Life is hard, and it doesn’t help that someone keeps predicting empty shelves and famine every few weeks. They all say the same thing: > _“Start a garden.”_ They give you a big list of things to grow. You go, “Wow, thanks. I work two jobs and cry myself to sleep at night, but I’ll get right on that.” And then you don’t, because life is hard. And complicated. Am I right? We’ve been growing for a few years. We’re not farmers. We’re not homesteaders. Sometimes, the best thing about professional homesteaders and farmers is the worst thing. They love growing. They assume you want to love growing, too. Why else would you be doing it? Well, I don’t love growing. I kinda like it, but I’m not doing this to reconnect with nature, or because I miss the 1800s, or because I want to stand around looking cute in overalls and pigtails. I’m doing this to have food. So I’m going to share what we’re doing on that front. We’re heading into colder months, but that’s a great time to start planning a survival garden for next year and rounding up your supplies. It’s going to be a garden you can actually manage, not something you start over a bunch of scary headlines and then abandon. Let’s go. ### Where do you even start? Let’s open with the basics: Learn your hardiness zones and planting seasons. You’ll typically start planting seeds indoors in late January and early February. You’ll harden your seedlings off in March and transfer them after the last frost. In terms of general timelines, most plants fall into a couple of big categories. You have fast growers that produce in 6-10 weeks. You have slower growers that produce in 12 weeks or longer. For example, bush beans and leafy greens like spinach produce in 10 weeks or less. Fruiting plants like tomatoes, eggplants, and winter squash take 12 weeks or longer. It’s worth getting an almanac that lists all the basic facts about most edible plants. Try Dave’s Garden PlantFiles, USDA Plants, or the Old Farmer’s Almanac Planting Calendar. Seed sellers like Burpee and Johnny’s Seeds also list these specs. ### What should you even grow? There’s endless lists of varieties, so where do you start? Start at this intersection: easy, hardy, and substantive. You want something that’s not going to take a ton of effort, and something that’s going to produce meals, not appetizers. So grow potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, winter squash, bush beans, peas, turnips, spinach, beets, parsnips, and radishes. These pack a lot of calories and nutrients. They’re pretty sturdy. In fact, Jerusalem artichokes can endure quite a lot of neglect—and they produce massive calories. If you’re just going to plant five foods: **Potatoes** Varieties: Kennebec, LeHigh, Yukon **Bush beans (black, pinto, kidney)** Varieties: Provider, Royal Burgundy, Borlotti **Winter Squash (Butternut, Acorn)** Varieties: Autumn Frost, Waltham Butternut, Table Queen Acorn **Jerusalem Artichokes** Varieties: White Fuseau, Dwarf Sunray **Kale** Varieties: Winterbor, Lacinato, Red Russian That’s it. Don’t worry about anything else for now. Don’t worry about cauliflower, broccoli, celery, lettuce, carrots, or tomatoes. They’re harder to grow, and they don’t supply as much in terms of calories and nutrition. Just grow those five, and you’ll have food to put on the table. You’re choosing these crops not just for their intake value, but their storage potential. Potatoes, beans, and squash last for weeks or months without a fridge. You can harvest kale continually with a “cut and come” approach. You can leave Jerusalem artichokes in the ground and dig them up when you want them, all year long. They grow from spring through fall, but you can harvest them at any point. In fact, it’s best to dig them up after the plant has died. Keep it simple. ### How much do you need to grow? Ah, yes, the part where people start giving up. I know, because that’s where my family was tempted to quit. You don’t want to commit to all that work when you’re not even sure it’s going to keep you alive. So here’s the down and dirty: If you want to grow 20 percent of your own food, that’s at least four raised beds, 4x8 foot, filled with those five king crops. If you’re trying to feed a family of three or four, that’s about 12-16 beds. This is where people also start to panic, but you’re not going to do that. You’re only going to plant five basic crops. Even better, you’re not going to wait until January to start rounding up all your supplies. You’re going to build the raised beds now. If 12 beds feels overwhelming, start with 4-5 beds. Think of it as practice with benefits. You don’t have to plant it all at once, either. You can plant in succession. That means you space the planting out over several weeks. This strategy means you’ll harvest over time, not all at once. It paces your supply. You’re going to realize something important: Those 12 beds will keep one person alive for up to 6 months on a strict emergency food diet. It could keep a small family alive for 2-3 months. Even a few beds will help you through any short-term panic buying or supply chain disruptions. Combine those beds with a 3-month food supply, and you can stretch your survival time out to half a year, maybe longer. Feel free to go ahead and get the beds, the soil, the seeds. If you get all this ready now, you won’t have to deal with shortages and supply glitches later. Keep the seeds in a cool, dry place. They’ll be fine. ### What about heat, drought? A hot afternoon can kill your entire garden during a drought. I would know… Now we’re going to modify our original list of five. Spring is done. You’re going to keep growing into summer. Beginners try to fight the heat. Stop fighting. Lean into it. Plant crops that like heat and drought. For example: > Tepary Beans, Cowpeas, Black-eyed Peas, Purple Hull Peas, Yardlong Beans, Okra, Wild Tomatillos, Callaloo Amaranth, Sorghum, Seminole Pumpkin, Cushaw Squash, Malabar Spinach, Sweet Potatoes These plants thrive in heat. They can survive 100F+ temperatures (38C). While normal crops require extra water during heatwaves, almost double in some cases, these plants don’t. For some, you only have to water them once a week. ### How do you… plant them…? Starting out, the biggest question for me was how you actually filled the beds. Do you plant all spinach in one bed, all kale in another…? Turns out, no… There’s this thing called “companion planting.” Maybe you’ve heard of the three sisters, an indigenous planting method where you plant a row of corn, a row of beans, a row of squash. They all benefit each other when planted in close proximity. There’s plants that get along, and ones that don’t. It sounds complicated, but you just need to understand the basic plant families. You generally want to plant one from each family in each bed: A brassica, an allium (onion/garlic), an amaranth (spinach, etc), and carrots. You can plant beans with almost anything because they’re nature’s fertilizers. Just don’t plant them with onions or garlic, because those don’t get along. Plant potatoes in buckets and hill them. Don’t plant heavy feeders like tomatoes, squashes, or brassicas together. They’ll deplete the soil very, very fast. ### Where do you get all the stuff? You’re going to get your seeds from Johnny’s Seeds, Burpee, True Leaf Market, Gurney’s, Baker Creek, Eden Brothers, Seed Savers Exchange, Botanical Interests, Tractor Supply, and Native Seeds Search. They also sell supplies. ### What if my neighbors steal my food? This thought keeps survivalist gardeners up at night. It’s a threat that I wasn’t sure how to deal with, and then it finally hit me: If your neighbors are stealing food from your garden, then things have truly gone to hell in a hefty bag. So, that’s when you go up to them and propose starting a garden in their back yard. Sure, you’ll get it going for them. In 6-8 weeks, they’ll start harvesting their own crops. You’ll have the time. After all, who is going to work at this point if supply chains have collapsed and everyone is starving? Even if you’re still going to your miserable job, I suspect your boss will let you clock out a little early in exchange for some fava beans. Honestly, do you think they’re all going to say no to that deal? This is one reason why it’s a good idea to stock up on dry goods if you can, so you’ve got supplies to spare. Trust me, you’re not going to shoot your neighbors. You’re just not. ### What does all of this look like? One of the hardest things to do, the thing that I believe stops most people from growing, is that they can’t visualize it. So, here’s mine. These include some brand new pages on survival gardening for my living survival guide. Are you planning a garden? Tell the circle.

So… you just wanna know whether you should get a gun. You’re worried about supply chains. You’re worried about elections. You’re worried about monster storms. You’re worried about a financial collapse. Frankly, you feel like you could handle most of what life throws at you nowadays. What scares you is how other people are going to react. That’s what you can’t predict. Are they gonna form a community with you? Are they gonna help you grow corn? Or will they just try to take your stuff and then… have you for dinner? Well, I’m not here to talk you out of a gun. I’m here to help you decide. ### Is that actually going to happen? Honestly, I’ve wrestled with the idea of gun ownership in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic hellscape. The internet is full of armchair preppers who insist you need a gun. Here’s an example, from a real Facebook post: > _If you really believe that if a group of 7 strong unarmed men that decide to take turns with your wife and 11 year old daughter after beating you to a pulp, that you don't need a firearm, I don't know what to say._ Cormac McCarthy just smiled… These armchair preppers describe all kinds of scenarios where a gun gives you an advantage over an attacker. They imagine someone barging into your house in the middle of the night. They imagine your car breaking down in a city overrun by roving bands of gangs. There’s one problem with all this: > They haven’t lived through any of it (yet). What actually happens during a disaster? Time and again, studies show that violent crime actually drops. Neighborhoods and communities come together to help each other and share resources. If anything, introducing firearms into these scenarios interferes with that cooperative spirit. Guns get in the way. ### Let’s say everything falls apart For the sake of argument, let’s say your life actually becomes a Cormac McCarthy novel, and everyone wants to kill you. Okay, let’s run with that. Statistically, a gun doesn’t give you any real advantage. A study by Harvard and Johns Hopkins looked at crime statistics across several decades. They found an important trend for your decision. When someone owned a gun, they only managed to successfully brandish it less than 1 percent of the time. In other words, they couldn’t even get to their gun. They couldn’t pull it out fast enough. Within that 1 percent, it only saved them about 4 percent of the time. Training makes no statistical difference. In fact, even trained police officers only hit their targets between 18 and 30 percent of the time. All told, you’re more likely to die in a car crash than you are to stop a bad guy with your gun. If you even want to stand a chance, you have to commit to hundreds of hours of training, not just at a gun range, but in high-intensity simulations that emulate urban warfare. Only one kind of training improves your odds: Combat drills with other armed opponents shooting back at you. In other words, paintball. ### Even if they’re shooting at you… The statistics really hit home when you talk about getting into an actual firefight with someone. Most armchair preppers would say you’re screwed if you don’t have a weapon to shoot back with. They’re wrong. Time and again, the data shows that bringing a gun to a gunfight gets you killed. One study found that trying to retaliate against an attacker with your own gun results in a 4x increase in your odds of death. That’s right, you’re actually better off without a gun, even if gangs are shooting at you. Why? According to one study based on FBI data, gun owners feel a false sense of dominance. It actually makes them two times less likely to flee when they could. Because they stay and engage the attacker, instead of taking the opportunity to escape, they’re more likely to die. So, the studies offer a pretty conclusive answer on the statistics front. You’re far better off evading, hiding, and fleeing assailants with guns. Owning a gun can trick you into fighting someone when you should just run away. It’s not very flattering for your ego. But it works. ### There’s something better than a gun You know what works better than a gun in real world situations? Pepper spray. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s real. Study after study has found that pepper spray offers a massive edge over firearms, stopping unarmed attackers between 60 and 90 percent of the time. That’s compared to a fraction of one percent for anyone who carries a gun without considerable training. With pepper spray, you don’t need a precise aim. You don’t hesitate. You still completely incapacitate your attacker. They remain essentially blind and immobile for 20-45 minutes, long enough to escape. Pepper spray doesn’t rewire your brain or give you a false sense of dominance. It doesn’t trick your brain into staying. You spray them. You run. That’s how you survive. There’s an exception here, sure, and that’s anyone with considerable training or background in law enforcement or military deployment. If you’re willing to become the punisher, then a gun will probably help you during a catastrophic social meltdown. You’ll be a hero to us all… Otherwise, it’s useless. ### Ask someone who has _used_ a gun Statistics tell you part of the story, not the whole thing. If you’re trying to decide if you need a gun, don’t talk to gun jockeys who’ve never actually used a firearm on someone. They’re not going to give you an informed perspective on the issue. Instead, talk to actual law enforcement officers who’ve shot someone. Talk to veterans who’ve seen combat. Talk to homeowners who’ve actually deterred a real threat with a weapon. That’s what I did. Here’s what they’ve told me: Buying a gun isn’t the end of a journey. It’s the beginning of one. You’re not just adding protection to your home. You’re also adding threats. You’re taking on an entirely new set of risks and responsibilities. You’ll have to train with it. You’ll have to clean and maintain it. You’ll have to store it somewhere that you can get to it during an emergency, but not somewhere kids will play with it. Your gun becomes a part of you. It’s an entirely different mindset. Part of your brain will always have to think about the gun. That’s the truth. It’s not unlike owning a very dangerous dog. Are you ready to take that on? Then get a gun. ### Why do Americans really buy guns? About 40 percent of American households own a gun. About 30 percent of individuals own one. Collectively, Americans own 46 percent of the world’s civilian firearms. We’re massively out of step with humanity. What’s up with that? Psychologists at the University of Wisconsin explain it best. Americans don’t buy guns for logical, rational reasons. In fact, they often completely ignore statistics about the dangers of gun ownership over the advantages. Instead, they buy guns for psychological protection. They _feel_ safer. From the psychologists: > Owners are using a gun to protect their psychological selves. Owning a gun helps them feel more in control of the world around them and more able to live meaningful, purposeful lives that connect to the people and communities they care for. This sort of protection may be especially appealing to those who think that the normal institutions of society – such as the police or the government – are either unable or unwilling to keep them safe. They feel they need to take protection into their own hands. If you’re worried about social collapse, you fall right into this category of folks who don’t trust our institutions to keep us safe anymore. I’m right there with you. Unfortunately, studies reveal how this attempt to reassert control by getting a gun backfires for a lot of civilians. Instead of feeling safer, gun owners often wind up putting themselves into a “doom loop” of hypervigilance and chronic stress. While the idea of owning a gun makes them feel safer, actually having a gun around stresses them out. Even when they’re just watching television, they feel like the world around them is more dangerous and more chaotic than it actually is. That’s how gun ownership rewires your brain. Another study by psychologists at Dartmouth found that new gun owners often make their decision from a place of fear, not logic. It’s the same fear that drives panic buying. In fact, the pandemic saw one of the biggest surges of gun sales in history. Americans were snatching up guns and toilet paper left and right, when the biggest threat was a virus you can’t shoot. On that note, a Rutgers study even found that those who avoided or refused actual health precautions were more likely to buy guns. You know what that tells me? It tells me that some of the fiercest gun advocates actually have a poor mental calculus for determining threats. When you decide to get a gun, you should do it from a calm, rational place. If you’re actively freaking out over scenarios where society breaks down and everyone starts shooting each other over the last bagel at Panera, or taking turns with your wife and daughter, per our creative Facebook prepper, you probably aren’t thinking rationally at the moment. What you need isn’t a gun. You need a nap. ### Listen to Keanu Reeves for a minute Everyone loves Keanu Reeves. The internet is full of articles telling us to be quieter and more thoughtful, like him. I don’t disagree. Armchair preppers frequently evoke John Wick as some kind of post-apocalyptic hero. It’s interesting, because Keanu Reeves himself… Doesn’t own a gun. Not. One. Gun. And yet, he undergoes extensive firearms training for his roles. It’s what makes the John Wick franchise so fun to watch. (I love them.) I think it’s worth noting that a star who became legendary for his dedication to accurate firearms use in his films makes a very clear, intentional decision not to own one in his personal life. This doesn’t mean he’s automatically right. But it gives you something to think about. It certainly _does_ mean that all the internet preppers who frequently factor John Wick into their logic are… Full of it. ### Take an honest look at your own mental health I’m going to be vulnerable with ya’ll for a minute. I’m not exactly a poster child for emotional stability. I’m a survivor of extreme childhood abuse with complex PTSD and anger issues. I’ve been starving the angry dog in my soul my entire life. Why would I suddenly start feeding it, just because some armchair prepper put fears inside my head? When I examine the statistics against my background, it’s an easy decision. No guns for me. Examine your own mental health. Be honest with yourself. That’s probably the hardest thing to do. Especially here in America, we’re conditioned to pretend we’re all perfectly happy and well-adjusted individuals. We’re not a country that takes mental health seriously. We never have been. We’re a country that compensates for our deep insecurities with firearms. That’s us. I’m willing to bet most of us aren’t feeling especially stable or adjusted these days. I think we have a lot going on underneath the surface, including loads of unprocessed trauma from the last several years. Take it from me. There’s a big difference between passing a background check, convincing everyone around you that you’re mentally healthy, and actually being mentally healthy enough to own a gun. Give yourself a hard look. Then decide. ### Confront your fears Before you get a gun, you must confront your fears, whether they’re driven by nightmares about famines or bad guys breaking into your house in the middle of the night. If you’re worried about any of that, like many of us are, take real steps to mitigate that risk without a gun first. I’ve already written about that. Understand that part of you probably wants a gun simply out of a psychological need to take control of your life and regain your sense of agency in a world that’s coming apart. You think it’ll make you feel better. Well, maybe. Or it might only increase your sense of fear and anxiety. There’s one last study on that front. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that carrying a gun directly alters your brain’s visual perception. Gun owners are significantly more likely to mistake harmless, everyday objects like phones or wallets as weapons. They’re also significantly more likely to view the world around them as dangerous. If you’re already sensitive to threats, if you’re already planning for famines and other disasters, do you really need an object in your life that’s only going to make you feel those threats more acutely? I sure don’t. But I said I wasn’t going to try and talk you out of guns. I said I was going to help you decide. After all, we’re heading into a future where the old rules and studies don’t apply quite the same way. Maybe it’s time for us all to become soldiers. Maybe we need to get more comfortable with the risks and responsibilities of gun ownership. Then again, the evidence points in the other direction. Do I know if a gun is right for you personally? No. I just know what the evidence says. Now, so do you. What I do know is that you probably want to make a decision sooner rather than later. If you’re going to get one, now is the time. Now is the time to adjust your mindset, to commit, to engage in meaningful training, to become a truly responsible gun owner. You’re not going to get a gun and stick it in your glovebox. You’re not going to slip it in a vest and walk around all braggadocious about it. That’s not going to help you. That’s going to make things worse. For many of us, gun ownership doesn’t offer a path to confronting our fears about famines or diesel shortages and doing anything productive about them. It offers a path to more fear, more sleepless nights, and more guns. Well, now we understand why some preppers wind up with an arsenal that would make John Wick blush. Does part of you want a gun? Do you already have one? Did this help you decide? Feel free to share. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

