Hey James, want to share some stuff about the collapse of civilization.
Check this out.
Today (as I write this), it's the 8th day of the strike. I live in medium to large town (around 400,000 habitants), and things here are looking pretty rough. There aren't almost any medicines left in hospitals. The little food left had their prices sky rocketting, and there isn't any gas left in the gas sations, which means no public transportation.
All that made me reflect on how thin and fragile is this gentlemen's agreemnent that we call "Civilization". I can'tt wait for the strike to continue and things turn into a Mad Max tyype situation.
There are two lessons I take from all of this:
1) Always have food and gas stocked at home.You never know when you'll need it.
2) Never do the great majority of your goods transportation via trucks, or else, you became a hostage to the truckers.
-Bruno
Bruno, I hope you and your family do well doing this. I would add a few notes that seem to have eluded some of the Baltimore area preppers I know. The assumption of clean water is too strong. Also, having cases of bottled water around is not healthy. There are estrogenic and plastic compounds in the PET bottled water.
Consider storing tap water in wine and whiskey bottles, particularly gallon bottles left over from table wine. Also, make sure you invest in a gravity fountain bottle of spring water, these are typically 5 gallon bottles, which is good for a small family for two days of drinking water. They are also made of heavier plastic, that does not breakdown like the PET bottles.
Masculine Axis: A Meditation on Manhood and Heroism
Bruno raises some outstanding points, as usual. Transportation of goods was done by boat for most of human history. As our roads decay, our rivers will be the only means of transporting goods just as the Amerindians did. I have advised people looking for a better place to move to pick somewhere with good waterways.
Bruno, get on Scribd and use the search term "Professor Parabellum." Or have James give you my email address. Also, FerFAL's book is very good.
Having read Bruno's article, I have a cryptocurrency idea that may beat inflation and be independent of any nation-state. If you are a developer with experience in distributed ledger blockchains, we should talk.
Open question to all
WHAT is civilization? That is something i've never understood.
From wikipedia
"A civilization or civilisation (see English spelling differences) is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication (for example, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]"
Confuses me even more.
The classic definition is the best, a society that generates surplus food stuffs sufficient to support an elite and engage in activities beyond mere subsistence, usually monumental architecture. Permanent servitude and class stratification are almost immediate results.
Don’t forget the water that’s already in your pipes and toilet tank. No matter where you are, if you dig a hole deep enough, you’ll find water. Now, if you’re in Las Vegas, it’s a mile down, but most temperature climates you can find water easy enough using coat hangers bent to an “L” shape as divining rods. Don’t know how or why it works, only that it does. I’ve found drains and septic tanks using this method when I didn’t have property maps. Dig for a day or 2 and you can have yourself a well. Find a way to filter it, make charcoal perhaps, and then distill it if you want to. Hope everything gets back to normal down there in Brazil for you soon. When will these people learn that it’s never a good idea to piss off the truck drivers?
Just a heads up to everybody: the strike ended today.
Things haven't got to thee Mad Max route, unfortunately.
Our goverment you freeze the gas prices for a time, to please thee drivers. On the other hand, the money they would gain from the gas taxes will have to be take from the money that sould be invested in public health and public education.
Everybody is pissed, and there will probably bee a major Teachers SStrikee iin the coming weeks. Or not, since the Soccer World Cup in gonna start in around two weeks, and everybody is goingg to the busy cheering on fucking Neymar Jr. (the main brazillian soccer player right now).
Anyway, just another day in the hated and beloved Brazil, a place that is not for amateurs.
The kind of plastic you want is HDPE. There's a code stamped into the bottom of all plastics like this number "2".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-density_polyethylene
Other plastics are also good but HDPE is a readily available standard. Look on the bottom of your milk jug it should be HDPE with a recycle code of "2". Five gallon food buckets are usually HDPE also.
I second FerFAL's book is very good. Probably one of the most practical survival book ever covering the most important thing of "what you need to think about" to prepare. It does go into what you need but it lays it put in such a way as to explain why things need to be done. A free copy of "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Kearny is a good idea. Even if it's not nuclear war it has some excellent practical advice. You can skip the nuke part if you're not interested. For nuke war, hard copy is essential.
@jacob
Oh goody I get to comment on my theory of civilization.
I think I'm the only person directly linking civilization to genetic temperament of humans and empathy. Civilization is the taming of humans so they can get along without excessive violence or domestication. I'm firmly convinced that a huge, massive problem in the world is psychopaths. I see them as a difference strain of humans. I think humans before civilization used to be mostly psychopaths. The Neanderthals were in Europe for 250,000 years or so and did not much of anything. The consensus is they were very violent. In actuality they were much more like animals. Animals, unless you are close offspring, are only interested in themselves. Anyone in their territory without the power to control them is exterminated. When civilization did pop up it progressed fast in terms of our history overall. A scientific research program in Russia made me think differently about early Man and led me to this idea. The Russian domesticated red fox study.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox
I believe that this experiment, while controlling for tameness brought fourth another trait that they haven't acknowledged. Empathy. I don't think you can have civilization without empathy. Blacks score very low on empathy and everywhere they predominate there is exactly...no empathy. No civilization. A total Hobbesian world of the vicious and strong preying on the weak. Psychologist have commented on how cold some of the ghetto Blacks are showing no remorse for the most vile crimes of violence against other people. Whites I think have very high levels of empathy. I think non close kin marriage made some of this possible and I believe WWI and WWII vastly accelerated the tend by killing off the most aggressive and psychopathic Whites in mass numbers. This is reversing towards disorder now. Psychopathic numbers are increasing because of the long peace we've had.
The practical implications of this are the presence of order or disorder directly related to how much you can empathize with others. If no one had any empathy then you have huge disorder. How many have you been around people and not killed them when you could have gotten away with it? We don;t kill them because of empathy. James has described Blacks that are more wealthy than him setting up to attack him. What did they expect to get, a few dollars, a phone? This shows a vast lack of empathy and complete disorder. You just can't have civilization where people attack each other every time they think the police are not standing directly over them. It breaks down the long chain of supply that keeps civilization going.
Sam J's theory of civilization,"Civilization came about because of the rise of empathy. This allowed people to work together".
Sam J’s theory of civilization, ”Empathy is necessary to form civilization. As capacity for empathy rose civilization rose with it.”
James rails against civilization but at the same time rails against the empathy deficit he lives in. You can't have both Barbarian paradise and civilization at the same time.