Another day in the happy little melting pot that is America. I recall reading Chittum’s “Civil War II The Coming Breakup of America” years and years ago where he predicted that a Balkanization would take place in the US along racial lines. I’m not sure I see that, although you could argue it has already happened de facto. I could see more of a political Balkanization but, in retrospect, we kind of already have that now don’t we? Look at those colored election maps that come out every four years and the same predictable areas are the same predictable colors. *

By accident or design, I managed to land in a place that pretty much aligns with my own ideals (or, perhaps, I landed here and it re-aligned my ideals to suit it). I don’t necessarily fit in with 100% of the prevailing beliefs here (I’m more of a Goldwater conservative rather than the classic conservative) but, thus far, one of the prevailing beliefs here is that as long as youre not screwing around with your neighbor’s stuff you can pretty much believe whatever the heck you want. That works for me.

So although the social issues seem to be getting to the fore these days, I’m still focused on the economic. And, really, these social issues are going to impact the economic numbers just as hard as the superflu. Whether a business is shut down for Covid or BLM it’s still a business making no money and not paying it’s bills. The bottom line is still the same: economic loss.

Since my apocalypse du jour is economic, I tend to lean towards the stockpile “food and cash-like instruments” end of the spectrum. Sure, there’s ammo in there as well but I’m planning for Great Depression II: The Next Generation, not Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo. Although, honestly, the only difference between preparing for one instead of the other is quantity.

And, not to beat a deceased equine, my experience has been that there’s going to be a lot of small, personal, intimate EOTWAWKI’s in your life (job loss, car problems, health scares, housing issues, loved ones in trouble, etc.) before the Big One and nine times out of ten money turns out to be the duct tape that puts your life back together. So…no debt, wad of cash. For whatever that doesnt fix we have our other preps.

I suppose if you live in a major urban population center, or a state that is home to several of them, your concerns are probably (and justifiably) more centered around the …social disturbances…going on at the moment. By all means, keep a wary eye on the crowds and don’t stray far from your favorite thundertoy….but don’t forget that race riots and firebombers occur far, far, far less frequently than pink slips, busted transmissions, sick dogs, and broken water heaters.

Statistically, this is going to happen more times in your life than a zombie apocalypse.

Prepare for the day the Antifa crowd in their black sweatshirts are marching down the street swinging pieces of pipe. It’ll happen at some point, I’m sure. But don’t get so caught up in the possibility of it happening that you ignore the higher probability of those small EOTWWAWKI’s.

* = Chittum is viewed, by many, as a racist. But whether he is or not, doesn’t change the validity (or invalidity) of his predictions. If a racist tells you to get off the tracks because a train is coming, the fact he is a racist (or a communist, or a Muslim, or a homosexual, or a Democrat) does not change the objective fact that, indeed, a train is coming and you need to get your butt off the tracks.

Merciful Crom, has it been a weird year or what? Remember when a 500 point swing in the market would take a week? Now it takes place in one day. And we have riots. And pandemic. And a presidential election. And Chuck Schumer is still running loose.  This really is going to be a year for the books.

And yet…so far…I’ve survived. In fact, not only have I survived, I’ve managed to get ahead on a few things. Most notable – house paid off. (Go me!) And all my investments have recovered to their pre-Superflu balances. And I took advantage of the dip(!) to buy in on the ground floor on a few things.

So, why didn’t I get my butt handed to me like some people in all of this? A few reasons. First and foremost, I live within my means. I drive a car older than I care to mention..but I’ve no car payment. I don’t get to buy expensive toys unless I save for them…but I have no credit card payment. School is paid as I go so…no student loan payment. And, now, house is paid so…no house payment. So when something exciting happens like getting hours cut or a job ‘furloughed’ due to Covid, I can spend the money I have on my needs and not on loan payments.

A few years ago I decided that the smart thing to do was have three different sources of revenue. This way if one crapped out, I wasn’t left with no income. Turns out, not a bad idea. I put a solid 15% of whatever I make into a “Do Not Touch” fund in case of emergencies and, as a result, I can function normally for several months at this point. Longer if I’m willing to give up a few luxuries like cable and that sort of thing.

It also helped that I had plenty of consumables on hand… toilet paper? Not a problem. Beef? Got a freezer full of it. Pasta and rice? Literally hundreds of pounds. If I really, really wanted to I could blow off grocery shopping for , probably, at least the rest of the year. If the money stopped coming in tomorrow I could dedicate $0 to groceries and be juuuuuuust fine.

