A subscriber recently sent us a detailed email expressing her concerns about being new to prepping and on significantly limited funds. She felt the pressure and anxiety of wanting to prepare for the problems she knew we were going to face, and she felt overwhelmed with the sheer volume of things to prepare for and items to have. It seems like everyone is selling something that promises it will solve your problems, but many of us are on tight budgets and whatever money is spent needs to be spent wisely. So what can you do to prepare for the worst of times with the fewest of dimes? People come to prepping for various reasons, and there is a considerable amount of new sites and new tools and gadgets that have sprung up over the last few years. While we have reviewed some of these items from time to time, we wanted to focus this blog on those new to prepping and with limited funds. As you will see from what we discuss here, it isn’t too late to start prepping if you begin now; and you may already have many of the resources you need to weather even the worst of disasters.1- Priorities & GoalsThe first step with prepping on a limited budget is to set priorities and goals. You need first to prioritize the most realistic threats you face. While you may feel that you need to prep for the Yellowstone Caldera blowing, that’s not your best bet if you live on the east coast and you’re at the start of hurricane season, or the midwest and you’re entering tornado season. List out the top possibilities for your area. List everything from Near Earth Objects, to terrorists, to civil unrest, to earthquakes and floods. Then rank your list logically by the likelihood of occurrence. The list should help you focus your preparations a little more.Next, list what you would realistically need for the top five or so events on your list. You’ll find that prepping for one is usually the same as prepping for them all. Common to all catastrophes that may befall us are specific needs: water, food, shelter, fire, etcetera. When you are prepping for one particular crisis, you are prepping for many possible catastrophes. Finally, take a personal inventory. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Do you know how to sew or knit, fish or hunt? Are you a quick learner or well-read? Are you a beast at the gym or love a good long hike? Do you cook, can, ferment, or know how to bake? Do you understand medicine or your way around an engine? Write out all the strengths you have, but also write out your weaknesses in another column. Are you out of shape, have medical conditions, or joint pain after prolonged physical activities? Are you overly dependent on eating out and couldn’t boil water, as they say? Have you never learned a skill? Some people are new to prepping but have never really been very self-sufficient in life. Once you have your two-column list of strengths and weaknesses, scratch out the word “Strengths” and replace it with the word “Practice.” Scratch out the word “Weaknesses” and replace it with “Challenges.” After all, you want to practice those strengths; you have to become more proficient. Don’t just rely on the hope that you can consistently access that strength. Cultivate it through practice. Likewise, those weaknesses are merely challenges you face. If you have severe medical conditions that would prevent you from ever being able to bug out if you needed to, you have to make that one of the challenges you prepare to remedy. Plan to strengthen your ability to hunker down safely in a crisis. If being out of shape is one of your weaknesses, then that’s the challenge you need to overcome. If your liability is that you are not very outgoing, your challenge and goal will be to try harder to make connections and build networks with people. You might not race out there and join a Mutual Assistance Group, but you may want to join the community garden or a skills-based club to meet like-minded individuals. Set your goals based upon your Practice and Challenges lists. Set both long and short-term goals. What can you start to do today? Remember, baby steps. Where would you like to get when you think over the long term?Now that you have it all on paper start working on your plans. You won’t make progress on all of them all of the time, but give yourself credit when you chip away at the list a little each day. Learning a new skill can be as easy as reading a book about it ten minutes a day. That’s a start, and it positions you better than you were when you knew nothing. Take your plans to the real world and start with the most important prep of all–yourself.2- FinancesFinances are the top perceived barrier to adequate preparation, but some of the best-prepared people we have ever met haven’t been made of money. So, it can’t be about money. After all, the tool you take up in your hand is worthless if you don’t know how to use it. The same is true for all those fancy supplies. You could buy the best magnesium fire starter on the planet and a massive box of fat sticks, but that pocket lighter or zippo of your grandfathers would probably work better in most situations. You could buy a three hundred dollar Berkey Water filter system, but that twenty-dollar Mini-Sawyer will filter one-hundred-thousand gallons and will slip in your pocket. My point here is simple: you need to cover what you need to survive from your likely disaster list, but you don’t need to worry about not having a fat wallet to do it.Here is where finances come to bear. Many, many people live hand to mouth. They work multiple jobs, and, at the end of the day, they are just scraping by. We are not a financial advisor by any means, but we have read the practical advice of Dave Ramsey, Robert Kiyosaki, Grant Cardone, and others. You can get their books at your local library. They will tell you slightly different things, but there are some common elements. Reviewing your finances and understanding your spending patterns is vital. Living within your means and avoiding credit is another. Each person’s situation will be different, but even if you have no money at the end of the day, you should be consulting these professionals about this topic. You should take the advice that best fits your circumstances and try to make it work. When we first started studying material like this, we were able to turn my dire financial situation into building a profitable business. It took time, but we chose to invest in myself and it paid off in dividends.Even if you are dirt poor, there are ways to slowly, paycheck by paycheck, set aside a little more. Suppose you go to the store for groceries, but you have never learned to cook beyond punching a few buttons on a microwave. In that case, you can immediately reap benefits by learning to cook beans, rice, vegetables, and other unprocessed foods. If you’re used to grabbing food on your way home from work, try a slow cooker once a week. You’ll come home to a hot meal. You will learn how to cook for yourself, and you will save significantly. When you sit down to eat, start adding up the total cost of the meal. You will readily see that it’s far cheaper to become self-sufficient and less dependent on restaurants. As we said earlier, some of the best-prepared people we have ever met haven’t been made of money. Those who have struggled with finances know how to get the full value out of things. They can stretch resources. They can look at an item and instantly understand how they might re-use or upcycle the container. They roll their sleeves up and dig into fixing something instead of paying someone else or throwing the item away, resolving to learn as they go. They have been prepping for years and maybe didn’t know it.3- Health & WellnessHealth and wellness are the most often overlooked parts of prepping. Try this exercise. Ask a friend to randomly text you at any hour on one of your days off the word “Go.” When you receive that text, no matter what you were doing at the moment you receive it, drop everything and walk across town and to the edge of town. Since this isn’t a real emergency, you can take a cab or rideshare home after this exercise. Does this sound like an exercise you are willing to do? If that text came through at this very moment, would you even be able to make the walk home or out of town from where you are right now? If not, you are going to have a hard time surviving in an SHTF situation. Are you unwilling to commit at that level, or do you know you’ll never make it to the other side of town? Revisit your priorities and set some goals. You can do this exercise without taking a walk, as well. Just pause when that text comes in and jot down a quick plan of what you would do. Running your brain through the scenario is akin to practicing it. You won’t have the same level of physical readiness, but your brain will be calmer in the crisis, and your focus will be more precise.You may not be in a good enough condition to even start a regimented physical fitness program. You may not feel that you have the time after all the hours of the day are spent. Know that there are traditional exercises like you might do at the gym, and there are exercises like walking on your lunch break or your dog after work. There are even exercises that you can do sitting at your desk. You won’t realize significant gains overnight in either strength or endurance, but prepping your body is a steady, slow process. You can’t instantly buy health, but you can chip away at unhealthy habits and patterns to get to a healthier core.With regards to wellness, that covers everything from what you put into your body or soul. Your mental health is tied into this as well. Your ability to cope with stressful situations is linked to this. Make sure you are feeding your body and your brain. Eat well. Hydrate well. Drink lots of clean water. Read about prepping, but also read books that fill you up and satisfy you. Try to avoid toxic or highly charged conflicts. Turn your inclination to fight or argue with others into a focused effort to prepare yourself for whatever the world may throw at you. Prepping your health and well-being is hands down more beneficial to you in a real catastrophe than any other tool you have in your inventory. The adage “If you don’t have your health, you haven’t anything” could not be more true to the prepper.4- Knowledge & SkillsYou can lay up for yourselves prepping supplies and foods stacked to the ceiling, but rodents may eat your food, rust can corrupt your tools, or marauders might rob you blind. Nobody can ever take from you your knowledge and skills. Next to your health, they are the most valuable tools in your prepping inventory. When you think of knowledge, think of what they call book smart. Maybe you don’t have any direct practical experience with building a cistern or raising chickens. Still, you can read a chapter in a book on it so that you could wrestle with the problem, and your chances of success would be greater than someone who doesn’t know what a cistern is or who has never seen a live chicken. Yes, there are many of those people out there.Think of your skills as things you have learned and practically applied at some point. Did you get a cheese making kit for your birthday and gave it a go? Congratulations, you now have the skill of making cheese. You might not be able to implement it in the aftermath of a crisis immediately, but you know what you need to gather and the procedures you must one day follow. Remember that metal shop class, woodshop, or home economics course you took in high school? Guess what? The purpose of those courses was to give you practical skills you could use in real life. Go back to your “Practice” list you made earlier and add some of these new skills with a dash in front of them. These are partial skills you can brush up on in the future. At any given time, you should be working on both knowledge and skills. You want to be adding to your personal prepper inventory continually. Even though you may not have space for a garden, read up on setting one up. Build your knowledge base. Get two solid pieces of rope and learn a new knot every week. Most people can tie a shoelace knot and a square knot, and that is it. That won’t do it if you’re forced to live in the wild. Nothing is keeping you from learning. Bolster your knowledge and skills every day. Your brain is the best tool in your prepping inventory.5- Gear & ToolsWe saved the gear and tools for last because we wanted to show you the resources you already have or can quickly build in your inventory. There are, however, some essential things you will need that apply to any survival situation. As we mentioned earlier, specific needs are common to all catastrophes that may befall us: water, food, shelter, fire. First, you want access to clean water. You may not have space for a dozen or more fifty-five-gallon barrels, but a Mini-Sawyer water filter like we will link to in the comments below will fit in your pocket and can filter up to one hundred thousand gallons of water. If you live in the southeast region of America, water availability may not be a huge issue. If you live in the desert southwest region of America, you will need to store some water for emergencies. You need food, preferably long shelf life food that is nutrient or calorically dense—rice, beans, dehydrated fruits and vegetables, and so forth. If you cannot afford an electric countertop dehydrator, you can still dehydrate in the same way they have for years–in the oven or with the sun. You can build a supply of food by setting a little aside each week.When you think of shelter, think hats, gloves, and articles of clothing that shelter your body, but also think tents, tarps, and structures you can build. Read up on building emergency structures and then attempt to practically apply what you have learned one day before you are forced to do it.We don’t want someone reading this blog to get bent out of shape thinking they need a lot of gear to survive. If you can process water, have food stored and be able to cook it during a disaster, you’ll be ahead of about 99% of those around you. If you focus on the items we covered in the first 4 points of this video, having gear will just be a bonus to an already firm foundation you built. Again, we purposefully avoided going into detail about gear in this section as we’d recommend anyone starting out in prepping to not go after gear, but instead focus on the other 4 items. We’ll do a breakout blog shortly detailing the basic items each prepper should have. ConclusionPrepping is more than just hoarding supplies and tools you have never previously had to use. The real resources you need to survive can’t be purchased. Even on a minimal budget, you can begin to build what you need to meet the challenge of the most pressing disasters you might face. If nothing at all ever happens and your life is truly blessed, you will still be better off for having prepped. Your life will be more comfortable and more affordable. You will be more self-reliant and more self-confident. Even if you are starting to prep today, you will still be better positioned to survive than the majority of the population, and you don’t have to break the bank to get started. Start small, and build steadily over time.As always, please stay safe out there.
We recently released a blog on the five major threats we face. That blog covered issues we’ll see on a global scale, but one of my subscribers, Lady Court Tales, asked if I could provide “Just an overall prediction of possibilities with possible preemptive solutions. The best you can.” While it is always prudent to see the more significant, global threats, as we covered in that blog, we think it’s also essential to see the risks rising now that may come to a head in twenty-twenty-one that will impact you directly. These issues that are already starting to impact people today can lead to a larger ailment and the collapse of systems upon which we rely. It is, therefore, prudent for us to understand these threats today. Here are ten immediate threats we will see in twenty-twenty-one and we’ll cover in each point how you can prepare yourself and your family to survive them. While this blog is a bit on the lengthy side, we didn’t want to just acknowledge the problems, but instead we took time to give specific actions you can take now as we discuss each item. So let’s jump in.1- Hunger CrisisFood is a basic human need. Our ability to have food on the table is typically threatened by three circumstances: poverty, natural disasters disrupting production and supply lines, or contaminated food. 2020 revealed severe cracks in our overall system. Even before the lockdown, the detrimental effects of commercial food production were apparent in the form of highly-processed foods with little nutritional value and the occasional recall for E. Coli, Listeria, Cyclospora, Hepatitis, and Salmonella. In fact, one in six Americans become sick from contaminated food every year.In the early days of 2020’s run on stores and the panic hoarding of some items caused disruptions in supplies. And, when scores of workers fell ill in meatpacking plants, people panicked even more. Many stores ran out of some foods, and others put limits on quantities people could purchase. From milk to meat, eggs, flour, and sugar, many of the staple foods we had come accustomed to having available with a quick stop to the store suddenly became a challenge to acquire. With more lockdowns on the horizon and the continued detrimental effects of large scale food production and disruption, we can expect food insecurity to continue to rise. Already, we are seeing large unemployment numbers and growing food lines. As the common man’s economy continues to struggle to build back, we can expect that number to continue, at least for the immediate future to continue.You can insulate yourself somewhat by storing staples, gardening, learning to cook, can, ferment, and dehydrate food, hunting, and fishing, or seeking out local sources of grown food and game. Decreasing your dependence on large scale production sources will strengthen your ability to keep food on the table.2- Housing InsecurityIn the early days of the lockdowns, businesses were forced to shutter or rapidly shift their business models to an at-home or touchless experience. Theaters, the travel and events industries, retail locations, restaurant chains, gyms, and more, all folded and shuttered their locations within a few months. The millions of those employed in these industries suddenly found themselves without a steady income. Even before 2020, 78% of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. Surprisingly, American’s personal credit debt shrunk for the first time in a long time as people quickly realigned their finances and, honestly, had fewer opportunities to go out and spend money.But as 2020 came to a close, stimulus relief was drying up, and people’s savings accounts were drying up. Already I have heard several stories of people turning to credit cards to pay rent. Without a swift economic recovery or another middle to lower-income stimulus, we can expect millions of Americans to reach a point where they were having to decide between getting groceries, paying their rent or mortgage, or making their car payment.Similar to the environment created by the subprime lending housing disaster of 2008, we could see more foreclosures, more people moving to rural or lower-income states and areas, or homelessness. Of particular note is the number of people moving to more affordable states or rural areas because this will be compounded in 2021 by more people working from home because of the pandemic. However 2021 plays out, we will undoubtedly see increasing housing insecurity. Whether that means you or someone you know suddenly needs to plan an escape from the city, a necessary downsizing or packing everything you can into your car, realize housing insecurity will dramatically impact Americans throughout this next year. What can you do now? If there is the possibility that you will face housing security issues, decide to act sooner rather than later. If that’s moving in with friends or family, picking up a renter or roommate, or pulling up stakes and moving to a more affordable area, those are always better options than using retirement funds or credit cards. Take a look at our other blog on What To Do If You Become Homeless after this blog.3- Shutdowns & Unemployment2020 introduced us to shutdowns and lockdowns. It showed us a type of unemployment brought about by a massive employment paradigm shift away from communal locations to the virtual conference call and touchless services. While some businesses like retail home delivery, sanitation, grocery stores, and food delivery services soared, many businesses suffered or folded altogether.By most researchers’ estimates, we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. Local, state, and federal governments will continue to respond in ways they feel will best protect their residents. Schools will open and close. Restaurants will open at partial capacity, maybe even lower capacity, or outdoor only, which isn’t really a possibility in northern states. Will we ever see a filled sports arena or stadium again? We don’t know.We do know that any “new normal,” as they say, isn’t likely to look very familiar, as in the way we did it before. The world has changed, and until we fully adjust to it, lockdowns will be the new norm. With each lockdown or shutdown, however, the unemployment rate will remain high. Some businesses will never re-open. Chances are you know more than one person who has either lost a job, is having trouble finding a job, or may never work in their industry again. As I mentioned earlier, most Americans live hand to mouth each week, so when unemployment benefits run out, savings are depleted, and retirement accounts are tapped, it’s going to worsen. Three in ten Americans had no emergency funds set aside at all.If you are unemployed, facing unemployment, or are seeing that a shutdown is on the horizon in your area, it’s not too late to insulate yourself a little bit. That may mean, for you, going to trade school, community college, taking online training courses, cultivating or learning new skills, or taking a pay cut and taking up a new career just to remain employed. Take heed and prepare your supplies with enough food to stretch out for an extended period. Learn from the prepping community how to be more resourceful. One channel I always recommend to people is the Prepper Princess. She does a great job at providing tips for low income living. Be sure to tell her City Prepping sent you.4- Rise in CrimeWith high unemployment numbers and food insecurity, you can expect to see a rise in crime in 2021. Most crime is opportunistic, and it is committed for a host of reasons: no direction in life, drugs, poverty, lack of school and work, etcetera. With the current state of things, we have many of those combined factors, so it is almost a certainty that petty crimes will rise. The stress of lockdowns will turn some to the coping mechanisms of drugs and alcohol. While those aren’t sole contributors to a rise in crime, they influence the numbers.What happens if a strained and stressed populace continues to demonstrate its frustration through civil unrest? In that case, there will always be opportunists with no real affiliation who will seize on the opportunity to loot and steal. From this overt crime to the often covert crimes of domestic violence and abuse, we can expect that these numbers will rise, at least slightly, in 2021.Your best defense against a rising crime rate is any defense. The fact is that most Americans take very few precautions and safeguards against crime and then kick themselves later when they are victims of crime. Review your home’s security, locks, alarms, and procedures. Review your self-defense items and skills. Review some of the other videos on this channel about home security and ensure you have a secure perimeter, alert system, and a lock-in plan.5- Mental