Survive Infinite Dangers: The Family Survival Guide of 21st Century Dangers (20 page)

Now, let’s get back to “survivalism”. You’re not going to venture into a barter area without being armed but you must have a second person with you carrying a minimum of a shot gun. An alcoholic with a gun is someone you don’t want to meet. You do NOT set up a table with a sign reading “vodka for barter”. “Psych out” your potential trading partner before you even make it known you have vodka. If you have any doubt, keep it in your bag and stick to a honey trade. You won’t get as much for what you have but you’ll also avert problems for yourself and some other group also trying to survive. So let’s go on to honey. You really don’t need to stock more than these two items for barter. Or just stock honey if you prefer. It will take up more room and require more honey to buy that extra gasoline or whatever that other person has that you need (note: in survival you restrict everything to things you need. Never waste barter on things you want except for rare occasions like some candy for the kids!.

As I say, honey is excellent barter material plus, properly sealed and stored in a cool, dark, area like a basement, will outlive you. Honey found in Egyptian tombs 2,500 years old heated up I read tasted good! If we have to remain in our basements for 2,500 years, count me out. With honey, buy the bigger jars. They won’t zoom up in value (maybe double). Plus honey is very nutritious and you’ll use some in your own group.

What? You’ve already got a basement full of canned goods and spend an hour a day rotating out old date codes. You just gained an hour a day! Get quotes from two or three liquor stores as well as food distributors for the Luksusowa vodka and the honey (pick honey sizes and containers of your choice. You may even find a large honey farm! Either give away the food you’ve wasted an hour a day rotating or eat it but don’t replace it. Buy the liquor or honey first. Personally, I have both vodka and honey ready to barter with as some people will not want liquor; particularly families with small children. Having dad drunk in their group is not what the wife has in mind. But “hot toddies” of a bit of vodka and honey might be just the thing for a sore throat or insomnia. Just like a bartender, if you sense the buyer has a problem with alcohol, switch to honey. Have your gun in plain sight in case he “insists”. But, with the right person, a couple of bottles of vodka might get you a week’s worth of fresh produce! Don’t carry much vodka on you. If they clean you out of five bottles of airline size bottle vodka they can’t get drunk enough to do harm to anyone.

As I say, if it bothers you, stick with honey. It will just take more room to store and more weight to lug around as you check out what is for barter. Ten cases of vodka occupy 15 inches square about six feet tall. 1200 bottles of large honey jars – you do the math – a LOT more! You probably wouldn’t buy that much honey as that size honey jar sells for $4 even wholesale. Shop around, Costco will work deals on large quantities of food. You get the most “bang for the buck” for size with vodka. And the price of vodka may go through the roof if the disaster stretches into months. Your vodka stash may become worth more than that silver you thought you’d get rich on!

One last thing; you’ve got up to 25% of your investable assets in precious metals so what do you do with the rest? This may take the help of a competent broker where you pay (gasp!) commissions. You want really boring foreign stocks and bonds that pay a dividend in their money (reinvest it) and our government cannot convert into their new funny money if a “bank holiday” occurs. This may entail buying on a foreign stock market and doing (legal) things that are financially over my head. Pick the right countries. I own Swiss francs but stopped buying when my source increased their conversion commission rate to 6%. I’d like more but not at a cost of 12% “round trip”! I now buy Swiss Franc ETF symbol FXF. It’s been said silver and the Swiss Franc are the most secure investments in the world. I hope they are right!

You need a true expert plus do your own reading. Two years ago the best on Wall Street were pushing the rock solid bonds of Iceland. They had the highest credit rating in the world. The country was a wonderland. I sensed something was amiss. Unemployment was a negative number as people worked two jobs. Their standard of living was the highest in Europe. But the only thing they did was to take in money and loan it out at a higher rate. The music stopped when ours did. But their juke box also caught on fire. Their national foreign debt is now 200% of GNP which is the highest in the world. So you have to dig to see why a country is “highly rated”. And remember the “eggs in one basket” saying. Being shy of the U.S. dollar but still convertible back into dollars for an emergency is smart. When the President apologizes that “everyone” is now broke you’ll yawn and go to bed. Others will be flat broke but not you! Everyone connected to him will have probably (unknown to the president I’ll say for this book) already done everything above plus shorted the dollar big-time to wake up worth millions more in real money (while the “man on the street” is building his apple cart and painting “will work for road kill” signs). Yes, the world is not fair but you have to accept reality. Giving him the benefit of the doubt I’ll say the president gave strict orders for this not to leak out and anyone who leaked the information would be fired. The leakers will request their final paychecks be sent to the islands they just bought south of Cuba.