Civil disturbance? Can’t find an AR for love or money in your local gun shop? No 9mm to be had anywhere? Very, very, very much not a problem.

I’m not saying this to brag, rather I mention it because I feel vindicated. The lifestyle I live, which does sometimes generate a bit of derision from others, has put me in a position where the world may be flailing around like a chicken with its head removed but I’ve got a little ocean of calm and relative security. And I am tremendously grateful to…me….for doing what it took to get there.

Yeah, once in a while my t-shirts have a hole in them, or my shoes look a little frayed, and I use a seven year old phone but…if thats the price of the security and safety that I feel I’ve garnered for myself than I’d say it was a very good trade.

I hope you do as well. I hope you do better. I hope you look at all the possible wildly bad stuff that is going on this year and think “Y’know…I’d feel a little better about my odds if we did…” and then you go do it. There’s still plenty of room for improvement in my situation…more security, more resilience, more resources…but at the moment, things are nowhere near as bad as they are for other people. I know people who have had their hours cut and they have to decide on whether to sell the gun collection in order to meet the mortgage and keep the jet ski from being repossessed. Sad for them, but we all make choices.

Anyway, thats my take on things after watching the news this evening and realizing that, all in all, I’m rather glad I’ve spent the last thirty years as a paranoid survivalist. I should add that while I am satisfied that I’ve been heading in the right direction all along, I’m not complacent. There’s still more to do. Always is.

Be honest, can you relate to this: several weeks ago you were focused. You were at CostCo, WalMart, and a few other places making sure you were ‘topped off’ on things. Maybe you finally pulled the trigger on some of those bigger expenditures because ‘now was the time’. You went to bed each night mentally wargaming how things might go and what you might need, and in the morning you resolved to hurry up and get dressed and go get those things. And then…things seemed ‘kinda’ normal. The panic ebbed and receded. Sure the rice and pasta aisles were empty, but there’s plenty of other stuff. And, after a few weeks, that sense of urgency you felt, that pushed you into doing things, started diminishing. Maybe ‘right now’ became ‘later this week’ became ‘next payday’ became ‘when I get around to it’.

Can you relate to that? Because that’s pretty much what I’m fighting against with the guy in the mirror. I’ve got a lovely spreadsheet of goodies (The Preponomicon) and far too many things on that list are at less than “90% complete”. But…but…it’s sunny! Gas is $1.65! The electricity is on! Dairy Queen is open! We can eat out again! So…what’s you hurry, buddy?

Complacency…thats what it looks like, guys. You stop running when you don’t see the bear behind you anymore. ‘Course, looking behind you means you might not see the other bear ahead of you.

I’m trying to be diligent about working my way down my list and, I gotta say, motivation can be lacking at times. But I know that even if there’s no ‘second wave’ of infections, no mutation, no economic Chernobyl from spending, no massive job layoffs, no meat shortages, no drug shortages, no stock market slump, happening right now that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen tomorrow, or next week, or next month. The tricky part is maintaining that mindset that ‘bad stuff could be right around the corner’ when all your sense are saying ‘things arent so bad right now’.

So…I look at my list and remind myself that I wrote it for a good reason, I thought it over carefully, and made the ffort to put it on paper. I trust the me from two months ago that this was worth following up on. So…off to CostCo.

You guys should do whatever it takes…watch Walking Dead, read One Second After, review some graphic historical accounts of societal disasters…whatever it takes for you to recover your motivation, but stay motivated. Even if we sail through this, and the crappy fallout, there’ll be another one along before you know it.

So, having been into preparedness (or survivalism) for the last thirty years, you would think that would have been ridiculously ample time to get squared away for something like the Current Situation. So, why the sudden frenzy of buying?

Well, virtually all of my projected scenarios involved some sort of grid-down type of scenario where we are hoarding gasoline, hunkering down, without electricity, listening to our wind-up radios, and that sort of thing. That’s the scenario where you crack open the #10 cans of freezedrieds. As a result, I’ve been prepared for that sort of thing for a while now.

But this particular flavor of apocalypse, so far, has been different. I doesn’t feel dire enough to break into $65 #10 cans of freeze-dried meats. Rather, I can still go to Costco, for now, and buy a flat of pork chops or a 10# brick of 85/15 ground beef. And its that ‘normal’, day-to-day food that I’m winding up going long on right now.

Other stuff like soap, rice, batteries, detergent, aluminum foil, etc….thats all fine… at 100+% on those. But that everyday stuff was a bit lighter than I would have thought and that’s where the focus is now.