HealthIf there were a national measurement of mental health, it would undoubtedly be negatively off the charts in 2020. The long term effects of these lockdowns will have a severe impact on both adults and children.Instances of depression, anxiety, developmental and social delays are all likely increasing behind closed doors. By May of 2020, just a few months in from the real start of SARS-COV-2 in America, prescriptions for anti-anxiety medicines spiked 34%. Prescriptions for antidepressants shot up equally as high. Feelings of isolation and uncertainty about the world, along with the reduction of social networks, groups, churches, family, and friends, all have taken a toll on the collective American conscience. The fact is that the connections people usually make to loved ones and supportive communities have been impacted dramatically this year. Though we struggle to build and find new ways to connect and new ways to keep busy and continue to learn and grow, like a plant, we need the light of each other to thrive truly.Most of us will be just fine over the long arc of time. Some of the most vulnerable, the very young, the very old, and those who were fragile to begin with will not be. Even worse, those who were severely unstable and only held somewhat in check by the constraints and checks of a social order could potentially become even more isolated and disturbed. Stoked divisions, conflicts, and vastly divergent ideologies will only further some of these individual’s declines.Keep your head about you and learn from this year’s lockdowns what you need to encourage your own mental health. Read, take up a home hobby, learn a skill, get fresh air when you can, exercise, call friends on the phone or the computer, seek out those vital connections that keep us feeling grounded and part of a broader community. Don’t give in to the feelings of being alone, but strive to build new relationships. Comment in the comments section below and tell us what you’re doing and your best advice to keep sane. If 2021 is worse than 2020 has been, we will be thankful to hear from you.6- BankruptcyAs a result of SARS-COV-2, consumer spending has dropped to record lows, and unemployment briefly reached the highest levels since the Great Depression. As a result, many experts have projected a massive number of consumer and business bankruptcy filings in the coming months. Some businesses have shuttered for good. Some people are on the cusp of the worst economically challenging times they have ever experienced. Millions have been forced into early retirement as businesses were quickly restructured. Recent college graduates are facing a job market with few prospects. Millions of unemployed are finding a shortage of openings as companies struggle to get by and pass on expanding their workforces. Older workers are finding companies less willing to hire for experience since so many business models have been flipped on their head during the pandemic. Perhaps the worst hit has been small business owners. Small businesses employ 47.3% of the U.S. private workforce, and many small businesses have simply not been able to survive through these difficult times.The Paycheck Protection Act and the CARES Act provided a boost in the form of loans to small businesses, but those funds are drying up, and Congress remains deeply divided on the best approach to keep the economy from sinking. Even with a stimulus lifebuoy in 2021, many, many businesses will still fail.This crisis could dramatically worsen in 2021. There isn’t much you can do to save the small businesses except to seek them out and spend your money there. The real impact of these bankruptcies, assuming they aren’t directly occurring with you, are fewer jobs and fewer choices. Fewer dollars spent in the community you live in, and the more that flies out of the community, the fewer tax dollars and revenue generated. Infrastructures supported with tax dollars suffer. Critical safety nets suffer from a lack of funding. So if it’s within your means to support your local business, try to do so.7- National DebtThe hunger crisis, housing insecurity, shutdowns and unemployment, a rise in crime, mental health suffering, and bankruptcy are mainly at the community level. They are all very local to us. They either compound and impact our community as a whole or are more likely to impact our lives personally. The last four factors discussed here are on a larger scale. They are threats we face at a national level. They are threats that will be with us for years to come.The first is the national debt. It was Milton Friedman, the economist, who had said “if your choice is a bigger deficit with lower taxes and a smaller government, or a smaller deficit with higher taxes and a bigger government, always go for a bigger deficit.” Many presidents, politicians, and chairs of the Fed have shared that philosophy, so we have gotten in the habit of borrowing and printing money against an uncertain future.It has been so bad that by the end of 2020, the amount of debt owed by the United States will amount to a whopping 98 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Imagine if, for every hundred dollars you had, 98 of those dollars were borrowed, and you only earned 2 of them. That isn’t sustainable for a year, let alone for decades, but amidst a deepening global crisis, the need to borrow even further has increased our debt by almost 20% more than just last year. The exponential growth in debt year after year accelerates the next immediate threat– the weakening dollar.Over the next decade and into the foreseeable future, prepare for taxes to be increased. If you can learn to reduce your personal debt and find ways to either increase your monthly income or cut your living expenses, this will serve you well in the long run. 8- Weakening DollarBanks can refuse to lend you money because you have over-borrowed and don’t earn enough to pay back your debt. Businesses might refuse your check if they think it’s likely it could bounce. Even your friends might not want to accept money from you if they know 98% of it is borrowed. In the same way, our financial standing internationally will be impacted as countries see the U.S. Dollar becoming increasingly problematic as a reserve currency due to our heavy debt. Historically, the dollar has had few challenges and has been able to remain unscathed as the fiat currency of choice. That may be changing now as other countries are recovering faster than the United States from the global recession in which we all find ourselves. Their currencies will put pressure on the dollar. The fact is that America is so dependent upon foreign manufacturing and resources from other countries that when the dollar weakens and the imports cease to flow, we would all be staring down the barrel of a very prolonged economic collapse. Suppose confidence in the dollar ever erodes so much that it is replaced by another currency or a combination of other stronger currencies or DeFi technologies like cryptocurrency. In that case, it might never realize its former strength again.Like the previous point, begin to consider your long term financial plan. For us personally, we’ve begun to diversify my investments into other assets, such as precious metals, cryptocurrency, and real estate, a subject which we’ll cover in a blog we’ll be releasing soon. The key here is to begin investing in yourself and educating yourself for other options that give you options should the dollar continue its slide on the global stage.9- Natural DisastersBeyond the local, immediate threats and the national threats, we can’t forget the reason many of us started prepping to begin with–natural disasters. In 2020 wildfires in Australia and California set new destructive records, displaced thousands of people, and decimated wildlife and plant life. The Atlantic hurricane season was also record-breaking. It started early and ended with a trio of storms in late October and November. 2020 also saw an Easter tornado outbreak, a somewhat rare occurrence of 100 plus tornadoes in a short period of time. And, 2020 was the first year I and many others learned what a derecho is. This year’s derecho destroyed most of the corn and soybean crops throughout Ohio.Inevitably in the comment section, people will debate about the root contributing factors to these events– human made or cyclical on a millennial-scale–, that’s not the point here; one thing we should all probably agree upon is that these ecological disasters aren’t likely to subside in 2021. They may increase in strength and frequency.The whole point of this is to encourage people to prepare. If you haven’t begun to take this seriously, we’re not sure what else there is left to convince you at this point. This will take a slightly different approach next year in that we will be focusing on the more practical, basic elements of emergency preparedness and things you can do to prepare. Expect to see a lot of practical, informational videos in the coming year to help you prepare no matter what level you currently are in your preparedness.10- COVID-19The real unknown in 2020 that some of us in the community have been warning about for several years now has been COVID-19. There are so many origin theories and plot lines about this strain of coronavirus that the real threats of COVID-19 are often being lost. This virus has a high measure of spread and higher than the average flu case-fatality rate. Given those two things, we’ll let others debate the shape of the clouds while we batten down the hatches.There are several new considerations about the new vaccines coming out, and we will do a whole blog on that this month. What has been claimed is that the new vaccines, from both Pfizer and Moderna, allege an incredible success rate, and 40 million doses will be ready by the end of this year. That sounds like a lot, but the vaccines require two doses– one a few weeks after the first dose. That would be enough to vaccinate the three million people who live in long-term-care facilities, as well as most, but not all, of the country’s 21 million health care workers. In the February and March timeframe, people over the age of 65 could start to be vaccinated. April through June, the rest of the Americans could receive it. Assuming the vaccine truly works and has no significant side effects and that enough people volunteer to receive the vaccine, we could slow the transmission and seriousness of SARS-COV-2 by the end of 2021. That means we would be living with it and the effects of it throughout this next year. As at the beginning of this outbreak, there are quite a few unknowns. Be prepared for extended lockdowns well into 2021. This issue will not go away even if an effective vaccine is rolled out and people willingly take it. Prepare your finances accordingly for the possibility that it may be well into 2021 before we see any semblance of normality.ConclusionFrom hunger to poverty to natural disasters, twenty-twenty-one could be at least as odd and disruptive as twenty-twenty was. Many of the things that will happen in 2021 we can’t stop or prevent. What we can do, however, is position ourselves to survive the catastrophes that befall us, individually and collectively, and tend to our piece of the world. We can look at the possibilities of 2021, but we shouldn’t forget the promise, as well. One thing that 2020 has taught many and is maybe the reason you find yourself subscribing to a prepper channel like this now is that even a little planning can minimize the impact of disasters upon us when they do occur, and they will occur.As always, stay safe out there.
The ultra-rich are very different from us in many ways. Like it or not, they are at the head of the herd with their eyes on the horizon. Often they have occupations that require them to seek risk aversion for millions or billions of dollars of their own and other people’s assets. They are similar to us in that they are interested in self-preservation. They are focused on their survival and holding their wealth and power in perpetuity. So, why are they prepping in more significant numbers? Why are they buying homes in more stable countries, diversifying their assets in multiple economies, building bunkers in some cases, and planning their emergency escape routes and means? Do they know something we don’t? Do they see something on the horizon that we, in the middle or back of the herd, can’t yet see? They make their living by being forerunners, forward-thinkers. They read the tea leaves and try to predict the future, so what should we take from that when up to fifty percent or more have, at the very least, an escape plan? Should we take a signal from them and prepare as we can? Can we be better prepared than they are?1- What the Leaders of the Herd Know That We Don’tThe ultra-rich don’t work with their own money. They work with other people’s money. They avoid excessive taxation by moving their money to other countries. They keep their money for themselves. Even their philanthropic efforts are rewarded by society with substantial tax savings and returns, so much so that they profit from the act of giving. Lately, though, the ultra-rich have been expressing increasing nervousness about the world today. The CEO of LinkedIn recently said that well over fifty percent of the super-wealthy he knew had recently purchased safe escape houses far removed from civilization or in countries with more stable economies and societies like New Zealand.When afforded a long view of the horizon, it is easier to see that all nations rise and fall. All economies grow and fall. If all your money was in Greece a few years back, you lost out when their economy collapsed. If you have investments in the Middle East, some countries in Africa, Ukraine, or Turkey, you have had a front-row seat to how quickly assets can change hands or collapse. You have had a front-row seat to the fragility of economies. The chances are that neither you nor I have either the investments in foreign countries or the unique perspectives of the world that the ultra-rich do.While we may have a good understanding of how our town or city works, and we should be aware of politics at a national level after this last election season, the chances are our view of the real threats in the world are more at a micro-level. A prepper looks for the long threats that loom on the horizon and the immediate threats that hide around the corner. With their immediate surroundings well secured by walls and personal security, the ultra-rich have the luxury of looking more critically at the long threats on the horizon.2- Nations on the Verge of CollapseSteve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, is less focused on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath of “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. He is stocked up on motorcycles, guns, ammo, and food and plans on bunkering at his estate for as long as it takes for social order to be restored.In a recent interview, he stated, “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now. I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work.”He is not alone in his thinking, either. Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.People who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now. It isn’t new. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent investor, has estimated that over fifty percent of the people he knows also have a plan for a cataclysmic event, whether that is escaping to New Zealand or remodeling a Cold War missile silo in Nebraska. For years, the wealthy have hidden their money away in offshore accounts, made land purchases far away from government restrictions, and in areas with little access. As public institutions deteriorate, élite anxiety has emerged as a gauge of our national predicament. They understand that the dollar can collapse. They know nothing gold can stay. They understand that the cultural and socio-economic divide is wider today than it has ever been in our lifetimes, and that our nation, as strong as it may seem and as long as it has endured, is as fragile a union as any nation. For example, in the first 7 days after Donald Trump’s election, thirteen-thousand-four-hundred-one Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. How many more registered throughout the last four years, and how many will register in New Zealand and elsewhere over the next four years? Internally, externally, revolutionary, or apocalyptically, they understand these machinations cause nations to rise and fall. They see it played out globally with other countries and ask themselves, “Why not here?” Like countless other nations, if our nation gets pulled apart, what’s going to be your plan? As the economic divide becomes glaringly more apparent every day, the “have nots” who pay taxes will increasingly become more aware that the “haves” pay no taxes. As nation-states experience a sharp drop in revenue, as they have due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but retain the unfunded liabilities and inflated expectations and social spending inherited from the industrial era, tax consumers will be the losers. As they lose out, they will lash out against the rich, so the rich prepare themselves for this possibility. Areas of opportunity and security will shift. Economies that have been rich during the Industrial Era may well be subject to deflation of living standards and social unrest as governments prove incapable of guaranteeing prosperity as entitlement programs collapse. So, what can we take from their observations and their fears of our fragile and strained social and economic orders that compel them to prep at ever-increasing numbers?3-Natural Tendency to Seek Risk AversionWe share a natural tendency to seek risk aversion. Whether that is protecting our company’s online gaming servers from hurricanes in Barbados or protecting our families from a home invasion, our natural tendency as human beings is to assess threats, both seen and unseen, and reduce these threats to our security. A risk-averse investor is an investor who prefers lower returns with known risks rather than higher returns with unknown risks. The super-wealthy often protect millions and billions of dollars of their own and other assets. Their natural inclination is to hedge their bets and minimize risk. Most preppers are, by nature, risk-averse as well. They prefer the lower profile returns of well-stocked supplies and food stores over flashier but less useful purchases. The prepper typically puts more faith in a well-made tool and the knowledge and skills to use it over something that, realistically, can be used a handful of times.While the average prepper can’t purchase a private off-the-grid island, refurbish a cold-war missile silo, or even buy secluded acreage to build a bug out home, the need to secure a geographical location is essential to long term survival. The first location to secure is your own home or residence. Understand your home in terms of defensible perimeters, lines of sight, and zones of control. You may not have an acre long driveway, but you probably have a walkway or hallway that leads to your front door. There are several blogs on CityPrepping that cover securing your home.The second is having a bugout location if you find yourself in a genuinely SHTF situation. Again, you do not have to have the resources to buy and build on the best and most secluded acreage. In an awful case necessitating your need to bugout, you are not going to be able to pitch a tent on someone else’s land, either. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t find a location secluded and off the beaten path enough that you could hide out if the world is falling apart. Is there a network of caves you once visited as a child? Do you have in your supplies and skills what you would need to survive, on your own and independently, hidden away from the eyes of others or the scrutiny of the government? Without a bugout location, even one you don’t own, you become a victim of the herd. When the military forces you for the common good in one direction or the other, you have no choice. To prevent this, make sure that you have a good paper map and a few good ideas. Maybe even plan and practice a route or two. Just like the ultra-rich, you should have a plan for hunkering down and protecting yourself as well as a strategy to escape to safer locations.4-How You Are Better Off Than the RichAs different as some of us may seem from the ultra-rich, we share several critical outlooks and are better off in some ways. If we went down a tick list of things to prep for, they would be similar, but maybe structured differently: civil unrest, terrorism, the collapse of the economy, EMPs, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and so forth. Our abilities to prep for each one are disparate. Let’s face it; we won’t be able to evacuate with our pilot and her family to our tropical island. In some ways, though, we are better off. First, we have the opportunity to do it for ourselves. In an actual grid-down situation or one where the economy has completely collapsed, no amount of stored weapons will compensate for the skill of hunting and fishing. Still, a person familiar with a Remington 760 and where a game trail is will be the richest man in a grid down situation. As we have said before, knowing how to fish is more important than all the best of the best tackle. Do you know medicine, how to cook, sew or knit, brew beer, or make cheese? If you do, your value just went way up.Second, we have a more significant opportunity to build networks and communities. While bringing a great deal to the table with their hoarded stores, the ultra-rich have a more challenging time building a network of skilled individuals. Whom should they, whom could they trust? Whom could they let into their secure compounds? How long until even the most secure of their compounds is overrun by sheer numbers of people looking to survive? Yet, the average person has a better read on his fellow average person. You can more keenly assess someone’s value to your network. You can better determine how the average person might help you to leverage the resources of an area. It’s your fellow person in your prepping community that is likely to ride to your rescue when the chips are down. It isn’t going to be the remotely compounded ultra-rich, former silicon valley executive with his tricked out bug-out vehicle hardened against EMPs.Finally, as far as the ultra-rich’s long vision reaches, it is far removed from the middle of the pack, the day-to-day, what we see, and what we know. So, while we should be aware that the ultra-rich are prepping in extraordinary numbers right now for many reasons, it’s important to note that they may not be prepping for the right scenarios. They are prepping to try and maintain a lifestyle. You are prepping to survive in the worst of calamities. There is a difference, even if just a subtle one.ConclusionWe can’t exactly hop our private jet with the pilot’s family and flee to our isolated sanctuary. We can: have escape routes to safer places, have a grab-and-go-bag, have the means to purify water, have a skill that brings value to the table. COVID-19 has initiated both the rich and poor to the prepper community. As the rich and the poor and the middle-income folks realize how hard isolation and independent survival can be, we all seek the Ultimum Refugio, the last resort, the last refuge. We are collectively aware of the hurdles we face. Now is the time to double down on your efforts. As recent times have demonstrated, food and supply shortages can reach even the most affluent neighborhoods. The only insulation from a disaster that you have is your knowledge and preparedness. Neither of those depends upon your income. So, yes, the wealthy are prepping for reasons to which we should pay attention. You should be prepping, as well, and the odds are better in your favor, even though the resources you have may be less.As always, please stay safe out there.