So, I was going to write one more article about what the billionaires are doing to get ready for the end times. It was going to talk about their secret hospitals and their secret supply chains. And then I realized something. > _It’s sooooo boring._ At this point, I’m not interested in their hush-hush plans to try and survive the chaos they’ve created. I don’t care what underground seed banks they’re building, or what automated hydroponic gardens they’re designing. I don’t care about their fortified farms or their tactical extraction teams. You know what I found far more interesting? Hilling potatoes. Admittedly, there’s nothing sexy about hilling potatoes. I thought it was going to be complicated. It’s not. It’s easy. Here’s what you do: 1. You get a potato that hasn’t been drenched in pesticides and anti-sprouting agents. Ideally, an organic potato. 2. You let it start to sprout. The sprouts should run about an inch. 3. You cut it up. Make sure each chunk has two eyes. 4. You let the chunks harden or “callus” for a day or two. 5. You fill a bucket with soil, about 4-6 inches. You can also use a grow bag. Put your potatoes down in there. Make sure the sprouts are facing up. You might want to drill some holes around the bottom of the bucket to help with drainage. Potatoes hate soil that’s too moist. 6. Let them grow for a few weeks, until they’re about 6-8 inches tall. 7. Cover them with soil, leaving 2-3 inches exposed. 8. A few weeks later, do it again. 9. The plant will start to wilt around 11 weeks. It’s storing all its energy in those potatoes. Stop watering it. Let it die. 10. Around week 12 or 13, the top plant turns brown. Cut it down. Turn over the bucket. Dig out your potatoes. You’ll have 3-5 lbs. Brush them off and store them in a cool, dark place. Try a box with sawdust. Don’t wash your potatoes until you’re preparing them to cook. 11. Chop up the plant. Toss the roots into a green waste bin, not your compost. 12. Compost the rest. 13. That’s it. I’m a fan of visuals: Do you think the average billionaire knows how to hill potatoes? What do you think they see when they look at a sprouting tater? They probably see garbage. Not you, not anymore. This is why you’re going to outlast the billionaires. Where they see junk, you see food. You see potential. You see life waiting. You know what’s almost funny? Billionaires are installing elite sprinkler systems on their mansions to put out wildfires. Have you seen these? They come complete with an early warning system and everything. They know they can’t rely on city water during a wildfire, so these are designed to tap into their swimming pools. Yep, they use their swimming pools to keep their mansions from burning down. This system isn’t even designed to save them, just their property. They’re not going to stay. They’re going to climb into a private evac chopper or blast off in a Tesla jetpack. That’s how much they care about their property. It’s an interesting paradox. The more you have, the more you lose. It must drive them bonkers, trying to protect every comfort and convenience while watching the earth prepare to swallow them whole. It must make them feel helpless, hence the increasingly ludicrous survival tech. You? You’re in a far better position. As of today, you know how to turn one potato into a bunch of potatoes. Compared to a billionaire, you are practically a god now. Remember that. Always. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

So… you just wanna know what kind of water filter to buy. Not a problem! You wanna be ready for the next big disaster. But you hate reading all the fine print on all these different types of filters. You loathe deciphering their marketing claims. LifeStraw. Sawyer. Berkey. Alexapure. Guardian. Grayl. On and on. It’s worse than trying to pick out a mask in a pandemic. (Sorry, too soon?) You have quite enough problems on your plate, thank you very much. You can only last a few days without water, and those few days aren’t fun. We’re looking at a rough year with multiple threats inbound, from supply chain failures to major storms that knock out water treatment plants. In the end, my family has wound up using several different kinds of filters over the last three years. We’ve tried them. We’ve researched them. We’ve tested them. We have different kinds of water filters for different situations. But there’s one water filter to rule them all, and by the time we get to it, you’ll understand why. TL;DR? Okay, I get it… Just scroll down to the bottom. It’s the Outback Emergency Gravity Water Filter System. I don’t want to waste your time. But you’ll appreciate why it’s so effing cool once you understand all the other options. (Btw, they aren’t paying me any money. They have no idea who I am. They don’t need me. I’m a small fish to them.) This is what we’ve learned: ## If you want a portable filter… Look, I love filters. I have a 3-stage RV filter and about five different kinds of replacement filters that all do slightly different things. But you’re not a filter nerd like me. You just want something you know works. So let’s get into it, shall we? Let’s say you want a filter that fits inside a backpack. Well, then you’re looking at filters that mostly focus on weeding out parasites and bacteria. It’s hard to find a portable filter that stops viruses, VOCs, and heavy metals. That matters, because you need to understand the limitations of your filter. You probably shouldn’t be drinking rancid floodwater through these things. They’re better than nothing, but they might not be enough. That’s really important to know for all the newbs out there who think they’re going to survive the end times with a LifeStraw. I’m sorry, you won’t. Why? ### LifeStraw This is your basic, entry-level device. A LifeStraw filters down to .2 microns, blocking more than 99 percent of bacteria, parasites, and microplastics. Each filter lasts up to about 1,000 gallons (3,700 liters). Here’s where things get messy: The basic LifeStraw doesn’t block viruses or heavy metals. For viruses, you have to upgrade to LifeStraw Community, LifeStraw Escape, or LifeStraw Mission. These filter down to .02 microns. For metals, you have to get the LifeStraw Go or a LifeStraw Home pitcher. There’s only two models that do everything: LifeStraw Community and LifeStraw Escape. These aren’t small, and they’re not cheap. You wouldn’t be fitting them in a backpack, but they’d be easy to toss into a car. LifeStraw breaks down when you start needing to filter dirty water from floods that might contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs), heavy metals like lead, and petroleum byproducts. It’s a lot better than nothing. It’s not the best. ### Sawyer Their basic models only filter down to .1 microns. They stop parasites and bacteria. They last a long time, up to about 100,000 gallons (378,000 liters). But if you want a filter that also stops viruses, you have to upgrade to the Sawyer Point ZeroTwo. Unlike their other models, the Point ZeroTwo is basically a kit that lets you convert a bucket into a serious water filtration system. There’s also a version that you can adapt to a regular faucet. None of their filters remove heavy metals or VOCs. You can do better. ### MSR Guardian The MSR Guardian offers military-grade filtration down to .02 microns, stopping more than 99.9 percent of viruses, bacteria, and parasites. When it comes to turbidity (nastiness), the Guardian blows almost everyone away. The rugged design can handle some pretty muddy water without clogging. It has a unique self-cleaning feature that works as you pump. With MSR, you don’t have to fuss with seven different models. They offer two, doing the same thing in different ways. The pump model is the easiest to pack and lasts the longest at 2,000+ gallons (7,000 liters). The gravity model doesn’t require you to pump, and it also fits inside a bag pretty well. The only downside is that it carries about a third of the lifespan at roughly 800 gallons (3,000 liters). Unfortunately, neither model truly removes heavy metals or VOCs. If that’s your concern, you have to keep shopping. ### Grayl GeoPress The Grayl GeoPress matches or outperforms the other filters across the board. While it only filters down to 1.25 microns, it uses an ion matrix to trap viruses and bacteria. The filter material also contains carbon, allowing it to trap trace toxins and metals. On that front, it’s a big step up. It’s still not quite up to the task of handling industrial toxins in floodwater. It also clogs easier than the MSR Guardian. So if you’re dealing with truly muddy nasty water, the Grayl is going to fail. ### Ketadyn Manufactured in Switzerland, these filters have a strong reputation. However, they still come up short on metals and VOCs. Their basic model, Hiker Pro, filters down to .2 microns, stopping almost all parasites and bacteria. Their BeFree model filters down to .1 microns, which still won’t stop viruses. Their Vario model absorbs VOCS and metals. Again, it only filters down to .2 microns. The carbon block also only lasts for about 100 gallons (400 liters). ### Survivor Filter Pro This filter has undergone rigorous testing by Intertek and BCS laboratories. It outperforms all of the other filters, while also achieving a 93 percent reduction in lead. We’re talking about a serious filter with a carbon core and a .01 micron stage. It’s rated to last roughly 26,000 gallons (100,000 liters). Of course, like with many filters, the carbon component burns out faster, at 500 gallons. It enjoys a strong reputation among backpackers and survivalists. ### The Verdict If you want a portable filter that can handle it all, get the Survivor Filter Pro. Go ahead and stock up on a replacement kit or two. You’re done! ## If you want a gravity filter… Bigger filters offer better filtration for VOCs and heavy metals. They won’t fit in a backpack, but they’ll fit in a car. They’ll fit on a counter. They’ll fit on a bench. In a worst-case scenario, ask yourself: Are you really gonna be hiking through the woods, or will you be hanging out in the ruins of your neighborhood and drinking whatever comes out of your pipes for weeks to come…? Or maybe you have rain barrels, or storage tanks, but you’d still like to filter that water…? If it’s Scenarios B and C: ### Alexapure Their gravity system relies on carbon block filters with an ionic core. They offer transparent testing to document the removal of 99 percent of viruses, bacteria, and parasites. They also remove heavy metals and VOCs. The downside? While they advertise a lifespan in the thousands of gallons, they only filter heavy toxins and viruses up to 200 gallons each. If you drop two filters into the chamber, that’s roughly 400 gallons of safe drinking water during an emergency (1,500 liters). Also: These carbon block filters clog easily. You really can’t pour dirty water straight into the chamber and expect them to last very long. So if you go this route, you absolutely have to prefilter out the mud and other turbidity first. And they’re expensive… ### Boroux/Berkey These gravity filters work in a very similar way, but they last longer for VOC and heavy metal removal, up to 800 gallons for a pair (3,000 liters). The downside? They haven’t gotten along very well with the FDA. They had to remove their virus claims. So with Alexapure, you’re getting a filter that does it all but only up to about 400 gallons for a pair of filters. With Boroux, you’re getting filters that last 4X as long, but they can’t promise you virus removal. It’s quite a dilemma. ### British Berkefeld/Doulton Doulton has been around for 200 years. They know what they’re doing. They have the official NSF certifications the other brands lack. They filter down to .9 microns, removing bacteria and parasites (not viruses). Their filters have a thinner carbon block, but they still remove VOCs and heavy metals. Their lifespan runs about 800 gallons (3,000 liters). With Doulton, you’re getting assurance. They’re also a lot cheaper… ### Outback At last, the one water filter to rule them all… These kits have started showing up in stores more recently, but the company has been around for 20 years. They’ve got serious street cred. Originally developed for the Peace Corps, the Outback Emergency Gravity Water Filter System has seen disaster zones all over the world. And yes, the Peace Corps, the actual U.S. federal agency, has been deploying these in the field the whole time. The Red Cross has also been using them, along with many other organizations. This same company has supplied water purification systems for the Department of State, the CDC, and the Department of Defense. They’re the real deal. It’s a simple design that uses 4-stage filtration in two buckets. The top bucket and filter handle the turbidity (nastiness). The bottom bucket does the finer filtering and chemical removal. These kits achieve 99 percent reduction in viruses, bacteria, and parasites, according to official lab tests done by BioVir and Aqua Diagnostics. They also strip out VOCs and heavy metals. They meet strict EPA guidelines for handling heavy chemical spills and toxins. As for lifespan, a set of filters lasts roughly 1,800 gallons (6,800 liters) in normal conditions. For disaster water that’s full of god-knows-what, the lifespan drops to about 500 gallons (1,890 liters). Unused and unopened, these filter kits are verified to last up to ten years or more. So… ### The Verdict Yes, it’s Outback. If you want a lightweight, semi-portable gravity filter that can handle almost anything, then go with the Outback Emergency Gravity Water Filter System. It’s simple. It’s two buckets. You don’t have to crouch beside a river and drink through a straw. You don’t have to hang anything off a tree branch. You literally take the water you can find and dump it in the bucket. The bucket filters it. You drink it. In a disaster, there are no guarantees. Jesus isn’t going to stop by and turn your floodwater into wine. That would be nice. If you’re faced with drinking water with god-knows-what in it, or dying of thirst, I think we would all feel a lot better with a sturdy filter with good job references, and not something that Alex Jones used to sell to morons. (No offense…) If you just want to know what works, if you just want to get something to stick in your closet and feel a little bit better about the future, then it really comes down to two filters: One, get the ultra-portable Survivor Filter Pro. Two, get the lightweight bucket-style Outback Emergency Gravity System. _Obviously, I have to put a disclaimer down here telling you that it’s not my fault if a worm eats your brain. I just gave you the best information I had. But honestly, if a worm eats your brain, then it’s probably going to eat mine too._ _Stay safe out there._ _—Jessica_ * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Something's been missing... This year, I published an illustrated survival guide. People seem to love it. I'm still catching up on the emails since it came out. Over at Substack, my newsletter is finally growing again. I've finished my first course in electrical wiring. But this isn't good enough. We can do better. The problem with my guide is that, despite the work I've put into it, despite the quality, it's one person's knowledge. The next version of the guide needs to be something bigger than I can produce myself. Because I can't figure out how to produce insulin or make shirts from hemp. I can't turn the guide into an app. Not alone. Of course, I'm a fatal introvert, even a recluse. I can research all day long. I can write. I can design. What I can't do is interview experts. What I can't do is manage a nonprofit, an LLC, or an S Corporation. It just ain't happenin. So when I say I can't do this anymore... That's what I mean. It's time to scale up and evolve. It's what the project demands. So I've started organizing a small team, people who can do this work while I stay where I'm most effective, writing stuff. The first task: A new publication. It's not going to be like my other publications. It's not going to replace _this_ one. It's going to do something entirely different. Let me explain... The good thing about Substack and Ghost is that there's a ton of experts out there who are all focused on restoring soil, growing food, operating Ham radios, building resilient communities, and developing practical skills. The bad thing? We're scattered. We fall down in the feeds. Sometimes, it feels like we're competing for attention and bandwidth. What if we collaborated? Read this post: Welcome to Survivalutions. We Focus on The How of It All.Survival + SolutionsSurvivalutionsSurvivalutions This new publication is going to live on Substack. It's going to bring in all the foragers, all the homesteaders, all the gardeners, all the herbalists, all the plumbers and preppers out there. It's not going to accept paid subscriptions, only free ones. It's going to elevate, promote, cross-post, and republish their work under one roof where you can find all the people who can teach you things you need to know about surviving this strange world. I'm not going to be the only one running it. We've got an editorial team. From there... I'm going to formally bring in some of these voices for the next version of the guide, as long as they're willing to put their name on it and contribute their work under the original, creative commons license. It's going to remain free. Even better, we're going to start working on an app, a mobile version of the guide you can use on a phone that exists alongside the print version. We're going to continue publishing the print guide with updates once a year. We'll update the app in real time, in addition to releasing PDF versions. Because you might as well use technology while you still can, right? What do they get out of it? My working theory is that we're better off joining forces. Sure, we can continue writing and collecting support on our own publications. We can "monetize" however we want. But we start pointing our work to some central places. We stop fighting the algorithms alone. We start learning to use them. This isn't free labor for "exposure." It's work they're already doing, or they've already done, amplified by a collective. It's also a place for them to promote their own guides and their own books. Think of it as a publishing collective. That's the idea. It's an idea that's been on the tip of my skull all year, and I've finally landed on a way to do it. This means I get to keep writing and doing my research and experiments in the quiet, but my ideas finally start to scale up in the way I've wanted for some time now. So when I say I can't do this anymore, I mean I can't do _just_ this anymore. It's time to finally evolve. I know how to do it now. Please consider signing up for the new publication over at the Stack. After I send this, I'm going to start adding contributors. Let me know what you think, Jessica Support

Here’s a simple thought experiment: Let’s say the worst happens, and civilization falls apart this weekend. Who would you rather have on your survival team: Rambo, or MacGyver? (Feel free to drop an actual answer down in the comments.) All the preppers and homesteaders love to show off their pantries. There’s dozens of videos and articles out there on food storage. I’ve never seen one about tools. Have you? We’re not talking about a multitool that goes in your bugout bag. Oh, you can also stab a marauder with that bottle opener? Cool, cool. But no. We’re talking about tools to build things. This fact doesn’t get much attention in all the commotion about surviving longterm disasters and emergencies. And yet, the preppers and homesteaders with the best information and the best chances of survival know the value of a good tool. A good tool means food. A good tool means water. A good tool means life. Even if you’re not planning for supply chain disruptions or disasters, good tools empower you. We finally started making our own shelves and other stuff after we got sick of spending hours trying to find dimensions to fit our spaces. When plumbers pitched us thousands of dollars to install a simple composting toilet, we turned to our tools and our growing ingenuity. We haven’t done anything too fancy, and we still use brackets to hold things together. A professional woodworker would probably laugh at some of the stuff we’ve made. Here’s the thing: They work. Without these tools, there’s no way we could’ve customized our rain barrels and composting toilets or built the gear storage we needed. Once you have the right tools, the projects themselves become less intimidating and overwhelming. They become doable. You don’t have to acquire all these tools yourself. All around the world, communities are building tool libraries and communal sheds. You could do something similar. It’s becoming more than just a good idea. It’s becoming essential. As industrial civilization erodes, giving way to an era of supply chain disruptions and endless inflation, products will only become more expensive. The power to build and repair your stuff will save you money. In a few years, it could be the difference between having something and doing without. If you didn’t grow up with the knowledge, it’s surprisingly difficult to learn all the tools that make projects easier. We’re going beyond standard tools like tape measures and screwdrivers. You already know about those. We’re focusing on the tools that maybe you don’t know about. If you know a good tool you consider a lifesaver, drop it in the comments. Let’s build a digital tool library. Here’s mine: ### A hole saw kit Over the last year, we’ve drilled lots of holes. We’ve drilled holes in buckets and barrels. We’ve drilled them in doors. We’ve drilled them in different sizes, from half-inch all the way up to three. It’s probably one of the most underrated tools out there. If you think you’re going to want to install your own rain barrels, composting toilets, or atmospheric rain generators, you’re going to need one. When you need a nice, perfectly round hole, nothing else really does the job. A standard hole saw kit covers all these different sizes, but check to make sure. Get a full-sized one if you have ambitious plans for DIY survival projects. You also might want to think about getting hole saws with bi-metal or tungsten carbide tips if you plan on drilling holes in metal. We wound up needing these when we installed a deadbolt on one of our doors. ### A step bit So you need to enlarge a hole for a bigger screw or a bigger tube. Or you want to be able to drill several different size holes with a single bit. Well, there’s a specific tool for that. It’s called a step bit. ### A manual, hand-crank