by Tom Baugh, DumpDC

Imagine the following. Assume that the world has collapsed into chaos, and among the many survivors are two individuals in particular: Survivor A and Survivor B. Survivor A has ten pairs of shoes stored for the collapse, while Survivor B has a thousand pairs of shoes socked away. Survivor A takes loving care of each pair, while Survivor B runs his shoes hard, wearing them out and then grabbing another off the shelf.

Question: After fifty years, how many shoes does each survivor have to pass on to his grandchildren?

Think hard. Hint: this is a trick question.

Answer: No shoes remain fifty years hence. It doesn’t matter how many shoes you store away, or how much care you put into them, after five decades the materials in them are shot. They may still look like shoes, but wear them for a week or so and the truth will be told. Neither survivors’ grandchildren will have any shoes. Assuming that each survivor and his children and grandchildren lived long enough to notice, of course.

No shoes. Or tires. Or grease. Or tractors. Or root canals. Or just about anything you care to name. Except maybe chickens or goats or unfired rounds of ammunition buried somewhere, the owner long dead. And even those would be suspect if unearthed one day.

At some point, Roman nobles, seeing their aqueduct and road contracting businesses starting a downturn, decided to raise a few chickens. Two or three generations later these families were chicken farmers. There isn’t anything wrong with being a chicken farmer, of course, but it helps to have roads upon which to transport those chickens to market and water to give them along the way. But, no one knew how to build or maintain these things any more. Besides, most of the stones in those roads and aqueducts which remained had been pried loose for building huts. Such is the end-state of a slow collapse. Life gets hard fast, and stays that way, if you are just one of millions of chicken farmers with no other professions to be found.

A collapse isn’t all bad, though. It is an excellent mechanism for getting rid of undesirables, particularly those undesirables who expect, and now demand with increasing fervor, to be given everything you have ever earned in your life. And everything you have yet to earn in the future. And everything your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and so on, have yet to earn. When you are a productive economic slave, a collapse is a really good thing. I would rather live free and by my wits post-collapse, rather than continue in a gilded gulag under the lash of civility and perverted law.

The question is, what kind of collapse do we need? Rather than a slow, dwindling collapse that the Romans suffered, which led to the Dark Ages, I would prefer a fast, deep and short collapse that thins the herd of those who will do nothing for their own self-interest, or who would actively get in our way, and still leaves enough stuff on the shelf so we can get shoe production going again. With the slight change of having learned to be intolerant, post-collapse, of the gulag-
masters, of course. Who exactly those gulag-masters are, and how they should be handled, I’ll save for another time, but you probably have a good idea already.

If you are a gulag-master reading this for the purpose of figuring out how to entrap your fellow man into a gulag of one form or another, you may want to consider taking on a new line of work before it is too late. Certain resumes are likely to be “not entertained” when the time comes. For you gulag-masters, continuing on your current course and speed is tantamount to gambling that your gulag system will remain intact forever. Seeing this, many of us decided to start a casino for taking your bets. Step right up, my friends.

Note: Nothing you will ever hear me say advocates any violence or other illegality, not so long as the federal government of the United States remains in effect and in force. What happens after that tenure expires, however, is a totally different discussion. Of course, under those conditions, and absent those federal laws, certain actions would no longer be illegal, would they? Particularly if certain enterprising State Governors and Legislators decided to call upon a militia for various lawfully constituted purposes. If you live in a state in which these positions aren’t occupied by individuals so inclined, consider various means by which you might hire, in-extremis, some who are.

So now let’s shift gears a little bit. If you’ve read much of my work, you know that I am keen on uncovering reality by performing experiments. Here’s another. Go to a gun show, then walk around and ask people the following series of questions. If the answer to each question is in the negative, stop asking questions and move on.

a) Do you think there is going to be a collapse of law and order?
b) Do you think that weapons and ammunition are going to be an essential component to surviving that collapse?
c) Will it be essential to restart the economy after a collapse?
d) What skills will you bring to a post-collapse world to be able to thrive in that economy?

Now, because you asked these questions at a gun show, affirmative answers to a) and b) should be obvious. The last two are where it gets interesting. We’ll get back to some likely answers you will encounter, and their implications, later in this article.

I think you will agree that what we are about to enter can best be described as a period of armed conflict. The potential initiators for this conflict are numerous and, again, a topic for another article, but the end result of all of these initiators will be the same: a period of wide-spread brush- fire wars.