The winter storm rages outside, and the power grid goes down for an extended time. The temperature in your house or apartment is dropping, and the roads are impassable. If the power is down for just a day, you will probably be fine, but you will need to know what you can do to survive if days turn into weeks. Do you have the right things in your prepper supplies to survive an extended period of sub-zero temperatures indoors? Do you know what you need to do immediately to increase your odds of long term survival?1- Move to One RoomIf you are an urban dweller, when the power goes out, your heat probably goes out too. Thanks to insulation and objects around your apartment retaining heat, the temperature won’t drop to the outside temperature right away; however, you need to take precautions against losing your dwelling’s warmth and keeping the cold out. If you feel that the outage may go on for some time or after a major disaster happens and you know power won’t be back for a while, you will want to move to one room of the home, likely near the kitchen. In this way, if you cook, you will also be generating heat in your environment. The room you choose should not have vaulted ceilings and should be sealed off from places that do. Your home’s heat will race to the highest point in your home, so you will want to seal the loss of air at the tops of doors and doorways as well as at the bottom.Immediately seal windows, cracks under doors, and doors to hallways and other rooms. Sealing off the room can be accomplished with blankets or towels, a tarp, but even plastic sheeting or garbage bags affixed with painter’s tape can hold back pockets of cold air and stop the flow out of warm air. Any covered windows with direct sunlight you will want to uncover during full sun hours, as the direct sunlight can significantly warm your room.Likely, your windows are already closed, but make sure the doors to other rooms are closed as well. You want to slow the exchange of warm and cold air. The second law of thermodynamics is entropy. That is to say that the warm interior of your home will lose heat to the cold exterior until equilibrium is achieved. That equilibrium is the outside temperature because Mother Nature is always more powerful. To combat this, you want to leverage insulation and stop the points where cold and warm air is exchanging.If you are near the kitchen, as we advise, you will want to put your faucet on at a drip. Flowing water, even at a slow rate, is less likely to freeze. If icicles start forming from the droplets, you will have a good indicator of how cold it is getting in your home. You may also consider placing a small candle under the long section of the faucet’s spout assembly. Water is precious, so make sure it is dripping into a container, and let that container be your reminder to stay hydrated.2- Layer Up and Pull Out the GearOf course, pull out the clothes and layer up. You will want to slow the exchange of heat between your body and the exterior air. There are three main layers and three special considerations. Your base layer wicks away moisture and can be as light as silk or as breathable as cotton. Your mid-layer insulates and retains body heat. And your outer layer really protects you from the outside elements, but indoors it creates another barrier between you and the temperatures outside. The three special considerations are your head, hands, and feet. Make sure you have gloves on whenever possible. Double layer your socks. Wear a hat to help you retain heat. You lose ten percent of your body heat through your head, so make sure you have your head covered. Don’t wait to feel cold before you layer up.You should also plan to move into the room your prepper supplies, food stores enough to last at least a week, water, camping supplies, and every blanket you own. Now might be the time to do your prepping inventory since you will have little else to do in a snow storm. As odd as it may sound, you should pitch your tent. Tents are designed to retain some heat within them. At the very least, they further slow the exchange between cold and warm air. If you are in your home, in your layers, in your tent, and your sleeping bag, it would have to get well below freezing in your apartment before you became at risk of hypothermia. Your tent can create a microclimate significantly warmer than the room it is in and tremendously warmer than the outdoors.Emergency blankets are excellent reflectors of heat, so they reflect your own body’s heat back to you. Unfortunately, they leak out the sides and are difficult to wrap tightly around yourself. You can use them as great vapor locks on your windows. You can also cut a hole in the center and use tape on the sides to create a highly effective poncho for yourself.3-Creating WarmthIf you cannot leave your apartment or home for over a week during and following a winter storm and a grid down situation, you will need to prioritize warmth. Your body is the most efficient heat generator, and we will cover that in a moment, but you will want to generate heat in your living space to combat the temperatures outside.Even with the power out, you may still have natural gas flowing. You will need to use a match or lighter since electric starters will not be working. There are indoor safe propane heaters available. Even with these, though, and with all indoor flames of any kind, you should have water or fire extinguisher nearby, and you absolutely should have a carbon monoxide detector. Even the cleanest of fuels give off some carbon monoxide, and CO2 can build-up as well. When cooking or heating with open flames, even cracking a window a half-inch can bring in the fresh air and vent some of the carbon monoxides. Take this seriously as many people pass away annually due to carbon monoxide poisoning.There are several options for heating and open flames. Not everyone has a fireplace. You may have seen the isopropyl alcohol-soaked toilet paper roll in a paint can. We would only suggest that if you are truly desperate, as the flames can be unruly and dangerous, even with the addition of rocks on top. A simpler option is several tea candles in a paint or coffee can. We like this method because you can easily store over a hundred tea candles in a paint can in your prepper supplies. Each tea candle will burn for about three hours, and you only need about six in the bottom of your paint can to create enough heat with which to cook. Hurricane or prayer candles can also be grouped to provide you a higher concentration of heat that will last much longer than the tea candles– an incredible three to four days. Inverting a flower pot with foil inside or placing a pot or pan above the flame will create a radiating heat source and increase the candles’ or tea lights’ warming effects. Even a can of Crisco or jar of tallow with a wick in it will provide you some light and heat enough to warm liquids.You may also have cans of Sterno or Safe Heat in your camping or prepping supplies. You can pick up a case of twelve of these little cans for around twenty dollars. Again, while these give off significantly fewer harmful chemicals and gasses, any flame at all is going to give off carbon monoxide gasses, so you should remain aware of this and take precautions. These can provide up to six hours of heat sufficient enough with which to cook. Whatever your option or solution is, always give special consideration to any open flames within your house.We often think we need a raging fire or a blasting furnace to raise a room’s temperature. That simply is not true. If your room is well sealed from the exchange of warm and cold air, even a few small flames can maintain or even slightly raise a small room’s internal temperature. Time, consistency, location, and spread are critical factors for raising a room’s temperature. That is how long the heat source is lasting, at what constant high temperature it is functioning, where it is positioned, and how much heat is radiant. None of these solutions will create a sauna in your home or make it feel like the tropics, but the key here is to lose as little heat as possible compared to the outside and to retain as much of the heat as you can. Any net gain in temperature is a plus.Finally, when heating or cooking, try to keep these activities to the early part of the day if your resources are limited. You will sleep warmly in a tent and sleeping bag through the night, but you will feel the cold the most in the early hours.4-Food, Exercise, & HealthThink of your heat source as also a source of light and cooking. You want to always have heated water on hand. A hot water bottle will retain and emit heat for hours. Tea, coffee, or any hot or warm liquid will warm you and lessen the degree to which your body has to work to generate its heat. Heat soup or chili, or Ramen to warm your home and feed your body’s furnace.You will need to make sure you are eating enough to give your best heat generator your own body, what it needs to keep you warm. If you were on a vanity diet and not on a diet for health reasons, you need to postpone that now. Providing your body the fuel it needs to regulate body temperature is the most important thing now. Snacking on candy or carbohydrate-rich chips will have to be okay because these provide your body with easy fuels to burn. When it comes to your body temperature, you want to keep your body neither too hot nor too cold. As stable as you can keep your temperature, the better. If you have ever been so cold that you could say it was “in your bones,” what likely occurred was your body’s internal thermostat was shocked and triggered enough to kick into high gear. To regulate itself again took time, no matter how many hot baths you took afterward. Your internal temperature regulation is incredibly stable, but you need to make sure it doesn’t get shocked too far in any direction–either cold or hot.If you are fortunate enough to have natural gas in the early days of an electrical grid-down, take advantage of the opportunity to bake cookies and loaves of bread. Try that homemade jerky recipe that will keep your oven on low for hours. Cooking will heat your house and provide you a source of carbohydrates. Don’t just cook the one loaf, either. You should cook two or three at a time. You could trade the bread with neighbors or eat it yourself. Once it has cooled, store it in a window sill, and it will keep for an extended period. As a heating source with your home sealed off pretty well, even a stovetop can warm a room. The oven is a radiant box of consistent heat. When you are finished cooking, crack the oven’s door and let the remaining heat flow into the room. You may not have the luxury of natural gas. If you live in an urban environment, a prolonged period of no electricity may cause the flow of natural gas to stop, so cook early and in abundance as soon as the power goes out.Some light exercise, physical games, or anything to elevate the heart rate and body temperature will benefit you greatly. Twenty minutes of activity will elevate body temperature for up to an hour afterward. Light exercise will also clear your mind, keep you focused, and keep your mood high.If the grid down situation lasts more than a week, the chances are very high that water flow will stop. Municipal sources will struggle with broken pipes, and many require electricity for pumping water. In apartments, your flow of hot water from the boilers in the basement could end as soon as day one. Flushing a toilet may not be possible, but you will still need to remove biological waste for health reasons. A bucket toilet and trash bags are an excellent method to do this. It’s worked for moms and children everywhere, from parking lots to campouts, so that it will work for you as well.Eat, drink, exercise, and remove waste. Feed your brain with a good book or a game. If you live in a family, it is easier to entertain yourself. You may have a trusted neighbor friend you might want to welcome into your warm home for a short period. You will benefit from each other’s warmth and cheer.ConclusionIf you live in a home, there are many other considerations we don’t cover in this blog, like draining your water heater and toilet tanks. We have focused on more of the urban dweller because even in the suburbs and exurbs, some people have their own propane tanks or solar sources for some electricity. Though we have focused more on the urban dweller, expand upon the basics, we provide here and do other research to develop an indoor cold weather survival plan of your own. Once you have a plan developed, take a weekend and shut your heat off. Give it a trial run and see what you may have overlooked, what worked well for you, and what you still need to do to be prepared. Just as you might chop wood for fires through the winter if you lived in the country, the urban dweller needs to prepare for extended periods of cold. Invest in plastic sheeting and painter’s tape. Purchase and store some tea candles, emergency candles, and cooking cans. Even a Kelly Kettle like what I carry on my website or a teapot and camping cooking system will benefit you greatly. Get a high quality insulated sleeping bag and emergency blankets, and don’t be afraid of pitching your tent indoor. If the power goes out and the temperature outside keeps dropping, you can insulate yourself and survive for as long as you have to.As always, please stay safe out there.
A subscriber with the username “waibelr” commented on one of our blogs, saying, “A topic I haven’t heard discussed before…is how your body reacts during a sudden diet change. We think that there’s an assumption out there that calories are calories, and as long as you have them, you’re OK.” We wanted to highlight that observation in this video, where we will explore some of the dietary effects of sudden diet changes on our physical and mental health. It is our brain, after all, that makes the critical decisions for the body, and the body that carries the brain to safety. If our bodies falter or our cognitive abilities diminish because of a rapid diet shift like you might see after a disaster when you turn to your food stores or try to find food sources, your chances of survival decrease. You may think you’re making good choices or be so confused you can’t make that critical decision that will save your life at that moment. Obviously, in a dire situation, you will eat whatever you can get your hands on, but in your planning for a disaster or amidst the struggle to survive, understanding how proper nutrition and a regular diet increases your odds of survival can be critical. So, what are the effects of dietary stress on our survival? This blog will cover four main things studies tell us about a rapid change in diet.1- The Body Reacts“A feeling of weakness took the place of hunger. Conscious of the need of food, I felt no cravings. Occasionally, while scrambling over logs and through thickets, a sense of faintness and exhaustion would come over me, but I would suppress it with the audible expression, ‘This won’t do; I must find my company.’” So wrote Truman Everts in Thirty-Seven Days of Peril about being lost in Yellowstone in the 1870s. Evert survived, but he, in desperation, caught a small bird and ate it raw and hallucinated from malnutrition and exposure. Whether we have an abundance of food that we are just not used to eating or starving and desperate for food after a catastrophe, the effects on the body and brain can be the same. When the body suffers from either a lack of nutrition or experiences a sudden shift in diet, our cognitive function can suffer. The decisions we make in a survival situation are critical, and so we need to look at our food preps with nutrition in mind. Calories simply replacing calories will not guarantee our survival. Our brains and bodies need the proper balance of nutrition and fluids to minimize the shock of sudden dietary changes resulting from disasters.If you have ever been on a Keto diet, which is an extremely low carbohydrate diet, you are probably aware of keto flu and the accompanying brain fog of carbohydrate deprivation. Extreme carbohydrate decreases can make us feel like we have the early onset of the flu, making us feel foggy and lightheaded. When your calories or carbohydrates are restricted, the first source of energy your body burns – long before fat – is glycogen. Glycogen is a form of carbohydrate stored in the liver and muscles. Attached to every gram of glycogen is water. So when you burn through all of your glycogen, the adjoining water exits the body. This is why people will lose weight suddenly on these diets. The water gets flushed from the body.A different problem occurs when we suddenly shift to a heavy carbohydrate diet like those stored rice and beans in our prepping supplies. Like a heavy thanksgiving meal, we feel bloated and sleepy. Add to this that the higher fiber and carbohydrate content requires more fluid for our bodies to process, and water may be a limited resource in a survival situation. You may be flirting with the early effects of dehydration, as well.The fact is that drastic and immediate diet shifts can lead to dehydration, massive fluctuations in blood sugar levels, muscle breakdown, a slowing of metabolism, and short-term and long-term brain impairments. In an incredibly stressful survival situation where you are also under constant duress or sleep deprivation, the stress hormone corticosterone can help you survive but will increase your ongoing stress responses and depression. Neither of those is suitable for clear decision making.So, when thinking about your survival basics in your supplies or if you find yourself needing to acquire food and water to survive, even before your caloric considerations, consider these two groupings: SOLIDS, your carbs, proteins, and energy density, and LIQUIDS, which is obviously water but will be your best vehicle for transporting electrolytes, sodium, and sugar to your body. And consider both the liquids and solids as they relate to your diet right now, when you’re not under the stress of a catastrophe.After all, is what you are eating now similar to what you would be eating from your prepping supplies?2- SolidsWe lump, pun intended, solids into one category, but the category composes your carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and caloric density, often referred to as the “energy” of the food. As we said, though, calories are just one consideration and not the only concern. Caloric density or energy is the number of calories your body can process out of the food. If you are forced to survive on leafy greens you forage for, you are at the lowest range of the density scale. Though your iron and trace minerals will be high, your calories and energy to burn will be low. On the high end of the scale, you would find peanuts, butter, and oils. Truman Everts, who survived those 37 days in the wilderness, was given a pint of oil rendered from bear fat when he was found. That provided him a high caloric and fatty emergency restorative to his body. The next day his diet was restored, and he felt considerably better. A shot of olive oil might sound crazy, but it could provide you with the essential fats you need to maintain brain function. For instance, on the keto diet, MCT oil, or Medium Chain Triglycerides, coconut-derived oil is recommended for combating brain fog. Even homemade ghee, derived from butter, has a shelf life of up to a year or more and can provide you with the caloric density and essential fats your body and brain needs. Whatever you choose, make sure to have some type of complex oil in your prepping stores for when you need it. If you’re caught out in the cold, know that you will need to seek out, at some point early on, foods with high caloric content.As we mentioned earlier, carbohydrates are critical to your survival, and too many or too few in your diet can dramatically affect mood, brain, and body function. Suppose you are turning to your emergency food supplies. In that case, you are likely dramatically increasing your carbohydrates, so you have to be aware of the increased fluid requirements, the metabolic slowing effects, and the possible digestive impact of the increased fiber. It would be hard to run from a disaster if you’re dehydrated, or you need to stop to go to the bathroom, or you are suffering from gastro distress. If you are foraging or fleeing disaster, realize that the lack of carbohydrates could affect your ability to think clearly and have enough energy. Forage for that bag of chips. Oats, grains, even a snack bag of corn chips can provide you with an essential amount of carbs to get you through.The final component of this solids category is protein. If you have too little protein, your body will turn to glycogen and begin to cannibalize muscle to get at it. Before it gets to this point, though, it’s going to attack more aggressively your body’s stored fat. You can survive for an extended period without protein, specifically, but your body will begin to cannibalize itself for the proteins it needs after just a few days without it. If you watch any of the popular survivor shows on television, you will see the effects of low protein diets and starvation are very apparent around day twenty. At this point, you are behind the curve and continually trying to make up for lost protein intake, and your body requires more stable nutrients in regular supply to realign itself. The most significant effect of low protein will manifest itself in the form of repressed metabolism. Your body will slow down to preserve energy. When you need to be active and alert, you will be, instead, tired and lethargic.When you think of proteins, likely meat, eggs, and milk come to mind. Those can be hard to come by in a grid down situation, and jerky will require greater fluid intake to process. However, protein can be found in a wide range of foods you might not immediately consider. These include: mushrooms, beans, sunflower seeds, nuts, lentils, peas, or pasta. All of these have more protein than meat or eggs. We recommend TVP, texturized vegetable protein, powdered peanut butter, dried