist over your people comes at an environmental cost. Even with a pandemic raging worldwide, China’s C02 emissions reached a record high of 12 billion metric tons. Unfortunately, health and mortality data is never accurately reported from behind the red curtain, so we can only wonder what effect the toxic chemicals and air have on people. China’s emissions exceeded all developed nations in 2019. The country accounted for nearly 27% of the world’s greenhouse gasses. Though China has vowed to reach net-zero emissions by 2060, they neither have a track record of meeting their global responsibilities nor does a consensus of scientists believe that is soon enough. The country is currently running 1,058 coal plants – more than half the world’s capacity. The emissions leading to climate change argument aside, this is a damaging and toxic level of pollutants rising into the air and seeping into the world’s oceans. That can’t be good for the planet, even thousands of miles away.
This is a good time to start making a list of recipes you can cook with only food on your shelf. Start with 7 recipes. ( Technically, you COULD just make these 7 things over and over). Not sure “I” could, but it’s a start. Then think about getting a 3 week supply of these ingredients. Three weeks. You can do that. Every time you make something, think, “Can I adjust this?” Example: pizza. Can you buy the ingredients for pizza and keep them on a shelf? Sure. Learn how to make the homemade crust (need yeast). Buy pizza sauce. Invest in some dehydrated cheese (it’s pricey, but it’s available), or in the short term, just freeze some. Get some sausage “bites” that are freeze-dried. OR learn to can ground beef, OR use canned chicken. You probably won’t want to use your freeze-dried mozzarella cheese and sausage bites. But you’ll have them on hand and you’ll be eating pizza when everyone else is eating Top Ramen. heh heh heh. Okay, so this doesn’t have a lot to do with pasta, but I talked about pasta last week AND some of your easiest recipes could just be spaghetti and tuna casserole.
Some camp stoves are super fancy. I like this one too, because it can use both butane OR propane: 
When it comes to something as unruly as a fire, every bit of planning you do in advance of the event will pay off for you. You should prepare as though a fire or smoke will be either in your home or rapidly approaching your home. The first part of that preparation is to create a defensible space around your property. Defensible space is the buffer you create between a building on your property and any natural or artificial combustibles surrounding the building or property. For some, that may mean clearing brush, dead leaves, and other vegetation. For others, that may mean clearing debris, trash, or other combustibles in and around their property. 
The set phase of the Ready, Set, Go can be summarized in a single phrase, “Have a plan.” Have a plan for when your structure is on fire. Have a plan for when a fire is approaching your structure. You can’t outthink an unpredictable fire, but you can think and develop solutions for potential fires. Walk around your home and have the family review what they would do if a fire were in that room. Walk around your yard or property and decide what you would do if a fire were anywhere 360 degrees around your property, above you, or below. 
Go is the proper action if you feel unsafe. You do not have to wait for officials to tell you to evacuate. The time to escape an out-of-control fire was a few minutes ago; the next best time is right now. If possible, grab your evacuation checklist. If you can, load your emergency supplies into your vehicle. Here, your advantage is having all these supplies ready to go from one place rather than having to run around a burning home to try and gather them up and load them. If you have a preset plan, family members can take charge and be responsible for certain parts of the plan. One person might be in charge of getting everyone’s packs into the vehicle. Another person might be in charge of getting the pets. Another person might be in charge of the crucial documents envelope. In this way, if someone is away from home, another person can easily know that the away person’s responsibilities will need to be covered.
Imagine your electrical system going out. You would call the providing company, right? Maybe you’d check the internet for outages. If the internet were down on your home computer and your phone, what would you do? Would you pull out your phone book and call someone assigned the job of answering the phone at your electric company? Do you have a phone book? Is your phone working? An automated system replaced the position that answered the phone at the electric company. That’s down. Even if you got through, there’s no one there who can manually look up your 16-digit account number. Besides, they have a slightly bigger problem than your residential need.
Ransomware hackers are primarily about profit. Governments supporting them are primarily about disruption. Whether they are a small-time operation calling from India to guide you through an emergency repair to your system hoping to dupe you into revealing your username and password, or they are a Nairobi Prince trying to send you a secret inheritance outside the banking system to trick you into getting access to your bank account, these hackers have been around for a long time. Just one person falls for one of these low-level scams, and they make a considerable profit. One US Dollar is worth over seven thousand Indian Rupees at the time of this video. It’s easy to dismiss this level of scammer, though, because we take our own responsibility for our security. We may be smart enough to always remain out of their snares.