drill Power tools are great, but think about our longterm future. The way things are going, maybe you won’t always have electricity when you need to build something. That’s where the hand-crank drill comes in handy. Many of them come with adjustable chucks that can accommodate the same bits as power tools, including hole saws. It’s more difficult, but I’ll take difficult over impossible any day. ### Saws You’ll need different saws for different jobs. Start with a standard hardpoint saw. It cuts through most types of wood boards. If you’re going to cut a lot of wood and just need rough cuts, use a panel saw. Hacksaws are great for cutting through metal and pipes, including PVC. Toothsaws and jab saws are useful for cutting shapes out of different materials. If you didn’t have a hole saw, you could use a jab saw to achieve a rough round hole, not perfect, but it gets the job done. ### Sawhorses For the longest time, we tried to get by without sawhorses. That was a mistake. Sawhorses made life much easier. Finally, we had something to hold the boards and keep them steady while we sawed or sanded them. Building shelves and beds suddenly became a doable task instead of a Tolkienesque quest. ### Files If you need to shave down a part to make it fit, files are your friend. You can use woodworking files, or you can use rougher and coarser files for plastic and metal. For metal, bastard files work great. ### Dremels and rotary tools These things are lifesavers. Dremel and rotary tools can cut through just about anything if you have the right tip. They can sand and shave hard materials. They can cut patterns. We’ve used our dremel on door reinforcers, polycarbonate panels, and more. If you’re working with metal, get some tungsten carbide burrs. ### Pliers You’re going to need a strong grip for different projects. Combination and lineman pliers work for most jobs—but not all jobs. We already had to do some maintenance on our water harvesting pump. To get the impeller out for cleaning and lubing, I was glad to have slip joint pliers that clamped evenly on both sides and let me pull it straight out. Pliers are also helpful for gripping screws with worn heads. Needle-nose pliers are also commonly used for different jobs. ### A T-Square If you plan on sawing boards to build shelves or garden beds, it’s really nice to be able to mark straight lines. That’s where a T-Square comes in handy. You fold it out. You place the top along the board. It forms a perfect right angle, letting you mark those straight lines to guide your sawing. These are bigger than a standard carpenter’s square, so they can handle bigger projects. ### Corner and angle clamps If you’ve ever tried building your own standalone shelves, you know what a lifesaver these are. Holding wood boards together while you glue or fasten them is a massive pain in the rear. These clamps hold your boards together at right angles for you, letting you drill pilot holes and screw them together easily. They turn an onerous task into something simple and procedural. You could also use these clamps to make a quick job out of building raised beds. ### A speed square These help you measure angles for cutting seats into boards, when you need one piece of wood to sit in another. (For example, rafters.) They help with several other situations when you need to cut straight lines and curves. You’ll want one if you plan on building anything like an outdoor food dehydrator or a shed. ### Pipe cutters You can make a lot of different, temporary structures with PVC pipe. You can also make sturdier structures with steel pipe or conduit. Down the road, we’re thinking about making a greenhouse with metal conduit and polycarbonate panels. It would be cheaper and more resilient than most kits you get online. You can cut pipe with a saw, but it’s difficult to get a straight edge and takes a lot of energy. Pipe cutters make the job way more manageable. You use PVC pipe cutters to cut PVC pipe. You use steel pipe cutters to cut metal. ### A pipe bender If you want versatility in making different types of structures, pipes can work wonders where wood becomes a liability that rots over time. If you’re going to be making things out of metal pipe and conduit, you need a heavy-duty pipe bender. They’re easy to use. They bend pipe to any angle you need. ### Shovels You know what a shovel is, but did you know there’s at least ten different kinds of shovels? You have your standard digging shovel for piercing ground and scooping soil. You have flat and pointed digging shovels for different types of soil. If you’re just moving a lot of dirt, you want a flat scoop shovel or a transfer shovel. If you’ve got tougher ground or a lot of grass and roots, then you want a pointed or spade digging shovel. Rounded shovels are better for gardening and looser soil. Then you have your edging shovel for… forming clean edges. If you’re digging a trench, you need a trench shovel. If you’re installing fencing or posts, you want a post-hole digger, and they’re also good for moving dirt out of deep, tight spaces. Trying to use one shovel for everything is probably one of the biggest mistakes we made when we were starting out. ### A mattock If you’ve got very tough ground, then mattocks save your back. Never swing them like they do in the movies. You slide and drop. Keep yourself low. Let gravity do the work for you. That’s how you break up soil. ### A digging bar If you’re digging deep into hard ground, a shovel might not be enough. A digging bar is something you simply lift and drop. Use the digging bar to break up the dirt. Use the shovel to move it. ### A list of other tools So we’re not leaving out the obvious ones: Yes to hammers. Yes to screwdrivers, bolt cutters, tape measure, wrenches, Allen wrenches, drive socket wrenches, mallets, scrapers, sandpaper, hand sanders, sanding blocks, crowbars, and chisels. What’s your favorite tool? Let everyone know. ### Duct tape Who could forget? ### Walk around the hardware store There’s no way to list every different kind of tool you might need in the years ahead. That would take a book. Just take some time and walk around local hardware stores. Look at the tools on the shelves. Follow your curiosity. Half the time, it’s not just about the tool and its intended purposes. It’s knowing how the tools function and having a mental library to draw on. You might find a new way to use an old tool. You also don’t need to own every single tool. You just need to know what they do. If you know what tools do, then you can improvise one. When everyone else is focused on diesel export bans and billionaire bunkers, you’ll be wise to build your tool shed and develop the skills to use them. In the end, it doesn’t matter how much gold or silver someone has locked away in a safe, and it doesn’t matter how many guns they have. Does the world need more Rambos, or MacGyvers? I know my answer. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

In 1940, Eva Saxl and her husband Viktor fled Europe to Shanghai. They thought they were escaping genocide and the collapse of civilization. They were wrong. A year later, the war found them. Japan not only bombed Pearl Harbor but also intensified their occupation of China. It wasn’t long before Japanese forces shut down all the pharmacies, while committing countless more war crimes and atrocities. So many died that the city began sending around vehicles to collect the dead every morning, like garbage. A diabetic, Eva couldn’t find insulin anywhere except the black market. One of her friends tried. Tainted insulin killed them. Eva’s husband begged Japanese authorities to do something about the supply shortages. They told him his wife was expendable. So, Eva and Viktor decided to do something unthinkable. They found a textbook, _Beckman’s Internal Medicine_. It described how Frederick Banting and Charles Best made insulin from animal pancreas in the 1920s. Armed with his engineering skills, Viktor used it to start manufacturing their own formula in a basement lab run by a Chinese chemist. Eva was fluent in multiple languages. She used her social networking skills to build a coalition and secure funding to buy all the supplies, including pancreases from local butchers. They tested their insulin on rabbits for a year, watching Eva’s own supply dwindle. Finally, she tried a batch on herself. It worked. Eva Saxl didn’t keep the knowledge for herself. She started giving her home lab insulin to families and their children who were also facing death at the hands of an occupying military. She saved hundreds of lives. If she can do it… Why can’t we? ### Let’s imagine an alternative future It’s 2035. Supply chains haven’t completely collapsed, but they’re not what they used to be. Not at all. It’s hard to get stuff. What you can find is expensive. Store shelves don’t sit empty, but you no longer make a grocery list like you did in the old days. You just go there and fill up your cart with things you’ll conceivably eat, what you can afford. You supplement heavily by trading with your neighbors, because ya’ll were smart and started growing taters and beans years ago. It’s really not that far off from how millions live now, especially outside the U.S. Westerners were just so insulated for so long, and now it’s finally hitting them. But that’s not really where the collapse hurts the most. As for pharmacies, we’ve already seen supply shocks to medicines. Supply chains are concentrated at a handful of hubs around the world. When a disaster hits one of these hubs, it puts tens of millions at risk. So by the 2030s, medical supply shortages are the norm. Some crucial drug is always out. You have family members with medical conditions. Or maybe _you_ have a medical condition. While you’re all certainly growing medicinal herbs by the 2030s, you’re so relieved that some of the science teachers and community organizers in your town got together and found ways to synthesize basic drugs like insulin and other medications for blood pressure and heart disease. Some research has found that plants like bitter melon, burdock, dandelion, purslane, and even cinnamon can help manage blood sugar. But we’ve yet to find a true insulin replacement. It’s 2035. Your community has a simple medicine production lab, powered with solar. You didn’t sit around doomscrolling. You didn’t just stockpile JaseCase like that video ad talked about. You followed Eva and Viktor. You organized. ### Welcome to forward thinking in the collapse Welcome to the big mental shift that’s underway. The general public seems to be going through their doomer phase, much like we did years ago. They’re freaking out over viral predictions of disaster every few weeks. They’re fantasizing about food stockpiles. Yes, it’s definitely a phase. Yes, you’ll create a bulk food system if you have the resources—if you haven’t already. But the work we need to be doing goes far beyond bags of rice and beans. Individual prepping gets you through one or two disasters at a time. We’re facing something much larger and more permanent than a disaster, so we have to scale. Civilization isn’t going to vanish overnight. Electricity isn’t going away. You’re just going to have to become more resourceful. Something I’m often asked is how those of us with medical conditions will survive as our global civilization sinks deeper into chaos and instability. Sure, it’s nice to talk about growing medicinal herbs. I’ve got pages and pages on that. But let’s face it, you’re not going to tell someone with diabetes or high blood pressure to chew a root. That’s not really going to help everyone. What I’m offering is less a “how to,” because I’m not a scientist or a medical doctor. I’m definitely not advocating that anyone try to manufacture insulin in their garage. That’s reckless. What I _am_ saying: The knowledge and tools exist for communities with scientists to build the infrastructure to manufacture some of these medicines. You don’t need Nobel Prize-winning chemists. There are already groups around the world who know how to manufacture these drugs. All you need is a college chemistry lab. Even a high school lab would do… What you need are science teachers from local high schools and colleges. What you need is some lab equipment. More than anything, what you need is a will to figure out the basics. Yes, it gets complicated when you start talking about FDA approval, clinical trials, and regulations. It gets expensive. Then again, we’re talking about a future where your community either has the capability to manufacture these drugs, or you don’t, and you have to watch them suffer. Our future looks a lot like the life of Eva and Viktor Saxl. It looks like begging an occupying force for mercy, and getting told no. It’s getting told you’re expendable. It’s already happening. The question is what you’re going to do to prepare for the day you’re finally told you or someone you care about is expendable, that you’re all too difficult to keep alive in a civilization upended by climate chaos and all the violence that comes with it. The question is what kind of community and what kind of resources you can bring together when your leaders decide they care more about data centers and crypto than the lives of their citizens. At the center of that lies the biggest question, what kind of person are you going to be? Are you going to be the kind who stockpiles food and hides from your neighbors? Or will you be the kind of person who helps build a lab that makes insulin and saves hundreds of lives? I’m calling these kinds of posts “speculative nonfiction.” Because I’m not telling anyone exactly how to do something. I’m trying to sketch an outline of how you’d do it. I’m trying to break down attitudes and mindsets that it would be impossible. I’m trying to illustrate that it’s doable. I’m discovering the way. ### The equipment you’d need So you want to make insulin in a bio-chemistry lab. Here’s what you’d need: First, you need regional networks to facilitate supplies. Your network’s primary objective is maintaining a master cell bank of E. Coli or yeast (a specific strain) that produces the insulin used in pharmaceuticals. Forget cow pancreas. That won’t work in a longterm collapse scenario where you’re trying to supply thousands of people over the course of many, many years. You need a bioreactor. It’s a container made from glass or stainless steel that holds 5-20 liters (or a lot more). It has controls for temperature, dissolved oxygen, and other environmental factors. It stirs or mixes raw materials. What else? > A centrifuge: It’s a device that “spins down” the liquid and separates the cells from the mixture when they’re ready. > > A chromatography system: This device separates and purifies the insulin from the waste products. > > A lyophilizer or freeze-dryer: This device can freeze-dry the finished insulin so you can store it in a powder, reducing the need for refrigeration. > > Autoclave: A sterilizer that uses steam to clean all the equipment. It’s essential to keep it all sterile to keep invasive bacteria from ruining the bioreaction process. > > A liquid chromatagrophy machine (HPLC) to analyze the insulin for quality. You could also use a gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) machine. Finally, you need a buttload of acids, buffers, purified water, and other materials. As long as some kind of supply chain exists, you’ll be able to get them. This isn’t one person’s job. It’s a team. You have to divide the labor. One group concentrates on the lab work. Another concentrates on securing the gear and supplies, as well as maintaining it. Yet another concentrates on finding or generating the electricity and the fuel to run the lab and the supply network. If you want to know how a community truly forms, this is it. This is the grit of community. A collapse community isn’t about sitting around a water cooler trading small talk. It’s not about those warm, fuzzy moments. A collapse community has to coordinate. They have to divide labor and share resources. They don’t have to like each other. They just have to share a purpose, a vision, and a plan. Over the last several years, biohackers have been fighting back against big pharma. They offer the way forward on this. They’ve been reclaiming drug production and setting up labs to experiment with cost-based production along with regional supply chains. For example, the Open Insulin Project has already developed a protocol for synthesizing insulin in more robust, decentralized labs at a fraction of the cost it’s sold by big pharma. They need more time and money for clinical trials and navigating the labyrinthine approval process. It’s exactly the kind of thing we should be talking about more. This is where rogue biohacking preppers come in. Collapse survival isn’t just about growing beans in your backyard. It has to include this, too. At the current rate of collapse, wars and disasters are going to decimate our medical supply chains while these protocols inch their way through a corrupted system that’s been taken over by profiteers and bureaucrats. So if you really want to challenge the system, if you really want to save lives, I would suggest less performative politics online, less empty rhetoric about “revolution,” and more capacity building. One day, you just might find yourself in need of some homegrown insulin because the idiots in charge did something even more stupid than what they’re already doing. It’s highly likely. And by the way… As Eva Saxl’s story reminds us, the vulnerable are much more than liabilities or trophies to put on our compassion display shelves. They are valuable. They have knowledge. They have skills. They can contribute. They just might not contribute in the ways that ableist society structures have conditioned us to think about what’s “useful.” That’s exactly the problem with ableism. It assumes that because someone can’t do one thing, they can’t do _anything_. We’re not going to understand the entire process of manufacturing a medicine like insulin in one post online. That’s not the point. The point is to stop assuming that we’re at the mercy of collapse. The point is to stop thinking about survival and prepping on the individual scale. It’s to stop thinking you can simply fill a pantry with canned salmon and then wait for the famine to kill your neighbors. It’s to stop thinking that just because you live in an apartment, there’s nothing you can do except wait to starve. You can join a collaborative that hacks some aspect of survival. You can _form_ the collaborative. Does that sound nuts? Well, here’s what sounds nuts to me: Going to a lousy job every day, trying not to think about the end of civilization, then going home and watching Netflix while trying not to think about the end of civilization, and then getting angry and leaving snarky comments on Reddit. That sounds nuts. So does sitting around sharing more articles simply reacting and emoting over the latest assault on humanity by the fascists. Ultimately, that’s not resistance. That’s letting them win. To me, true resistance is building things that give agency back to your community. There are ways to do the things we consider impossible. We just have to find them. Fascists took Eva Saxl’s insulin and told her she was going to die, and they didn’t care. She said _fine, I’ll make my own insulin_. And she _did_. