are you really a prepper?

ARE YOU REALLY A PREPPER?

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note: it's an older book-see if you can find it in the library.  "The Invisible Scar" by Caroline Bird is the best book I've ever read on The Great Depression.  Starts at street level and examines the event more from the individuals level, even as it covers things from a macro-perspective.  You'll be more frightened by this than any current fear mongering, as it stripes away the propaganda and it will remind you of how history is now repeating itself.
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note: Junes donations and Amazon commission came in at $290.  Thank you everyone.  I love you all long time.  Having said that, please don't forget you are still on the hook for your dollar a month if you haven't pre-paid, unless you are as broke as can be.  If you bought something for $20 at Amazon I only receive 80 cents in the new commission rate ( this was the last payment under the old rate, so the $215 I just got will be far less next month ).  So if you bought a used book for a buck plus shipping, thank you but that is only four cents commission.  Try for a buck a month in my pocket.  If you can only buy one of my books, fine, thirty cents is better than nothing.  You know you want to support your favorite doomer author, who asks for very little and delivers so much.  I'll also try to just make snide comments once a month for donations.
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I don’t check out Creekmore’s site all that often-there just isn’t really ever that much there.  He’s a great guy, minimizes the BS he preaches ( which isn’t really dangerous advice, more generic than anything.  He does lean a bit too close to bible thumping for my taste but that is a preference ), but there just doesn’t seem to be a lot to read over there.  But I do check in occasionally, mostly when nobody else can be bothered to post.  You can scan a few weeks, see if there is an article to read.  There was a really good guest article “The Half-Way Prepper”.  The gist of it was that nobody can afford a concrete bunker up in the mountains and so you just do things half way instead all out insane.  You can’t move to Idaho, so you buy a few acres in Tennessee.  You can’t work from home as a consultant or programmer, so you get a job relatively close that is relatively secure.  You can’t afford a huge semi-auto arsenal so you have a good hunting rifle with plenty of ammunition.  This was great advice and a great article, but I noticed a troubling underlying theme as I read through the meaty article.  He wasn’t much of a prepper.

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Now, don’t get me wrong.  In the somewhat deluded fantasyland of rainbow crapping unicorns that Rawles and Creekmore dwell, you can be a prepper if you have a few months of food and a means of defense.  They call this preparedness because nobody else in the city is armed nor do they have but a weeks groceries in the cupboard.  This is their evangelical mission, bringing in those poor lost souls to the flock, everyone welcome just pull up a chair and listen to the  Preacher tell you how you can spend money to save your soul.  The more ears listening, the more purchases, the more advertising dollars.  You are welcome to their church if all you have is a case of MRE’s and a semi-automatic firearm ( which, in a pinch, can be substituted with a bolt action, but ONLY if it is in officially approved military caliber-but you are expected to get that super deluxe plastic poodle shooter post haste ).  All the Official Church Doctrine is of course spouted.  Concrete bunker, bug out bag, freeze dried foods, but like the Catholic Church which never turned away a sinner, ‘cause the collection plate needed filling, All Preppers Are Welcome regardless of levels of preparedness.  Hell, you can have nothing but a Rambo Survival Knife and a pack of seeds and as long as your heart is pure, as long as your intentions are noble, you are an automatic member. 

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I know I’m a bit harsh on advertiser sponsored preppers.  Just like when you watch free TV, you expect commercials.  What chaps my ass about TV shows is when they go out of their way to showcase the products during the show, THEN we still have to watch commercials.  If you are going to go slow-mo as your hero cop pulls out of the station, highlighting the grill Chevy bowtie or the Ford oval, THAT should be the damn commercial, damn your greedy hides all to hell, damn you!  You wonder why Netflix is so popular?  Car commercials are a special kind of putrid crap, and showing the car racing around the city is a better advertiser than an official commercial anyway.  You cheese dingus bastards already added 50% more commercials than when I was a kid, and now you want product placement also?  AND for me to pay for signal delivery? Well, as we just talked about previously, the survivalist product companies are in a world of hurt, as are the sites that fed off them.  It almost makes me believe in karma again.

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Again, free content equals the need to watch commercials.  YouTube seems to be doing okay with that ( although I haven’t paid attention to their financials lately ).  I get the fact that commercials were necessary on prepper sites.  What chaps my ass is when those sites do product placement.  An actor will drink a Coke during a TV show.  Repeatedly.  If he ever switched to water it would probably kill him.  But you can ignore that fact if you so choose.  When a prepper site writes an article with product placement, that crosses a line.  Then the site just becomes the advertisers bitch.  That would be like Coke insisting a grade school teacher told students water was poisonous or polluted or that sugar was an actual vitamin.  Do you see where I’m coming from?  When Prepper Expert A says that the ONLY gun you should own is a semi auto, he might believe his own bullspit.  Or, he might be attracting advertisers for ammunition, ammo magazines, FLIR scopes and gun periodicals.  That is why I hate advertised sites, because their credibility and motivation is questionable ( of course, as I’ve said, this isn’t an evil conspiracy.  Those advertisers seek out the writers already holding the views they endorse.  But the end results are the same ).

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In this case, what the advertisers are doing is moving the baseline of preparedness to near zero.  Because “growth” is the only business paradigm known, all your prepper companies, just like any other company selling any other product, need to grow to survive.  You have to pay for machinery and warehousing and of course advertising.  They operate in a closed system of debt and increased debt to reduce the old debt and needing more customers but getting into more debt still to service new customers.  To use a very basic example, if I was to become my own publisher-not that I would necessarily except to feed my ego rather than my wallet-I’d buy the computer equipment to high-speed copy CD discs and the means to print a professional cover on those CD’s.  Then I’d have inventory costs for mailing envelopes and CD covers and etc.  Then I’d keep mailing out free samplers to prepper sites, and give away copies to attract buzz.  Before I have one customer, I already need hundreds to pay my cost.  If I sell CD’s like I am now, just a replacement for Kindle books, a non-printed CD, my cost is zero and I can go months without a customer and not suffer. 

