dipped 2 of 2

DIPPED 2

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note: HA! Friggin hilarious.  Click on the cartoon to enlarge click here
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I know you’ve all had a very busy twenty-four hours, stuck in traffic in the city recreating the exact moment in the near future you are overrun by ghetto hoards starting the revolution by killing Honkey Mo-Fo’s, and might have forgotten of what I bespoke, so here is a quick reminder.  DIP is Defending In Place, a terrible strategy but far better than doing close to nothing except fantasizing how you want to be Jackie’s ( of Backwoods Home fame ) neighbor but never will be because if the wife wouldn’t be able to go to the Jewish deli at 5 am for pastrami, you are as good as dead to her.  You are SOOO close to never getting your pension ( ah, HELLO!!! Does Illinois ring a bell right about now? ) and have only a few years before your children are 18 so you can freely tell the spouse to piss off and die, and so you do nothing and never will do anything.  Fine, I’m trying really hard not to pass judgment here, you are so welcome you ingrate bastard.  DIP is probably a good option for you.

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I know what you are saying to yourself right about now-gee, it sounds just like bugging in, or staying in place and he is just making up a new acronym to sound all special ed and special ops.  I don’t think I did make that one up, I believe it was a short lived term that never caught on, and I’ll differ with you in that it is a bit different than bugging in for the fact that it acknowledges the dire danger of suburbia and its population and density.  It is Bugging In Plus.  Bugging in is really nothing short of retarded.  But very few of us get to do much better.  I might be living in town, but I do have a off grid location awaiting me very close.  But that is TOO close, other than long term if this burg finally sheds a big chunk of its population.  So I’m only marginally better than most, and not by much.  Instead of berating myself I’m okay with my choices.  I’ll spend the last years happy in my trade and my relationship and death is any time between now and a day after the real collapse.  I’m supplied to survive past that but don’t count on it.  I saw a nice bumper sticker yesterday.  “My life is better than your vacation”.  Classic.  Live your life how you want it, NOW, rather than substituting consumerism as fake happiness.  None of us wants to live a life of crap because it might help us survive longer, not when we are old and content anyway.  This is not defeatism but just being right with your world.  If you have no desire to move, just try to do DIP as well as you can ( this doesn’t negate my advice to move out of the city-it is just being realistic ).

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And doing DIP well is all about strategic food reserves.  Yes, I’ve said before that extra food and ammo isn’t going to keep you alive in the city.  But that assumes you are a lone prepper that is bugging in.  At most, you follow the staple of prepper fiction ( not the same as post-apocalypse fiction.  The former is fantasy to the later science fiction ) and gets the neighbors on the block to band together, doing a piss poor job of eating OR fighting as nobody else was prepared.  With a strategic food reserve, however, you have a much better chance of surviving.  Assuming you can push your defenses out offensively, blocking nearby bridges or such to keep the travelers farther away than a surrounding wall, and keep patrols up to keep a DMZ, you might stand a chance.  But before you stress about weapons and ammo ( covered shortly ), food is first.  Food is always first.  Remember what I said about most soil in most places being denuded centuries ago?  Don’t automatically assume your local soil will be productive.  Just because weeds and trees grow there doesn’t mean much. 

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So don’t assume ANY food will be retrievable from close by or afar ( this ain’t The Walking Dead-survivors will eat all the food before they cease being survivors ) and don’t assume you’ll quickly grow crops.  You’ll need to compost a LOT to refurbish soil.  You need artificial fertilizer for some acreage to start, to cushion your composting year(s), and food storage until then, and you must plan not for yourself but for your tribe.  This is were the rubber meets the road.  A family with unprepared friends won’t last long.  Nobody is going to join hands and sing Kumbaya and die together as the supplies run out.  Some joker will always take it upon himself to free up the supplies.  You are all AR tricked out to repel boarders and the whole time the Trojan Horse was inside your walls.  If you are a true tribe ALREADY established, old school, then there are few worries.  But an ad hoc tribe?  No.  Tribes need to evolve together, trust being established over long periods of peace or short periods of trauma.  But the first calamity?  No true, real trust.  Just because your neighbor also served over in Afghanistan doesn’t necessarily mean you are a tribe come the collapse.  Not if he isn’t already supplied.  Hunger, and the immediate needs of the family are what will prevail in the near future.

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In a true tribe, the family doesn’t necessarily come first, not if certain things create a stronger tribe.  For instance, an obvious example, a warrior doesn’t refuse to fight to save the tribe just because his death will leave a widow.  The tribe will provide for his family after he is gone.  But that is not how our current society is set up.  It is every man for himself, every rabid Republican wishing to do away with the social safety net.  Which sounds good to save on money, but which ignores the tribal obligation of providing for families.  If you insist that the nation replace the tribe, you can’t do away with the nation assuming its responsibilities.  The nation only wants you to fulfill your obligations, without it assuming theirs.  Reward and responsibility are two way streets.  Ending the welfare state is abandoning responsibility for the family that you are asked to abandon so as to protect the state.  I’m not saying that Private Smith dying with no family at the same time Welfare Mother Jones is getting bennies is the same thing as the tribe supporting the widow.  I’m saying in toto, those that can defend must do so as those unable to provide must be protected, if the nation state wants the loyalty you’d give a tribe.  The rich humps that call for the welfare state to end so lazy bastards will go to work fail to mention that their policies shipped jobs overseas, imported immigrants and automated local jobs so as to get richer, so that there aren’t employment options for these people anyway.  The rich, mule member munchers like Rush, are flaming morons.