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Imagine you’re sitting in a room, filling out some lame survey, and you start to see smoke. What would you do? Would you try to find where it’s coming from and do something about it? Or would you just sit there and wait for instructions? Most of us like to think we’d get up and do something. We all think highly of ourselves. In 1968, a couple of psychologists at Columbia University found an interesting answer to that question. They put students in a room and started filling it with smoke. They didn’t tell them the smoke was part of the experiment. And they learned something interesting. When it was just one person in the room, by themselves, 75 percent of the time someone got up and did something. The dynamic completely reversed when they added more participants. Put two more people in the room, and suddenly someone only does something about the smoke 38 percent of the time. And when you secretly tell those other two participants _not_ to do anything, it drops down to 10 percent. This study became known as “the smoky room experiment.” It was just one of many studies that alerted us to our future. Here’s another question: You’re in a room by yourself, and you have to stay there for 15 minutes. You have two choices. You can sit quietly and think. Or you can push a little red button to deliver mild electric shocks to yourself. Again, most of us say we’d never shock ourselves out of pure boredom, just to escape 15 minutes of introspection. And yet… As it turns out, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women prefer to shock themselves rather than spend 15 minutes alone. That’s according to a 2014 study at the University of Virginia. So I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but hear me out: Combine these studies, and you arrive at something equal parts hilarious and terrifying. Put three people in a room with a little red button and start filling it with smoke, and they’re more likely to sit there and shock themselves to death than to do anything to save each other. This is what the world looks like to me at this point. The world is on fire, and we’re all sitting around tapping buttons that only cause self-injury. Does that sound accurate to you? If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with the world, how we could wind up in such a mess, psychology offers plenty of reasons. Sure, we can definitely blame billionaires for a vast majority of the world’s problems, but that doesn’t explain why so many of us out there just want to sit back and let them destroy everything. My theory: The billionaires know about these cognitive weaknesses, at least intuitively, and their superpower is finding ways to exploit them. I’m a former professor, and I spent years studying human psychology because I wanted to understand why we, as a society, seem to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again until the planet lies in ruins. It became something of a hobby. Humanity isn’t doomed to these short circuits, but any hope for us lies in understanding our faulty wiring so we can do better. Of course, if you’re a true pessimist, you’ll simply get a kick out of reading about all the ways humans are hard-wired for destruction. Let’s get into it: Do you think humans have the capacity to think about the longterm future? A study by a psychologist at UCLA found that most people regard their future selves as a stranger. His team plugged people up to machines and monitored their brains while asking them questions. There’s a region of our brains that light up when we think about someone we don’t know. That’s the exact same part of the brain we use when we imagine ourselves months or years from now. It’s no wonder societies can’t seem to make good decisions, at the ballot box or otherwise. They feel no intimate connection to the version of themselves that has to live through the consequences. It doesn’t mean we’re incapable. It means that thinking about your longterm future is an intentional act. It’s something you have to train yourself to do, to map out the consequences of doing something that simply satisfies your emotions in the moment. It’s hard. In 2009, a Harvard business professor introduced “Kanter’s Law,” which describes the way major changes feel impossible when you’re in the middle of them. She was describing business transitions, but it sums up the current mess pretty well. When things get tough, people tend to rush back to the status quo. They prefer the devil they know, even if it’s killing them. A psychologist at NYU published an entire book backing up Kanter’s Law, except he called all of this _systems justification theory_. It’s another way of saying something we’ve all seen over the last generation: People fear change, and their fear keeps them trapped in miserable conditions. They’ll actually go out of their way to justify toxic norms while rejecting alternatives because they’re so scared to lose the little bit of comfort or security they’ve got. They’ll cling to that as long as they can. A Harvard psychologist called it “the region beta paradox.” If things get bad fast, that motivates everyone to action. If things get bad slowly, almost nobody wants to disrupt their version of “normal.” They’ll just suffer. Psychologists have found other corollaries to this behavior, like “shifting baseline syndrome.” As things get progressively worse, our longterm and generational memories forget what normal used to feel like. It’s hard to remember that things used to be any better than they are now. Meanwhile, it’s very hard to convince someone that bad things could actually happen to them. They assume they’re going to be fine, no matter how bad things get. Psychologists call this optimism bias. A 2011 study confirmed that a majority of people simply don’t think statistics apply to them. Almost everyone thinks they’re going to beat the odds. In short, they simply don’t count on reality having any personal impact. There’s a term related to optimism bias, called “selective updating.” Basically, when we take in new information about risks, our brains want to exempt us from the numbers. Most of us never think _we’ll_ be the ones running from a flood or a fire. You see this idea all the time in eyewitness accounts. At some point, many of them say something like, “I never thought it could happen to _me_.” That’s selective updating. In the 1960s, a psychologist at Duke University identified perhaps our most crucial weakness in the face of fascism and collapse: We ignore warnings. Not only do we ignore warnings, but a large portion of society takes a bizarre pride in shrugging them off while downplaying threats. Psychologists call this pride “reactance,” a stubborn refusal to take precautions. It only gets worse the harder you try to convince them to take a threat seriously. It doesn’t matter what evidence you show them. It doesn’t matter if you’re a friend or a member of their family. They’re more likely to turn on you than listen. Psychologists have even identified a behavior called “vicarious reactance,” when people who _are_ taking warnings seriously nonetheless want to defend the “individual rights” and “choices” of idiots. Their brains would rather protect someone’s right to do something stupid, even if that behavior puts everyone around them at risk. This problem has gotten especially bad in western societies that elevate individualism or collectivism. Yeah, that tracks. In the 1970s, a study confirmed an especially disturbing behavior, something we’ve seen too many times today. Researchers showed evidence to religious high school girls that Jesus wasn’t actually divine. They found the evidence compelling, but it didn’t matter. Most of them didn’t question their faith. In fact, many of the girls reported that seeing evidence that challenged their views only strengthened their faith in those views. It wasn’t a fluke. Studies across decades have confirmed similar reactions. For example, one study in 2020 found that Trump supporters weren’t persuaded by compelling evidence of his crimes and wrongdoings. In fact, the information made them _more_ likely to start attacking his opponents, accusing _them_ of wrongdoing. That’s exactly how things have played out over the last few years. Psychologists have been confirming Leon Festinger’s concept of “cognitive dissonance” for generations. If you don’t remember, Festinger documented a cult’s insistence that the world was going to end, which only grew stronger every time their deadline for the apocalypse passed. What’s even more interesting are Festinger’s studies showing that the less you pay someone to do meaningless work, the harder they lie to themselves about a hidden purpose, just so they don’t have to admit they wasted an afternoon. Meanwhile, people who got paid fairly for the same work complained more. Perhaps it has occurred to you that billionaires have read these studies, or at least had someone summarize the findings for them. Imagine how a billionaire reacts to the notion that paying workers less actually makes them _more_ likely to find meaning and purpose in their work, and paying them more actually provides a foundation of dignity and self-respect to complain. It doesn’t take rocket science. Meanwhile, researchers figured out years ago that credentials actually make little or no difference in the persuasiveness of an argument. One study confirmed this all the way back in 2010: Nobody actually cares about your degrees, your publications, your accomplishments. If they don’t already agree with you on some level, then they’re going to dismiss your qualifications. Specifically, psychologists call this process “selective perception.” We all tend to filter out the information and evidence that doesn’t align with our worldviews. Research has also found that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to fall into these traps, precisely because you consider yourself “immune.” An educated person stops monitoring themselves for bias. They get complacent. On a similar note, psychologists have identified a behavior called “moral licensing” and a related one called “moral cleansing.” It’s similar to the educated person who thinks they can never fall for propaganda. Once someone does a few good things, they earn a reputation as a “good person.” Once they’ve established that reputation, society lets them do all kinds of bad things. You can license a politician… Or an entire country. When someone does something bad, and they secretly know it, they often choose to engage in rituals of “moral cleansing” instead of actually accepting accountability for their poor behavior. These rituals often involve virtue signaling, moral grandstanding, and scapegoating of others deemed to be less morally upright than them. All of this behavior has one goal, repairing an individual’s damaged perception of themselves as a good person. That’s all they’re trying to do. Entire societies can conduct moral cleansing rituals. Entire societies can also engage in something psychologists call “social amnesia.” In the 1990s, a psychologist named Russell Jacoby introduced this concept to explain how politicians and institutions get away with selling the same bad solutions to the same crises over and over, ignoring our real problems. Societies have a way of erasing tragedies that reveal too much about their skewed values. Consider how many people knew anything about the 1918 pandemic until it was thrust back into collective consciousness, and consider how much John Barry’s history in _The Great Influenza_ reveals noble memories of Woodrow Wilson, a eugenicist warhawk. Americans don’t want to know that. So they forget it. The biggest problem of all is how our societies handle truth tellers. You can lie to someone over and over again, and the repetition itself becomes a truth. As an article in the _Journal of Cognition_ explains, "Repetition generates the illusion of epistemic weight." If your brain sees something a lot, it's wired to give it more credibility. The billionaires understand this perfectly. It’s how advertising works. Meanwhile, truth tellers get a raw deal. Because they often have to voice unpleasant ideas, and they have to criticize those in power, they run afoul of the human mind’s key biases and fallacies. People want to exempt themselves from reality. They don’t want to challenge the status quo. They want to morally license and cleanse themselves and each other. They take pride in shrugging off warnings and declaring their personal freedoms in the face of disaster. Because of all this, someone who breaks all of those illusions becomes the ultimate villain. Psychology backs that up. In the 1990s, psychologists John Skowronski and Donal Carlston defined this phenomenon as “spontaneous trait transference.” As Skowronsky explains, "politicians who allege corruption by their opponents may themselves be perceived as dishonest" and "critics who praise artists may themselves be perceived as talented." If you describe someone as negative, unreliable, or dangerous, people tend to misremember it as a self-description. Later, Rick Brown and John Bassili found that people transfer personality traits to inanimate objects like bananas. It’s incredibly difficult to speak the truth when the architects of comforting lies have everything working in their favor. So… We live in a world where you can hand a button to someone and expect them to start shocking themselves within 15 minutes if they get too bored. We live in a world where you can convince someone that bananas are evil, as long as you tell them so enough times. We live in a world where presenting compelling evidence to someone actually strengthens their belief in conspiracy theories. That’s why we’re in such a mess. There’s no need to lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling and asking darkness and deities why things are so bad or why it often feels like nobody actually wants to save the country, or the planet. Psychologists know because they’ve been studying our brains for more than 100 years, and they’ve seen the depths of our capacity for self-deception. Billionaires have also seen it, and they’ve built a system that nurtures these flaws rather than trying to condition our better selves. So you can finally put the question to rest. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

_Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice._ _—Robert Frost_ It’s getting popular to talk about the end of the world. It’s also getting _profitable_. Marketing analysts have predicted major growth in the prepping and survival industries over the next decade. What kind of growth? We’re talking about food buckets and premade bugout bags. We’re talking about podcasts and listicles stuffed with affiliate links offering “secrets” about generating endless amounts of food, water, and electricity for pennies on the dollar. Unfortunately, the companies and influencers pushing all this stuff aren’t actually trying to help anyone. They’re trying to make money off the legitimate, inevitable awakening of the public—and their fear. Everyone is finally starting to realize that the shelves aren’t going to stay full. The lights aren’t going to stay on. The air conditioners aren’t going to keep humming. Eventually, something’s gotta give. That thing is the grid. Ultimately, it’s a good thing for more westerners to see what’s going on. A few years ago, you’d get rubber-stamped as a conspiracy theorist for talking about endless wars or depopulation agendas set by billionaires. Not anymore… ## Things have changed The UN has declared our original climate goals dead. The World Economic Forum is talking about water scarcity. We’ve seen Project 2025 become a reality. The Epstein files have highlighted the total psychopathic nature of our institutions and their leaders. The world’s richest men openly brag about buying elections and committing war crimes. Tech companies are trying to build data centers in almost every major city, driving up utility bills and wrecking entire communities. It’s never been clearer what they have planned. It’s no longer the stuff of back alley Reddit threads. It’s all out in the open. Content about famines and population bottlenecks routinely go viral now, but there’s just one problem with all this. It’s nonsense. Like always, grifters are trying to cash in on the profound shift in vibes. They want to appropriate this new awareness. They want to channel it into income streams. And look, there’s nothing wrong with trying to make a living. But there’s something wrong with selling lies. If you want to make a living off the end of the world, at least be honest about it. (Wink, wink.) There’s something wrong with panicking millions and telling them to do things that will _hurt_ their chances of survival. That’s what bothers me. Society should be coming together and forming plans to get through heatwaves, crop failures, droughts, fires, and floods. If nothing else, families should be working on projects that will actually keep them alive. Instead, they’re dining out on clickbait. So, what’s some of the worst advice out there? What’s wrong with it? Let’s talk. ## “You’ll live like the pioneers.” Adobe There’s a certain comfort in believing you can survive the future by turning to the past, and there’s some truth to it. And yet, that simple truth gets watered down and dumbed up for mass consumption as survival goop. One toxic line of thought recommends we live more like our ancestors did, fishing, hunting, and foraging. It confuses a few different points. Yes, our future _does_ look more like the past in some ways. Grids will eventually give out under the pressure of weather chaos exacerbated by data centers and crypto mining facilities. So, you’re going to need ways to live your life with less electricity, and sometimes no electricity at all. But it’s pure escapist fantasy to imagine most of us will just waltz back to life on farms and homesteads like our ancestors did hundreds of years ago. The world has fundamentally changed. The ecosystems of a melting planet can no longer support that kind of life, certainly not for hundreds of millions. Sit down and do the math. Even if a handful of hardy preppers tried to sustain themselves by hunting game, even for a portion of their food, they would deplete an area’s wildlife in a matter of weeks. Not years. Not months. Weeks. They would simply run out of deer, squirrels, raccoons, fish, birds, and everything else. The animals that survived would be far too cunning for an ordinary person to ever kill. You think you’re just going to start growing crops in your back yard? I suggest you go out there and take a good look at your soil. Is it healthy enough to grow all the food you’ll need for the rest of your life? Do you understand how to fix nitrogen in the dirt? Have you studied crop rotations? How are you going to sustain your food garden when grid failures ultimately kill your water pressure? The point isn’t that you should give up. The point is that if you’re going to survive, you have to put some thought into it, and you have to start planning long before the collapse hits you. You don’t just start growing vegetables 8 weeks before a famine predicted by an online prophet. It takes years of growing, composting, and restoring the soil before you begin producing a fraction of what you’ll need to survive. Likewise, technology isn’t just going to vanish overnight. It’s going to be around for decades to come. It’s just going to become less reliable. I don’t know a single homesteader, online or otherwise, who doesn’t still rely on some forms of technology and machinery to do some of their work. #### Do this instead: Stop daydreaming about living like some display in a museum. Look at the technology of prior ages as a resource, a trove of tools and strategies that you can adapt for the present. Some of it will work. A lot of it won’t. You’re going to be living less like a pioneer, more like the rebels in _Star Wars_ or a scavenger in some dystopia. Your future is not being directed by George Romero. It’s being written by William Gibson and Ridley Scott. You’re going to be fixing old appliances. You’re going to be pulling things out of landfills and refurbishing them. You’re going to be trying to stay under the radar of evil fascist regimes and their stormtroopers. How do I know all this? I’m _doing_ it. ### “Cities will become death traps.” Photo by he zhu on Unsplash You still hear this one all the time. Many who fancy themselves a prepper spend their nights and weekends scouring Zillow for bugout locations. They whisper about the awful things that’ll happen in densely populated areas. They never stop and think about the real threat of living out in the middle of the woods all by yourself. It doesn’t take roving bands of hungry city slickers to kill you. It only takes a handful of bad hombres. The woods are full of them. Last year, someone told me the horror story of a couple who moved out to a rural area precisely to get away from the looming threats of city life while living on the land and building a little collapse haven for themselves. It didn’t go so well. Just like there’s a bad side of town, there’s also a bad side of the country. The couple unwittingly moved right into the middle of it. Locals started vandalizing their property. Late at night, ghostly cries echoed through the wildness, telling them to get out, they didn’t belong here. The sheriff couldn’t do anything. (Or wouldn’t do anything.) He kindly informed them that there was just something “wrong with the folks who lived around there.” The prepper couple was… Trapped. Something similar happened to my uncle. Despite owning a hundred acres of undeveloped land, a prepper’s paradise, he lives in fear of the trailer park that sits across the road from the entrance to his property. Methheads trespass all the time. Sometimes, he wakes up to find them staring at him through the windows. He believes that one day, someone is going to try to kill him. So… These two anecdotes punctuate something you learn when you actually study the history, ecology, and psychology of collapse. Technically, you’re no safer out in the country than you are in the city. In some ways, you’re even more vulnerable out there. You’re cut off from help. You’re cut off from supply chains. You live further away from whatever is left of civilization when it crumbles. You’re not escaping anything. You’re simply trading one set of risks for another. This notion of cities becoming death traps stems from a deep misunderstanding of how ordinary people act during disasters. Contrary to what the movies show, and what the mainstream media likes to amplify, people tend to remain incredibly calm—almost too calm. Studies confirm that most of us are far more likely to downplay and ignore threats, and we want to pretend things are normal. Look at histories of famine across the world, in Ireland, India, China. Mass violence didn’t ensue. What actually happened? Opportunistic crime exploded. People did murder and eat each other, but they did it on the sly. You were far more likely to be killed and slaughtered by someone you knew than a horde of hungry strangers. I’ve encountered no historical accounts of that. Meanwhile, everyone invested immense effort in maintaining the illusion of normalcy. They even told each other to cheer up. That _is_ documented. It happened. #### Do this instead: If you live in one of the areas marked for doom by some armchair survivalist, stop worrying. Stop feeling like you have to move, or that there’s no point in doing anything because you live in a downtown studio apartment. There’s plenty you can do. In a collapse scenario, other people become a double-edged sword. You need them to survive, but the wrong kind of people will jeopardize your health and safety. They don’t even have to be malicious. They could just be careless. There’s no right or wrong place to be as society unravels. You simply have to develop different approaches depending on where you choose to stay. If you feel stuck in a densely populated urban area, then your survival depends on making contacts and connections. Build networks. Build warehouse gardens. Build basement cooling centers. Build water generators and rooftop solar installations. Form your own patrol groups and repair teams. You’re going to do that by talking about things like resilience and sustainability, urban gardens, and disaster preparedness networks. If you lead with “the world is ending,” that’s going to scare away a lot of folks who haven’t fully awoken quite yet, but could still be useful. Living in a city isn’t a death sentence. It’s an opportunity. ## “It’s Going to Happen on X Date and Time” So, some dude gave you a calendar date for the collapse. How nice of them… Those predictions go viral because they offer everyone what they want most, a sense of certainty in an unpredictable world. Here’s the thing: If you want to become truly collapse aware, truly resilient, and truly reliable in an emergency, then you have to dispense with the notion that you’ll know when or how the doom is coming. Case in point: Nepal. In reality, there’s absolutely nothing to stop nature from wiping you off the face of the earth. Watch the videos of the glacier collapse. They’re chilling because they reveal the true power of the crisis. It’s entirely possible that you and I both end up in a catastrophic disaster like that, something so intense and overwhelming that it negates all of our plans. In order to live in this new world, you have to do something that most of the internet prophets won’t talk about: > _You need a tolerance for uncertainty._ You can’t predict exactly what’s going to happen or when. You can’t just put a bunch of food buckets on a credit card and blow off the bill by telling yourself it won’t matter because the financial industry is going to collapse, and all debt is going to be rendered worthless. That’s not an