mushrooms, beans, peas, and pasta in your prepping supplies. Though, if you hate mushrooms or can’t eat peanuts or soy, never eat pasta, or eat too few beans that you can’t handle the gastro effects, you will want to either start incorporating more in your diet now or you will want to stock proteins similar to the ones you eat in healthy, calmer times. Again, you want to avoid shocking your body further in your struggle to survive.What’s your go-to carbohydrate, fat, or protein?3-LiquidsA human can go without food for about three weeks but would typically only last three to four days without water. While water is the king of all liquids, to survive, you need to think of fluids as the carrier of other substances like sugars and salts, the conduit for smooth neural network firing, and the necessary component to aid in the processing of all the solids you take into your body. If you only eat dry beans and dry jerky, you will be dehydrating yourself in the process. Potassium, sodium, and calcium are electrolytes or salts that help conduct electric currents in the body. Chemically, electrolytes are substances that become ions in solution and acquire the capacity to conduct electricity. To fire on all cylinders, you need to have an electrolyte balance in your body. You may not need to add salt to any of your pre-prepared survival foods, as they tend to be high in salt as a preservative so that you will get enough. However, for long term survival, you’ll want the components to make a super hydrating electrolyte formula. This is water, table salt, baking soda, and potassium chloride like Morton’s Lite Salt. One and a half teaspoons of it to four cups of water and your electrolytes will be in balance. Your hydration will be maintained better. Your brain and muscles will continue to function and fire off their electricity with minimal disruption. If you add some sugar in the mix and a powdered fruit flavor, you have made your own Gatorade. However much you consume of your electrolyte solution, whether you make it yourself or buy a pre-made mix for your bug out bag and supplies, drink the equivalent amount of just plain water to guarantee hydration. When it comes to sugars, your body will suffer from a lack of sugar even before some of the other effects. You can die quite quickly from lack of sugar, and even before death, low blood sugar can result in impaired thinking, body weakness, and passing out. Know the sugars in nature from some plants and make sure you have hard candies on hand. You may remember that tray of hard candies your grandmother had for years and years. They were still good to eat and a source of critical sugars, though probably not your preferred go-to treat at grandma’s house. Having both sugar and hard candy in your prepping supplies will help you to stay alert, awake, and clear thinking. When it comes to sugars, too, remember that starches are complex sugars. Our bodies can break those complex starch chains down into simple sugars, which the body can then breakdown into glucose. We don’t want to have a whole science lesson here, but starchy foods like dried and powdered potatoes, rice, cereals, oats, and other grains, are going to help your body get the sugars it needs as well as the carbohydrates. Consider having dried and powdered potatoes in your prepping supplies, and eat that bag of chips when you’re on the road trying to survive a calamity.When it comes to hydration and survival, think of all the forms of hidden water around you. Most canned vegetables are packed in a mix of sodium and water. Drinking green bean juice doesn’t sound enjoyable, but it could keep you alive. Canned fruit is usually packed in a simple syrup of sugar and water. You can survive on that. If you never drink sugary sodas, in a crisis, diets are secondary to hydration, so drink whatever you can. Even wine or beer or alcohol is partly water. If you are concerned about the dehydrating or intoxicating effects of alcohol, you can heat it to reduce or eliminate the alcohol. Alcohol begins to evaporate at 172 degrees Fahrenheit, but water doesn’t reach a boiling point until 212 Fahrenheit. Basically, after about an hour of a temperature around 190 degrees and a quick boil for five minutes or so, you will considerably reduce the alcohol content in a bottle of wine. It won’t be gone entirely, as that takes more time, but you will reduce the alcohol’s impairment effects and increase the ratio of water to alcohol. Give the same treatment to a beer, which is of even lower alcohol content, and you significantly reduce the alcohol to water ratio and gain a healthy dose of vitamin B. Also, diluting the heat-treated beer or wine with water will further weaken the alcohol’s effects and provide you with the critical hydrating liquids your body requires.Finally, you should know and begin noting the odd places around you where water can be found. What plants grow in your area that you could chew to extract water from but maybe don’t want to eat in large quantities? Never drink water from water beds or radiators because of the chemicals added to condition the water, but that neighbor’s swimming pool has water that can be purified and consumed, as nasty as that may seem.What’s your hidden source of water, sugar, or salt?4-Know Your Body and Know Your EdgesHow long can you go without food when you wake up tomorrow? How cranky will you be if you skip a meal? What are the effects of drinking a pint of water, first thing, every morning for a week? Do you feel different? How? Answer these questions for yourself during these quiet times to know how your body reacts with foods and water or without food and water. At what point do you feel foggy, and your thinking feels unclear? How many hours did that take, and what does that feel like? Recognize it because understanding your nutritional requirements could be the choice between life or death in a survival situation. The decisions you make in a crisis are that critical–that serious, but you have to have the right nutrition and fluids to make the best decision.Also, know and begin noting the sources for these various components of nutrition and hydration around you. Know where to find and how to purify water. Most people take for granted the foods around them, only knowing the calories of foods at best. Surviving well means much more than calories in and calories out. It’s about creating a stable energy source for your body and minimizing the jarring effects of nutritional shock, diet change, or increased activities due to the need to survive. You can’t just count your water, dry beans, ramen, hardtack, and rice when prepping your emergency supplies. Understand the solids and liquids we explored here and build out your home and bug out supplies from there. Put rock salt and rock candy sugar in your prepping supplies along with your pasta and water. Put dried mushrooms and dried potatoes in there with your powdered gravy and spices. The more you know and prepare now, the better your odds will be when the crisis or disaster is upon you.How long have you ever gone without a meal, and how did it affect you?ConclusionThere’s a lot more to consider than calories in and calories out, and our bodies are complex machines that require a delicate mix of fuels. Armed with this knowledge, take a good look at your food and liquid stores. Are you covering all your needs? Before you eat that next snack, ask yourself, what is in the food that your body is craving or needs? Know your fuels, how your body runs on them, and where to obtain them before you find yourself suffering the effects of dramatic metabolic changes, decreased cognitive abilities, even starvation.As always, please stay safe out there.
Several years ago, we made a blog on becoming the gray man–how to blend in and go unnoticed in public. Since then, we have talked to more experts in undercover, observational, and investigative work and learned even more about how people are discovered when trying to go unnoticed. So, we thought this would be an excellent time to expand upon that first blog and discuss four new keys to becoming a Gray Man. There may come a time when you or your family need to move unnoticed through a crowd, potentially during a time of civil unrest, to get to a bug out location or get home. Would you know how to blend in to not draw attention to yourself? Could you be invisible? Could you be the Gray Man?1- Know the BaselineIn the first blog, we discussed the baseline in the context of what is typical for a given environment. We recommended observing the environment and choosing clothes and actions that fit into that environment. Imagine the baseline as the smooth surface of a lake. What’s below is hidden. What is above is ordinary. If there is a disruption in the water, our attention is drawn toward the interruption. Our minds automatically begin to question the origin and intent of the disruption. Was it a fish, a bird, a rock falling, or a person? Genuinely knowing the baseline comes down to answering a few questions for yourself about whatever environment you are passing through before you find yourself there or while you are in it. First, what are the everyday activities of the location and the time of the day’s activities? Are you passing through a business district? Do you look like everyone else– coming from or going to work or out on their lunch break? Every area has a regularly scheduled pattern. Residential areas have people walking in the early mornings and early evenings, but not usually during midday. Cities have a flurry of activity before and after work and during lunch hours.Regarding clothing, if you’re in your military-style jacket because that’s part of your bugout gear, you will look very out of place. Consider what people carry their items in when they move through the area. Placing the military-style jacket and other items in a large retail store shopping bag, for instance, would make you look just like every other shopper in the area. Second, what is the economic and ethnic background of the region you are passing through at the moment? The more prosperous or more impoverished a neighborhood, the more likely you are to stand out. You will always want to choose the blandest and average clothing. Hiking boots in a business district will stand out. Move quickly and purposefully through any environment when you are dressed far from the baseline. Lingering in these environments begs people to question what you are doing. Walk at a determined but not too fast pace. Recognize the baseline of behavior for the area. Do you remember that person you saw that one time singing or shouting in the grocery store? Do you remember that beggar you saw that made you feel uncomfortable? Chances are you do many months later. We have a natural desire to avoid people whose behavior we believe to be less than sane or dangerous. At the same time, those people stand out to us because our brain puts us on alert to behavior outside of the baseline. If we were in the peaceful wilderness and suddenly heard branches breaking, it’s the same thing. However, in the cityscape, there is usually a cacophony that our minds interpret as a single drone. There is a kaleidoscope of imagery and color that our mind blends together to allow us to focus on precise details. So, we take in the sounds and imagery. Still, we don’t process the individual information unless our subconscious mind alerts us to incongruities, sounds, or images that rise above our personal, unconscious baselines and require further scrutiny from us. The majority of people go through their lives without really observing anything too unusual, and that is the key right there. If there isn’t someone screaming or singing on your subway train, the chances are you will remember very little about the ride later on in your day. If there isn’t someone running when everyone else in the area is walking, you likely won’t notice anything odd in the area. You probably won’t be able to recall any detail about anyone in particular. If everyone else is moving in one direction, say returning from a food area to work, you may look out of place moving against the grain of traffic. It would be better to maybe sit or stand in place, bury your head in a book or phone, and not risk appearing to have contrary behavior to the surroundings around you.2- Avoid the Observer and Be the ObserverIt is a woman, especially a mother, who will first see the lost child in a crowd. Most men, realistically, would walk by and not notice the child. Men who are fathers themselves are more likely to notice. The security guard whose job is to protect an area is most likely to see the out of place abandoned backpack or sketchy, nervous individual. Most people are below the observational baseline. It is natural for most individuals to drone out the sounds and images in every environment. Know that in every environment, there are people who are observing, and the Gray Man’s goal is to remain unobserved.Suppose you go to an area where people commonly meet up to go for lunch, like a statue or a significant street corner. People will be scanning the crowd for people with similar features to their friends, which means they are more apt to notice anything or anyone out of the ordinary. You will want to avoid these areas by skirting around them.Guards, door attendants, hostesses, retail kiosk staff, and, of course, police are conditioned to scan the crowds for familiar features. Guards may be looking for threats or just be checking people out in general. Door attendants are looking for features similar to the occupants of the buildings with which they are associated. Retail kiosk staff are looking for customers or individuals who can use their services or products. And, police officers have been trained to alert on suspicious individuals. A federal agent once told me that they always had to remind rookies to look at their shoes. Shoes are a significant identifier of socioeconomics and position. The undercover agent making a drug buy is likely out of place if wearing loafers. If you’re wearing a bulky jacket on a warm day, the police officer will be the first to notice. In one police manual, I have read that to determine if a suspect has an unholstered weapon, you only need to keenly observe the manner they walk and how they shift their weight. Identifying suspicious individuals just outside the baseline is part of their observational training.Assess the environment you are about to move through. Avoid making eye contact but look at where others are looking. Where are others observing the crowd? Who are the people actively looking, or where are those people most likely to be? Don’t be afraid to stop, look at your smartphone, for instance, and then move in another direction away from these observation points. Even to the trained and astute observer, it will just look like you forgot something or had a message which caused you to alter your pre-set plans.3-Go With The Flow and Have a PlanAlmost everyone you see has a plan. It’s the person who does not have a plan that we naturally question what they are doing. The tourist is sightseeing. A person may be going to the store, to work, on a date, out to eat, or with other specific purposes. The common element is that almost all the people functioning below the acceptable baseline are moving with purpose and according to a particular pattern and flow. The tourist and the couple on the date are not likely to be in any particular hurry. The person returning to work is typically moving to the business district and is moving more rapidly. The tourist may be stopping for a selfie. Almost everywhere these days, though, you can find people just standing and looking at their phones, and you can use that to your advantage. Stopping out of the flow of pedestrian traffic and looking down at your phone or a newspaper or book provides you the opportunity to assess the flow, look for would-be observers, and plan your route. People moving with the flow only observe you long enough to move past you. You are more an obstacle to avoid because you would impede their progress in their plan. So long as your stopping is not jarring to them, you will likely remain unnoticed. Ask yourself, what is your plan and purpose for moving through or standing still in an environment? Make sure that plan aligns with others in the area and falls below the observational baseline. Ask yourself what the flow patterns of the site are. Where are the highest concentrations of people? Where are they moving to, and how fast or slow are they moving there? How does the flow pattern change just one block over from where you are? What might someone in that environment be doing? The key to not being observed, here, is to become the observer. To blend in, you will want to understand the intents, movements, and types of people in your environment and then mimic those behaviors.When you are the observer, you will more easily pick up on others in the environment outside that baseline. The undercover police officer looking for someone in the crowd; the person staring at you because they were scanning the public for their friend and something about you alerted them; the person just watching for some unknown reason; any of these people will immediately pop to your attention when you are the observer of the baseline. You may see them before they see you. Pretend not to notice them if you note that they are directly observing you. Nonchalantly move from their line of vision and leave the area. Chances are their attention will re-focus away from you if you’ve only slightly risen above the baseline.4-Facial RecognitionThere are two real types of facial recognition. There is the kind we do with our eyes, and there is the kind that computers do. Here we will briefly look at both. It is natural for people to study faces, yet we view direct eye contact, just like animals, as a threat. If you want to test this theory, make and hold a stranger’s gaze. Within seconds of their recognition of it, the stranger will be questioning your intent. That long survivalist beard you have been growing might not stand out in your small town, but it will in the business district of a city. The dark sunglasses you wear as part of your disguise and concealment are out of place on a cloudy day, just as they are out of place at night. A cowboy hat in a city setting would look out of place, but a baseball cap of the local sports team falls under the baseline because people in the area are accustomed to seeing that. A hoodie may be out of place in one environment but perfectly natural in another. Subtly concealing your eyes, face, and head will keep you from being scrutinized by casual observers. Even if it is too dark for sunglasses, clear lens glasses can conceal the pupils and most of the eyes.Concealing your face is essential when you consider passive observational methods like electronic surveillance. Facial recognition software identifies key points on a face: the distance between pupils, the outer point of the eye or outer canthus, the inner point of the eyes or inner canthus, the center point between eyes or glabella, the tip of the nose, the philtrum, the nares, the chin, the points around the lips, and many more spots. The more points the software can identify and measure, the more accurate its identification will be. The uniqueness of our faces is as precise an identifier as our fingerprints. Our brains do the same measurements and identification, but we just don’t realize that they are doing it. And, just like our brains, the software has a baseline. It is either comparing those points to a set of matching parameters that it has to look for or recording the information for further comparisons.The next time you have a moment, as part of your exercises to become the Gray Man, pause and add up all of the active cameras in an area. How many CCTV domes do you see around banks, ATMs, parking structures, public parks, in front of doorways, and so forth? Imagine that they are all linked together. Does it provide a comprehensive view of an entire area? Likely, they are not all linked together at any given moment, but it only takes one of those cameras connected to software programmed to notice features or behavior outside of the typical baseline for bells and whistles to be triggered. Even irregular movements can trigger alerts in some software. Voice recognition software and drug dogs work in the same manner. Voice recognition software filters all noise and listens for the right voice or the correct phrases that trigger above the baseline. Drug dogs are not trained to alert on the perfumes someone uses to try and conceal their drugs. They are trained to alert on the drugs they are going to smell underneath that odor. All active and passive surveillance has a baseline. Understand where that is and what the likely triggers might be, then act accordingly.Looking down slightly is your best defense from both observer gazes and cameras. A hat then conceals many facial features. Sunglasses or glasses add some additional protection for your identifiable facial points. Right now, masks worn during what many consider an active pandemic are the Gray Man’s best friend. They conceal critical points on the nose, mouth, and chin. A few years back, wearing a mask would make you a focal point. Now, not wearing a mask is more likely to draw the observer’s gaze. Protect your face’s identification points like you protect your driver’s license if you hope to remain unseen.ConclusionYour ability to go unnoticed in both calm and chaotic environments depends on your ability to observe and emulate the baselines of appearance, behavior, and flow. Be the observer instead of the observed. Act as if you have a specific intent and direction, and move accordingly through the area. Be aware of your face and the identifiers it has. Do your best to conceal yourself within the natural parameters of the dress in the environment. Remember, the baseline is like the calm surface of the water. You will want to avoid anything that could disturb that calm surface and register with either people or software.As always, please stay safe out there.