Chapter 16

Long-Term Survival (Over Six Months)

This is (about) the point where this book begins to leave you to your own devices. The author made his own decision he has no desire to spend the remainder of his days on this earth living in a permanent Armageddon world. You’ve probably seen a “Mad Max” movie where the world’s population has been reduced by 99% and the only law is who has the largest gang. Would I change my mind as the eighth month came around and I watched my family begin to starve; probably. That’s why I am making the decision now. To prepare for a permanent Armageddon world where civilization never returns is many times more expensive and takes full-time time, effort and money to “prepare” and remain prepared.

If this is of interest to you or you want to stretch six months to five, or more, years, I highly recommend a book by James Wesley, Rawles entitled “HOW TO SURVIVE THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT”. Mr. Rawles has constructed a “ranch” that is truly an armed and fortified series of bunkers, buildings and underground areas that would survive anything short of a direct nuclear strike. His excellent book includes much of the information found in this book but goes much further and instructs the reader to, well, prepare for everything up to, and including, “the end of the world as we know it”. He omits some of the short-term information found in this book and does not include much on what this author considers our greatest threats which are all technology based; EMP, radiation, anthrax, cyber-terrorism, bioterrorism and so forth. Mr. Rawles has 25 years experience in the military while I have spent my life working in and around “high technology”. So factor that difference in as well. But, with some exceptions, consider his book as picking up where this book leaves off. This is in preparation, expense, commitment and the time required to follow both books. Just as I’ve recommended other books I recommend this book for your short list for your “survivalist library”. This consists of fewer than a dozen books plus printouts of numerous Web sites. Information and common sense will be in short supply and will be two of your most valuable commodities.

Chapter 17

Government, Politics and You

In the first chapter of this book the comment was made that this would absolutely not be about politics. That does not mean it should be ignored. Ignore politics at your own peril thus this book will not ignore politics; it just won’t take sides. The quotation of Prussian soldier, writer and historian Carl Phillipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means” uttered his famous quotation sometime after the age of 12 (1792) as that is when he entered the army. He did much during his 51 years of life but is remembered for this one quote written into one of the military warfare books he wrote. It is all too common to be remembered for a single quote or action made in a busy lifetime. At least he had one. I’m sure 99.99% of all people since time began are totally forgotten including you and me most likely. That’s a lovely thought!

Once you reach the point of needing to survive a situation close to total anarchy or Armageddon, it doesn’t matter if it due to an accidental man-made (i.e. as we came close to it several times during the Cold War when a solar flare set off “incoming missile warning” in the late 60’s, a small Norwegian test rocket was misread by Russian equipment as a hundreds of incoming U.S. missiles giving the Russian head of state at the time something like 46 seconds to utter “Nyet” or “Da” where “Da” would have had someone push the big red button and turned the world into an inferno followed by nuclear winters for hundreds of years. A quick phone call from Oslo yelling “oops, sorry!!” never made the news until the mid-90’s when the history of the Cold War began to be released mostly by United States military historians began to compare notes with their counterparts in Moscow. The number of “oops” that occurred once notes were matched up I’ve read caused communications between the United States and what remained of Russia to open up by a factor of one hundred, or more, to avoid future “oops”. Unfortunately, the nuclear (and other even more dangerous weapons – yes, such weapons do exist – Google the phrase “Rods from God” for one of hundreds of methods, items, techniques, etc. that can be used for good or bad that the author is aware of. Like most things in life they are not inherently bad. Nuclear energy can provide more energy than a population many times our current number (a little under seven billion souls share this earth with you and me plus a trillion billion trillion other separate entities of life). This does include life forms such as single cell micro-organisms. Life is truly everywhere and mankind for the first time ever has the ability to end all life and, technically (the theory exists but I highly doubt it has ever been built) the ability to turn our planet into a smudge of dust as viewed from a telescope a billion light years away by a civilization that, today, is just now beginning to generate life forms (please, no letters on religion and creation – this book also doesn’t take sides on religion either other than to say almost all wars have begun due to politics, land, religion, philosophy and, sometimes, due to no reason at all other than a country’s “leader” is about to be tossed out on his (or her) ear so he picks a country and goes to war with it (there no better way to unite a country’s people behind a completely incompetent head of state than to go to war with just about anyone else).