actionable plan. That’s simply apocalyptic thinking. Apocalyptic thinking is a lot like wishful thinking. It’s just that instead of lying to yourself that everything will be fine, you lie to yourself that you’ll make it through a finite disaster unscathed while everyone else perishes, leaving you to inherit the diminished earth. That’s not how it works. It’s not even close. #### Do this instead: There’s no need to tune out the news. You’re better off staying informed. But you should also read scientific reports and articles. Read history and psychology. Truly educate yourself on what’s happening and why. > _Keep an open mind. > > Learn new things. > > Live._ Above all, don’t get too absorbed in trying to predict exactly when a famine or a financial collapse is going to happen. It’s not good for your mental health. (I’ve been there.) It’s also not good for your bank account. The more you read, the more you pay attention, the more you learn that we’re all still guessing what’s going to happen. We have a good idea, but it’s not a movie script. It could happen this year, or next, or 2030. Different disasters are going to impact different places at different times in different ways. It doesn’t have to get as bad as a Mad Max movie in order to completely upend your life. Talk to someone who survived a wildfire. Talk to someone still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Some of them lost everything, and it didn’t take a famine or a worldwide financial collapse. You should definitely be building networks and putting systems in place, but it’s not a sprint. It’s not a race. It’s a commitment. There’s no hard deadline for you to have everything in place. You’re going to have to balance all this with your other responsibilities. In some ways, that’s exactly what makes all of this so hard sometimes. Be steady about it. ### You actually have to do it If you actually tried to do half the things recommended out there, you would quickly learn that most of their plans don’t work. They just _sound_ good. That’s one of the biggest problems with the internet. If something sounds good, it doesn’t matter if it’s accurate or rooted in evidence. It will spread. And so, millions of westerners think they’re going to survive the apocalypse because they have a few food buckets and a barrel of water. They think they’re going to hunt squirrels or fish in a lake near a city with tens of thousands of residents who all have the same idea. This is a recipe for disaster within a disaster. They think they have to protect themselves from some imaginary horde of starving civilians, or they think they need to know the exact time and place the apocalypse will begin, or they think they need the perfect cabin in the woods to escape civilization, and that’s where they put their energy. We have a name for all this mindset: > _They’re self-fulfilling prophecies._ Someone who engages in this logic isn’t actually doing anything productive to prepare for any kind of longterm emergency or dystopian future. They are, in fact, doing things that make them worse off in the long run. They’re simply feeding an industry that wants to exploit their fears. Instead, they could be figuring out where and how they could actually grow food, even in downtown areas. They could be learning about Ron Finley and his urban growing projects. They could be installing actual systems and building real networks that could help themselves as collapse accelerates. If you want to survive, you have to stop fantasizing about a cabin full of food buckets and start building your salvation where you are, not where you want to be. ## Main character syndrome All this would be a lot more interesting if you were the main character in the preface to an apocalyptic novel where you were assured to “make it” if you followed the plot and did all the things you were supposed to do. It would be easier to swallow our dystopian future if we could at least know whether or not we’d have to keep showing up to our lousy jobs, for how long, while watching this lousy charade of a political system continue to wobble on with no end in sight. It would be nice if the government collapsed. It would be nice if the banks collapsed. It would be nice if some major disaster happened that was just bad enough that it motivated everyone to start growing food in their back yards, but not so bad that it actually starved us all to death. In some ways, that wouldn’t be a disaster at all. It would be liberating. Unfortunately, we aren’t the main character in an apocalyptic novel. There’s no ending written for us. We have no idea what’s actually going to happen to our systems and institutions as the heatwaves, droughts, floods, and storms get worse. We have an educated guess, and that’s the best we can manage. There’s also no guarantee that we’ll do all this, and the metaphorical equivalent of a glacier doesn’t come crashing down on our heads with all the force and indifference of nature and consequences, rendering it all meaningless anyway. We’re preparing for the things we can’t predict. Will it be fire, or ice? Just remember, the point of the blooming survival industry isn’t necessarily to help you survive. It’s to make money off your desire to, while perpetuating all the same toxic mindsets and attitudes that got us here. Stay smart. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Last week, I released the first official edition of _Survival Illustrated_. It felt finished for now, but a feeling of accomplishment remained elusive. I wasn’t sure how many people would find it valuable—or even useful. Then the comments and emails started pouring in: More than a hundred comments between my two newsletters, and dozens of emails from people who are already using the guide, installing rain barrels and water filters, storing food, growing herbal medicines, and building units of survival with their neighbors. Here’s one of the best so far: > _Thanks to you I have not one but two massive water tanks because I got them on sale and remember thinking I’m sure the Sentinel would grab them as water is life! I only have 1100 sq metres and folks thought I was insane as I live in a rural area in town. Ha! Water rates have rocketed and I am able to meet our needs and water our food garden and tiny food forest for free. The non-native trees have been cut down and I have enough firewood for a number of winters. I was told I was an idiot keeping the tiny forest, put a pool in they said, it will increase your house price!! Anything grows here as long as it has water. I’ve lived in this house for 25 years and never used a spray, and I have been growing soil for that long when folks thought I was crazy. No need for expensive store bought fertiliser. > > Your book helped me design my place for safety, best growing use and so much more. It’s on two levels and under the house is now a workshop, for processing the produce and storing it. I followed your guide, thank you, it saved me so much time. I also have a small safer living area, I am about to put in a composting toilet and a small shower that runs off a 12 v battery. In a cyclone I now have a retreat or another living area for a family when their home gets flooded. I’m on top of a hill but large areas around town go under. These used to be once in 75 year events, we’ve had 4 in the last ten years! > > Folks are not laughing at me now and come to me to borrow a generator, get supplies, food etc. In return, they help harvesting and processing . > > This is a red neck area, right wing and so racist. I’m the opposite. Weirdly, when your home is flooded and your car is floating away, it seems the crazy old hedge witch with the half dingo dog isn’t crazy anymore. Politics doesn’t matter when you’re homeless, cold, wet and hungry. > > You gave me the belief I could do this. > > Somehow the gun toting, racist ratbags are starting to see that eating a hot stew made by my lesbian mates while drinking a mug of steaming coffee from beans grown and harvested by my trans mate and particularly enjoying the shot of whiskey in that coffee distilled by an indigenous person makes racism rather childish. > > Your little guide and previous articles have done much more than help me set this up, your book kills racism. > > Please don’t stop doing what you are doing. When it all goes to shit , and ofc there are days when it does, I grab myself a whiskey, sit under the house, take five and pick up your guide knowing I’ll at least have a way of fixing the problem even if I need to get someone to help me and because folks have been helped in the past with zero judgement, I have people I can call on. > > They still think I’m an old, welsh hedgewitch and still very wary of my dog but I’m now eccentric, not crazy. > > You helped make a tiny community._ This is better than any review in a fancy magazine, because it’s real. It’s someone benefiting directly from the work, building on it, and improving the lives around them. These notes have meant a lot to me, because all this was the entire point of the guide, that people would take it and use it as the seed for their own networks and communities, or at least some fertilizer. I’m also pretty sure this means a lot to AKET, the group that helped finance so much of the work. These are real results, and I hope to see more. I wanted this to be more than just another survival guide. I didn’t want to be just one more prepper on social media trying to sell food buckets. I wanted to help make a roadmap for the future. They’re getting it: > _I love your work because it's not just about moving to the wilderness and waiting for the world to end, but about living here, now and being prepared._ They’re not just stopping with the guide, either. They’re going out and gaining more knowledge, taking courses, and developing skills: > _We love it! We printed it out and working our-way through the projects. We set up batteries and solar panels. Leaning to grow food, making water harvesting set up, using tools, giving my kids survival skills. We plan to do a bike maintenance class where it teaches you how to build a bike for local charities shop._ People have been dropping notes to tell me how much time and money the guide has already saved them implementing survival plans, not just for themselves, but for their families and their neighbors. It has helped them think about it and talk about it. This is the kind of movement I like to see, not scanning for bugout locations, not talking in hushed tones about disasters on the way, but getting ready where you are, with what you have. It’s the opposite of panicking. It’s building. A year ago, many of us wondered how we were going to get through this climate hell. We could barely say the word “collapse” without instantly getting accused of fearmongering. Now we have a much clearer picture of what’s possible, and how to get there. It doesn’t require moving out to the woods. It doesn’t require spending tens of thousands of dollars on special gear. For the next week or so, I’m going to try and relax a little. (I don’t know if that’s possible for me). I’m going to listen to Cradle of Filth. I’m going to make a list of topics to explore in future posts. I’m going to write a little on other topics. I’m going to organize the garage again. I’m going to filter rainwater. I’m going to read and respond to as many of the comments and notes as I can. How are you using the guide? Let me know. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Last year, something occurred to me. I needed to write another book. This book would be different from all the other ones I’d written: novels, reference guides, edited collections, graphic novels. This was going to be a survival guide, a collection of everything I’ve learned over the last four years. It was going to cover the essentials of food storage, bugout bags, rain harvesting, growing food, foraging, herbal medicine, and a lot more. It was going to be the kind of guide I wish I’d had when I first started prepping. Some of you know: Back in 2024, I left a tenured position in academia for several reasons. More than anything, it felt pointless to continue submitting articles to journals and publishers about obscure topics while the world turned to ash right in front of us. It felt pointless to sit around in endless meetings and Zoom calls, debating “what’s best for students” without asking them—and often ignoring them when they tried to tell their professors what they really needed. Long story short, it took me three years to write this guide. It’s one of the most challenging, most ambitious, most difficult things I’ve ever done. I spent three years learning Blender, one of the most powerful but also one of the most difficult pieces of software in the world. Yeah, three years. For three years, I spent most of my free nights in front of a computer, learning about mesh topology, shader nodes, geometry nodes, grease pencils, and line art modifiers. I learned about rigging and posing characters. I learned about shape keys. I learned about blend modes. I learned about path curves and bolt factories. I did this while raising a kid and holding down two jobs, three if you include the countless hours spent learning how to build sustainable survival systems. In the end, I was able to produce this: Survival Book_Reduced SizeSurvival Book_Reduced Size.pdf44 MBdownload-circle It’s more than 200 pages. It’s free. You can also order a print version. For the print version, go here. I’m sorry there’s no dramatic, AI rendered images of urban ruins. There’s no shadowy figures holding assault rifles. For my guide, I decided to do something different. I decided to make prepping _fun_. Even _cute_. I’m sorry if you don’t like the font. I deliberately chose something that looks casual, something that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I can’t change the font right now. That would require a pretty extensive redesign. This guide will never be done. I’m never going to finish it. Why? Because the survival guide in my head—the perfect survival guide—is 450 pages. It talks about growing antibiotics from soil. It includes instructions for communities on manufacturing medicines like insulin. It provides a detailed breakdown on Morse code and Ham radio operation. It shows you how to completely disassemble a bicycle. It shows you how to wire an entire cabin from scratch. That’s why I’m never going to finish it. The guide will always feel incomplete. It’s a growing guide, meant to reflect a lifetime of learning, a lifetime of reclaiming the forgotten skills that weren’t passed down to me from older generations. No, not horseback riding. No, not trapping game. These aren’t solutions for most of us. They’re distractions. They’re false comforts. So I’m going to keep working on it. I’ll keep releasing editions with new sections. I’ll keep posting about my journey online. It’s been a rewarding but frustrating journey. On the one hand, I’ve solved problems that felt almost impossible, like filtering rainwater from a shingle roof and figuring out how to make an affordable composting setup for basic sanitation during a longterm emergency… in the suburbs. Believe it or not, that wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was overcoming all the naysayers, the ones who insisted that I couldn’t do it, or that it wasn’t worth doing for various reasons, or that my illustrations weren’t good enough, or that it had already been done and I was wasting my time. I feel good about this edition. On the other hand… Honestly, it’s been a little demoralizing to watch AI slop artists slide into this platform and start generating content about the topics I’ve been researching for years, raking in ten times more praise despite their heavy reliance on artificial intelligence for their prose and their illustrations. For what it’s worth, there’s some extremely cool AI programs that add shading to your artwork and give it a smooth, professional finish. I really wanted to use them for my guide. I didn’t. This is what restraint looks like. This is what it looks like not to use AI, even when you really, really want to rationalize it. I wasn’t going to say anything, but… People have started recommending these articles to me. They’ve started asking me for my takes on their affiliate links. They’ve said they’re willing to spend forty bucks to learn about “water freedom,” even though I’m offering that knowledge for free. (It’s just a dehumidifier, folks.) The irony of it all? When I first started writing seriously on Substack in 2022, I was accused of engaging in deceptive affiliate marketing to promote nose sprays and supplements. I wasn’t. And yet, prominent accounts refused to promote my work because they were convinced I was a grifter. Now AI slop artists openly engage in that behavior, and nobody calls them out. These writers don’t have to worry about how they’re perceived. For the love of god, one of them uses the back of his head for a profile photo. Our readership happens to overlap a good bit, and I’ve noticed something. People are quick to come to their defense over their use of AI. They’re more than willing to overlook the inaccuracies, the hasty generalizations, the contradictions. They’re entirely invested in pulling out the one or two things they found admirable. It must be nice… Meanwhile, the same group wastes no time expressing their shock and disappointment at me when I violate an expectation, yanking support when I say something they disagree with, or when one of my characters promotes “unhealthy body types.” And yet, they willfully overlook or rationalize the moral and ethical dilemmas presented by the slop artists, writing about social collapse while employing the very technologies that are accelerating that collapse. Hey, I’m all about flexible moral standards. Could we try to make them equal? They don’t challenge the problematic assumptions underlying articles that declare entire regions of the country “bad places to be when collapse begins.” They don’t call out the privilege of thinking like that. Fine, I will. By the way, the premise of my work is that while most of us can’t control where we live, we _can_ take ownership and agency over our survival. Prepping and survival aren’t about running away from where you are because it feels dangerous. It’s about investing where you are. One of the biggest lessons in my guide isn’t explicitly stated, but it’s there on every single page. It’s something I learned when we moved across the country. You don’t escape collapse. Not even a little. You simply move into a different set of problems. We thought we were getting away from droughts, only to end up in the middle of one of the biggest droughts in history in one of the last places you’d expect. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a futile endeavor to ask AI to find all the places you shouldn’t live during the collapse of civilization. Instead, learn about where you are and come up with ways to deal with those problems. Does population density have to be a liability? What if you decided to make it a strength? If more people were invested in changing their surroundings, working together, cooperating, instead of just paying lip service to those ideas, then perhaps half the country wouldn’t be on track to become uninhabitable. The idea of simply leaving or abandoning a place once it becomes too difficult is, in fact, one of the primary reasons things have gotten so awful. People leave this or that city. They leave this or that country. They take all of their assumptions and entitlements with them, thinking that they weren’t part of the reason everything went to hell in the first place. Well, you know what they say: “Wherever you go, there you are.” My guide isn’t about fleeing. It’s about staying put. As for the newsletter: The first comments I often get on my articles now are people reprimanding me over my word choice or yelling about aspects of a platform I have no control over. They tell me I shouldn’t “worry” about securing my doors, even though I already did it and my point was how much I learned. They tell me I’m fragile for wanting to filter my rainwater. Why not just drink the dead frog fountain? “It will strengthen your immune system,” they say. People cancel. They open disputes. They send long emails lecturing me on what I’ve done wrong. They call me names. The irony is that these aren’t trolls. These are people who’ve benefited from my work. They preface their attacks by telling me how much and how long they’ve enjoyed it. And you know what I think? Gosh, these are the people who want to build community??? Well, good luck with that… Something really interesting happened yesterday. I posted a link to my new guide, and you know what one of my readers did? They didn’t like the post. They didn’t say thank you or congratulations. They shared a link to a slop article and said I might find it useful. What am I supposed to do with that? Thanks, I guess. Anyway, I was going to end this article by begging for support. But I don’t think I’ll do that. The work either speaks for itself, or it doesn’t. Either way, I’m going to keep working on the guide. I’m going to keep calling out nonsense when I see it. I’m going to keep telling unpleasant truths, even when it costs me a quarter of my subscribers. There’s no other way for me. It’s this, or nothing. So could you just let me know: Do you like the guide? If you like the guide, if you think it’s worth continuing to work on and improve, could you take a few seconds out of your day to let me know? Could you hit a button on your mouse or your phone? Could you type a couple of sentences? Although we’re all supposed to be Clint Eastwood-style rugged individualists, and we’re not supposed to care what anyone thinks, I’d like to remind everyone that even Clint Eastwood cares what people think, or he wouldn’t have kept releasing movies. He wouldn’t have gone on all those talk shows to promote them. He wouldn’t have accepted all those awards and all that money. I’m not supposed to care? The entire point of art and teaching is other people, so what they think actually kinda matters—for a lot of different reasons. Take care, Jessica Support