Criminals can’t steal from you if they don’t know and can’t find what you have. It is important to make sure that the things we want to keep safe are hidden away, but packing them all away in a big metal safe can make it difficult to access in a hurry and is an advertisement to criminals that your valuables are in the big metal box with a dial. Thanks to SimpliSafe for sponsoring the blog. Right now they’re having their best sale of the year—but more on that later! When it comes to hiding your valuables, sometimes you just want to hide important documents, jewelry, family heirlooms, currency, self-defense items, or even something as simple as a Christmas gift. In this blog, we’ll cover ten great hiding spots around your house.Socket SafeIf you have an electrical socket you don’t use and you know how to safely turn off the flow of electricity to it, simply hiding a valuable behind the wall plate may be enough to deter a criminal. Small items can be hidden away in this manner. For a more advanced setup, hidden wall safe outlets can be constructed from an emptied outlet box with reduced size three-prong plugs. That option will give you more room, but it will also require some basic construction skills. This is a completely fake socket that looks real but will provide you a small hidden storage compartment.Picture Frame SafeWhen a criminal enters your home, they are looking for things they can easily grab and hastily go, if they have to. The tickets under a magnet on your refrigerator, the jewelry box, the small lockbox, or unbolted gun safe, all of these are grab and go items. While they might glance at your photos to put a face with the home and help them in figuring out what you may have in the home, they aren’t likely to pause and ponder your pictures on the wall. This is where a picture frame safe can be very useful to you. This doesn’t have to be too fancy and your picture shouldn’t be so great that someone would want to take it off the wall and really get a good look at it, but we like the picture frame safe because it’s one most people can build themselves. Consider hanging this on the wall versus putting it on a shelf. If someone is ransacking your home they could discover it when clearing shelves, but they are less likely to take it off the wall.Wall Clock SafeIn the same vein as the picture frame safe, wall clock safes are an affordable option. People will look at your safe hundreds of times, glancing up at the time. Burglars will be watching the clock to see how long they’ve been in the house and how close it is to popular times to arrive at home between four and seven o’clock. People will be glancing at your valuables throughout the day, and nobody will ever suspect what’s cleverly hidden behind the clock face. Just remember to keep the clock set to the proper time, so no obsessive-compulsive criminals try to help you out by setting it to the correct time.Book SafeThe book safe has probably been the most reliable safe since the first bound book was ever made. With the printing press and our modern age of printing, there are hundreds of millions of books out there. Chances are you have at least one within reach of you right now. The real beauty of the book safe is that you can use any book with a relatively sturdy spine and appropriate thickness. Cookbooks are fantastic because criminals aren’t likely to either read or cook from a book. All you need is an Exacto knife and you can easily hollow out a space. Place the book among other books and it is easily hidden in plain sight. On a full bookshelf, it might as well be a secret combination, because only you know which book it is and others don’t. One thing to note, though, there has been a long tradition of storing money in Bibles. Often that was the only real book settlers had with them, and the tradition kind of stuck. For this reason, avoid using a Bible, as this will be the book criminals would most likely grab to search through. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to pause to read it.As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog, it is sponsored by SimpliSafe. There’s almost always a rise in break-ins during the holidays. We think criminals look forward to Christmas more than kids do. It makes sense then that SimpliSafe would be having their best sale of the year right now. We like their products because SimpliSafe is an incredibly effective, reliable home security system that will make sure your home is safe. You don’t have to be an electronics expert or an electrician. It is an out-of-the-box, plug-in, customizable and expandable system approach that allows you to build out your own security system. From sensors that distinguish between heat signatures of pets versus humans, to window and door sensors, you can customize a system that will provide you alerts that will never leave you unaware. You can simply order it online or over the phone, it’s delivered right to your home, and you set it up yourself in under an hour. From there your home is professionally monitored 24/7—if anything happens, they’ll make sure the police get called. They’ve got sensors that work well to cover every window, room, and door, plus many great extras like water sensors, temperature sensors, and HD cameras. It’s all really easy to use, and you get around the clock protection for just fifty cents a day with no contracts. They’ve even, recently, won U.S. News & World Report’s best overall home security of 2020. We easily customized a system online, and had it out of the box and running in about an hour after it arrived. If you’d like to check them out, please visit simplisafe.com/cityprepping to get a special holiday offer.False Bottom DrawerIf you are a bit of a carpenter, a false bottom drawer is a great hiding place. While criminals may search your drawers and under your clothes, a false bottom drawer typically has a layer that can be pulled out to reveal a few inches of void space. In a hurry, you could easily grab the drawer, toss the contents, and access your hidden interior compartment. It doesn’t have to be a dresser drawer either. It could be a bathroom or kitchen drawer, a nightstand, or a desk. Most any drawer can be converted with a decent saw and some plywood. Add some decorative drawer liner throughout the inside of the drawer to even further conceal your valuables.Lift Top Tables & NightstandsFor the truly ambitious person who really needs to access their things in a hurry but still want maximum concealment, consider a lift-top table or lift-top nightstand. These are whole pieces of furniture designed with tops that lift up entirely. Just two hinges and possibly a switch or lock of some kind is all it takes to completely conceal your valuables. In an instant and even under pressure, you can access your valuables and essentials by just lifting the lid. Lift top furniture is another one of those historic safe spots. It was a preferred way to secure valuables at home from the early days through the nineteen hundreds. If you search that old desk of yours long enough, you might just find the trick hiding spot. They are a little more expensive, but the lift-top nightstand and coffee table are making a comeback. Typically the lift-top is intended as a tv tray like feature, but you can easily repurpose it to suit your security needs.Cell Phone CasesIt is kind of weird, but you probably always have your smartphone with you nowadays. It has become an extension of our hands. We usually always have it nearby. It’s also a high theft item, which may be why we keep it close. We have always kept cash flattened in the case on the back of the phone. In an emergency situation or if my wallet gets stolen, we have some money to get home. Also, criminals don’t usually peel the case off of the phone, first thing, so if it gets stolen, you might be able to get your money back as well. You can’t store anything more than a few flattened, folded in half, crisp bills, but that may be enough. Maybe there’s another important document you could fit back there. Take a moment, peel the case off right now, and take a look.Bottle SafeAs ubiquitous as cell phones have become in our modern age, the water bottle maybe even more of a common, prominent fixture in our daily lives. What we really like about these is how much they can hold: spare keys, currency, an emergency credit card. Typically, the bottom simply unscrews to reveal all your secret items within. Put some tissue or cloth in there to make sure your items don’t bounce around when the bottle is moved or picked up. Put some stickers on it to identify it. Make it cool, but not too cool, and it will blend into the backdrop of everyday living. A burglar is not likely to grab that off the countertop of your home. If you’re hiding a gift for someone in your house, well, let’s just say it’s not cool to use someone’s dedicated water bottle.Can SafeAlso in the category of the mundane and oft-overlooked is the good old fashioned can safe. These look like just regular cans of food. You can purchase them premade, or with a little work you can easily make one yourself from any can of food you have. If you went to the cupboard now and moved around some cans you would probably find a can of something you forgot was there– a can of corn, beans, or soup. According to one study, only 82 % of Americans cook food in their own homes. How many of those home-cooked meals call for corn? Would a hungry criminal grab your bag of chips or your can of kidney beans? Again, here, you will want to include a cloth rag or tissue to dampen the noise if shaken and you will want the weight to be similar to that of the real item. Your can could be as large as a coffee can or as small as a can of sardines. If you’re not going to access the item except in an emergency, you could build a false top coffee can. If anyone ever used it and scooped the coffee from the top, your contents below would still be safe. Get creative and stash your stuff.Around the HouseIf all of those gadgets sound like too much effort to you, remember that houses are built with all kinds of hiding spots. Some modern constructions have wall niches that simply need a large framed piece of artwork to conceal the void behind. There is an actual Facebook channel dedicated to things found in walls, so there’s an area back there to hide things. Older homes have floorboards that can easily store vast quantities of items. There’s space under beds and in headboards, under couches, and behind furniture. There’s a space behind most every drawer where you could easily tape an envelope of cash. You can even wrap the item in plastic and hide it in your flour or sugar. If your container is waterproof, the toilet tank is another great spot. Who goes back there or thinks of going back there? There’s a lot of space above ceiling tiles and in attics. Garages are also areas that offer multiple areas to conceal items. It’s not likely that criminals are going to pull that cardboard box labeled “Christmas Decorations” off of its high shelf, so that box can hide almost anything away safely.ConclusionThe sad fact is that most people don’t ever take an assessment of their valuables and seek to secure them well. Keeping your items safe doesn’t always require expensive safes. Two things to remember, though, when hiding items. First, how quickly do you need to grab the item in a fire or emergency? Some items you may want a small fireproof bag or safe for. While they may have little value for criminals, they may be very important to you. So, how fast can you access the item? Second, if it’s something you likely are tucking away for a long time, you will want to make sure it is well protected from the elements and from rodents. Simply wrapping important documents in plastic and storing it in a wall won’t do. If you ever have mice or termites, they will nest in or eat up those documents in no time.simplisafe.com/citypreppingWe would love to hear your creative hiding places or hiding places you have heard – the more creative the better. We could only cover a handful here, but there are so many more. As always, stay safe out there.
Suddenly the sky is lit up like a fiery sunset as far as your eye can see. The electricity pops off, your car stalls, your phone suddenly is no longer working. In fact, every electrical circuit in every electrical device is suddenly fried out. Within a minute, transformers are exploding across the country. You’re stranded, perhaps far from home, with no means to call for help or to traverse the miles back to your family while smoke and fire is visible all around you. Planes are, literally, falling out of the sky. What happened? An alien attack? It was an electromagnetic pulse, and it’s not just the stuff of fiction novels. It’s more realistic than an all out nuclear war or even a solar flare strong enough to do the same damage, and it is becoming more likely by the day. North Korea is the most likely bad actor, and they have already threatened us with just such an attack. Will you survive while millions more Americans die?What is a High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse?A nuclear EMP or electromagnetic pulse is the electric shockwave triggered by a nuclear blast. It is an intense burst of electromagnetic radiation. It quite literally fries every electronic circuit in its range. This destroys most every device, as very few systems are shielded from such a pulse. While a nuclear weapon detonated on land would have more devastating effects from the blast and an EMP would be the least of people’s worries, a very high-altitude EMP called a HEMP above the Earth’s atmosphere would create an EMP that would stretch from horizon to horizon. People on the ground would not feel a thing unless they have functional electronics in them like a pacemaker. If you are on the ground beneath such a blast you would see a fantastic light show similar to a great fire rolling across the heavens.There are three distinct waves of energy from a HEMP and each will overload and burnout circuitry: E one a short duration pulse, E two an intermediate pulse similar to a massive lightning storm, and E three which is similar to a severe geomagnetic disturbance. Those three waves from even a single high altitude detonation are sufficient to burn out every electronic component from horizon to horizon and send surges through systems even further than the visible horizon.An E one blast lasts only ten billionths of a second but has a peak amplitude of fifty kilovolts per meter. That is powerful enough to directly damage electronic components directly or by coupling to the attached wires or cables. Within a billionth of a second, the electrical intensity on the Earth’s surface becomes so hot that microchips fry, powerlines overload, and the electric grid completely collapses. The E two waveform is similar to lightning, and we know how lightning can bring down electricity power grids. The E three waves, because there are different waves during this phase based upon the blast effects. It causes a low frequency, quasi-DC current in the power grid that is similar to a severe geomagnetic disturbance event. It will last four or five minutes, can cause voltage collapse in systems and additional hot spot heating in transformers.These are not short term blackouts either. With every circuit and relay in the electrical grid down and needing to be replaced, new components would need to be manufactured and installed at every point in the power grid. With no manufacturing going on, the repair would take months, if not years to complete. Once a high-altitude EMP goes off, everything goes dark. Cars, planes, trains, subways suddenly stop. Electricity, water, natural gas all stop flowing, and nuclear power plants could meltdown if operators cannot manually scram them. With no electricity there is no refrigeration. Medicines and foods would expire within days. Farming stops. Food supplies stop. Commerce stops. Phones stop. Internet stops. All long range communication stops. All satellites above the earth in the same hemisphere instantly cease to operate.The Starfish Prime test by the US conducted in the sixties was a mere ten degrees above the horizon of Hawaii. Even at that very narrow azimuth and at a distance of nearly one thousand miles away and with a low yield nuclear device, over three hundred street lights in Hawaii burned out. That experiment in the sixties was at a time when far fewer electronic devices were in utilization. Imagine the devastating effects of a similar blast but directly over the United States. The explosive yield of devices is exponentially larger today, over sixty years later, resulting in a far more intense EMP.An intercontinental ballistic missile, ICBM, does not have to be very accurate. The rocket just has to go up and roughly in the right direction to become an orbital threat. It does not even need a complex guidance system. Any timed detonation at a height anywhere between thirty and five-hundred kilometers above the earth’s surface is all that would be required. If the midwest, at the center of the United States was the target and the missile fell far short and was detonated over the Pacific ocean, for instance, it would still have an EMP event sufficient enough to wipe out the coastal states and the coastal regions of Canada and Mexico. If the missile far overshot its intended target of the heartland of the United States, the event would be sufficient enough to wipe out the entire east coast. Essentially, anything in the line of sight of the blast will cease to function, and the line of sight at five-hundred kilometers above the earth is pretty extensive. It is a circle with a diameter of three-thousand-two-hundred and thirty-one miles. That is forty percent of the Earth’s surface, and easily contains the United States from West Quoddy Head, Maine to Cape Flattery, Washington–the eastern and western most points of the United States. While some components can be hardened against such an attack, and under the Reagan administration some military systems were hardened off, that work was not completed. No comprehensive emergency, hardened off system exists just like no comprehensive missile defense shield exists. All systems would suffer such catastrophic failures that the entire system would fail in a cascading collapse. Even if your cellphone were stored in a protective casing, when you turned it on you would have no cell towers, no satellites to relay any information, it wouldn’t even be able to sync its internal clock.Why is North Korea Now a Threat?For decades, national security and intelligence officials have warned that the United States was vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks that could cripple the nation’s power grid. Tensions between the U.S. and North Korea are ongoing, despite how friendly leaders might appear from time-to-time. North Korea continues to test its nuclear capability and has repeatedly threatened the U.S. with an EMP attack. In fact, twenty-seventeen news agencies in North Korea explicitly warned that North Korea could hit the U.S. with an EMP attack. North Korea’s nuclear efforts are much more aggressive than Iran’s at this point, though some experts indicate that Iran is an equally dangerous EMP attack threat.While North Korea is China by proxy, and China has no real vested interest at this point in completely destroying the United States economy, Kim Jong-un has at times bucked against China’s rule or tried to demonstrate their independence. Xi Jinping and the chinese government are not fully capable of reigning in the rogue and unbridled North Korean leader.On February sixth of twenty-sixteen, North Korea launched a satellite into orbit. The hurdles they faced to put a nuclear warhead in orbit were weight and flight time. But this year, in a parade in October, North Korea unveiled its largest-ever intercontinental ballistic missile. The size of the new missile indicated that it might fly farther and carry a more powerful nuclear warhead. Is that missile real and functional? We don’t know, but it does demonstrate a step forward in their nuclear delivery systems. Just one nuclear warhead detonated at high altitude over the United States would bring the country to a full stop, and Kim Jung-un has repeatedly expressed that he would like to do this.A Non-Electrical Timetable of DestructionSo, what really happens after an EMP? How bad could it actually be? Well, within seconds, everything containing electronic circuitry would instantly fizzle out. From insulin pumps to pacemakers, to life support systems, all would fail in a single instance. Medicines which need to be refrigerated would begin to deteriorate and lose efficacy. Foods which require refrigeration would begin the process of turning after just four hours. Millions and millions of Americans would be stranded miles from home, especially if the attack occurs during the day when that simple commute to work just became a multi-day walking journey.Our municipal water systems that depend on pumping stations and purification processes would cease to work in less than a day. Obtaining fresh drinking water will be a challenge within the first few days. Stores will be looted for food and water and batteries which will likely survive the blast. If you happen to be on a plane when the EMP strikes, your plane will stop working. If you’re driving in your car, it will roll to a stop. Even if you have an old time car that has no electronics in it, you couldn’t pump gas into it. It is estimated that in the first few hours after an EMP strikes and in the aftermath millions upon millions of Americans will die. The ensuing chaos and clamour for resources to survive will lead to the deaths of millions more. Fire and police services will not be available. You won’t be able to get any money from your bank or even make a purchase in a store with whatever cash you have. Most of the country will not even know what happened, since internet and broadcast news will be down. Even the Emergency Broadcasting Network will not work as any EMP would couple to broadcast antennas and pass through transmitter tuned circuits. In just seconds, the world will go dark and silent. In just days, wide scale panic and uncontrollable chaos will be the norm. The casualties will never be truly known, but experts estimate that up to ninety percent of Americans would perish.America would be able to retaliate before a detonation occurred, maybe even shoot down an incoming missile; but it only takes one missile to get through, and the United States missile defense shield doesn’t exist at this point. The american military would be able to retaliate with forces deployed at other locations around the world safe from the line of sight of the detonation, but with all communications down, this would be difficult to orchestrate and would be too little too late.Is There Anything You Can Do?With that level of destruction, we have to ask ourselves if there really is anything we can do, individually, to harden our lives against the possibility of an EMP? The answer is that we can do a little. You could build your own Faraday cage to protect some of your devices, but remember that your ability to recharge those devices or connect those devices to anything, including satellites will likely not exist anymore. Still, having a small solar recharging unit, rechargeable batteries, an old laptop, external hard drive, and a basic radio sealed in Faraday cage bags. It would certainly provide you a little bit of an edge in your survivability and ability to recover. Some solar panels and any hardened off against attack and stored when the attack occurs will likely survive an EMP attack and will provide you some basic electricity through an outage which could last for months. The solar power inverter, however, will not survive an EMP, so one would need to be stored if your unit isn’t self contained. We always recommend solar motion lights around your home, and they are affordable enough for one or two to be stored away in the same manner. Light at night will greatly increase your chances of survival.The main thing that will benefit you the most, however, is learning now how to function off grid. Take a weekend and unplug. Don’t eat or drink anything you haven’t directly acquired from nature or obtained from your prepping supplies. Assume that you have no power, no water, no means of transportation other than maybe a bicycle and try to live for a few hours that way or through the weekend. Figure out what your dependency weak points are, and begin to develop a plan around them.On the smaller side, make sure your prepping supplies have a manual can opener, a crank flashlight, a means to cook food and purify water like the Kelly Kettle or a solar oven, survival manuals and maps. If you live in a city that is near one of America’s fifty-eight nuclear power plants that have ninety-six reactors that would have to be scummed and shut down manually if possible, you will want to have an escape route planned. If all of the reactors aren’t successfully shutdown and even one meltdown occurs, the radioactive fallout will kill thousands in the short term and millions in the long term. Know where the likely safest places may be on the map, and from time to time, go walk a stretch of that route, noting any freshwater sources or shelter along the way. Create a family emergency plan and don’t just leave it on paper or in your head. Take the time to travel and review routes and locations.ConclusionEventually, after an EMP, areas of the country will come back online, not all at once and not at one hundred percent; but equipment brought in from other parts of the world will be functioning. It would require a global contribution to the rebuilding efforts. Your survivability will be a direct result of your supplies, your fitness, your knowledge, and your skills. The majority of Americans are far too reliant on technology and the never ceasing flow of energy, and they will not survive. When the power stops for a week, month or year, will you have what it takes to survive? What’s your survival plan?