As I’ve mentioned, the Current Situation will be a fascinating and illuminating experience to see what does and does not work as far as preparations go. So far, other than what I’ve mentioned, I’ve been fairly pleased. I am especially pleased that in the last few years my focus has moved into financial preparations..eliminating debt and socking away money in case something happened. That, more than the 5-gallon buckets of rice, seems to be the most comforting thing so far.

“So far”…you catch how many times I’ve used that in this post? There is no guarantee that what we are experiencing now will be the same thing we experience later. In fact, it’s virtually guaranteed that it will not. It may be worse, it may be better, but it will be different. For me, in my location, right now, the biggest prep is money. Lotta folks with cut or reduced hours, closed or restricted businesses, etc. For them, it’s living on savings and credit cards. I’ve been adamant about having more than one income stream and, sure enough, if one takes a hit the other can still keep some green coming in. That’s working out as I had hoped. But, thats how things are so far… tomorrow could be an entirely different (and worse) story.

Even the clueless idiots out there are catching on to things being a little squirrely. I don’t see anyone buying 4k televisions, jet skis, or pro gaming computers. When even those people, who normally ‘live for today’, curb their spending you know that the situation has reached a level of seriousness that is unprecedented.

Of course, because of that, the businesses that are open are seeing reduced sales revenue as well. If anyone at the local car dealerships is doing even 1/3 of their normal sales volume, I’d be surprised. I think we might see some very interesting sales and promotions coming up from many different businesses and markets as they try to drive up sales to meet their fixed costs. If you actually do have some ‘disposable income’ you might do very very well on buying a few goodies in the future. Heck, I should go troll Craigslist and see if I can pick up another EU200 or something.

So, here we are a month or two into the largest ‘disaster’ any of us have seen in our lifetimes and…so far….not what I expected. I have always thought the apocalypse was going to be either a ‘real’ one with Katrina-like infrastructure failures and lawlessness, or an economic crisis that, actually, closely parallels what we are in now but without the face masks. Either way, I do feel vindicated about both, the stockpiling of freezedrieds and the financial contortions I’ve gone though to get the finances resilient.

If it bleeds, it leads. Thats the axiom when it comes to news. (Trivia: I started college as a journalism major. I finished as..well.. I’ll let you know.)

It seems that the Kung Flu is having to share time with blaring headlines about 31% unemployment coming soon. And our governor just announced a moratorium on evictions, utility shutoffs, and that sorta thing. A recession, defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in GDP, seems all but guaranteed. Prisons are emptying, hospitals are floundering, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria! Haven’t you heard? The world is coming to an end!

Darn hard to keep a smile going with that sort of news. But…is it really news? Is it real news? Is it the dreaded ‘fake news’? Or is it just the most sensational way to get click on Reuters website? Should I max out the credit cards with the expectation that the ‘boogaloo’ is about to happen? Or do I carefully navigate my way through the upcoming societal detritus to the inevitable upswing on the other side? Stuff is getting real, that seems certain….but the news…they only tell you the worst of it, right?

At this point, I’m really willing to start believing that news is subjective. Get your news from as many different sources as you can, apply some critical thinking, and then you decide for yourself whats really news.

My grandfather, a man from the era of a high school education being considered higher learning, read all three newspapers every night…The NY Times, The Daily News, and The NY Post. It never occurred to me, as a stupid kid, to ask him why he sat up late at night at the kitchen table, listening to WNEW’s Make Believe Ballroom on the radio, reading newspapers, but whatever the reason was I’m pretty sure that after reading those three papers, with their three disparate points of view, he had a more rounded and well-informed opinion about the news than most people.

I try to get my information from equally as disparate, dispassionate, and disconnected sources. I play both sides of the fence…I listen to Fox and I listen to NPR. I watch CNN and I watch BBC. I read the books people think everyone should read, and then I read the books people think no one should ever read. And then…I make up my own mind.

No doubt, there is trouble ahead….but how much trouble, what kind of trouble, and for how long…. no one seems to really have any statements that everyone else can agree on. So, I take them all in and try to filter them as best I can. I suppose I could play it safe and go with ‘worst case scenario’ but I think thats a tad uncalled for. I think I’m going to proceed carefully and deliberately in everything I do moving forward until such time as I can loosen my hands on the reins a bit. When will that be? Not sure, but, whether we like it or not,  we’re definitely going to find out.

Moral of the story: don’t believe everything you read, but don’t disbelieve it either. Put your bran cells to work and examine, inspect, question, and evaluate what you’re told. Then act accordingly.