It's been almost six months since a major update to the survival guide. So, here's the latest version: Survival Book_Reduced SizeSurvival Book_Reduced Size.pdf44 MBdownload-circle This version includes dozens of new illustrations covering all the work we've done over the summer, figuring out rain harvesting and composting toilets, as well as other topics. I'll never be done with this guide, but it's looking good at well over 200 pages at this point. I've uploaded the full version. The "reduced sized" just refers to standard PDF compression. This work wouldn't be possible without the support of readers as well as organizations like AKET. You all deserve a big thanks. And if you can continue to support this project, it helps a lot. I was going to wait until next week to drop it, but I think we're done. And I can't sit on it any longer. It needs to be seen. I'm going to read over it a few more times before making the official print version available. Take a look and tell me what you think. Thanks, Jessica Support the project

In one of the apocalyptic shows I used to watch, one of the characters loses his mind. He spends years wandering the ruins of civilization until he meets someone. That someone tells him something important: > _“It’s not enough just to survive,” he says. > > “You have to survive**for something**.”_ That moment has stayed with me over the years, as civilization unravels, as we face heatwave after heatwave, drought after drought, storm after storm, war after war. More and more people grasp that they should be doing something. They want to know how to store food or generate water. They want to survive. And yet, I wonder how many of us are asking the most important question of all. > _What are you surviving for? Who are you surviving for? As things get worse, as surviving gets harder, what’s going to keep you going?_ Survivalists and preppers come in generations. Fifty years ago, earlier generations of preppers wanted fallout shelters for a Soviet invasion or a nuclear war. They stocked them with guns and canned corn. They didn’t plan on staying down there in their backyard bunkers forever. They intended to emerge after it was all over and rebuild society. As misguided as they were, they envisioned a future. They were surviving for something. The original homesteaders didn’t plan to live in the woods forever, working from dawn until dusk, working their butts off to survive another harsh winter. They wanted to build towns. They wanted civilization to reach them. Many of them worked conventional jobs for part of the year. They still needed money to buy tools and supplies. They didn’t just live in isolation. They were surviving for something. That’s the core of survivalism and prepping. You survive a global disaster that wipes out a huge chunk of the population. Then you rebuild. You see a future to live for. That’s one of the biggest differences between earlier generations of preppers and this one. We’re not just anticipating a single catastrophic event. We’re not even predicting a series of them. The science tells us we’re in for a breakdown of civilization everywhere, a collapse of the very ecosystems that sustain life. There won’t be any coming back from it—not in our lifetimes, not in ten lifetimes. We’re ruining the planet in a way that will last thousands of years, probably tens of thousands. Maybe forever. By the end of the century, humans might be gone. Any humans left certainly won’t be building any global civilizations. Our descendants will probably be living in tribes again, maybe small villages or towns. That’s what we’re preparing for, a degrowth, a shrinking. We know about the vast amounts of struggle, pain, and suffering ahead. We want to minimize it. We’re not just prepping. We’re also trying to develop sustainable ways of surviving a set of conditions that will only get harsher over the next several decades. It requires a fundamentally different mindset from the kind of prepping that remains popular on the internet, the kind that talks about storing food and water for a finite number of years, without much thought about what happens when grids fail, when the power or the internet doesn’t come back. It’s already happening. Look at Gary, Indiana. Residents there have gone weeks without power after storms with hurricane-force winds blew down the infrastructure. And yet, the data centers surrounding them hum along. Yes, racism has played a big role in that crisis—but it’s also a warning to the rest of us. Anyone who thinks the color of their skin is going to protect them from this level of systemic neglect is practicing their own racism. We’re not immune to this forever, just temporarily. We’ll find ourselves in that same situation soon enough. Regardless of your gender, your ethnicity, your social status, once you and your community cease to be profitable, you don’t matter to them. They won’t come out and fix your power. They won’t fix your water treatment plant. They won’t rebuild your house. What then? When that happens, it’s not just about surviving. > _What will you survive**for**?_ Appropriately enough, my family recently went on a trip. I stayed home, recovering from an infection and following my treatment regimen. (We all still mask everywhere in public.) It was the first time in years I had a few days to myself. I thought I was going to enjoy it a little. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought, and not just because I was sick. I missed them. We all have these little moments. Our spouse comes home a little late. We don’t hear from someone for a while. We wonder if something happened to them. Our brain starts running through scenarios. We ask ourselves: > _What would life be without them?_ It’s not pretty. Those moments remind us that we’re social creatures. Some individuals out there truly have nobody in their lives. Many of them tell us, it’s not pleasant. Even the introverts among us need something to survive for. At least, that’s my take. When I catch myself thinking I would be just fine on my own, I have to stop and remember that I’ve never truly been alone, even when I’m at odds with society, even though I prefer to spend a lot of time by myself. What am I surviving for? I’m surviving to protect my family, all of them, even the ones I don’t necessarily like that much. I’m also surviving because I have a high tolerance for the macabre, and I want to see what happens. I want to make it to 2050. I want to see how many of us are left. I want to bear witness to the collapse. I know, that makes me strange. It makes me wonder. Maybe a lot of people don’t want to think about prepping, beyond the panicked notion of stocking up on food or reading slop articles about living like the pioneers. Part of them doesn’t want to think about survival on deeper levels, because that’s precisely when you run into the bigger questions. You start thinking about things like your purpose on this planet. You start to ask yourself why you would want to survive in a world where it’s not just a famine or a pandemic, but a lifetime of pandemics and famines. What are you doing with your life? That’s an uncomfortable topic even during normal times. Why? Because millions out there are bereft of purpose and meaning. They’re just muddling through. It’s not entirely their fault. The ones at the top, the politicians and the billionaire stringpullers, they want it like that. They want everyone to feel useless. They don’t like it when you have a purpose. A purpose makes you strong. A purpose makes you do selfless things. A purpose makes you resist. If you’re only out for yourself, you’re much easier to manage. Selfish people break easy. My point: We all need something to survive for. We need a reason for hanging around. Maybe it’s a person, or maybe it’s an idea. Whatever it is, it’s part of a vision for the future. Even the bleakest vision is still a vision. What are you surviving for? Everyone has a vision. What’s yours? * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

There’s a scene in Bradley Garrett’s book _Bunker_ that still haunts me. One of the residents of a survival complex starts talking out loud about what he’s going to do when civilization caves in on itself. He’s going to hit every family in the neighborhoods around his bunker. He’s going to kill them. He’s going to put their heads on pikes. He’s not going to spare women and children. “Sorry not sorry,” he says. “It’s them or me.” (I’m embellishing the dialogue.) There’s another scene that stayed with me. At a local diner, one of the architects of a bunker community starts fantasizing about chaining up teenage girls in his safe room. Suffice to say, I’m not worried about my neighbors so much. They’re pretty easygoing. I’m worried about _these_ guys. I’m worried about the MAGA survivalist militia one town over. They say they’re preparing to defend themselves. I think they’re preparing to do something else, and it’s not friendly. There’s an old show called _Doomsday Preppers_ that used to air on the National Geographic Channel. In one episode, a militia says they have zero plans to learn how to farm or harvest rainwater—or anything else. They’re stocking up on guns. They’re making their own plate armor. They’re getting ready to raid other homesteading communities and take all their stuff. They’re very proud of it. So… Let’s face it, not everyone wants to build a community with you. As social collapse deepens, it won’t be enough to stock your pantry with dry goods. You’re going to need a way to protect yourself from the sinister ones. While the wannabe survivalists are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars on bunkers and military gear, you can do something far cheaper and vastly smarter. While you won’t be able to ward off an assault team, you can make it harder for the wannabes to cause you trouble. Here’s what we did. #### Put longer screws in your door Most homebuilders use cheap, flimsy 3/4 inch screws to install your exterior doors. I’m not kidding. That’s exactly what we found in our door jambs when we started upgrading our hardware. These do practically nothing to stop an intruder from getting into your home. One or two swift kicks, and that’s it. Any wannabe militia man can manage it… It’s not exactly top secret. On the other hand, most people never really think about what’s holding their front door together. If you want to know how basic door security works, you can watch this slightly cheesy local news report. Summary: A local news reporter switched the cheap, flimsy factory screws in a strike plate with longer 3-inch ones. He had to kick the door more than 20 times to break it open. Even then, the strike plate didn’t rip out. The deadbolt did. So, just replacing your screws provides a massive security upgrade. It’s a simple fix. #### Upgrade the strike plates You can also upgrade the strike plates themselves. We replaced ours with a combination strike plate that covers the doorknob as well as the deadbolt. They distribute the load across the door jamb. Here’s what they look like: Schlage You might have to do some chiseling to get the upgraded strike plates to fit. Don’t worry, it’s not that hard. You just need a wood chiseling set and a rubber mallet. It takes about 15-30 minutes per door. If you’re not sure how to go about it, YouTube has dozens of videos on how to do it. If I can do it, so can you. #### Upgrade the door hardware Think about upgrading your doorknob and deadbolt if they haven’t been replaced in 15-20 years. Newer sets from nicer brands like Schlage come with longer installation screws as a default now. Get one with an ANSI/BHMA Security Grade 1. These doorknobs and deadbolts undergo rigorous testing for heavy use and blunt force attacks. They can withstand up to 360 lbs of direct force. They’re also more resistant to sawing, picking, and drilling attacks. #### Install a door reinforcer Next, you’ll want to think about protecting your doorknob and deadbolt. You can do that by installing a basic door reinforcer. Sometimes, they’re called door wraps. You can buy combination ones. They offer the most strength. If your door has nonstandard spacing between the doorknob and the deadbolt, you might have to buy the smaller separate ones. Either way, you’re making it much harder for someone to kick out your deadbolt. #### Replace the hinge screws Finally, replace the flimsy 3/4 inch screws in your hinges with 3-inch deck screws. Go with #10 flathead. Replace the screws one at a time so your door doesn’t fall off. That takes care of the last weak point. #### Don’t forget the windows If someone can’t kick your door down, they’re going to focus on the windows. Here’s where things get a little more expensive, but it’s still doable. You don’t have to replace your windows. You just have to get creative. The same goes for doors with glass panels. There’s no way we could afford to replace the doors on our back deck. They’ve got big glass panes in the middle, something an intruder could easily smash out. So we came up with a workaround: Polycarbonate sheets. It’s 200 times stronger than glass. You can order 1/4 inch polycarbonate panels online, and you can request pre-drilled holes. We sized ours to provide a 1.5-inch overlap over the glass, so we can mount it right onto the door. Do your measurements and calculate how many holes you’ll need. Aim for 5-6 inches between the holes, going around the perimeter. Try to keep the holes 3/4 inch from the outer edge. We’re mounting our panel with #10 self-tapping metal roofing screws and washers. That means we needed 5/16 inch pre-drilled holes. We’re using 1/2 inch nylon spacers to hold the panel secure. The screws go through pre-drilled holes, then through the spacers, then into the door. When we mount that panel to the inside of our door, bad guys can smash the glass. It won’t matter. Their blows will glance off the inner polycarbonate panel. It would take more than 1,500 lbs of force to get that off. That solution works pretty well. If you want something with less hassle, contact a company like QMI. They make security screens that fit over an entire window unit. They’ll manufacture the screens and ship them to you, along with instructions to install them yourself. They’re a good company with a good reputation. #### The payoff When you make these upgrades, you’re spending a few hundred bucks to transform your doors from an invitation into a true barrier. Various estimates from security experts put the total force resistance of this setup around 1,500-2,000 lbs. It would take an assault team with hydraulic door breachers or heavy sledgehammers to get in. Opportunistic predators won’t pose a threat to you anymore. They can stand outside all day, kicking and kicking. They’ll break their foot before they get inside your home to take your stuff. If nothing else, it gives you time to execute whatever other home defense plans you might have. #### A few other things If you want even more security, try something like dooricade or nightlock. These products have good reputations. Everything else I’ve seen has mixed reviews. Of course, you’re free to experiment. #### Does all this sound paranoid? Maybe you’re thinking these ideas sound paranoid. Let’s think it through. Over the last several months, we’ve seen countless articles and videos go viral telling everyone to fill their homes with food in preparation for famines and disasters. But we’ve seen virtually no attention on the other important aspects of survival, like water and sanitation—or defense. I’ve watched seasoned preppers fall back on recommendations for home security systems to keep bad guys away. Is a home security system going to stop a starving militia? Is that system going to function during a disaster followed by days of power outages? Are those fake “beware of dog” signs going to deter someone who hasn’t eaten in three days, and getting desperate? How good would you really feel having a home full of canned beans during a famine, knowing that anyone could just kick your front door in and take all your food? Even if you plan on sharing your stuff, there’s no guarantee that every person you run across is going to appreciate your altruistic spirit. My family plans to share what we have, but we’re going to do it on our terms. We decide who to share with and how much. It’s not an open buffet. It can’t be. #### More than just security It took us a few days to upgrade the security on all of our doors. We did it ourselves. We bought the hardware. We installed it. In some cases, we even modified door reinforcers with dremels. I installed deadbolts myself from scratch, bore holes and everything. These are some sturdy doors now. I’m going to be adding detailed instructions on how to do all of this in the next version of my survival guide, which you can download here. You can also make donations there to support it. I’ve got more than secure doors and windows now. I have the skills to install and hang doors myself. These skills stack with the others my family has been building over the last year. The wannabe preppers and survivalists have it all backwards. They think guns are going to save them. They’re not. It’s just going to pit them against another group with bigger guns. It’s going to get them killed. You just have to stay out of the way while the jerks with guns kill each other. In reality, the absolute best security plan in our dystopian future is knowing how to do a lot of different things. Even if you can’t physically do all those things, you can still teach them to someone else. When you know how to do things, how to grow food, how to harvest and filter water, how to install doors, how to make other people feel safe, then they’re not going to want to kill you. They’re going to want to protect you. That’s a real security plan. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

When the World Economic Forum does something, you should probably pay attention. Every year, world leaders and their billionaire ventriloquists meet in Davos, Switzerland, and make plans for the rest of humanity. They’re the makers of “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” Well, they decided to make 2026 “the year of water.” Yay. Back in January, the UN declared a global “water bankruptcy” and started calling for radical solutions to the water crisis. The American West is currently facing its worst drought in more than a thousand years. Areas across the country are going through their worst shortages since the Dust Bowl. It’s hitting Europe, too. Right now, the Danube is so low that WWII shipwrecks are surfacing. All this includes me. We’re no longer in hypotheticals. As data centers gulp down our water, local officials tell us to take shorter showers. We decided to stop doomscrolling and do something about it. In fact, my family has spent the last several years trying to come up with a way to make some form of rain harvesting viable out in the American suburbs. I’ve been working on this project all summer, and it’s done. We perfected our setup. If you’ve read previous versions of this post, you’ll want to read this latest version. If nothing else, it’s got a much snazzier breakdown of all the contaminants our lab tested for. Harvesting rain isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. But it’s doable. ### Australia gets it You see, nearly 80 percent of homes in the U.S. use asphalt shingles for roofing material. Compare that to a country like Australia, where they make up less than 5 percent. Most homes down under have metal roofs. They’re designed to endure the harsher conditions. As such, Australia has normalized rainwater harvesting. Roughly 1 out of 4 homes in Australia has a rainwater tank. In rural areas, they’re a common sight. Meanwhile… Americans have defaulted to poisonous asphalt shingle roofs because they’re easier and cheaper to slap on a home. They don’t last nearly as long, and they’re terrible for harvesting rainwater. The standard asphalt shingle roof contains petroleum byproducts and hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy metals, and arsenic. We tried to hire rainwater specialists in the U.S. to help us install a rainwater harvesting system. They declined. “Don’t bother,” they said. Because asphalt shingles have become the default, metal roofs cost a lot more to install. That leaves 80 percent of homes with very limited options during a true longterm emergency or a disaster that hits the water supply. You can only store so much water in a home, and it’s not practical. Water takes up a lot of space. It’s heavy. Most homes don’t really have a great place to put a few hundred gallons of water. Tanks and cisterns cost a fortune. Even if you can find a way to get them on the cheap, there’s the whole poisonous chemical problem. Complicating matters further, most counties and cities won’t let you harvest rain from a shingle roof for regular drinking water while staying connected to the grid. You’re either on the water grid, or you’re off. You can try to live in both worlds, but it’s a dizzying labyrinth of regulations. If you just want to harvest rainwater and use it for emergencies, you’re kinda SOL. You have a toxic roof. You have no infrastructure or culture to work with. You’re on your own. We found a way. ### If you can’t move to Australia We couldn’t afford to install a metal roof, and we couldn’t afford to move to Australia. So we came up with a plan that works. We found a way to harvest rain from our poisonous shingle roof and transform it into drinkable water for emergencies. We installed rain barrels. We made a filtration system with a portable pump and hoses. We treated the water with a homemade chlorine product. We sent a sample to a lab that analyzed it for 100+ contaminants, including VOCs, heavy metals, and bacteria. It passed. This plan isn’t for wannabe survivalists. It’s the real deal. It’s going to take a little work, but it’s doable. It’s cost-effective. We’re going to explain it in detail, step by step, so that it’s simple to replicate. Let’s get into it: #### First, dig out your foundation Add paver base and paver sand. This step helps you level the ground and provide a good substructure for your rain barrels. You want to dig below the topsoil and into the harder clay. If it’s too hard, soak the area with a hose and leave it for 24 hours. You can also use a pickaxe, but don’t swing it overhead like they do in the movies. Use it more like a hoe. Letting a 5 lb mattock drop into the ground will help break it up. Use a level to get the bare dirt as even as possible, but understand that the paver base helps the most. Tamp it down. You can get paver base from any hardware store. You’ll need at least eight bags. Get ten to be safe. Next, put down your pavers and cinderblocks. We used 24 x 16 inch pavers for the base. They’re heavy as hell (50 lbs), but they’re worth it to create a large, even footprint. Lay cinderblocks on top. Two cinderblocks with one turned perpendicular match the paver size. The cinderblocks give you the clearance for hooking up hoses, filling up buckets, etc. You’ll put another layer of pavers on top for a smooth surface. #### Prepare your