As always, stay safe out there.
How will this change the way we live in the years ahead?
Is a vaccine around the corner?
What should we know?
What should we do?
At the time of writing of this blog, we are at over a hundred and fifty thousand new cases per day of Sars-cov-two and we are about two weeks from Halloween where people were getting out and interacting. We’re willing to put money on that number going up significantly two weeks after Thanksgiving. If we’re right, we will be at over one hundred and sixty thousand new cases per day by December seventh. We’re willing to wager that we’ll be over one hundred and eighty thousand new cases per day around the seventh of January which is two weeks after Christmas. Now we know that many in my community don’t want to talk about this any longer and are ready to move on. But as much as we’re all tired of dealing with this, we have to face reality of what is about to happen. We wrote this blog on November 12th and just yesterday alone, we had two thousand deaths. If there’s any silver lining in all of this, we hit that same death toll in early May when we were recording twenty five thousand new cases per day. New drugs and COVID nineteen therapy protocols have saved more lives compared to the early months of the pandemic, but significant increases in the number of daily cases will still lead to a significant number of fatalities.As we said, we think we’re all ready to move on. In this community, the discussion of this illness has become controversial, but based on the numbers, I think we’re in for some very difficult times ahead that will impact us all directly, and we think it is part of our responsibility to you to make this blog and caution you about the future we all face. Since City Prepping started, we’ve done blogs on the threats of pandemics, interruptions to our food supplies, a look at the influenza pandemic of nineteen eighteen, and what we can glean from that, and several videos on SARS-CoV-two, itself. We thought it was time to take a step back and then a step forward by seeing where we are at in this pandemic and what we still need to watch for and prepare for. In this blog, we will look at where we stand in all of this, what we can expect, how this pandemic will forever change our lives, the hope of a vaccine, what we should know, and what we should continue to do. While twenty-twenty-one will bring some great bright spots, we aren’t out of twenty-twenty yet, and the prognosis continues to look pretty grim.1- Where We Are At Right NowDemocratic Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York state is requiring travelers to get a Coronavirus test before and after they arrive. Republican Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert had for months refused to order residents to wear a mask, but after Utah’s worst single-day infection rates ever, he reversed course, declared a state of emergency, and mandated masks. Utah has reported just over 132,000 cases and just 659 deaths since the start of the pandemic. The President-Elect and the current President seem to have different opinions on mask-wearing, as do many of your neighbors and friends. There is one school of thought that believes mask-wearing suppresses immunity function and one that believes mask-wearing reduces the amount of exposure to the virus and the amount of virus spread from asymptomatic spreaders. If history is any lesson, masks will be mandatory in many areas of the country and in all public places throughout the country. There will be fines associated with non-compliance with the order. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, many local governments mandated masks. Most people complied, others poked holes in their masks to smoke or refused the orders outright and were fined. At the end of that pandemic, fifty million people died worldwide, 650,000 or so of those were in the United States alone. Currently, after approximately 10 months since the first reported cases in the United States, we are at 36% of the 1918 pandemic’s death toll. Does that mean we have at least 20 more months of this to go before we are ahead of it? Quite possibly.As a rule, epidemics create what researchers call a “U-shaped curve” of mortality—high death rates among the very young and very old, lower rates among working-age adults. For reasons as yet unknown, the U-shaped curve does not apply to today’s coronavirus. Some theories are that we protect our children, insulate them, pull them from schools, and keep them from large gatherings, so their infection and exposure rates are so much lower. But, we have also learned that this virus, unlike the influenza virus, affects multiple parts of the body, from the lungs to the heart to the blood and the kidneys. The virus’s long term health effects and complications are still largely unknown. COVID-19 seems to complicate and exacerbate other conditions of the body from asthma to inflammation to latent diseases like leukemia. As the body engages in its immune response to the virus, it perhaps gives way to other diseases or creates an environment where other diseases may emerge. The facts are that we don’t have all the facts. We are still learning about this virus every day. We also don’t have any singular treatment or prevention yet.Are you concerned this will get worse?2- What Can We Expect in the Coming Months?If history is to provide any guidance as to when we might emerge from this, we have to ask ourselves what was the cause for us emerging out of the 1918 flu pandemic. Some outlying theories are that the virus mutated and became weaker, but viruses spread throughout millions of hosts don’t just all of a sudden decide to simultaneously mutate. Unlike the novel coronavirus, the 1918 flu wasn’t entirely new. It was a variation of a virus that circulated in 1898. So, there were some people walking around with at least some naturally acquired resistance to it. The 1918 flu strain is thought to have circulated until 1975 when a new flu strain replaced it. Our herd immunity became stronger, but the virus didn’t just disappear overnight. The fact is our overcoming the effects of that virus was a combination of factors. When the 1918 pandemic hit, medical professionals had no reliable diagnostic test, no effective vaccine, no antiviral drugs, and no antibiotics – which might have treated the bacterial complications of the flu that killed most of its victims, in the form of pneumonia. Now, just like then, our treatments need to rise to the occasion. It’s not that the virus will get weaker, maybe it will, but that’s not likely. Our treatments and our understanding of it will increase. After the 1918 pandemic, we saw the first national health groups emerge, more sharing of treatment studies, better hygienic practices, and better medicines. We will likely see the same boost after we get ahead of COVID-19, but we have to accept that it’s here to stay.In the coming months, we can expect more lockdowns, the implementation of some contact tracing, the beginning tests of new vaccines, and new treatment approaches and therapies. We will become aware that pandemics are a social problem, not an individual one. Expect people to begin to be personally impacted by the virus. At the current rate of infection, well over 150,000 new cases reported daily in the United States, we can expect that communities, even isolated and insulated communities will begin to experience the virus. The economy will suffer as more people fall sick, but it will also adjust to more virtually productive and work from home strategies. People are already expressing their displeasure with mask orders, so it’s not likely people on either side of the belief in COVID are going to willingly line up to be tested or inoculated with a new vaccine. Would you take the vaccine?3-How will this change the way we live in the years ahead?Oddly enough, little existed in the historical record of the 1918 pandemic. It wasn’t until around the mid-seventies where it began to be explored and researched. Perhaps that was people avoiding thinking about it, or perhaps it was overshadowed by the first and second World Wars, perhaps other diseases like polio and tuberculosis became more prominent focal points in our minds. Whatever the reason, it did change our society. Our approaches to medicine, our treatment of pneumonia, our understanding of both bacterial and viral infections, our health and safety standards, even nationalized medical practices, all rose out of this dark but brief period in American history.Our understanding of crowd diseases, our awareness of infectious spread has increased dramatically. Had you ever heard of a super-spreader event before this year? We can extrapolate from this that large gathering events will continue to decline in popularity. Movie theaters, concerts, sporting events, even maximum occupancy levels will all be changed.Our sanitation practices will change. Buildings and public transit hubs and vehicles will periodically be closed for fumigation and sanitation. Handshaking is already on its way out. Hand washing is becoming more popular by the day.Our economy will have to pivot and rapidly adjust. Countless small and large businesses have folded already, and businesses will have to rethink their models if they hope to survive. Americans are traveling less, eating out less, recreating less. In a weird byproduct of that savings and spending priorities shift, Americans have been paying off debt at an unprecedented rate this year, while corporate credit levels have risen sharply. The financial markets will continue to suffer from short-term funding stresses, suppressed consumer demand, and long-term funding stresses as COVID continues to plague countries around the world.Are you making any changes in your life due to Covid-19?4-Is a vaccine around the corner?The headlines have been buzzing with one company’s trials of a vaccine with an alleged 90% efficacy rate. Pfizer recently announced that early data showed its vaccine prevented Covid-19 in more than 90% of trial volunteers. Other companies, including Moderna and Novavax, have also reported encouraging news about their vaccines. This is all great news if it all pans out. That would make it the magic bullet in this fight, and it is true that never before in human history has one virus been studied so much. Never before in human history have so many scientific minds and research funds and testing been dedicated to a singular disease, so maybe it is possible that globally, collectively we are on the cusp of a breakthrough like this.We have to wonder, though, is Pfizer’s vaccine or any other company’s vaccine at this point a game-changer? Since modern flu vaccines don’t have that kind of efficacy rate, people will not rush out to get inoculated and won’t be forced to be vaccinated. Poorer, populous countries may not be able to effectively inoculate their people. We remain optimistic that some type of semi-effective vaccine will happen, perhaps, next year. If the virus continues to spread at such high rates, people might even seek out a trusted vaccination. If the infection rates are low, however, it’s likely most people will avoid any vaccine. After all, though vaccinations have been proven again and again to be a valid preventative measure, large segments of the population will choose not to be vaccinated. Do you think we’ll have a reliable vaccine next year?5-What should we know?If you follow the math and science behind this pandemic, we can be encouraged that the quality of treatments is improving. The hope here is that we will be able to dial in an effective treatment plan that keeps people out of our hospitals and off of ventilators. The improving quality of treatments is evident in the death rate: Only about 1.5% of diagnosed cases have been fatal in recent weeks, compared with 1.7% in late July and early August, and a whopping 7% during the virus’s initial surge in the early spring. Treatments are getting better, and if they continue to improve we could see communities reopening, people returning to work and normal life, and children returning to school.Current testing is getting better, as well. We will, in the coming months, have a test for T-cells to add to our tests for COVID antibodies. Testing for T cells to the virus will allow us to determine with greater accuracy someone’s potential immunity to the virus. Determining who may have some potential immunity is the first real step to safely opening our businesses, economy, and schools. Antibodies tend to garner most of the attention, but levels of antibodies fall and can become undetectable. T cells that remember the virus are a better indicator because they can easily kick the body into protective mode to fend off an exposure. It is a solid improvement upon tests that merely determine if a person has antibodies to the virus.But treatment effectiveness is only part of the problem. This virus spreads more easily than other viruses we have encountered before. We are seeing a surge of cases throughout the world. The number of cases is increasing daily. In the United States, new cases are growing at a rate of over 150,000 per day. So, while we have treatments improving and fatality rates falling to just barely under 2 out of every 100 hundred people, we likely will not be able to hold the line there because of the infectious surge we are experiencing. To be honest, there aren’t enough hospital beds and there isn’t enough medicine in production. Remdesivir, for instance, has shown some effectiveness. It is one of the drugs the president received, but the drug just recently received FDA approval and is only available to hospitalized patients at certain institutions who have the medication available, or through a clinical trial. The results of those trials won’t really be known for months. As the cases increase, the treatments are still sparse, so we can expect the fatality rate will likely go up again before we can get it back down.6-What should we do?As bad as 2020 has been for many, 2021 will show only a little improvement if we don’t begin to act collectively to get ahead of this virus. We would like to tell you it’s going to get better, and in some ways, we think it will. When the T cell test is readily available, we will determine who in our herd is less susceptible to infection. These people will be able to go back to work and to school and move more freely in public without too much fear of reinfection.It is a tradition, of course, to gather during the holidays, but we may see a trend away from that this year. Already several officials have warned that we should confine gatherings to those family members within our households. Add to that the decreased travel, travel restrictions, and some state and local quarantine and testing rules we will continue to see if cases continue to increase, and the holidays will be small this year. With rates so high right now, it is advisable that we focus on our immediate families to ensure their safety. On the upside, you won’t have to put up with that crazy aunt or uncle this year.We should follow guidelines as health officials develop them. In the early days, they were trying to hit a moving target. You should continue to practice frequent hand washing, mask-wearing, social distancing, and avoid large public gatherings if at all possible. Take advantage of contactless grocery pickups, if available. Cook and eat at home whenever possible.The time for doubting this virus’s presence has passed. As it overwhelms some communities, realize that this can impact our work and our food supply lines. Make sure your preps are topped off. Continue to slowly fill in any gaps should we not be able to get things under control. Realize that hospitals and medical centers will be forced to continue to prioritize the affected and this will impact your routine medical care. Press your doctors to prescribe for you larger quantities of critical medicines you need to survive.ConclusionWe are entering the hardest days of the pandemic. The next 3 months will see an unfortunate but predictable rise in infections and then deaths. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though. We will get through this pandemic. Never before have we leveraged so much collective computational ability, brainpower, research, and the fast-tracking of potential medicines and cures. Just as the old LP record has become a thing of the past and music and images are digital now, our world is forever changing as a result of what we are experiencing today. It will change as a result of this virus. Our old normal is being replaced by what we hope will be a similar new normal.If you found this blog informative and helpful, please feel free to share it with your friends, family, and community. As always, please stay safe out there.
In this blog, we’re going to discuss body armor. There are quite a lot of options to choose from, and after collecting various body armor over the years, there’s a lot of things we wish we had known before we started down the path of purchasing armor, so what we’ll do in this blog is go through the 10 main considerations you should factor in when determining which setup is the right one for you. We’ve tried to boil the information down to these primary points:
Purpose of Body Armor
Understanding NIJ Ratings
Spalling
Types of Material
Cuts and Shapes of Armor
Sizing
Weight & Maneuverability
Pricing
How Long Will Body Armor Last?
What Armor is Right for You?
After going through all of these items, you should have a strong enough understanding of the core basics of body armor to help you decide what option is the right one for you.
So let’s jump in!
Purpose of Body Armor
When body armor is discussed, it’s typically in the context of protection against being shot by a firearm. There are types of armor that can protect against knives and other sharp objectives, but most of this video will be focused on protecting you against gun shots. While their design is to prevent bullets from entering vital parts of the body, you need to consider fragmentation, or spalling, which we’ll cover in a latter point. The primary purpose of body armor is to cover the vitals: hearts, lungs, diaphragm, and head if you have a helmet. In an engagement, body armor keeps you alive and in the fight. According to the FBI Crime Statics for 2015-2019, the overwhelming majority of homicides in the U.S. were from handguns followed by knives or cutting instruments which leads us to the next point, NIJ Ratings.
Understanding NIJ Ratings
The NIJ, or National Institute of Justice, is the research, development and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. In the context of Body Armor, they establish the minimum performance requirements and test methods for the ballistic resistance of personal body armor intended to protect against gunfire. They released a report in 2008 that details Body Armor Classification levels. They are:
IIA
II
IIIA
III
IV
One rating they don’t cover which you’ll often here is “IIIA+” which is not an NJI rating, but rather a vendor rating, which we’ll discuss briefly.
Let’s cover what each of these ratings entails.
Type IIA – protects against 9mm and .40 S&W
Type II – protects against 9mm and .357 Magnum
The rest of this video will cover these 3 ratings which is what most body armor dealers sell:
Type IIIA – protects against .357 SIG and .44 Magnum. For this rating, the armor must protect against .357 SIG FMJ Flat Nose bullets with a mass of 125 gr and a velocity of 1470 ft/s and against .44 Magnum Semi Jacketed Hollow Point bullets with a mass of 240 gr and a velocity of 1430 ft/s.
Type III – protects against rifles. For hard and soft armor, the rating must protect against 7.62 mm FMJ, steel jacketed bullets (U.S. Military designation M80) with a specified mass of 147 gr and a velocity of 2780 ft/s.
Type IV – protects against armor piercing rifles. For hard and soft armor, the rating must protect against a .30 caliber armor piercing bullets (U.S. Military designation M2 AP) with a specified mass of 166 gr and a velocity of 2880 ft/s.
Now it is important to note, that these standards are based upon a specific velocity we just detailed. If a bullet travels faster, the armor may not be able to stop the projectile even though the bullet has the weight defined for this rating. Just something for you to consider.
One other classification of body armor you’ll often run across that isn’t defined by the NIJ is the III+. These ratings are typically proprietary to a manufacturer and exceeds the requirements for level III armor according to the manufacturer.
Spalling
Bullet splash is what most shooters will call “spalling”. When a projectile hits armor, the bullet will essentially disentegrate and send fragments out on the sides. This is obviously problematic as you don’t want high velocity pieces of metal going into your neck, face or eyes. An artery could easily be cut this way and the wearer could be incapacitated. Manufacturers get around this issue by adding an “anti-spall” coating, designed to protect wearers from the fragments after a bullet has impacted against body armor. You’ll see companies on their website using proprietary names for their solution to bullet splash which captures the fragments after impact. A lot of AR500 plates you can find on the market may not offer this level of protection and will charge an additional fee, so when shopping options, be sure whatever armor you pick up, it has this feature.
Types of Material
Let’s look at the different types of material most often associated with body armor. Again, be sure to check the NIJ rating before making a purchase on any of these body armor materials to understand what armor level you’re getting to meet your specific needs.