The first way cyberattacks will impact you is the most obvious– prices. Even if no shortage occurs, but there is a stoppage in the flow or a threat of a bottleneck in the flow, prices will go up. When prices go up, they rarely, if ever, go back down. We aren’t short of gasoline, yet the price soared on perceived supply line threats. We weren’t short of toilet paper until people panicked and bought enough in a day to last them a year. A shortage that is either actual or perceived drives prices up and increases market volatility. One price increase in large-scale operation ripples to other, seemingly non-related, price increases. A gasoline increase results in higher costs for trucking and shipping. That ripples over to price increases on everything you buy. I assure you, the captains of industry will not just absorb those costs and hope prices drop again. Those costs will be passed on to we consumers. And watch for greedy and under-handed captains of industries to orchestrate attacks on their own systems to pull revenue out of the company’s pockets and into their personal offshore, untraceable accounts. 
Service interruptions are not just your utilities. If your health insurer’s computer systems are locked up by ransomware, your doctor isn’t likely to see you. Your surgeon isn’t expected to do that operation you need. If ADP gets locked by ransomware, millions will go unpaid. It’s not likely the grocery store is just going to lend these poor victims the food they need to get by until systems are restored. Even if something as seemingly innocuous as a cloud computing company is victimized by ransomware, it could cause 1000s of service interruptions from social media to your news feed to your ability to do a transaction at the convenience store to your digital credentials. Even the most isolated of ransomware incidents can have far-reaching service interruptions in your life.
When a ransomware attack is big enough, we suddenly become aware of how incredibly interlaced these systems are. The failure of one results in another having to stop as well. Sure, you could hand process all that beef because it is, after all, a person with a knife. But, the system is built on computerized conveyors, computerized packing, computerized shipping, computerized safety inspections, computerized reporting, computerized receiving, computerized invoicing, and accounting. When the flow of beef stops, the truckers are sidelined. 1000’s of people are suddenly without work. That means 1000’s of people are not making money the days or weeks after a ransomware attack. That means fewer dollars circulating in the economy and more people clutching their purses and adopting a “let’s wait and see what happens” attitude. Even one successful ransomware attack is like a solid punch in the gut to a nation’s economy.
As these attacks become more frequent and with greater magnitude, so too will the public demand for the government to step in and fix the problem. This, as I mentioned earlier, is the very definition of communism: “the major means of production, such as mines and factories, are owned and controlled by the public”– the public being the government of the people. 80% of our grid is owned and operated by private companies. When those companies fail to harden off and defend themselves from cyberattacks properly, the people will demand the government step in with meaningful consequences and solutions. Again, here is where some of the thinking derails, and people suggest governments and big businesses are self-inflicting these attacks on themselves to gain control over you. As pointed out earlier, the flaw in that thinking denies two proofs. One is that profits outweigh people. It’s not in a corporation’s best interest to jeopardize its revenue and reputation in exchange for government control. And, second, you and every other consumer is already a willing revenue-generating participant who voluntarily allows yourself to be tracked and regulated. 
As large and harmful as these attacks may have seemed to many, what we have seen today is just the beginning. Like in any industry (and ransomware is an industry), there will be a coming consolidation of attacks. Don’t be surprised if both the water company and the phone service go out simultaneously, or rideshare companies and your local electricity provider, or multiple utilities at the same time, or an automaker and a steel company. As is the nature of all things, the attacks will start to combine to increase the more significant effect and increase the pain and pressure on would-be ransom payers. In a way, we have been lucky with these smaller tests of the systems. Governments will weaponize the minor weaknesses their ransomware hackers have discovered and will launch a more significant, all-out, retaliatory strike at some point. That’s when things will get very bad, very fast. These early attacks are unsophisticated tests of our systems compared to the coming orchestrated Cyber Pearl Harbor of attacks still to come. Then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a large-scale coordinated attack on critical infrastructure that “would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability.” That was nearly ten years ago, and here we are now at dawn on the day of that battle.
You need to examine the fundamental aspects of your survival. Today, take steps to reduce your complete dependence on water, food, power, sewage, fuel, medicine, police, fire, and all of the just-in-time systems that provide all these. Make a checklist of these systems and determine your level of dependence and determine your Plan B. If the sewer system fails, what’s your plan. It’s less than desirable, but what plan can you implement to get by while maintaining your health and safety. If the water system fails or a boil order is given simultaneously as the gas or electricity is off, what’s your short-term Plan B to keep yourself in the essential life-giving element of water? If more than one just-in-time delivery of food stops along with any other ransomware attack, do you have enough food to survive for 3-weeks, 3-months, or longer? Are any of your plans dependent on a quick run to the store like a million other desperate people? You might want to rethink your plan if it does.
Hi Everyone,
* Garden Battles. I have this one pot. Last year, whatever I put in that pot got eaten – and I mean EVERY leaf, one by one until only stumps were left. So this year I took out all the dirt. Yeah. All of it. Put in new dirt and plants. I got some lovely broccoli, and then two days ago I got this:
Update: No missing leaves for the past 3 days. Mesh is secured. All stripped plants showing signs of regrowth.