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That is the difference between customers to recoup cost and customers for the sake of customers.  Going by the number of loyal minions who support me by the sales of my old magazine as they were offered for sale, I think I can safely call my rabid financial supporters at about twenty to twenty-five.  I’ll double that to account for previous donors not wishing to pay again, and add fifty percent to account for recent growth in eyeballs ( the more other sites fail, the more readers my way-out of desperation only of course ).  75 supporters out of a thousand readers.  Above that amount, I just have an ego gratifying number of followers.  You wonder why I can’t have any expenses publishing?  If I tried to recoup costs I’d be out of business myself.  And, just spitballing here, because I’m so incredibly awesome ( shut up! ) I think my numbers are high.  More people love me because I’m the best ( perhaps not to the Grammar Nazi’s, but hump you too ), so I get extra support.  The companies out there advertising are probable only looking at a 1-3% response rate.  If that.

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So you need LOTS of readers to support the advertisers.  So you make believe that anybody with a pulse can be a potential reader/supporter.  You lower the bar so far that the ranks are filled.  If you were in the military you know exactly what I am talking about ( probably the same if you work for a large corporation.  Come to think of it, I’d imagine that the “hire too many, layoff some, double the workload to the survivors” paradigm is deliberate because there is always so much rank filling deadwood out there.  Of course, the incompetent lazy kiss asses survive, so the actual workers need to triple their work to account for the still there worthless ones ).  I think we could re-introduce my long ago mentioned 80/20 Rule ( not that I came up with the concept, I just think I was the first survivalist to mention it.  I think.  Don’t hold me to that ).  20% of your customers provide 80% of your revenue.  It is lower than that in actuality but it highlights the general idea that few folks subsidize the rest.  The 80/20 Rule is just shorthand for a general idea.  20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes, or 20% of workers do 80% of the work, that sort of thing. 

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But I digress.  Here is my point.  Very few Preppers are actually preppers.  They are certainly not survivalists.  They are Pretty Pony Preppers, a few glittery sparkles conveying much and delivering little.  You cannot be prepped for a hurricane or power outage and think you will survive the collapse of civilization.  Which is seemingly what preppers believe for some bizarre reason.  Or, not so bizarre, if these sites they visit give that impression and being neophytes the readers believe them.  Remember, you gotta pack the pews, so don’t let any sinners get up and walk away.  Don’t insult them.  Tell them what they want to hear ( say three Hail Mary’s and you’ll go to heaven, repentant sinner ).  Tell them if they plant a pot on the porch with tomatoes they are a survivor.  Let me start dissecting the Half-Way Prepper’s preparations.  I understand any preps are better than nothing.  What I don’t understand is people being okay with that.

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First off, very important, Half Way Prepper ( HWP ) has a mortgage.  That would be okay if he had a fallback location, but his retreat is his home.  Quite simply, if your retreat is mortgaged, you don’t have a retreat.  You have a Pretty Pony.  It looks good, but for most scenarios of high probability it blows chunks.  It is okay to be stuck in a high density area working a crappy job, but it isn’t okay to count on that lasting.  Have that hunting cabin in the woods that is paid off.  You most likely won’t be bugging-in if the location is mortgaged.  I won’t go on and on about that, I’ll just leave it at that for now.  Next, food preps are marginal.  The soil sucks ( like most places.  Few focus on the fact most soil sucks most places due to historical fertility draw down.  You can own land, but if it is Southern clay, Rocky Mountain high acidic pine needle cover, dead desert, or similar, you have dirt, not soil.  Why did you pay THAT much for that land? ) at his location.  Yes, he is building it up.  Great.  Come the collapse he’ll be able to eat as much vegetables as he wants, at a whopping 200 calories a day.  That should be helpful. 

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You need storage food.  That really isn’t negotiable.  Since it can be 99% whole grains, it is too cheap not to have ( the rest of the food, the 1% most folks will have available in hunting, trapping, and gardening, makes the grain diet nutritious ).  If you don’t have years of grains, you aren’t really a candidate for survival.  HWP doesn’t focus exclusively on guns, so that is a good thing.  As long as you have ammo, the gun is incidental.  But his job is an hour commute a day.  And it is a government job.  How quick we forget 2009/2010 saw government budgets decimated.  It isn’t as secure as you think to work for those cheese dinguses.  And long commutes, seemingly pretty normal for most parts of the country, can be problematic unless you are a Fracking Fag.  Do we need to go over all that again?  Don’t piss me off, or we will.  If you have a mortgage, no place to go, only 3-6 months storage food, a job hanging on by a thread and a pathetic garden, how prepared are you?  Congratulations, you are “officially” a prepper.  But how long will you last outside of a natural disaster?  That generator you own brings MORE trouble, not less.  That was a waste of money that should have gone into food preps ( remember, your daily inflation food isn’t your collapse food-a generator doesn’t make it so.  I’ll discuss that another time ). 

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The point here is not the need to unzip and sling out our dingus and compare length and girth.  It is to warn you off complacency.  Thinking you are a prepper when you’re just a Pretty Pony is a scary example of hubris getting ready to kick you in the gonads, then squishing them like a grape while you are down for the count.  You can play pretend all you want, convincing yourself nothing bad will happen.  History, full of civilization collapses, calls you a dumbass.

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