Kevlar (soft)
This is a light-weight and flexible option. If you’re going to need something you can wear all day with minimum fatigue, wear under a shirt or jacket, and concealability is important, this may be the best solution. For these reasons, this option is very popular with law enforcement. They are typically rated for level IIA, II, and IIIA which all protect against handguns.
Steel (hard)
Steel is a very cost-effective material for hard armor. It is commonly used in level III body armor and is often used for targets.
The advantages it offers is that it can take multiple hits and still be useable. Have you ever purchased AR500 plates and shot them at the range? You get a lot of use out of them. The downside of this option is the weight and if you’re going to consider wearing body armor on a daily basis, this is probably not the direction you’ll want to go. For example, if you need step up to a level IV plate, that would weigh about 13 to 15 pounds per plate. With 2 plates and a carrier, you’re well over 30 pounds which would severely reduce mobility and inevitably lead to fatigue and back pain. If you are on a budget though, this is probably your best bet. Most of my armor is actually level III as my budget has been somewhat limited when I’ve purchased body armor, so there’s nothing wrong with it, but you need to think twice if you foresee you’ll be wearing this a lot. The big upside is long term durability, the ability to take multiple rounds and still work, and it just more durable even if dropped. Plus they are the thinnest of the body armor options. Just be sure to get the antispalling option when purchasing this.
Ceramic
Ceramic is lighter than steel, thicker, and more expensive. Ceramic/composite armor plates are placed in body armor plate carriers and worn to protect against bullets, projectiles, fragmentation/shrapnel and stab threats. The U.S. military issues ceramic plates to the infantry in conjunction with Kevlar. The downside is that most ceramic/composite body armor plates cannot withstand multiple hits to the same area. Composite/ceramic armor has a shorter shelf life and are less durable than traditional steel plates. Fortunately, the price of these plates has dropped over the years. If we were to step up from steel, this would be the next option.
Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene
This is a newer technology for body armor. It’s more expensive than ceramic, but slightly lighter and less thick, and can actually float in water. These, like ceramic can take multiple shots but unlike Steel, once they’ve been shot, they’re compromised and no longer usuable. This particular plate, the Gladiator Solutions level IV plate has Round Dispersion Technology, a proprietary approach which evenly disperses kinetic energy from a round’s impact to reduce compromise and trauma
The size needs to go at least nipple to nipple. And to have it high enough so that the top is at your jugular notch. To find the notch, trace your sternum up until you reach a soft spot. Pressing down on it will make you choke.
Weight & Maneuverability
Kevlar, Steel, Ceramic, and Polyethylene weight comparison.
Hard armor vs soft armor maneuverability.
Pricing
Compare the pricing for Steel, Ceramic, and Polyethylene.
How Long Will Body Armor Last?
The National Institute of Justice sets a standard of five years’ service for body armor plates, although the plates’ true life depends upon how the plates and plate carriers have been used, maintained, and stored. Armor worn every day will wear out much faster than a vest that’s been sitting on a shelf. After a few years, plates should routinely be checked for tears, burns, creases, strange smells, and other signs of damage or deterioration. Because ballistic materials degrade over time, soft body armor should always be replaced after five years. Continuing to wear soft body armor longer than five years is at the wearer’s risk.
Both steel and ceramic plate carriers normally come with five-year warranties, although tests indicate steel plates can often be used longer than ceramic composites, which might shatter if dropped or can be damaged by extreme changes in temperature. If properly stored and maintained, steel core body armor can last at least 20 years or more. Regardless of the type, body armor should always be replaced if it’s taken a hit or has otherwise been damaged.
What Armor is Right for You?
What armor should you get? Depends on the mission and the threats you anticipate.
Run through a summary here.
Concealable vs Observable, Soft armor vs. Plate Carrier
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The first step with prepping on a limited budget is to set priorities and goals. You need first to prioritize the most realistic threats you face. While you may feel that you need to prep for the Yellowstone Caldera blowing, that’s not your best bet if you live on the east coast and you’re at the start of hurricane season, or the midwest and you’re entering tornado season. List out the top possibilities for your area. List everything from Near Earth Objects, to terrorists, to civil unrest, to earthquakes and floods. Then rank your list logically by the likelihood of occurrence. The list should help you focus your preparations a little more.
Next, list what you would realistically need for the top five or so events on your list. You’ll find that prepping for one is usually the same as prepping for them all. Common to all catastrophes that may befall us are specific needs: water, food, shelter, fire, etcetera. When you are prepping for one particular crisis, you are prepping for many possible catastrophes.
Finally, take a personal inventory. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Do you know how to sew or knit, fish or hunt? Are you a quick learner or well-read? Are you a beast at the gym or love a good long hike? Do you cook, can, ferment, or know how to bake? Do you understand medicine or your way around an engine? Write out all the strengths you have, but also write out your weaknesses in another column. Are you out of shape, have medical conditions, or joint pain after prolonged physical activities? Are you overly dependent on eating out and couldn’t boil water, as they say? Have you never learned a skill? Some people are new to prepping but have never really been very self-sufficient in life.
Once you have your two-column list of strengths and weaknesses, scratch out the word “Strengths” and replace it with the word “Practice.” Scratch out the word “Weaknesses” and replace it with “Challenges.” After all, you want to practice those strengths; you have to become more proficient. Don’t just rely on the hope that you can consistently access that strength. Cultivate it through practice.
Likewise, those weaknesses are merely challenges you face. If you have severe medical conditions that would prevent you from ever being able to bug out if you needed to, you have to make that one of the challenges you prepare to remedy. Plan to strengthen your ability to hunker down safely in a crisis. If being out of shape is one of your weaknesses, then that’s the challenge you need to overcome. If your liability is that you are not very outgoing, your challenge and goal will be to try harder to make connections and build networks with people. You might not race out there and join a Mutual Assistance Group, but you may want to join the community garden or a skills-based club to meet like-minded individuals. Set your goals based upon your Practice and Challenges lists. Set both long and short-term goals. What can you start to do today? Remember, baby steps. Where would you like to get when you think over the long term?
Now that you have it all on paper start working on your plans. You won’t make progress on all of them all of the time, but give yourself credit when you chip away at the list a little each day. Learning a new skill can be as easy as reading a book about it ten minutes a day. That’s a start, and it positions you better than you were when you knew nothing. Take your plans to the real world and start with the most important prep of all–yourself.
2- Finances
Finances are the top perceived barrier to adequate preparation, but some of the best-prepared people we have ever met haven’t been made of money. So, it can’t be about money. After all, the tool you take up in your hand is worthless if you don’t know how to use it. The same is true for all those fancy supplies. You could buy the best magnesium fire starter on the planet and a massive box of fat sticks, but that pocket lighter or zippo of your grandfathers would probably work better in most situations. You could buy a three hundred dollar Berkey Water filter system, but that twenty-dollar Mini-Sawyer will filter one-hundred-thousand gallons and will slip in your pocket. My point here is simple: you need to cover what you need to survive from your likely disaster list, but you don’t need to worry about not having a fat wallet to do it.
Here is where finances come to bear. Many, many people live hand to mouth. They work multiple jobs, and, at the end of the day, they are just scraping by. We are not a financial advisor by any means, but we have read the practical advice of Dave Ramsey, Robert Kiyosaki, Grant Cardone, and others. You can get their books at your local library. They will tell you slightly different things, but there are some common elements. Reviewing your finances and understanding your spending patterns is vital. Living within your means and avoiding credit is another. Each person’s situation will be different, but even if you have no money at the end of the day, you should be consulting these professionals about this topic. You should take the advice that best fits your circumstances and try to make it work. When we first started studying material like this, we were able to turn my dire financial situation into building a profitable business. It took time, but we chose to invest in myself and it paid off in dividends.
Even if you are dirt poor, there are ways to slowly, paycheck by paycheck, set aside a little more. Suppose you go to the store for groceries, but you have never learned to cook beyond punching a few buttons on a microwave. In that case, you can immediately reap benefits by learning to cook beans, rice, vegetables, and other unprocessed foods. If you’re used to grabbing food on your way home from work, try a slow cooker once a week. You’ll come home to a hot meal. You will learn how to cook for yourself, and you will save significantly. When you sit down to eat, start adding up the total cost of the meal. You will readily see that it’s far cheaper to become self-sufficient and less dependent on restaurants.
As we said earlier, some of the best-prepared people we have ever met haven’t been made of money. Those who have struggled with finances know how to get the full value out of things. They can stretch resources. They can look at an item and instantly understand how they might re-use or upcycle the container. They roll their sleeves up and dig into fixing something instead of paying someone else or throwing the item away, resolving to learn as they go. They have been prepping for years and maybe didn’t know it.
3- Health & Wellness
Health and wellness are the most often overlooked parts of prepping. Try this exercise. Ask a friend to randomly text you at any hour on one of your days off the word “Go.” When you receive that text, no matter what you were doing at the moment you receive it, drop everything and walk across town and to the edge of town. Since this isn’t a real emergency, you can take a cab or rideshare home after this exercise. Does this sound like an exercise you are willing to do? If that text came through at this very moment, would you even be able to make the walk home or out of town from where you are right now? If not, you are going to have a hard time surviving in an SHTF situation.
Are you unwilling to commit at that level, or do you know you’ll never make it to the other side of town? Revisit your priorities and set some goals. You can do this exercise without taking a walk, as well. Just pause when that text comes in and jot down a quick plan of what you would do. Running your brain through the scenario is akin to practicing it. You won’t have the same level of physical readiness, but your brain will be calmer in the crisis, and your focus will be more precise.
You may not be in a good enough condition to even start a regimented physical fitness program. You may not feel that you have the time after all the hours of the day are spent. Know that there are traditional exercises like you might do at the gym, and there are exercises like walking on your lunch break or your dog after work. There are even exercises that you can do sitting at your desk. You won’t realize significant gains overnight in either strength or endurance, but prepping your body is a steady, slow process. You can’t instantly buy health, but you can chip away at unhealthy habits and patterns to get to a healthier core.
With regards to wellness, that covers everything from what you put into your body or soul. Your mental health is tied into this as well. Your ability to cope with stressful situations is linked to this. Make sure you are feeding your body and your brain. Eat well. Hydrate well. Drink lots of clean water. Read about prepping, but also read books that fill you up and satisfy you. Try to avoid toxic or highly charged conflicts. Turn your inclination to fight or argue with others into a focused effort to prepare yourself for whatever the world may throw at you. Prepping your health and well-being is hands down more beneficial to you in a real catastrophe than any other tool you have in your inventory. The adage “If you don’t have your health, you haven’t anything” could not be more true to the prepper.
4- Knowledge & Skills
You can lay up for yourselves prepping supplies and foods stacked to the ceiling, but rodents may eat your food, rust can corrupt your tools, or marauders might rob you blind. Nobody can ever take from you your knowledge and skills. Next to your health, they are the most valuable tools in your prepping inventory. When you think of knowledge, think of what they call book smart. Maybe you don’t have any direct practical experience with building a cistern or raising chickens. Still, you can read a chapter in a book on it so that you could wrestle with the problem, and your chances of success would be greater than someone who doesn’t know what a cistern is or who has never seen a live chicken. Yes, there are many of those people out there.
Think of your skills as things you have learned and practically applied at some point. Did you get a cheese making kit for your birthday and gave it a go? Congratulations, you now have the skill of making cheese. You might not be able to implement it in the aftermath of a crisis immediately, but you know what you need to gather and the procedures you must one day follow. Remember that metal shop class, woodshop, or home economics course you took in high school? Guess what? The purpose of those courses was to give you practical skills you could use in real life.
Go back to your “Practice” list you made earlier and add some of these new skills with a dash in front of them. These are partial skills you can brush up on in the future. At any given time, you should be working on both knowledge and skills. You want to be adding to your personal prepper inventory continually. Even though you may not have space for a garden, read up on setting one up. Build your knowledge base. Get two solid pieces of rope and learn a new knot every week. Most people can tie a shoelace knot and a square knot, and that is it. That won’t do it if you’re forced to live in the wild. Nothing is keeping you from learning. Bolster your knowledge and skills every day. Your brain is the best tool in your prepping inventory.
5- Gear & Tools
We saved the gear and tools for last because we wanted to show you the resources you already have or can quickly build in your inventory. There are, however, some essential things you will need that apply to any survival situation. As we mentioned earlier, specific needs are common to all catastrophes that may befall us: water, food, shelter, fire. First, you want access to clean water. You may not have space for a dozen or more fifty-five-gallon barrels, but a Mini-Sawyer water filter like we will link to in the comments below will fit in your pocket and can filter up to one hundred thousand gallons of water. If you live in the southeast region of America, water availability may not be a huge issue. If you live in the desert southwest region of America, you will need to store some water for emergencies.
You need food, preferably long shelf life food that is nutrient or calorically dense—rice, beans, dehydrated fruits and vegetables, and so forth. If you cannot afford an electric countertop dehydrator, you can still dehydrate in the same way they have for years–in the oven or with the sun. You can build a supply of food by setting a little aside each week.
When you think of shelter, think hats, gloves, and articles of clothing that shelter your body, but also think tents, tarps, and structures you can build. Read up on building emergency structures and then attempt to practically apply what you have learned one day before you are forced to do it.
We don’t want someone reading this blog to get bent out of shape thinking they need a lot of gear to survive. If you can process water, have food stored and be able to cook it during a disaster, you’ll be ahead of about 99% of those around you. If you focus on the items we covered in the first 4 points of this video, having gear will just be a bonus to an already firm foundation you built. Again, we purposefully avoided going into detail about gear in this section as we’d recommend anyone starting out in prepping to not go after gear, but instead focus on the other 4 items. We’ll do a breakout blog shortly detailing the basic items each prepper should have.
Conclusion
Prepping is more than just hoarding supplies and tools you have never previously had to use. The real resources you need to survive can’t be purchased. Even on a minimal budget, you can begin to build what you need to meet the challenge of the most pressing disasters you might face. If nothing at all ever happens and your life is truly blessed, you will still be better off for having prepped. Your life will be more comfortable and more affordable. You will be more self-reliant and more self-confident. Even if you are starting to prep today, you will still be better positioned to survive than the majority of the population, and you don’t have to break the bank to get started. Start small, and build steadily over time.
As always, please stay safe out there. 
Food is a basic human need. Our ability to have food on the table is typically threatened by three circumstances: poverty, natural disasters disrupting production and supply lines, or contaminated food. 2020 revealed severe cracks in our overall system. Even before the lockdown, the detrimental effects of commercial food production were apparent in the form of highly-processed foods with little nutritional value and the occasional recall for E. Coli, Listeria, Cyclospora, Hepatitis, and Salmonella. In fact, one in six Americans become sick from contaminated food every year.
In the early days of the lockdowns, businesses were forced to shutter or rapidly shift their business models to an at-home or touchless experience. Theaters, the travel and events industries, retail locations, restaurant chains, gyms, and more, all folded and shuttered their locations within a few months. The millions of those employed in these industries suddenly found themselves without a steady income. Even before 2020, 78% of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. Surprisingly, American’s personal credit debt shrunk for the first time in a long time as people quickly realigned their finances and, honestly, had fewer opportunities to go out and spend money.
2020 introduced us to shutdowns and lockdowns. It showed us a type of unemployment brought about by a massive employment paradigm shift away from communal locations to the virtual conference call and touchless services. While some businesses like retail home delivery, sanitation, grocery stores, and food delivery services soared, many businesses suffered or folded altogether.
With high unemployment numbers and food insecurity, you can expect to see a rise in crime in 2021. Most crime is opportunistic, and it is committed for a host of reasons: no direction in life, drugs, poverty, lack of school and work, etcetera. With the current state of things, we have many of those combined factors, so it is almost a certainty that petty crimes will rise. The stress of lockdowns will turn some to the coping mechanisms of drugs and alcohol. While those aren’t sole contributors to a rise in crime, they influence the numbers.
If there were a national measurement of mental health, it would undoubtedly be negatively off the charts in 2020. The long term effects of these lockdowns will have a severe impact on both adults and children.
As a result of SARS-COV-2, consumer spending has dropped to record lows, and unemployment briefly reached the highest levels since the Great Depression. As a result, many experts have projected a massive number of consumer and business bankruptcy filings in the coming months. Some businesses have shuttered for good. Some people are on the cusp of the worst economically challenging times they have ever experienced. 
The hunger crisis, housing insecurity, shutdowns and unemployment, a rise in crime, mental health suffering, and bankruptcy are mainly at the community level. They are all very local to us. They either compound and impact our community as a whole or are more likely to impact our lives personally. The last four factors discussed here are on a larger scale. They are threats we face at a national level. They are threats that will be with us for years to come.
Banks can refuse to lend you money because you have over-borrowed and don’t earn enough to pay back your debt. Businesses might refuse your check if they think it’s likely it could bounce. Even your friends might not want to accept money from you if they know 98% of it is borrowed. In the same way, our financial standing internationally will be impacted as countries see the U.S. Dollar becoming increasingly problematic as a reserve currency due to our heavy debt. Historically, the dollar has had few challenges and has been able to remain unscathed as the fiat currency of choice. That may be changing now as other countries are recovering faster than the United States from the global recession in which we all find ourselves. Their currencies will put pressure on the dollar. 
