Published ten months ago in my periodical ( subscription info at the end of the article )
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NEWER RELOCATION GUIDE
I would like to thank Jack Spirko of The Survival Podcast for this one, which I directly stole. It wasn't even his subject that gave me a related idea, but a straight up theft of his idea. He suggested that you could use the Corona restrictions as a good Strategic Relocation Guide. In other words, the states that had the least restrictions would be the best places to go. And that was it, just a few sentences presenting the core idea. He didn't elaborate past that, so I feel that I can ( this assumes he didn't return to flesh out the idea at a later date. If he did, I'm unaware ).
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I thought this was a really good idea, in its simplicity and its effectiveness, but as you know, being contrary in all things, I couldn't agree with its implementation as most people would see it. Most would look at South Dakota, Florida and Texas and say, well, those three states were the least restrictive so I will move there. Unfortunately, EVERYBODY is saying that, so every swinging dingus will get into a food fight and try to get the last U-Haul and move to those three states. You do NOT want to be part of that lemming horde ( fun filled fact-in 1980 Kurt Saxon mentioned voting with a U-Haul. I was just surfing through his old Survivalist magazines. I want to say in #5, but I'm going by fading memory. We are on the shoulders of giants ).
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I also want to add in, it wasn't JUST what the government said or did, you also want a clear idea of how the citizens treated each other over the restrictions. Mercy on you soul if you move to a red-ish area but you are knee deep in Karen's. That will be a little harder to research, so you need Boots On The Ground reports. Needless to say, I'll cover that, but after the migration patterns.
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I would NOT advise moving to Texas. Florida has caveats and if you choose South Dakota, make sure what you are getting into with the failing fracking industry ( I'm not sure who it was, North or South, that had the lions share of production. But like Oklahoma after the 80's, that state will have its funding decimated and the economy sucking butt, hard, while oil production flees. Taxes will shoot up as services suffer. Like the rest of us, but worse and faster ).
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Everyone wants to go to Texas, but she is NOT the Uber red bastion you think. It is a once great conservative location turned purple ( like Nevada ). I don't think you have to worry about it going all the way Blue, but it ain't no Red as far as politics. Its freedom is more myth than reality. You have a border crisis, always translating into drugs and criminal activity, and you have everyone else moving there jacking up prices. If all that is okay with you, fine. This is most likely the last move for any of us, though. I just want you more aware of this decision being longer lasting.
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If you are in a deep Blue state, Texas might still be your dream location. With all the issues of Nevada, I wouldn't care to move to any other place. We actually had a very good non-compliance rate the second half of Corona here in the Elko area, giving me hope that the event loosened state influence over local areas. Because Corona SHOULD have clearly highlighted both good and bad in an area. If the counties were just going along with the state, but not meaning it, they showed their true colors last year. So a win for my local area, and almost the entire rest of the state. Even Reno redeemed herself a bit, in my eyes, not going Full Blue Retard as Las Vegas eagerly did.
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Corona showed Californians and New Yorkers their future, and it looks pretty bad. If you thought your location blew monkey balls before, that was just a warm up ( I understand other states equally sucked, such as Oregon. You know, The Usual Suspects ). But, where are those two populations moving to? That's a gold star there, Skippy. Florida and Texas. It was bad enough living in a Red state that saw a lot of 1990's Californians move there. Those were the Not As Bad Liberals moving. Care to guess how much MORE communistic they are going to be in this batch? But even if that is overblown, you are looking at a hot real estate market.
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What do you do in a hot market? You SELL, not buy. Okay, you could sell, then move to another location in the same state and buy cheaper and be in a less populated area, but generally I'd say to avoid the areas everyone wants to move to, as a financial general guide. If everyone is doing something, it MIGHT be smart, but you still pay the price of panicking late rather than early. South Dakota is probably chock a block full of tiny 100 population towns in farm country, sold cheap, but make sure of your winter survivability there, grid down.
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I didn't like Florida for many reasons, although that is not to say it doesn't have potential survival wise. But I want to warn you economically. Texas has an economy largely based on oil. Fracking oil, now. Florida has an economy based on Disney World and Social Security. You can already kiss Texas' economy good bye, post fracking, and you are stuck there thinking you were in a Less Worse economic collapse area. Perhaps even in debt. Beware the same issue in Florida. Tourism is sure to suffer unless China copies 80's Japan in that industry.
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And while Social Security SHOULD be the last to fail, you cannot guarantee that. Again, no, you are NOT moving to a guaranteed state economy that is viable. No ones economy is going to survive post Corona and post Peak Oil, and you shouldn't expect it to unless you are an over optimistic unicorn glitter land dweller. What I'm saying is that do not move there expecting the economy to last on your schedule. The collapse has its own idea of timing and I think you should all have already been pouring an adult libation and toasting the fact you had an extra ten years of prepping.