People go to war to achieve a desired end-state. Some may argue that wars have been started as an ends in themselves to benefit various bankers or war industries. But even those wars achieve a desired end-state: the enrichment of the war-backers. Defensive wars, whether large and multi- national, or small and contained within the borders of your property, achieve the end-state of a nation, or you and your family remaining alive and your property intact. Or not. Other wars involve the end-state of satisfied vengeance. Or not.

In the crisis which draws closer each day, we have an unprecedented opportunity to achieve an end-state unique in all of human history, challenged only by the end-state attained by the Founders in the Revolutionary War. We now have the benefit of history which they lacked. To see what this end-state requires, we must first tie together our previous shoe discussion and our gun show survey.

Clearly, the way to solve the shoe crisis five decades out is to start making shoes again. We could get together and declare a War on Bare Feet, but that would, like any centralized economic plan, be self-defeating. No, the best way to start making shoes again is to defend property rights, not only your own property but that of your fellow citizens as well. Note that criminals who stole property do not have a right to the property they stole as it isn’t theirs. This applies to criminals at all levels; the individual who stole your chicken, the gulag-masters who stole your guns, the progressives who stole your rights, the arch-conservative who stole your ability to compete by tilting the balance of regulation toward his and his friends’ larger and larger enterprises, the banker who stole your home by manipulating credit availability after lobbying for tighter bankruptcy laws, and the politicians who abetted all of these. And the hundreds of millions of people who went to the polls and put those politicians in place thinking that by placing the chain around their necks they would at least get a few more shiny things from the stuff they stole from you after your neck was chained, too.

This is an electorate who will keep doing exactly the same thing, no matter what pin they put on who. Because they surround us, and are getting more numerous by the day. Each time someone decides that they would rather hang onto that government job, and just look the other way to keep that paycheck flowing as your rights and property are stripped away from you, their ranks have swelled just a little. And then swell a little more as those people use that largess to influence others who sell them goods or provide them services, and so on. We have passed the tipping point, and there is no turning back from the course we are on. There is an ultimate solution to this question, however. But it takes a collapse to get there.

You and your children and your grandchildren, ad infinitum, will get more shoes by protecting the property rights of the cobbler who will go into business to make shoes in exchange for food. And the property rights of the tanner who will provide the cobbler material in exchange for shoes, and the butcher who will provide the tanner hides in exchange for shoes and leather, and the farmer who will feed them all in exchange for shoes, leather, dressed meat and so on. This is what our Founders intended when they set up our system the way they did. But they could not know the last two centuries and what happens once property rights are violated. And how the monkeys, left-wing, right-wing, welfare or suited, breed out of control when that happens. Or maybe they did, but we just stopped paying attention because we got our shiny things, too, and ignored the monkeys of all stripes, and the threat they really are.

Now back to our gun show. After our subject agreed that a collapse is on the way, and said that arming himself was essential, we asked question c) about restarting the economy after a collapse.

Some, out of frustration and ignorance over what free markets and property rights are really about, will be opposed to anything that sounds “economic.” Having been subjected to endless artificial obstacles their entire lives, who could blame them? And yet, members of this gun show subset are arming themselves without the least inkling of how or why to provide value to others, or the value of an economy that our cobbler, tanner and butcher might enjoy. Some of these imagine that they are just going to live off the land and take what they need, from you or others if necessary. This latter subset is really just a gulag-master who, because of birth or circumstance, never got his hand on the gate-latch. Proceed accordingly.

Others in your sample group will answer the third question in the affirmative and want an economy restarted. Ask these people whether this means the current economy and all its trappings, such as home mortgage interest deductions, sales taxes, regulations, health insurance, etc. Many people at this point will hit a brick wall and want something other than what we have now, but not be able to articulate it. This is not their fault, and is merely a product of having been caged, mind, body and spirit, for so long. Many of them are probably some of those who get shiny things from you, but just don’t realize it. If they do realize it, your experiment will be over quickly as they walk off in a huff. Particularly when you ask that last question.

That last question is where the rubber hits the road. Some heavily-armed types will imagine that they will merc themselves out to protect the farmer and the cobbler and the tanner. Yet, here we are right back into the whole standing-army argument, which then requires taxation and administration. And that requires something for those mercenaries, or their bureaucratic beneficiaries, to do when there are no real bad guys. Such as manufacturing bad guys. Bad guys like you. This is not the desired end-state.