Beyond the local, immediate threats and the national threats, we can’t forget the reason many of us started prepping to begin with–natural disasters. In 2020 wildfires in Australia and California set new destructive records, displaced thousands of people, and decimated wildlife and plant life. 
The real unknown in 2020 that some of us in the community have been warning about for several years now has been COVID-19. There are so many origin theories and plot lines about this strain of coronavirus that the real threats of COVID-19 are often being lost. This virus has a high measure of spread and higher than the average flu case-fatality rate. Given those two things, we’ll let others debate the shape of the clouds while we batten down the hatches.
The ultra-rich don’t work with their own money. They work with other people’s money. They avoid excessive taxation by moving their money to other countries. They keep their money for themselves. Even their philanthropic efforts are rewarded by society with substantial tax savings and returns, so much so that they profit from the act of giving. Lately, though, the ultra-rich have been expressing increasing nervousness about the world today. The CEO of LinkedIn recently said that well over fifty percent of the super-wealthy he knew had recently purchased safe escape houses far removed from civilization or in countries with more stable economies and societies like New Zealand.
Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, is less focused on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath of “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. He is stocked up on motorcycles, guns, ammo, and food and plans on bunkering at his estate for as long as it takes for social order to be restored.
We share a natural tendency to seek risk aversion. Whether that is protecting our company’s online gaming servers from hurricanes in Barbados or protecting our families from a home invasion, our natural tendency as human beings is to assess threats, both seen and unseen, and reduce these threats to our security. A risk-averse investor is an investor who prefers lower returns with known risks rather than higher returns with unknown risks. The super-wealthy often protect millions and billions of dollars of their own and other assets. Their natural inclination is to hedge their bets and minimize risk. Most preppers are, by nature, risk-averse as well. They prefer the lower profile returns of well-stocked supplies and food stores over flashier but less useful purchases. The prepper typically puts more faith in a well-made tool and the knowledge and skills to use it over something that, realistically, can be used a handful of times.
As different as some of us may seem from the ultra-rich, we share several critical outlooks and are better off in some ways. If we went down a tick list of things to prep for, they would be similar, but maybe structured differently: civil unrest, terrorism, the collapse of the economy, EMPs, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and so forth. Our abilities to prep for each one are disparate. Let’s face it; we won’t be able to evacuate with our pilot and her family to our tropical island. In some ways, though, we are better off. 
If you are an urban dweller, when the power goes out, your heat probably goes out too. Thanks to insulation and objects around your apartment retaining heat, the temperature won’t drop to the outside temperature right away; however, you need to take precautions against losing your dwelling’s warmth and keeping the cold out. If you feel that the outage may go on for some time or after a major disaster happens and you know power won’t be back for a while, you will want to move to one room of the home, likely near the kitchen. In this way, if you cook, you will also be generating heat in your environment. The room you choose should not have vaulted ceilings and should be sealed off from places that do. Your home’s heat will race to the highest point in your home, so you will want to seal the loss of air at the tops of doors and doorways as well as at the bottom.
Of course, pull out the clothes and layer up. You will want to slow the exchange of heat between your body and the exterior air. There are three main layers and three special considerations. Your base layer wicks away moisture and can be as light as silk or as breathable as cotton. Your mid-layer insulates and retains body heat. And your outer layer really protects you from the outside elements, but indoors it creates another barrier between you and the temperatures outside. The three special considerations are your head, hands, and feet. Make sure you have gloves on whenever possible. Double layer your socks. Wear a hat to help you retain heat. You lose ten percent of your body heat through your head, so make sure you have your head covered. Don’t wait to feel cold before you layer up.
If you cannot leave your apartment or home for over a week during and following a winter storm and a grid down situation, you will need to prioritize warmth. Your body is the most efficient heat generator, and we will cover that in a moment, but you will want to generate heat in your living space to combat the temperatures outside.
Think of your heat source as also a source of light and cooking. You want to always have heated water on hand. A hot water bottle will retain and emit heat for hours. Tea, coffee, or any hot or warm liquid will warm you and lessen the degree to which your body has to work to generate its heat. Heat soup or chili, or Ramen to warm your home and feed your body’s furnace.
“A feeling of weakness took the place of hunger. Conscious of the need of food, I felt no cravings. Occasionally, while scrambling over logs and through thickets, a sense of faintness and exhaustion would come over me, but I would suppress it with the audible expression, ‘This won’t do; I must find my company.’” So wrote Truman Everts in 
We lump, pun intended, solids into one category, but the category composes your carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and caloric density, often referred to as the “energy” of the food. As we said, though, calories are just one consideration and not the only concern. Caloric density or energy is the number of calories your body can process out of the food. If you are forced to survive on leafy greens you forage for, you are at the lowest range of the density scale. Though your iron and trace minerals will be high, your calories and energy to burn will be low. On the high end of the scale, you would find peanuts, butter, and oils. 
A human can go without food for about three weeks but would typically only last three to four days without water. While water is the king of all liquids, to survive, you need to think of fluids as the carrier of other substances like sugars and salts, the conduit for smooth neural network firing, and the necessary component to aid in the processing of all the solids you take into your body. If you only eat dry beans and dry jerky, you will be dehydrating yourself in the process. Potassium, sodium, and calcium are electrolytes or salts that help conduct electric currents in the body. Chemically, electrolytes are substances that become ions in solution and acquire the capacity to conduct electricity. To fire on all cylinders, you need to have an electrolyte balance in your body. You may not need to add salt to any of your pre-prepared survival foods, as they tend to be high in salt as a preservative so that you will get enough. However, for long term survival, you’ll want the components to make a super hydrating electrolyte formula. This is water, table salt, baking soda, and potassium chloride like Morton’s Lite Salt. One and a half teaspoons of it to four cups of water and your electrolytes will be in balance. Your hydration will be maintained better. Your brain and muscles will continue to function and fire off their electricity with minimal disruption. If you add some sugar in the mix and a powdered fruit flavor, you have made your own Gatorade. However much you consume of your electrolyte solution, whether you make it yourself or buy a pre-made mix for your bug out bag and supplies, drink the equivalent amount of just plain water to guarantee hydration. 
How long can you go without food when you wake up tomorrow? How cranky will you be if you skip a meal? What are the effects of drinking a pint of water, first thing, every morning for a week? Do you feel different? How? Answer these questions for yourself during these quiet times to know how your body reacts with foods and water or without food and water. At what point do you feel foggy, and your thinking feels unclear? How many hours did that take, and what does that feel like? Recognize it because understanding your nutritional requirements could be the choice between life or death in a survival situation. The decisions you make in a crisis are that critical–that serious, but you have to have the right nutrition and fluids to make the best decision.
In the first blog, we discussed the baseline in the context of what is typical for a given environment. We recommended observing the environment and choosing clothes and actions that fit into that environment. Imagine the baseline as the smooth surface of a lake. What’s below is hidden. What is above is ordinary. If there is a disruption in the water, our attention is drawn toward the interruption. Our minds automatically begin to question the origin and intent of the disruption. Was it a fish, a bird, a rock falling, or a person? Genuinely knowing the baseline comes down to answering a few questions for yourself about whatever environment you are passing through before you find yourself there or while you are in it. 
It is a woman, especially a mother, who will first see the lost child in a crowd. Most men, realistically, would walk by and not notice the child. Men who are fathers themselves are more likely to notice. The security guard whose job is to protect an area is most likely to see the out of place abandoned backpack or sketchy, nervous individual. Most people are below the observational baseline. It is natural for most individuals to drone out the sounds and images in every environment. Know that in every environment, there are people who are observing, and the Gray Man’s goal is to remain unobserved.
Almost everyone you see has a plan. It’s the person who does not have a plan that we naturally question what they are doing. The tourist is sightseeing. A person may be going to the store, to work, on a date, out to eat, or with other specific purposes. The common element is that almost all the people functioning below the acceptable baseline are moving with purpose and according to a particular pattern and flow. The tourist and the couple on the date are not likely to be in any particular hurry. The person returning to work is typically moving to the business district and is moving more rapidly. The tourist may be stopping for a selfie. Almost everywhere these days, though, you can find people just standing and looking at their phones, and you can use that to your advantage. Stopping out of the flow of pedestrian traffic and looking down at your phone or a newspaper or book provides you the opportunity to assess the flow, look for would-be observers, and plan your route. 
There are two real types of facial recognition. There is the kind we do with our eyes, and there is the kind that computers do. Here we will briefly look at both. It is natural for people to study faces, yet we view direct eye contact, just like animals, as a threat. If you want to test this theory, make and hold a stranger’s gaze. Within seconds of their recognition of it, the stranger will be questioning your intent. That long survivalist beard you have been growing might not stand out in your small town, but it will in the business district of a city. The dark sunglasses you wear as part of your disguise and concealment are out of place on a cloudy day, just as they are out of place at night. A cowboy hat in a city setting would look out of place, but a baseball cap of the local sports team falls under the baseline because people in the area are accustomed to seeing that. A hoodie may be out of place in one environment but perfectly natural in another. Subtly concealing your eyes, face, and head will keep you from being scrutinized by casual observers. Even if it is too dark for sunglasses, clear lens glasses can conceal the pupils and most of the eyes.
If you have an electrical socket you don’t use and you know how to safely turn off the flow of electricity to it, simply hiding a valuable behind the wall plate may be enough to deter a criminal. Small items can be hidden away in this manner. For a more advanced setup, hidden wall safe outlets can be constructed from an emptied outlet box with reduced size three-prong plugs. That option will give you more room, but it will also require some basic construction skills. This is a completely fake socket that looks real but will provide you a small hidden storage compartment.
When a criminal enters your home, they are looking for things they can easily grab and hastily go, if they have to. The tickets under a magnet on your refrigerator, the jewelry box, the small lockbox, or unbolted gun safe, all of these are grab and go items. While they might glance at your photos to put a face with the home and help them in figuring out what you may have in the home, they aren’t likely to pause and ponder your pictures on the wall. This is where a picture frame safe can be very useful to you. This doesn’t have to be too fancy and your picture shouldn’t be so great that someone would want to take it off the wall and really get a good look at it, but we like the picture frame safe because it’s one most people can build themselves. Consider hanging this on the wall versus putting it on a shelf. If someone is ransacking your home they could discover it when clearing shelves, but they are less likely to take it off the wall.
In the same vein as the picture frame safe, wall clock safes are an affordable option. People will look at your safe hundreds of times, glancing up at the time. Burglars will be watching the clock to see how long they’ve been in the house and how close it is to popular times to arrive at home between four and seven o’clock. People will be glancing at your valuables throughout the day, and nobody will ever suspect what’s cleverly hidden behind the clock face. Just remember to keep the clock set to the proper time, so no obsessive-compulsive criminals try to help you out by setting it to the correct time.
The book safe has probably been the most reliable safe since the first bound book was ever made. With the printing press and our modern age of printing, there are hundreds of millions of books out there. Chances are you have at least one within reach of you right now. The real beauty of the book safe is that you can use any book with a relatively sturdy spine and appropriate thickness. Cookbooks are fantastic because criminals aren’t likely to either read or cook from a book. All you need is an Exacto knife and you can easily hollow out a space. Place the book among other books and it is easily hidden in plain sight. On a full bookshelf, it might as well be a secret combination, because only you know which book it is and others don’t. One thing to note, though, there has been a long tradition of storing money in Bibles. Often that was the only real book settlers had with them, and the tradition kind of stuck. For this reason, avoid using a Bible, as this will be the book criminals would most likely grab to search through. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to pause to read it.
If you are a bit of a carpenter, a false bottom drawer is a great hiding place. While criminals may search your drawers and under your clothes, a false bottom drawer typically has a layer that can be pulled out to reveal a few inches of void space. In a hurry, you could easily grab the drawer, toss the contents, and access your hidden interior compartment. It doesn’t have to be a dresser drawer either. It could be a bathroom or kitchen drawer, a nightstand, or a desk. Most any drawer can be converted with a decent saw and some plywood. Add some decorative drawer liner throughout the inside of the drawer to even further conceal your valuables.
For the truly ambitious person who really needs to access their things in a hurry but still want maximum concealment, consider a lift-top table or lift-top nightstand. These are whole pieces of furniture designed with tops that lift up entirely. Just two hinges and possibly a switch or lock of some kind is all it takes to completely conceal your valuables. In an instant and even under pressure, you can access your valuables and essentials by just lifting the lid. Lift top furniture is another one of those historic safe spots. It was a preferred way to secure valuables at home from the early days through the nineteen hundreds. If you search that old desk of yours long enough, you might just find the trick hiding spot. They are a little more expensive, but the lift-top nightstand and coffee table are making a comeback. Typically the lift-top is intended as a tv tray like feature, but you can easily repurpose it to suit your security needs.
It is kind of weird, but you probably always have your smartphone with you nowadays. It has become an extension of our hands. We usually always have it nearby. It’s also a high theft item, which may be why we keep it close. We have always kept cash flattened in the case on the back of the phone. In an emergency situation or if my wallet gets stolen, we have some money to get home. Also, criminals don’t usually peel the case off of the phone, first thing, so if it gets stolen, you might be able to get your money back as well. You can’t store anything more than a few flattened, folded in half, crisp bills, but that may be enough. Maybe there’s another important document you could fit back there. Take a moment, peel the case off right now, and take a look.
As ubiquitous as cell phones have become in our modern age, the water bottle maybe even more of a common, prominent fixture in our daily lives. What we really like about these is how much they can hold: spare keys, currency, an emergency credit card. Typically, the bottom simply unscrews to reveal all your secret items within. Put some tissue or cloth in there to make sure your items don’t bounce around when the bottle is moved or picked up. Put some stickers on it to identify it. Make it cool, but not too cool, and it will blend into the backdrop of everyday living. A burglar is not likely to grab that off the countertop of your home. If you’re hiding a gift for someone in your house, well, let’s just say it’s not cool to use someone’s dedicated water bottle.
Also in the category of the mundane and oft-overlooked is the good old fashioned can safe. These look like just regular cans of food. You can purchase them premade, or with a little work you can easily make one yourself from any can of food you have. If you went to the cupboard now and moved around some cans you would probably find a can of something you forgot was there– a can of corn, beans, or soup. According to one study, only 82 % of Americans cook food in their own homes. How many of those home-cooked meals call for corn? Would a hungry criminal grab your bag of chips or your can of kidney beans? Again, here, you will want to include a cloth rag or tissue to dampen the noise if shaken and you will want the weight to be similar to that of the real item. Your can could be as large as a coffee can or as small as a can of sardines. If you’re not going to access the item except in an emergency, you could build a false top coffee can. If anyone ever used it and scooped the coffee from the top, your contents below would still be safe. Get creative and stash your stuff.
If all of those gadgets sound like too much effort to you, remember that houses are built with all kinds of hiding spots. Some modern constructions have wall niches that simply need a large framed piece of artwork to conceal the void behind. There is an actual Facebook channel dedicated to things found in walls, so there’s an area back there to hide things. Older homes have floorboards that can easily store vast quantities of items. There’s space under beds and in headboards, under couches, and behind furniture. There’s a space behind most every drawer where you could easily tape an envelope of cash. You can even wrap the item in plastic and hide it in your flour or sugar. If your container is waterproof, the toilet tank is another great spot. Who goes back there or thinks of going back there? There’s a lot of space above ceiling tiles and in attics. Garages are also areas that offer multiple areas to conceal items. It’s not likely that criminals are going to pull that cardboard box labeled “Christmas Decorations” off of its high shelf, so that box can hide almost anything away safely.
A nuclear EMP or electromagnetic pulse is the electric shockwave triggered by a nuclear blast. It is an intense burst of electromagnetic radiation. It quite literally fries every electronic circuit in its range. This destroys most every device, as very few systems are shielded from such a pulse. While a nuclear weapon detonated on land would have more devastating effects from the blast and an EMP would be the least of people’s worries, a very high-altitude EMP called a HEMP above the Earth’s atmosphere would create an EMP that would stretch from horizon to horizon. People on the ground would not feel a thing unless they have functional electronics in them like a pacemaker. If you are on the ground beneath such a blast you would see a fantastic light show similar to a great fire rolling across the heavens.
For decades, national security and intelligence officials have warned that the United States was vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks that could cripple the nation’s power grid. Tensions between the U.S. and North Korea are ongoing, despite how friendly leaders might appear from time-to-time. North Korea continues to test its nuclear capability and has repeatedly threatened the U.S. with an EMP attack. In fact, twenty-seventeen news agencies in North Korea explicitly warned that North Korea could hit the U.S. with an EMP attack. North Korea’s nuclear efforts are much more aggressive than Iran’s at this point, though some experts indicate that Iran is an equally dangerous EMP attack threat.
So, what really happens after an EMP? How bad could it actually be? Well, within seconds, everything containing electronic circuitry would instantly fizzle out. From insulin pumps to pacemakers, to life support systems, all would fail in a single instance. Medicines which need to be refrigerated would begin to deteriorate and lose efficacy. Foods which require refrigeration would begin the process of turning after just four hours. Millions and millions of Americans would be stranded miles from home, especially if the attack occurs during the day when that simple commute to work just became a multi-day walking journey.
With that level of destruction, we have to ask ourselves if there really is anything we can do, individually, to harden our lives against the possibility of an EMP? The answer is that we can do a little. You could build your own Faraday cage to protect some of your devices, but remember that your ability to recharge those devices or connect those devices to anything, including satellites will likely not exist anymore. Still, having a small solar recharging unit, rechargeable batteries, an old laptop, external hard drive, and a basic radio sealed in 