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And don't think I don't hear your innermost thoughts ( besides lusting after my hair ). You are thinking, well, gee, we survived Black Monday in 1987, we survived the Asian Contagion in the 90's, we survived The Tech Wreck ( okay, I finally get it twenty years late. The Y2K scare was government propaganda for throwing extra money at the tech sector to try to bail it out ). We barely survived the Housing Bubble, but we managed it at the mere cost of lots of inflation, kicking out lower economic tier home owners back into the renting pool and lots and gobs and oodles of institutional debt. So, gee, perhaps we will survive the Corona Economy.
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Okay, I get it. You would actually be excused for thinking that way, because every single time the Doomers insisted we were all going to die, we didn't. The US has been on boom and bust cycles for about 150 years ( bank meddling and the Industrial Age go together like salt and pepper ). Why can't this time be The Same? You mean, other than Colonies, Commodities, Currency and Crude? Industrial Ages need Colonies for affordable Commodities ( and Customers ), accepting our Currency issued by a Central bank and relying on Carbon fuels, mostly Crude, for affordable fuel. That is a lot of Cee's, and every single one of them is failing, because Corona ( hey, another C ).
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But, that is my story. Perhaps you feel lucky ( do you, punk? ), and you want to assume a mortgage after you move to your new Redder, more Conservative sanctuary that as a bonus has the Best Economy Ever because of free markets or whatever myth is convincing the worker drones to become debt slaves. Now, I know this is a lot of pressure on you. You need a Anti-Corona state filled with more Konservatives than Karen's ( perhaps not in sheer numbers, but in widespread dispersion ). You need to find a home you can buy from equity or savings rather than debt. You need to find a job in 50% unemployment.
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Sucks to be you, moving? Of course it does. When HASN'T it sucked to downgrade the American Dream? That is at least, minimum, a fifty year old trend. When did that NOT suck? You had to move from the industrial belt to the sun belt, from Union to retail. You had to move to the urban suburbs from small towns as all the mom & pop's closed and Warehouse Stores took over. You had to go from living near work to adding 20% to your work day from commutes. Cars went from nice to have, modern, luxurious to absolutely necessary.
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Jobs went from Worth Working to Half The Purchasing Power in one generation. Work went from manual and then working into supervision for the last half of your working life to bitches taking over management so you had to retire twenty years earlier than before, and that didn't give you enough time after kids to become independent enough for that ( this on top of being at the mercy of Bitches Lib Divorce Court, crapping on whatever you would have had left to retire on ). Work went from White Tribal to White Male Minority working the crap jobs left over from Diversity Hires. All your life it has sucked to be you, working. This time is only differs in details.
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If it was me, and I just sold a house, I'd take the equity and buy a home in a depressed area, one that can be subdivided into small apartments, and a hunk of junk land. I'd rent out to a friend or church member as I lived on the junk land, as they lived there cheap while you worked on both. You have income, both small town and hermitage land and you are not in debt. And I don't think you can do that in Florida or Texas if real estate prices are exploding ( perhaps you could, I have no idea. My land searches were sixteen years ago ).
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If you have no home, I'd find a way to avoid the last month or two of rent and buy junk land, the last of the money going into the gas tank to get me there. If you cannot find a cheap RV, and don't want to pay the lumber costs, I would look up “hexa-yurt” and build a dome out of rigid board insulation until I could find a better solution ( I have been told the connectors to build your own dome are on a waiting list. I don't know if you could ferrocement your hexa-yurt ). Or, perhaps you can find a junked van to bury ( with ferrocement and proper rust proofing ). You don't need sheets of plywood if you use cardboard and ferrocement.
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The old timey Redneck Way of building underground while dirt poor was to dig a ditch around a small hill ( or, dig a ditch and throw the dirt up into a hill ) and then place wire mesh down the trench and then over the hill. Now add cement ( and a doorway under the hill ). You've built a dome without lumber. Now remove all the dirt from under the cement. Most of us older folk might not be up to that, but it is an option while lumber went from $300 for a six sided 8x8 lumber cube to $1300, and RV's are selling for a premium as everyone bails the Blue cities.
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( If you only add an inch or two of dirt on top for camouflage, and the rigid board repurposed for roof insulation, you could get by without much cement, just ferrocement. From all reports of folks using that, such as JUST chicken wire in one layer and a thin layer of cement re-roofing an old roof that had rotted from the Florida weather, that stuff is as strong as can be. Don't be stupid adding weight to it, but don't think you need six inch poured walls or roof either )
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If you think you need a nice house and a nice job and a perfect freedom loving state, you are shooting too high. You are playing the moron, not on TV but in real time. You don't get to be Yuppie Scum during an economic collapse. Make a list ( or, if suitably Nerd-I'll try not to make fun but no guarantees- a spread sheet ) of the Less Corona Restrictions states, a list of gun control states, the list of unemployment by states, the worst property tax states ( Texas is pretty high- nothing in life is free and if you aren't paying income tax you are paying a high tax elsewhere ) and the worst zoning regulation, shake or stir, and find the Least Worst Choice.