gutters Remove the bottom section of gutter. You’ll probably have to unscrew the downspout straps. You might be able to simply reconfigure your gutter pieces like the image shown above. We placed our barrels 2 feet away from the house to help protect the foundation. We wound up using a hacksaw on a piece of downspout to get the right length. It can be frustrating to cut gutter, but it works. We tried aviation snips, but a hacksaw provided the cleanest cut. If you don’t want to mess with cutting gutter, you can buy pre-cut lengths from places like Gutterworks. Make sure to measure the gutter heights. You want a few inches of space between the barrel and the gutter exit. Remember that your gutter will be heading down at a 75-degree angle. Don’t use a 90-degree elbow. Some people skip this step and just buy diverter kits. We couldn’t find a diverter kit with consistent reviews. Biggest complaint: They’re either flimsy, or they don’t collect much rain during light showers. We’re building for extreme droughts, which means a free-flowing gutter. We also skipped the first flush. My full illustrated guide talks about them, but we opted for something simpler. Many rain barrels come with screened holes, but you might want an extra layer of protection. You can buy barrel nets that fit over the entire top part of the barrel. They’re easy to put on. All the debris from the first gutter gush ends up on the net. You just pull it off and shake it. ### Get your barrels You can buy rain barrels from almost any hardware or big box store now. We decided to go with Epoch. They have a strong reputation. They use upcycled food barrels. Ours arrived clean, with all the parts already installed. We could’ve drilled out the holes ourselves, but it can be a real hassle if you’re also digging a foundation and working on other projects. These are tough barrels that will last a long time, and that’s the goal. They’ll take a beating. Remember, these things will be holding hundreds of pounds of water when they’re full. You can link the barrels at the top and bottom to ensure they fill at the same time. Just add hose splitters to the faucets. Get a short hose for the top link. You can cut it and then add a female hose repair to the other end. You technically only need one splitter, but two means you can draw water from either barrel. #### Add a more serious overflow Unfortunately, most preconfigured barrels come with tiny garden hose outlets for the overflow. They’re not going to handle a major storm or a flash flood if you’re using a free-flowing gutter. Companies assume most people will be using a diverter kit. If you’re using a full gutter, then you need a bigger overflow. We did the math and arrived at a 2-inch hose. Combined with our two-barrel system, it can handle up to 3 or even 3.5 inches of rain per hour. Believe it or not, even during a drought, you can expect flash floods. You don’t want floods spilling rain over your barrels and into the foundation you dug. It’s not easy to find a 2-inch heavy duty hose, but we finally got one from Gloxco with a male NPT nipple. It’ll fit right into a 2” bulkhead union. For that, we’re drilling a 3-inch hole on the backside, just the first barrel. Yes, you drill a 3-inch hole for a 2-inch bulkhead union. That’s how it works. Here’s a closeup shot of the hose splitters. Pretty standard. But if you want a heavy duty one that’s lead-free, try Morvat. #### The first filter setup Now we’re going to walk you through the trial-and-error process for getting the pump and filters set up. That way, you’ll understand it all better. (It’s called scaffolding.) The hardest part was coming up with a way to filter the roofwater. Most of the filtration systems we looked at were expensive and impractical on a budget. Then we got the idea to use a battery pump. It was a gamechanger. This portable battery pump gave us the pressure and gallons per minute (gpm) needed to push the water through inline hose filters you see in the image above. Just to be crystal clear, no, you can’t rely on gravity to push the water through these filters. You need a heavy-duty pump. Ideally, you need one with a battery you can take out and charge on a solar backup system. It’s a major plus. It makes the system much more resilient during power outages. * First, add a 60-mesh hose filter to the pump intake. This step keeps grit from the barrel water from ruining the pump. The phrase “60 mesh” means 60 openings per inch of screen. You can go as high as 400, but don’t. If the screen is too fine, it can choke pumps and deflect water. * Uxcell and Giex sell reliable brands of garden hose sediment filters. * Next, a Camco TastePure filter (20 micron) acts as a sacrificial first defense. It removes finer sediment. It also strips out some of the VOCs and heavy metals. Its main job is to protect the other filters. * The Envig Catalytic KDF55 uses a stronger type of carbon that strips out a lot more VOCs and heavy metals. * The Clear2O does a final sediment mop-up to catch anything that got through the first two filters, including any carbon particles. These filters don’t strip out any viruses or bacteria. They do prefiltering for our gravity-fed setup at the end. You can add a little bleach (about 1 ounce) to each full barrel to help knock out those threats early. Be careful. Bleach can interact with roof runoff to create toxic byproducts. You can also use HOCl. It’s safer, more effective, and it won’t ruin your clothes. The good news: All of these filters use garden hose thread. They come with garden hose attachments. So does the pump. You don’t have to fuss with adapters. _Simple_. #### The second filter setup We improved on the first filter setup in a few ways. First, we added a Sawyer Tap to the end. It’s a tight little .1 micron filter that also features a garden hose thread for easy attachment. The .1 micron filter blocks 99.99 percent of bacteria and other threats like Giardia and Cryptosporidium. It also stops microplastics and fiberglass dust that can shed from a shingle roof. One of the only things it doesn’t stop: viruses. (For that, we use a gravity system, discussed later.) Even better, this filter costs around $30 or $40, and it doesn’t need replacements. You can clean it by reversing the water flow. We also added a pressure release hose. The more filters you add, the more backpressure risk you add to your pump. That can strain the motor and cause damage. We bypassed this problem by adding another Morvat hose splitter on the pump outlet. Route one spigot into your filter lineup. Route the other back to your barrel. This way, your pump pushes as much water into the filters as they can handle. The excess goes back to your source. That’s especially important if you’re going to use submicron filters. Problem solved. #### The third setup Portable electric pumps offer convenience, but you might wind up in an emergency with no power, not even solar panels to charge a battery. That’s why we got a manual pump. It took a long time to find something capable of delivering the right pressure to push through 3-4 different inline filters, but we finally landed on the Bosworth Guzzler. There’s a model with a short handle for around a hundred bucks. It’s moderately hard to operate. We shelled out the extra money for the upgraded version with an extended handle, because… who knows? Maybe we’ll get injured. Maybe our kid will wind up needing to run the pump. The upgraded version makes operation way easier. If you order a Guzzler, you can choose garden hose threads for the native ports. With the manual pump, you have a lot more control over the pressure and flow. You’ll still probably want to add a 60-mesh sediment filter to the inlet. #### Add your collection tank The filter line feeds into a bucket. We got 2-gallon and 5-gallon foodsafe buckets from Leaktite. Some days, you’ll want to filter several gallons. Other days, you’ll just want something light. For the hoses, we went with Camco 4-ft premium RV drinking hoses. They’re foodsafe. You don’t want to run standard garden hoses into your pump or your bucket. They can reintroduce contaminants. On the filter end, if you need any adapters, look for ones made with lead-free brass or 304 steel. That way, you keep it all clean. If you want something bigger than a 2-gallon bucket, Epoch sells 17-gallon mini rain barrels. We got one. The plan: Fill it up once a week by running the pump. Use the filtered water for growing food. We can also collect drinking water from it during an emergency if we need to do that. #### The fourth & final setup If you’re setting up your filters and taking them down every few days, that can turn into a real chore. We learned that firsthand. You can avoid a lot of the headache by using a 3-stage RV filter frame with universal housings. Benefits: It’s a lot faster to set up and take down. You can replace the original filters with any 10 x 2.5 inch filters from any brand. That’s a good thing, because it means you can experiment a little with different filtration options. For example, we found something even better than the Sawyer Tap, which has a tendency to slide off under intense pressure. In the fourth setup, we’re using a .01 micron filter from Envig. That’s ultrafiltration, baby. It catches bacteria, cysts, parasites, and fine particles. It’s a powerful addon to KDF 55 carbon. Like the other components, these come with native garden hose threads (just to keep things simple). We got ours from iSpring, the CW31. We also got a carrying case from Clearsource, but it’s not completely necessary. The RV filter system is compact, but it’s just heavy enough (16 pounds dry) that you might want to think about a way to make lugging it around a little easier. Once we’re done with our inline filters, we’re probably moving to this streamlined setup to make everything more manageable. We tried it, and… We like it. #### **Quick tip: storing the filters** When you’re not using your filters, store them in a fridge to control bacterial growth. It’s best to use a separate mini fridge. It might sound like a hassle, but it’s worth it to protect the filters. #### The final stage: gravity filtration & HOCl The first set of filters removes heavy metals and VOCs, along with sediment. They don’t remove viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc. The Sawyer Tap .1 micron filter can’t get the viruses, even though it stops the rest. Even the Envig .01 micron filter doesn’t stop all viruses. So we needed a final stage. That’s where the gravity-fed systems come in. We spent a long time untangling all the claims and ad copy to find out which gravity filters actually do what they say. We looked at several different brands. Ultimately, we went with Alexapure. There was one last problem we had to deal with: Our filtered water kept triggering home bacteria tests. We finally figured out why. Basically, unchlorinated water will almost always trip a bacteria test. We didn’t want to just shrug it off. That’s what a hobbyist prepper would do. So, we added a HOCl treatment. If you’re not familiar, HOCl is a powerful disinfectant that your own body makes to fight pathogens. I’ve written about it before. It has an established reputation in food safety. Hypochlorous acid (HOCl) is a free chlorine that’s already used to treat water during emergencies. We scoured various state health departments and university pages to arrive at this: You can shock-treat water with HOCL at 100-200 ppm to ensure that you’re killing any viruses or bacteria that made it through the filtration process. So, we added 1/4 - 1/3 cup of HOCl (200 ppm) to every 1 gallon of water to kill any remaining viruses or bacteria. The lower dose (1/4 cup) takes us to roughly 3 ppm of free chlorine, considered safe for drinking. The higher dose (1/3 cup) takes us to roughly 4.08 ppm, just barely over the 4 ppm threshold. So if we stay within that range, we’ll maximize pathogen killing and stay in the safe zone. People have asked us which type of HOCl generator we use. We’ve been using the Eco One for about a year, with test strips. It works. You probably don’t want to add HOCl to your gravity-fed system, because it’s corrosive over time. So, we added a second container. We’re using a 2-gallon sports cooler. Just open your gravity spigot and pour it right in. We keep the cooler next to our Alexapure. We fill the cooler. Then we add the HOCl. ### The lab test results We sent a sample of our filtered rainwater to a lab for testing. We used Tap Score’s “advanced rainwater test,” which looks for more than 100 different toxins including heavy metals, VOCs, and bacteria. And drumroll… It’s clean. No VOCs. No heavy metals. No bacteria. Everything falls right in line with the EPA’s federal MCLG (maximum contaminant level goal). It’s a strict, unenforceable guideline that many municipalities strive for. So, our water might even be cleaner than what comes out of many taps. Take a look: ### Our conclusion: This plan works. We like it. We’re not going to drink this water every day, but we have a system ready to deploy for longterm disasters. The entire setup costs about $1,000. Once you’ve set it up, you’ll spend a few hundred bucks a year to replace all the filters if you’re using them continuously. You could save money if you only use them for emergencies. If you’re only using them for emergencies, you have to follow the instructions that come with the filters for safely storing them. All told, it’s a fraction of what a full system would cost if you installed a metal roof and hired professionals. If we wanted to install a metal roof with a cistern and a pro filtration system, connected to our plumbing, that would easily run $30,000 - $50,000 to get the whole thing in place. One can dream… But that’s the whole point. We don’t have time to daydream about our perfect survival setup. We can’t just sit in envy of Australians, where they’ve normalized rain collection. We have to do the best we can where we are. If you can’t afford this on a single budget, consider crowdsourcing it. A small group could share pumps and filters. I’ve done my best to list all the specific parts and brands we used for the project. I’ve started keeping detailed lists of parts and supplies for all of our survival projects on this site. All of this information is free. I’m not doing this for commissions. We don’t use affiliate links. We’re not making any money off the sales. People have just asked for me to be as specific as possible, and I’m honoring that. Do whatever you want with it. It would be great if we could start normalizing rain harvesting. Maybe one day, we’ll be more like Australia. This is where it starts. Wells can run dry. Reservoirs take a long time to recharge. After fifteen minutes of rain, we have 100+ gallons of water. We’ve had water during one of the worst droughts in our community’s history. It sounds like a lot of work, and it sounds expensive. Well, it’s all relative, and it all depends on how badly you want to live. If you don’t want to do any of this, feel free to place your faith in the hands of the billionaire ventriloquists at Davos. Celebrate the “year of water.” I’m sure they’ve got your back. We decided to try something else. It worked. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. 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It’s a real buzzkill to watch all these prepper videos on YouTube show you how to build a rain harvesting system, only to realize that you can’t do it. Why? The rainwater from your shingle roof contains an ungodly amount of deadly toxins and poisons. Or maybe it doesn’t. But it probably does. We kept getting different answers. We emailed some rain harvesting specialists a few years ago and asked them if there was any way to do it. They said, “Don’t bother…” That felt conclusive. Like I said, a real buzzkill… And then there’s all the survival and homesteading guides that _kinda_ tell you how to build a rain harvesting system, but not really… My family brainstormed, but we kept running into walls. Then finally, we started piecing together a plan. After all, we’re not interested in drinking rainwater every day. We don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cisterns, pumps, and special plumbing. We don’t want to ditch the grid just yet. We just want a simple backup water source for emergencies, and now would be the time. If you’ve been going through the same frustrations, hitting the same dead ends, then maybe this post will help. We’re laying out the plan in maximum detail. We barely got any rain last week, and our barrels have already filled up. 100 gallons. Since our first update, we got our lab results back from Tap Score. They analyzed the water for 100+ contaminants common in roofwater. It’s clean, with one exception, and we already found a solution. If you just want the results, then scroll down to the last section. Otherwise, start here. Let’s get into it: First, dig out your foundation. Add paver base and paver sand. This step helps you level the ground and provide a good substructure for your barrels. You want to dig below the topsoil and into the harder clay. If it’s too hard, soak the area with a hose and leave it for 24 hours. You can also use a pickaxe, but don’t swing it overhead like they do in the movies. Use it more like a hoe. Letting a 5 lb mattock drop into the ground will help break it up. Use a level to get the bare dirt as even as possible, but know that the paver base helps the most. Tamp it down. We used 24 x 16 inch pavers for the base. They’re heavy as hell (50 lbs), but they’re worth it to create a large, even footprint. Lay cinderblocks on top. Two cinderblocks with one turned perpendicular match the paver size. The cinderblocks give you the clearance for hooking up hoses, filling up buckets, etc. You’ll put another layer of pavers on top for a smooth surface. Remove the bottom section of gutter. You’ll probably have to unscrew downspout straps. You might be able to simply reconfigure your gutter pieces like the image shown above. We placed our barrels 2 feet away from the house to help protect the foundation. We wound up using a hacksaw on a downspout to get the right length. It can be frustrating to cut gutter, but it works. We tried aviation snips, but a hacksaw provided the cleanest cut. If you don’t want to mess with cutting gutter, you can buy precut lengths from places like Gutterworks. Make sure to measure the gutter heights. You want a few inches of space between the barrel and the gutter exit. Remember that your gutter will be heading down at a 75-degree angle. Don’t use a 90-degree elbow. Water will pool… Some people skip this step and just buy diverter kits. We couldn’t find a diverter kit with consistent reviews. Biggest complaint: They’re either flimsy, or they don’t collect much rain during light showers. We’re building for extreme droughts, which means a free-flowing gutter. We also skipped the first flush. My full illustrated guide talks about them, but we opted for something simpler. You can buy barrel nets that fit over the entire top part of the barrel. They’re easy to put on. All the debris from the first gutter gush ends up on the net. You just pull it off and shake it. Your barrels will also have a mesh screen over the top entry hole. It’s two layers of protection. You can buy rain barrels from almost any hardware or big box store now. We decided to go with Epoch. They have a strong reputation. They use upcycled food barrels. Ours arrived clean, with all the parts already installed. We could’ve drilled out the holes ourselves, but it can be a real hassle if you’re also digging a foundation and working on other projects. These are tough barrels that will last a long time, and that’s the goal. They’ll take a beating. Remember, these things will be holding hundreds of pounds of water when they’re full. You can link the barrels at the top and bottom to ensure they fill at the same time. Just add hose splitters to the faucets. Get a short hose for the top link. You can cut it and then add a female hose repair to the other end. You technically only need one splitter, but two means you can draw water from either barrel. The second barrel is probably going to have the cleaner water. Unfortunately, most preconfigured barrels come with tiny garden hose outlets for the overflow. They’re not going to handle a major storm or a flash flood if you’re using a free-flowing gutter. Companies assume most people will be using a diverter kit. If you’re using a full gutter, then you need a bigger overflow. We did the math and arrived at a 2-inch hose. Combined with our two-barrel system, it can handle up to 3 or even 3.5 inches of rain per hour. Believe it or not, even during a drought, you can expect some pretty intense surges. That’s part of the problem. The rain comes in short bursts and flash floods. It’s not steady. You don’t want a flood to send water gushing over the top of your barrels. It’ll soak your foundation and ruin all that hard work. It’s not easy to find a 2-inch heavy-duty hose, but we finally got one from Gloxco with a male NPT nipple. It’ll fit right into a 2” bulkhead union. For that, we’re drilling a 3-inch hole on the backside, just the first barrel. A closeup of the hose splitters. Pretty standard. But if you want a heavy-duty one that’s lead-free, try Morvat. The hardest part was coming up with a way to filter the roofwater. Most pump systems we looked at were expensive and impractical on a budget. Then we got the idea to use a battery pump. It would give us the pressure and gpm needed to push the water through inline hose filters. While a battery pump will ultimately overheat and die if you run it like this for hours, we’re not doing that. We’re running the pump long enough to fill up a bucket for emergency drinking water. Or we’re running it long enough to feed our plants with a soaker hose. That’s 10-15 minutes max. The filter setup looks complicated, but it’s not that bad. * First, add a 60-mesh hose filter to the pump intake. This step keeps grit from the barrel water from ruining the pump. The phrase “60 mesh” means 60 openings per inch of screen. You can go as high as 400, but don’t. If the screen is too fine, it can choke pumps and deflect water. * Next, a Camco tastepure filter (20 micron) acts as a sacrificial first defense. It removes finer sediment. It also strips out some of the VOCs and heavy metals. Its main job is to protect the other filters. * The Envig Catalytic KDF55 uses a stronger type of carbon that strips out a lot more VOCs and heavy metals. * The Clear2O does a final sediment mop-up to catch anything that got through the first two filters, including any carbon