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As the nation state has disintegrated for some time now ( dysfunctional failing states aren’t necessarily failures as social entities as they are reforming along tribal lines.  Afghanistan might be poor but by and large their culture has endured the entire time the Soviets and Americans have tried to defeat it and been themselves defeated economically AND culturally, as a good example of nations falling as tribes form once again ), and the only tribes that have formed here are criminals or fundamentalist religions ( the nation state entity religions will fail alongside the nations ), we cling to a dying culture.  We are still looking at ourselves as nationalists rather than tribal, at least in our daily subsidence cultural traits.  We pledge our royalty to the nation ( “Murica! Love it or leave it!” ), desperately hoping that it will save us, completely ignoring tribe as the wave of the future.  We will, in times of obvious outright collapse, suddenly attempt to form a tribe but the people will NOT be loyal or trustworthy. 

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In short, if you don’t provide for your people they don’t protect you the tribe.  When the tribe is bonded and trusting, then deprivation is endured collectively.  But when a tribe is being formed, in its birth, if the reward is not present the sacrifices will not be offered.  If you don’t have food, you can’t form a tribe, which is where the Shelter In Place folks screw it up.  Probationary tribal members don’t sacrifice their families health for other probationary tribal members.  Bribing tribal members into being loyal is the same as priming the pump.  It is the same as seed corn, or having money before you can make any.  You must buy loyalty, first with life saving supplies and then with shared sacrifice.  You don’t start the process with expectations of altruism, which sucks, but the ultimate reward is a whole stronger than its parts.  You must create your tribe with booty.  Feed your people and soon you’ll have a tribe.  Not a collection of minions wanting to do your bidding.  Folks will never fall for that warlordism unless they have no choice, such as joining an already formed and functional tribe.  Think of food as a drug dealer hooking a potential junkie.  The first one is free, then they pay.

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Needing to feed your team to buy their loyalty is not going to be a cheap proposition.  It sounds like it, at first, and it is, until you realize what you need to make it work correctly.  You aren’t just feeding warriors, but dependents.  You aren’t just feeding them survival rations, but iron rations for farming and fighting.  And you are most likely arming them to begin with.  And just a squad?  Just ten, as first mentioned?  Let’s do the number for just ten to highlight how costly this is.  Ten people, not even on triple rations, just in wheat for three years ( two for sparse harvests, one spare ), each with two dependents ( parents, children, spouses, siblings, whatever ) is NINTY years worth of wheat ( ten warriors, with twenty dependents, times three ).  A ton of wheat is five years worth, which pencils out to eighteen tons.  Plus storage.  A five gallon bucket holds 35 pounds, for seven pounds per gallon.  You need five thousand gallons in storage containers.  And this is what you thought ten warriors for $700 started at.

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Now arm them.  You could probably get WWII Mausers a bit cheaper, but right now the overall best deal after ammunition cost is going to be buying a crate of Yugo SKS’s.  $400 each.  Now add five thousand rounds of ammo each, in steel cased at twenty cents each.  $10k.  Total, $14,000 ( convert the carbines to bolt action or you’ll need even more ammo ).  The wheat was, without storage containers, fairly cheap at only $4k.  A minimum of $20k for only one squad of soldiers, underfed.  They were $70 each to start with, but then quickly reached two grand each after arming them and feeding their dependents for a long enough time period.  If they were all going to use captured weapons, just the 223 ammo and the wheat ( at a minimum of two years, assuming not so bad farming results ) is STILL $13,000.  Anything else has a very limited change of success.  What are you going to do, assume only orphans will join you in the fight?  Soon, they’ll start families, or at least want to and will tend to leave a bachelor outfit.  You can start out at that $700 and hope for the best, but don’t expect it.

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If everyone is well armed and only needs food, you are going to do fine with very little.  Just stocking tons of grain will do a lot to increase your chances of survival.  But make sure you factor in dependents, and the truly needed logistics.  That $700 figure was a start, and yes to be fair just providing for family hidden in the boonies escalates almost as quickly, so the preceding was not meant as an unfair comparison to that.  One wife and two kids, just one rifle, in food costs alone will be ( three year minimum ) five tons of grain.  Four people, three years, four hundred pounds a year, 4800 pounds.  Twenty cents a pound, not including storage, a thousand bucks.  Another thousand for ammo.  So $2,400 for just a family, with only one combatant, verses $13k for a tribe.  The costs are frightening either way.  Just know going it alone, while cheaper, isn’t THAT inexpensive and a lot more dangerous.  Plus, you need to add in the cost of buying that remote homestead, rather than the “free” one you are in now.  Then the costs become similar.  If your odds are improved by numbers, the DIP strategy becomes less onerous.

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