“He may be an incompetent smuck of a leader but he’s our incompetent smuck so we’ll defend him and our country to our deaths!” Then they proceed to do just that. In the day of the Roman Empire they fell from within when they had conquered the known world and had no one else to fight with. Thus the curious quotes of more than a few made in the 1990’s that “us being a single Super Power is a danger to the world”. Well, that is rapidly changing to where we may soon no longer be a Super Power at all!

You are reading this book to learn the methods, techniques and skills of surviving the result of politics carried to its extreme – war. What to buy, what to do and everything you need to prepare. The reasons the world has been brought to the point where a book like this is even needed is chronicled in hundreds of other books, magazines, TV, newspapers and other media in a blizzard of information that comes at you 24/7 you really cannot avoid “politics” unless you truly live “off grid”, have no radio or television such that the world could have ended ten years ago but you wouldn’t have noticed. Even the few “loners” in Idaho who have tried this seem to have to “come up for air” every year or two. If the infamous unibomber hadn’t trekked into a town to mail a letter to his brother or a “letter-bomb” to someone on his “evil person list” (that’s what he had written on it – not too original) he could have lived out his years in his isolated cabin and his remains found by hikers maybe a few hundred years from now. So there is just no way to escape this world alive.

Assuming you live in a country that allows peaceful dissent (isn’t smart to “dissent” in, say, North Korea) by all means exercise your rights and make your wants, desires and wishes known. By the ballot box or by signs and peaceful assembly “leaders” need “direction” from those who they are supposed to work for (or that’s the way a Republic is supposed to work, not so in a dictatorship, oligarchy, monarchy and all the other “archs” including Anarchy which, not surprising, has many definitions including “no ruler or enforced or voted governance”, “no authority” and “lawlessness”.

As you exercise your right of dissent (assuming you have that right), for heaven’s sake, do not assume two dissenting sides will always work things out and all a country, group or the like needs are good negotiators who will talk until everyone gets enough of what they want, they shake hands then go home to a hot meal and a warm bed. IF you become involved on one side or the other (you usually don’t have to unless a country has some akin to a draft law whereby you are forced to be and maybe even fight on one side whether you like it or not) never forget the first obligation is to yourself and those you’ve already mutually agreed are members of your group is to survive! Put whatever brought you and the world to this point aside other than to know and understand “the players” so you know who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are. Also, this can and probably will change as the months drag on. Read the next chapter carefully to understand what I just wrote.

Above all, repeat to yourself until it becomes part of your normal behavior, “survivors play chess while losers play checkers”. If you don’t play chess, it is great way to exercise the mind to reach the mental state you’ll need to lead and to survive. You can play others on-line for free! Give it a try! Chess is where you think “moves” many moves in advance. If he or she does this what would be my best move. With every move it opens up a plethora of “next possible moves”. Expert chess players can think and visualize “next moves” a dozen moves ahead. The possibilities end up in the trillions by the time you get out to a dozen moves ahead. How can a human brain think that far ahead and rationally comprehend so many possibilities? It can’t. That’s why the best chess player in the world was still beating a Cray computer (most powerful computer in the world) until just a few years ago. The human mind eliminated moves the opponent could make that would lead to defeat while the computer included all such moves. Be a student of human nature. In a time of anarchy understanding what people typically do in times of stress will become invaluable. Think ahead of others. Always be proactive, never reactive. To survive a disaster you’ve already taken the first step by buying then reading this book. You’re proactive while others around you are stuck in reactive. They will do “something” when the lights go out, a mushroom cloud is seen in the distance, people begin to get sick by the thousands then millions and – well, you’re already reading a list of (about) 95% of the “maybe’s” in this book. To save space, the “fewer than one percent” dangers were left out on purpose. You know, the science fiction thrillers but they are just that – fiction. The meteor speeding toward earth (yes, possible, we would probably see it then be destroyed ten seconds later so why include it?), space aliens, a race of Big Foots emerging from Arkansas hills who quickly multiply then buy Wall Street on a million to one leveraged IPO followed by cyber warfare with China. Those were all left “on the cutting room floor”.