Better, as the Founders understood, was that the cobbler and the tanner and the butcher and so on, sprout a pair and be willing to go out and, militia-style, handle the bad guys when needed. But we’ve been bred away from that to the point that the few of us who remain are now expected to pop-up, as if on a live-fire range, as convenient targets for destruction when they come to take our guns. Assuming they find them all, of course. Even so, if you have sufficient knowledge, however, “armed” doesn’t necessarily mean “with a gun,” which is one reason they don’t teach science and chemistry worth a damn anymore. Meat and bone succumb to many things other than bullets. Besides, the bad guys will always have plenty of guns and bullets and armored vehicles.

We have to start looking at them as mobile supply depots from whom we can requisition material any time we choose. That requisition takes many forms, of course.

Killing is far easier than creation. That is why it takes years to train a master cobbler or tanner or butcher or farmer or machinist or nuclear engineer, but only weeks or months to train a killer. We just have to accept that sometimes it’s best to park the Abrams out back of the shoe-shop, and let the local kids joy-ride it from time to time in that fallow field so that next year we’ll have tank drivers and tank commanders. Tank drivers and commanders who can also tan leather or build machines to drive cobbler needles or split atoms. And a tank can pull a hell of a combine, to boot. Tough guys who can’t create aren’t worth much. Creators who are tough, on the other hand, will inherit the earth. Unless we decide not to, which would be a shame. Note that someone who lacks knowledge, but is willing to work, actually work to provide value, is also a creator. This person once was an apprentice to a master, and who one day would become a master himself.

Which brings us to our last set of respondents, those who understand that they individually need to bring skills, knowledge and effort (stored trade goods don’t count) to the table of that post-
conflict economy, but who despair that they don’t want to live a mid-1800s existence. I don’t blame them, I don’t either. Not while there are all those great machines left lying around. Machines we can use to build other machines before the first set rusts away. Or before someone builds a chicken coop out of it because the collapse is drawing out too long. But at least this set of people know that they need to prepare their minds as well as their arms. Some of them are actually proceeding in this direction, but your poll will tell you how few and far between they really are, even in such a heavily-weighted group as gun-show attendees.

I’m out of room for now. But in a later article we’ll talk about how to not live a mid-1800s existence; that story involves an interesting rock in Alabama that we aren’t allowed to use. And along the way we’ll tease that desired end-state out of hiding, which will allow us to concentrate our fires during said crisis in a manner best calculated to attain it.

Tom Baugh
Author
www.StarvingTheMonkeys.com

by Michael Gaddy

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Individual ownership of a firearm no more qualifies the owner to protect themselves and their property and defend the rights granted by their creator than individual ownership of a cowboy hat qualifies the owner for the National Finals Rodeo.

Responsible ownership of a firearm requires not only adequate training in its use, but also a mental mindset capable of formulating and implementing a plan should that tool ever be required. Irresponsible use of a firearm often provides opponents of the right to keep and bear arms a useful weapon, especially considering their willing accomplices in the congress and the media.

Training with your chosen firearm should occur frequently, weekly if possible, at the very least, monthly. Always practice on silhouette targets and not bull’s-eye targets. Reality is a must in training. Devote quite a bit of practice and ammo on headshots. Criminals frequently wear body armor. Train diligently to become ambidextrous in the use of your firearm in the event your strong side should become incapacitated.

If one has decided to become trained and may be forced at some time to use his weapon for defense of his home, life, family, or rights, he/she should take the time to talk this decision over with members of their family. Each should be aware of the inherent danger should events occur that require a firearm to be employed, and where they should position themselves to remain as safe as possible.

The person(s) most likely to use the firearm should be aware of where other members of the family would be and to make every effort to insure that any missed shots not endanger them. High-powered magnum pistols and rifles can penetrate several internal and/or external walls.

It is imperative that one have complete knowledge of his living environment: where are your firearms located, can you negotiate your way through the house without lights, etc. It could prove invaluable to possess the ability to navigate each and every room in your house in complete darkness without giving away your position.

Keeping your firearm and ammunition in separate locations is absurd. An unloaded $800 pistol or revolver can instantly become a very expensive rock. Have an adequate supply of ammo. I, personally, have a firearm and ammo discretely located in each room of my home so as to never be isolated from either should the need arise.

I do not recommend the use of the laser sights now in vogue with many gun owners. In a dark environment they give away your position to a possible adversary. Not a good thing in a gunfight. A high intensity flashlight can be a force option, used to locate, identify, and temporarily disorient a potential bad guy, but should be employed with discretion when one is facing multiple targets, for the light too can give away your position.

