A fascinating article about someone who, admittedly a ‘hard luck case’, moves to ‘survivalist country’ and winds up in the sort of situation that has no good resolution.

The takeaway here, as I see it, is that while we like the idea of a place out in the middle of nowhere, that middle of nowhere also appeals to another subset of people that we may not particularly want to share oxygen with. In short, the ‘wide open spaces’ and ‘lack of oversight’ that make a place appealing to you and I also appeal to some less savory types who might be your neighbors. And, sometimes, it can turn ugly in a big way.

Whatever terms he initially plugged into Google or Facebook or YouTube, he was soon frequenting websites promoting far-right conspiracy theories, watching videos predicting imminent social collapse, and reading how-to guides on survival preparedness. Over a few months in late 2012, the content of Taylor’s Facebook posts shifted from topics like trucks and music to videos from the hacktivist group Anonymous and posts about pandemic disease, the threat of GMO foods, the rise of Islam, and the Obama administration’s purported plans to confiscate everyone’s guns. Taylor devoured TV shows like Doomsday Preppers, Survivor Man, Live Free or Die, and Man, Woman, Wild. The notion of living off the land allowed him to imagine ways he might escape the wage economy and finally make something of himself.

RTWT.

An interesting article about disease-laden Africa and how all the plagues and pestilence in any part of the world is just one Boeing away from becoming our problem.

A 340-mile road, flanked by deep valleys, connects Kikwit to Kinshasa. In 1995, that road was so badly maintained that the journey took more than a week. “You’d have to dig yourself out every couple of minutes,” Mikolo says. Now the road is beautifully paved for most of its length, and can be traversed in just eight hours. Twelve million people live in Kinshasa—three times the combined population of the capitals affected by the 2014 West African outbreak. About eight international flights depart daily from the city’s airport.

If Ebola hit Kikwit today, “it would arrive here easily,” Muyembe tells me in his office at the National Institute for Biomedical Research, in Kinshasa. “Patients will leave Kikwit to seek better treatment, and Kinshasa will be contaminated immediately. And then from here to Belgium? Or the U.S.?” He laughs, morbidly.

Zombie are the new normal in EOTW fiction, but before then the big science fiction threat was some sort of superflu (“The Stand”, anyone?)

We’re kinda seeing it now in NYC with their measles episode. Heck, right here in my college town we’re having an outbreak of whooping cough. Not to get anyone’s tinfoil hat into a twist, but that whole “I don’t need to vaccinate my kid if everyone else is vaccinated” doesn’t seem to be working very well.

It’s tough to avoid people, but I suppose if you live out in the desert where you can go quite a while between human contact you might wind up missing the whole pandemic. Or you might die alone drowning in your own fluid-filled lungs. :::shrug:::

The folks at Fatherland Homeland security used to tell us to keep duct tape and plastic sheeting around for this sort of thing. Remember that? (And remember that awesome color-coded alert system they introduced?)

I suppose the only thing you can really do to mitigate your chances of being a victim of some pandemic is avoid people, be prepared to stay indoors for a length of time, and bleach/sterilize/sanitize the hell out of everything. I know that I could lock the doors and not leave my house for a couple months. Thats no guarantee against catching Captain Trips but it seems that your chances of catching something from someone is greatly reduced when you avoid all contact with those someones.

The article linked above is pretty interesting. It just reinforces that the African continent is well and truly screwed.