In any emergency situation lasting more than a few hours, there's one thing more important than any other.

Water.

But after that, when thinking about long term trouble, the second most important thing is probably something you don't think about when planning. It certainly isn't something you can pack in your bug out bag.

The second most important thing is relationships. If you don't have good relationships with your neighbors, with people at the destinations of your bug-out, with those you'll need to rely on when the phone is out, when the cars have no gas, when the internet is down, then it won't matter if you have all the water and food and ammo you'll ever need. Because you can't do it all alone.

Do you know your neighbors? Can you rely on them in a pinch? If not, why not? When walking to the nearest main road becomes an adventure, it will be good to know the names of the people whose doors you may need to bang on.

The Raw Story | Old-line Republican warns 'something's in the works' to trigger a police state

Bush Abolishes Fifth Amendment (reddit.com)

FEMA Concentration Camps: Locations and Executive Orders - Friends of Liberty

Life and Deatherage: Reagan-lovers are dangerously unhinged


Life and Deatherage: This is the Tipping Point


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This is video of how it is possible to completely and unnoticably compromise an electronic voting machine in under a minute.

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Over at DailyKos, SusanG has a good review of the scary book of political analysis It Can Happen Here.

Gotta love any book that takes Sinclair Lewis as a starting point. Everyone had to read The Jungle in the 10th grade at my high school–I wonder if that is still on the reading list? I still recall Lewis' lament at the reception The Jungle received: "I aimed to hit the reader in the heart but instead struck him in the stomach." Or something like that.

Seems to me America would be better served by having its students read Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. Perhaps then the population would be more aware of the dangers in following good-ole-boy demagogues.

I think I'll stay here in the foothills. No way would I put my faith or money into any sort of home or getaway on the ocean. Here's why.

Even if you aren't directly affected by a sea level rise, what do you think the economic repercussions of coastal flooding will be? And then there are your relatives who will want to come and stay with you after their beach front home floods.

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I sure hope this article is correct. Solar power holds out the hope of decentralized power. As John Robb points out, big centralized networks are very very easy to disrupt.

Of course, at this moment, we face the early adopter's dilemma. Do we pay high prices now for tech that isn't very efficent, or wait a few years and get more for less. Reminds me of a small publishing company I know that jumped whole hog into computers in 1983, embracing the terrible IBM compatible standard. 18 months later they realized they really wanted Macs.

Technorati Tags: Solar Power

Here's a very simple example of separating the wheat from the chaff.

If a flu epidemic broke out in your country, and the only thing you had do to to survive was to keep you and yours at home for two weeks without contact with any other person, would you survive?

Now, suppose that the power went out. (Power companies need people to come to work to keep the power flowing. It isn't automatic.) How about now?

Just getting started here, but I've got a backlog of ideas and plans. Here are a few of the reviews and article topics coming up:

• Expert 1 recommends the "sole gun" be a SKS semi-automatic rifle .308 caliber model, probably Chinese make, $150. Expert 2 recommends a lever action 45-70, probably $500. Will I follow one or another's advice, or go off on some other tangent recommended by a stranger?
• Taste testing Emergency Essentials' roast beef and cheese tortellini meals.
• Citizenré's long term rental deal on solar panels for your home--is it a way to get cheap electricity that will still be running if terrorists blow the national power grid?