Home invasions are becoming more and more in the news and usually involve a multitude of bad guys. Know whom you are admitting into your home. It is not unusual in a self-defense situation to find oneself in a target-rich environment. One magazine or cylinder of ammo may not be sufficient for the situation. Practice your reloads until they are automatic.

An adrenaline rush will cause one’s aim to be unsteady and erratic. Sometime before you practice on your silhouette targets, run in place for several minutes, pick up your firearm and attempt to engage the targets. Raising your heart rate is the closest one can come to duplicating the adrenaline rush brought on by a potential life or death encounter.

Do not rush toward the sound of a forced intrusion into your home; in so doing you give away your position and could draw fire from several adversaries at once. Do not turn on lights as that too could give away your position and draw fire. Stay low, think on your feet and react. Fear should be a motivator, but never the director of your actions.

What I am going to mention next is something I have personally done and recommend to all. Either travel to your local law enforcement, or, if you have a group of like-minded citizens or a shooting club, ask a representative of law enforcement to attend a meeting. At this meeting ask the LE representative if he/she understands their oath to uphold and defend; have a copy of their oath handy. Pointedly ask how an unlawful order to seize public firearms would be handled by their department. If they answer the order would be executed, ask what would be their department’s response if citizens refused to comply. I believe this serves to inform those in LE that adherence to unconstitutional confiscation might not go as smoothly as they expect and serve as a subtle reminder of who they are paid to “serve and protect” and who is paying their salaries.

If you have a number of like-minded patriots, or a gun club with members you trust, establish a phone tree. In other words, should one of your group become the target of a criminal invasion, they would call the first person on the list who would in turn call two people on the list and so on until all members were notified. Criminals prefer to execute their crimes with relative cover and quiet. A number of well-armed, concerned folks arriving at the scene could possibly insure a positive outcome and/or provide much needed assistance.

Train hard; train often; train in realistic scenarios; your life and the life of your family may depend on it.

by A Country Gentleman

Pivoting off our last post in the series, let’s talk today about assessing your required capabilities. Jim Rawles, who puts the  style in the preparedness lifestyle, has had many articles that touch on specific capabilities assessments, such as this one and this one. What we’ll be talking about today is the general theory and practice of how to assess a given situation and determine, based on conditions, what your required capabilities are.

First things first, identify your particular situation. For example, a person living in a rural area will have vastly different needs that someone living in an urban environment, while a suburban person will have different needs than either a rural farmer or an urbanite. I highly recommend including climate, terrain, population density, demographics (population age distribution, etc), unemployment statistics, local fabrication capabilities, water and sewer infrastructure, transportation infrastructure and other pertinent data.

Now that you know what your local physical and human terrain looks like, assess the most likely threats and scenarios that could impact you and your area. There are two broad categories, natural (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes) and human (riots, civil unrest, infrastructure collapse) and that affect and interact with each other. A localized “grid down” scenario driven by a hurricane can influence secondary, human driven scenarios. For each scenario,I recommend analyzing it by comparing “Probability of Occurrence vs Impact if Risk is Incurred”. Please see the following graphic for an example of how to do this:

For a particular potential event, determine the probability of occurence, for example, if you live on the east coast, a hurricane is a “likely” event. Next determine the impact. If the event occurs, how bad will things get?

Once you’ve determined your risk for a potential event and its attendant impact, now you know what to prepare for. If your X for a Hurricane lands in a red or orange zone, that is the event you need to plan and prepare for first. The scenarios that are in yellow deserve attention once the most critical occurences have been addressed.

Now that you know the probability and occurrence of your particular situation, the “how to prepare” should be framed in terms of “capabilities” and not “widgets” or “gear”. We will address this next step in part 2.

(Note that Part 2 has not yet been published, but you will see it here as soon as it is!)

by Michael Gaddy

When a person’s actions are restricted to what can be defined as self-defense, the assailant controls many of the variables they face. Time; place; daylight; dark; cold or hot are many of the variables one must consider. Therefore, the variables that we can control must be mastered if we are to have a chance for survival if ever faced with a do-or-die situation.

Those who own firearms and practice with them enough to be considered proficient in their use, most likely choose good weather in which to practice; light conditions are optimal and a good comfort level is maintained. Sure, you can hit that silhouette at 25 ft with both hands the majority of the time with optimal conditions with your favorite handgun. You can also hit that target at 300 yards with your battle rifle, sometimes putting all your shots in a small group when conditions are great; fine indeed if your attack occurs only during the daylight with no wind and the temperature hovering around 72. How many know how they will perform these tasks when faced with darkness, heavy wind, freezing temperatures or blowing snow? Better yet, how many know how their equipment will perform in less than ideal conditions?