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And add in your X Factor. In my case, in this article, that would be “Too Popular”. With Texas and Florida it might be “Too Much Immigration” as well. Anyone that says “State X Is The Best” is only talking about personal preference. You'll note two strangely contradictory facts. One, Jim is the mostest studliest survivalist ever, and two, nobody thinks Nevada is a good survival retreat. Yet here I am. What does that tell you? No, not that I am wrong. It tells you that you shouldn't follow Best Of Lists, because they do not allow for your personal situation. At the time, I really needed to move to a No Income Tax state, because I was sucking hind tit with the child support payments. Now, no income, I need LESS property tax. No list of Best Survivalist State would have accounted for that.
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Have you ever been to Texas? Florida? I lived in both. Texas is its own country. I could not relate culturally. But the big issue was that the weather there is simply a little slice of Hell. I don't think any other state is so big and has the crappiest weather ever of any place on Earth or epoch in every single one of its regions. It is simply amazing. Let me just suggest that if most of her settlers were German, you might begin to understand what special brand of retard wants to live in Texas ( I'm half German, by the way ).
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Florida is a swamp. Not only is it a swamp, it is a swamp full of violently angry Negro's and other swarthy foreigners, or perhaps even worse, retired New Yorkers or New Jersians. The only claim to fame Floridians have is staying drunk in Key West, or not having to worry about freezing to death. I'm sorry, I know I'm a mutant, but any place you cannot grow potatoes is no place I want to live. Even without unwanted neighbors. And at the very least, check the cost of hurricane insurance before you assume you can afford to live there. Mine jacked up considerably, and was prior to the years of massive hurricane hits, prior to the real estate bubble, and in one of the areas LEAST impacted through history by that natural disaster.
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As far as the kind of culture you will find in your new location, that is difficult. Culture anymore can be like micro-climates. Hard to pinpoint without being there. All you can do is research the history of who immigrated there and if extremely lucky know someone who lived there. I didn't know until recently that most California settlers originally were from Puritan Yankee Scum. That explains the hideous communism along side half the country filled with far more conservatives types ( rugged cowboys being the myth if rarely the reality ). I thought Oklahoma was settled after the Civil War, but the folks there, at least in the east, are more Down Home Southern than anyone I ever met in Florida.
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I got a pretty crappy reception in Wyoming, across the board hostility, and am amazed at the contrary reports. Louisiana had such a creepy Southern Comfort vibe I got right back on another Greyhound bus that same day. And that was after many times in various decrepit downtown Greyhound terminals. Culture is hard to pinpoint never living somewhere, and you don't have time to move to a bunch of different places. Even in an RV and retired, I submit to you that if ever there was a time to move your bowels or get off the commode, this is it, right here and right now.
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Time is short, if you have any belief at all that western civilization is already collapsing, with the US perhaps only behind the UK in how far along we have come in destroying ourselves ( Britain, being controlled by the US if they were to be bailed out from their own imperial collapse, was surely given its walking papers to go Full Retard Politically Correct, almost as if the message was “we were founded by Englishmen, now look at how nicely progressive they became, so American's can as well”. It could be worse, the dumb asses could have picked that road to ruin themselves ).
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So, this is where Corona Restrictions come into play, the shortcut to your cultural guide. If a people fought off the worst of the Corona Lock Downs, perhaps they can then be potential tribesmen. No guarantee, but it is a quick and dirty shuffling of the cards as to where you want to relocate to. Since you don't have time to sniff it all out in person. Just don't take too much of a shortcut, lining up a half dozen states on the top of the list and throw a dart at the map. You are using Corona as a relocation guide, but after that you must add in all other considerations ( I would say, be careful giving too much weight to just one. For instance, I chose Nevada for very conservative gun laws, and since moving here they went from Red to Purple. Same with taxes ).
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Corona Restrictions are just the first gathering of possibilities, substitution for Culture Knowledge of the area. Then factor in everything else. This makes sense in that I kept telling you previously to pick a spot FIRST on culture. YOUR culture, not the culture of those writing these Best Survivalist Retreat lists ( and that includes my list. Most of you would hate Nevada. Primarily I love it because I can stand these idiots here better than the idiots anywhere else ). Then, you picked the least worst spot of your culture with everything else like taxes and gun laws and cost of living.
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See, me and Spirko almost agree on something! Yes, that scares me. The next thing you know I'm buying BitCoin and looking forward to the US not collapsing because, well, because my advertisers wouldn't like that! ( I still love you, Jack. We can't all be me, so I don't take it personally ). But to give the devil his due, Corona Relocation Guide was a brilliant idea ( Spirko has a lot of great ideas, you just have to put up with his peculiarities. He is King of the Backwoods Home School of prepping, and recommended in spite of that ).
( .Y. )
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James M Dakin
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