If you can be 100% certain you will only be faced with a life-or-death self-defense situation when conditions are ideal, stop reading now; the following will be of no interest to you.

Monday and Tuesday here in the Rockies witnessed blizzard conditions with 1–2 feet of snow, blowing winds sometimes reaching 50 mph and temperatures near zero. While most folks thought this the best time to hunker down with a good book or movie, I got together all of the firearms, ammo and equipment that I might have to use to defend my life and/or the life of my family and headed for the range. I’m sure any who witnessed me entering the range that day were comforted in the thought that I was totally insane. When the 5-hour session was over, I was very cold and miserable, but I knew how both my equipment and I would function in that environment. I viewed the experience as a variable somewhat mastered.

The things that can be learned about ones firearms and equipment in terrible conditions could be the edge one needs to stay alive at some point in time and most useful when it becomes necessary to provide food for the table. Calculating for point of impact with projectiles down range in a 50 mph wind with numb fingers and blinding snow presented a real challenge. Then, to try all of the tactical sights on targets at less than 100 yards was quite an experience. Which ones work and which ones do not was a question that was answered for me along with what reticle performs best in blizzard conditions. Which action on what rifle actually froze up and would not function at all? What firearms lubricants held up in those conditions? What trigger guards were of adequate size to handle a gloved finger? All questions I had answered for me that would not have occurred had I not taken the time to train in those conditions.

Some time back I spent equal time in training in the desert around Tucson Arizona in the month of June. Again, not everything performs as advertised in a 100-degree plus environment, most of all the owner of the equipment. Taking the necessary time to train in all environs in which one could possibly find themselves is vital. Equipment, physics, physiology and how they relate to your ability to function in a stressful situation are invaluable pieces of knowledge. Once you possess this knowledge, you increase your confidence to deal with any situation ten fold. Confidence and mental preparation will see one through many situations where the ignorant will fail to survive.

Training with your chosen equipment in optimal conditions is fine and should be done on a regular basis to become as proficient as possible and to understand exactly how your equipment functions. This should include being able to make adjustments and repairs as might be required and assembly and disassembly of your chosen firearm. Having necessary spare parts is also a must. Say you have a bent charging handle on your AR platform; do you know how to replace it? What about replacing a broken firing pin?

Equally important is knowing and understanding how you and your equipment function in extreme environments. Once you understand how everything works, take it all out during extreme cold and heat; try them in a pouring rain and windy conditions; disassemble and assemble in low-light situations without giving away your position. All of the above could be the determining factors in whether you and your family are able to survive an attack or able are to provide food for survival if/when the situation demands.

by David Edwards and Daniel Tencer

Some 100 new militia groups have formed since the election of President Barack Obama, says the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In a re-run of the phenomenon seen when President Bill Clinton took office, gun-rights advocates, libertarians, survivalists and others are forming militias as a symbol of their resistance to what they see as an administration that threatens to restrict their right to bear arms and expand government control over the lives of private citizens.

“The truth is that these groups are popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a social-justice group that has been tracking the rise of militias over the past year.

Potok’s group put out a report earlier this year raising the alarm about the resurgence of armed militias. Since then, he told CNN, the group has counted about 100 new groups formed across the country.

“There really is this terrible fear mixed with fury about the idea that President Obama is somehow leading a socialistic takeover of America,” Potok said.

A CNN news crew that visited the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia found a group that sees itself as a “deterrent” to any attempts to restrict gun use, and otherwise sees itself as a place to learn survival skills.

“Just the simple fact that we are out here and we are doing this, will give somebody pause, will make them think twice,” said militia member Michael Lackomar, who added that he thought Obama “could be dangerous for the nation.”

“Anytime we get a Democratic president in the office, people become concerned, including myself, and we get a resurgence out here,” said one militia member, identified only as Brian.

But CNN’s Jim Acosta points out that gun control “is unrealistic in many ways, because the Obama administration and the Democrats know that it would be political suicide for them to go after gun control measures. Even the attorney general has indicated he won’t go back to the assault weapons ban enacted in the Clinton administration.”

In its report from August, the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out that the most recent wave of militia groups differs slightly from the wave seen under President Clinton in one respect.

“A key difference this time is that the federal government — the entity that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy — is headed by a black man,” the report states. “That, coupled with high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America, has helped to racialize the Patriot movement, which in the past was not primarily motivated by race hate.”

This video is from CNN’s American Morning, broadcast Nov. 16, 2009.