particles. These filters don’t strip out any viruses or bacteria. They do prefiltering for our gravity-fed setup at the end. You can add a little bleach (about 1 ounce) to each full barrel to help knock out those threats early. Be careful. Bleach can interact with roof runoff to create toxic byproducts. You can also use HOCl. It’s safer, more effective, and it won’t ruin your clothes. The good news: All of these filters use garden hose thread. They come with garden hose attachments. So does the pump. You don’t have to fuss with adapters. _Simple_. You can go the extra mile in your prefilter setup by adding a Sawyer Tap. It’s a tight little .1 micron filter that also features a garden hose thread for easy attachment. The .1 micron filter blocks 99.99 percent of bacteria and other threats like Giardia and Cryptosporidium. It also stops microplastics and fiberglass dust that can shed from a shingle roof. One of the only things it doesn’t stop: viruses. (For that, we use the gravity system.) Even better, this filter costs around $30 or $40, and it doesn’t need replacements. You can clean it by reversing the water flow. Adding this element brings our system into peak performance. The gravity-fed system gets nice, clean water to do a final round of purification. One last thing: The more filters you add, the more backpressure risk you add to your pump. That can strain the motor and cause damage. Bypass this problem by adding another hose splitter on the pump outlet. Route one spigot into your filter lineup. Route the other back to your barrel. That way, your pump pushes as much water into the filters as they can handle. The excess goes back to your source. That’s especially important if you’re going to use submicron filters. Problem solved. Battery pumps offer convenience, but you might wind up in an emergency with no power _and_ no water. That’s why we got a manual pump. It took a long time to find something capable of delivering the right pressure to push through 3-4 different inline filters, but we finally landed on the Bosworth Guzzler. There’s a model with a short handle for around a hundred bucks. It’s moderately hard to operate. We shelled out the extra money for the upgraded version with an extended handle, because… who knows? Maybe we’ll get injured. Maybe our kid will wind up needing to run the pump. The upgraded version makes operation way easier. If you order a Guzzler, you can choose garden hose threads for the native ports. With the manual pump, you have a lot more control over the pressure and flow. You’ll still probably want to add a 60-mesh sediment filter to the inlet. The filter line feeds into a bucket. We got 2-gallon and 5-gallon foodsafe buckets. Some days, you’ll want to filter several gallons. Other days, you’ll just want something light. For the hoses, we went with Camco 4-ft premium RV drinking hoses. They’re foodsafe. You don’t want to run standard garden hoses into your pump or your bucket. They can reintroduce contaminants. On the filter end, if you need any adapters, look for ones made with lead-free brass or 304 steel. That way, you keep it all clean. The inline filters remove heavy metals and VOCs, along with sediment. They don’t remove viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc. Even the Sawyer Tap .1 micron filter can’t get the viruses, even though it stops the rest. That’s where the gravity-fed systems come in. We spent a long time untangling all the claims and ad copy to find out which gravity filters actually do what they say. Ultimately, we went with Alexapure. Since our first update, we added yet another stage here: HOCl treatment. We added 1/3 cup of HOCL (100-200 ppm) to every 1 gallon of water to kill any remaining viruses or bacteria. You probably don’t want to add HOCl to your gravity-fed system, because it’s corrosive over time. So, add a second container. We’re using a 2-gallon sports cooler. Just open your spigot and pour it right in. Then add the HOCl. ### The Lab Test Results We sent a sample of our filtered rainwater to a lab for testing. We used Tap Score’s “advanced rainwater test,” which looks for more than 100 different toxins including heavy metals, VOCs, and bacteria. And… Our sample looks clear across the board, with one exception. Although the lab found no E. coli, they did detect bacteria. We figured out why. Unchlorinated water will almost always trip a bacteria test. Going forward, we’re going to use HOCl (a chlorine-based compound) as a final treatment in the water. If you’re not familiar, it’s an extremely effective germ killer that’s safer than bleach. (But you can still use bleach…) HOCl isn’t great for carbon block filters, so we emptied the water into a final container, a regular 2-gallon sports cooler, and that’s where we added the HOCl, at roughly 2/3 cup with a 200 ppm solution. You add the HOCl. You stir. You wait about 30 minutes. You test with strips. If you’ve still got 3-10 ppm HOCl in your water, then it should be safe to drink. Virtually all viruses and bacteria are dead, and the remaining HOCl will protect your water for at least a day or two. We’re sending another sample to the lab. We’ll see how things go. You can see the first round of results below. It’s some pretty clean water: ### Our conclusion: This setup works. We probably won’t be drinking rainwater every day, and definitely not until we get the final results back from the second sample, but we feel good about using it during an emergency. The entire setup costs about $1,000. It’s a fraction of what a full system would cost if you installed a metal roof and hired professionals. You can knock that price down even further if you don’t mind buying cheaper barrels and installing your own faucets. The biggest cost lies in the pumps. You could probably install something like this system for $600 if you went with an ordinary pump. You’d just need to find a way to power it for off-grid use. That’d be doable. The battery-powered pumps offer convenience and portability, but they’re not essential. A basic cost breakdown: Used DIY foodgrade barrels: $100 Construction materials: $100 DIY gravity filter bucket: $200 Filters: $150 Pump: $50 If you can't afford this on a single budget, consider crowdsourcing it. A small group could share pumps and filters. Wells can run dry. Reservoirs take a long time to recharge. After fifteen minutes of rain, we had dozens of gallons of water. We made it safe to drink. Mission accomplished? * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Let's start with some good news. For months, we've been working on ways to harvest water during emergencies. Water matters more than anything. You can't last more than a few days without it, and you certainly can't grow food. This project has gone through several phases. In the first stage, we debunked dew harvesting as a viable way to survive. We tried Warka towers. They don't work in most areas. Next, we tried a passive dew harvesting system with several different kinds of plastic. They worked, but scaling them up would mean covering half a yard in panels with a metal framework to protect them from the wind. We're talking anywhere from 500-800 square feet (50-75 square meters) of panels just to collect a couple of gallons. It would cost at least a thousand bucks. The solution just doesn't scale. But something did finally work. This: We spent weeks on a DIY water generator. If you know, water generators have become popular over the last few years. Several companies sell them now. The problem? They cost $2,000 or more. They often come with proprietary parts, meaning they're hard to replace. The filter kits also cost a lot. It's the safest route, but it's also expensive and exclusive. Meanwhile, you can find dozens of videos on YouTube that show you how to make a water generator with a dehumidifier. They use the same basic technology. Of course, they're not designed to produce potable water. So you have to get creative. Filtering dehumidifier water poses a major challenge. It takes a long time to produce enough to fill a gravity-fed water system like Alexapure or Boroux. These gravity-fed purifiers need "head pressure" to operate well, meaning it's best to submerge them. You need at least 2-3 gallons to do that. A lot of YouTube videos recommend large containers for DIY water generators. In the real world, that means running a dehumidifier for hours on end. That translates into a lot of electricity. Dehumidifiers produce grey water. Even companies like Alexapure and Boroux don't recommend drinking it. The water can clog or degrade expensive carbon block filters. It's just not very practical. We found a better way. First: We got a brand new 50-pint GE dehumidifier for about $300. On paper, that means it produces 50 pints over 24 hours of operation. That's roughly six gallons (23 liters). On a good night, with the window open, and 50-60 percent humidity, it can produce about 2-3 gallons of water over 12 hours. On average, you can expect one gallon every six hours. That will help keep a small family alive. So, we had to find an effective way to filter one gallon of water with a gravity system without overwhelming the carbon filters. We shrank the containers. We bought a bunch of different-sized containers and experimented with them, using the setup in our diagram. We made a triple stack. The top container holds a suction line filter with 100 mesh. That filters out a lot of sediment and gunk that would otherwise clog a carbon block filter. The middle container holds the carbon block filter that strips out heavy metals, VOCs, and microbes. The bottom container holds your clean water. First, we moved down to 2-gallon Cambro containers. Then we finally settled on Rubbermaid 1.1 gallon "Flex & Seal" containers. They have just enough room to hold the suction line filter and the carbon blocks. They're small enough that you can fill them up to generate the necessary head pressure. So even if you only have one gallon of water, it works. The real question: Is the water safe? Nobody will ever tell you it's "safe" to drink water from a dehumidifier, but we're talking about an emergency situation with no access to water at all. If you have any way to run a dehumidifier, like an emergency solar array, then it gives you a lifeline. With that in mind, we sent our dehumidifier water to Tap Score to analyze for heavy metals and other contaminants. It's pretty clean. There was no detectable lead or other heavy metals, other than a trace amount of manganese. "No evaluation possible" means that nothing was detected for that analyte. They found fluoride in our sample, which is baffling, but we did wash the containers. They might've held on to the fluoride. For this test, we used one Alexapure filter. Our choice ultimately came down to Alexapure and Berkey/Boroux. They're the only two brands that have ever claimed their filters can remove viruses and bacteria. Here are the results: So, here's the verdict: We're confident that we can use this DIY setup as a last resort. That said, the quality of your water will depend on the quality of the air. Your air can absorb VOCs and other toxins and those can wind up in your dehumidifier water, even if the unit itself isn't leaching metals. If you're going to do this: Buy a dedicated dehumidifier that you only use for water emergencies. Keep it clean. Run an air purifier next to it to help with the air quality. If you can, try to run the dehumidifier in the evening with an open window to take advantage of maximum humidity. Understand that you're taking on a risk, but it's less of a risk than dying of thirst. Now for the even better news: We've finished our rain barrel setup. We made a filter train that cleans the water down to .1 microns. We sent the water off to a lab for testing. We've also used Varify for home testing and the results look good. We're perfecting the setup, finding ways to store the filters safely between uses, and also finding ways to knock down the cost, and we'll have more updates on that soon. Earlier this summer, we developed a cheap composting toilet that you can set up and take down as needed, without spending thousands of dollars. Now we're working on a way to hot compost your toilet material in the safest way, even out in the suburbs with neighbors who won't tolerate open piles of poop in your yard. We've found sanitary, sealable containers for the job. More updates on that soon... We're going to update the survival guide with all of this information in the fall. We're also going to launch a page on this site that lists out all the detailed parts and vendors we're using for supplies. Finding this stuff has been half the challenge. So, it'll make your job easier. We're also going to make playlists of YouTube videos with vetted content. That way, you won't have to sift through a dozen viral "dew harvesting" clickbait traps to find information. All of this takes an immense amount of time and work. We're trying to design affordable setups. We get there by trial and error. Supplies and tests cost a lot. So if you can throw us some support, that would be nice. We have a couple of very generous backers, but we need a large base to keep this work going. It's easy to churn out content that simply feeds the hamster wheels of outrage and despair. We're trying to rise above that and produce practical, grounded takes that can actually help everyone get through this era. I'm not going to lie to you and make promises about taking on billionaire fascists that I can't keep. I'm not offering moonshot crusades. I'm not predicting famines that might or might not happen in the next 60 days. I'm testing our specific, concrete ideas that could actually save someone during a crisis. We all talk about building communities, units of survival, and enclaves of resilience. I'm trying to make the blueprint for that. If you find this content valuable, please help sustain it. If you've been doing that, then... thank you. I hope we can keep earning your support. Thank you, Jessica * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Everyone seems to have forgotten the urgent predictions from earlier this summer about empty shelves, fuel shortages, and famines. They were supposed to happen in early July. We’re still waiting. They’re running late. I don’t know what everyone else did to get ready. My family spent the last few months growing vegetables, installing rain barrels, building composting toilets, and testing water generators. I finished a course on electrical wiring so I can actually _do_ stuff. Back in May, the internet was filled with dudes telling Americans how screwed they were. They weren’t talking years. They were talking weeks. 60 Days… These viral podcast interviews and clickbait articles were generating millions of views. They spawned endless discussion threads full of anxious Americans who had no idea what to do other than fill their pantries with canned tuna and “start a garden.” What specific advice did the doomsday bros offer? Abandon your financial responsibilities. Quit paying your mortgage. Devote every last penny to prepping. Sit down on the kitchen floor and melt into a blob of despair. And so on… In an interesting plot twist, many women (including myself) tried to offer a different message. After years of trying to sound alarms, suddenly we were the calm mongers. Once again, nobody wanted to listen. Suddenly, it was cool to overreact. What did _we_ say? We pushed back on the fear. Because this time, the fear was unwarranted. The advice was reckless. Yeah, things were going to get bad. They were _always_ going to get bad—for reasons far wider and far deeper than any single war or any fascist regime. But you can’t put a date on collapse. Sixty days? A hundred days? A thousand days? Nobody really knows. That’s the whole point of developing more sustainable systems, so that you don’t freak out when “it” finally hits your personal fan. If anything, that’s been my central message for nearly half a decade now. You don’t prepare because you know when it’s going to happen. You prepare because you _don’t_. We advised everyone to consult history and science. We advised them to come up with a systematic plan to address their anxieties. We told them the fears of shortages and famines would subside, but the need to develop sustainable and resilient ways of living would persist. That’s the underlying reality. Above all, we advised everyone to keep paying their rent and mortgage. We said they would have to keep going to their jobs, even as they planned for doomsday. We told them that the financial system wouldn’t collapse overnight. The data centers that calculate their debts would remain intact. The strangest thing happened: Those who’d spent years telling “doomers” like us to calm down suddenly took the opposite stance. They lectured us on the gravity of the situation. They presumed to explain prepping to us. They bashed us for not taking the problem seriously. They questioned our expertise and credentials. A handful of men said it was time to overreact, it was time to put your life on hold because disaster was imminent… Everyone stopped and listened. Readers left condescending essays in the comments on my posts, or they sent me nasty emails explaining why they were pulling their support. They called me irresponsible. They accused me of misleading the public. It’s been eight weeks, 60 days. In fact, it’s been longer. There’s no famine. We’re still looking at very rough crop reports, compounded by droughts and supply chain problems. And yet… You still have to pay your bills. You still have to show up to work. School is still starting back in August. We probably _will_ experience shortages and higher prices, but what’s new? That’s the story of the 2020s. People respond, defending the doomsday bros. “Things are still getting worse,” they say. No kidding. They’ve been getting worse for a long time, and they’ll continue to get worse. Maybe they just weren’t paying attention until someone with the appropriate status managed to say something that soaked through. Meanwhile, I wonder how many people took practical steps to prepare for an actual disaster. I wonder how many of them built the communities they called for. I wonder how many of them gave up when they learned how hard it is to engage in “prepping” while meeting all of your other responsibilities, because those don’t simply go away because there’s no food. While the rest of the world was busy trying to prove their predictions, some of us just got to work. This is how I’ve spent my time. For so many people, doomsday predictions are simply a fantasy. They’re an excuse to abandon their obligations. They give us all permission to envision a different world, to dream about escaping the systems we’re trapped in, because the systems are certainly killing us. There’s no question about that. But you don’t need a super drought to install rain barrels. You don’t have to live in fear of starvation to start a garden. You don’t need to have panic attacks over Ebola to start wearing an N95 again. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make, and that’s the point so many people don’t want to hear. This is the crucial flaw we have to overcome. You can’t just “prep” when you think you’re going to die. You have to do it all the time. You have to stop thinking of it as prepping and see it as a necessary way of life. You have to nurture the communities even when you think you don’t need them. And yet… It’s easy to sit around and guess when we’re going to have shortages or famines. It’s easy to watch YouTube videos and think you know how to harvest dew with twenty dollars of supplies. It’s easy to run around the internet telling everyone how to build community or quit their jobs and start a commune on a farm. But that’s not how life works. That’s a fairy tale. That’s how you die. That’s how you end up in a cage match at a box store over the last case of bottled water. If this is what it means to be a doomer, to sit around on your phone or a laptop constantly predicting bad shit and doing nothing at all to get ready for it, then I’m not a doomer. I never was. It was just an insult launched at me, a term that I reappropriated for a while. But that’s not me. It’s not you. From the very first days of the pandemic, we took action. We helped people. We tried to inform them, and that’s how we wound up with the label. The ones who actually manage farms and homesteads will tell you. The real deal? It’s difficult. It’s a commitment. It’s not something you pick up after a viral article and then put down when the doomsday predictions fade. And if you live in the suburbs… It’s even harder. Guess what? Hundreds of millions of Americans aren’t going to survive by moving to the country. They’re not going to adopt the lives of their supposed homesteading forefathers. The math doesn’t add up. It’s not sustainable. Millions of us are going to survive by staying exactly where we are. We’re going to survive by adapting. We’re going to survive by transforming our suburban hellscapes into enclaves instead of trying to escape them. We’re going to survive by building loose networks with people we might not like very much, instead of fantasizing about utopian communities where everyone agrees with each other and sees the world the same way. We’re going to survive by learning to harvest rain from our shitty asphalt shingle roofs and learning how to filter it. We’re going to survive by learning how to rejuvenate our back yards full of hard clay. We’re going to survive by repurposing tools. We’re going to survive by scavenging and dumpster diving. As for this summer, my family has done a lot. We grew our garden. We reorganized our garage from top to bottom as a survival nook. We installed our rain barrels. We made our composting toilets. We came up with ways to do all this without running afoul of our neighbors and their manicured lawns. We did it while the rest of the internet was freaking out over tank bottoms. We built our water filtration systems. We tested them. No lead. No iron. No mercury. Safe levels across the board. For the next week, we slow down a little. We wait for final lab results on our water harvesting systems. (I’ll post them as soon as they’re ready.) We polish our plans. We get ready to do a major update on the survival guide, which already runs 200 pages. We live. This is how you survive. You plan. You execute. You live. You don’t wait for another viral article warning you about a disaster. You don’t sit around trying to put a date on collapse, because that date will almost always be wrong. You learn to accept the uncertainty of a chaotic future, and you manage it. It’s the way now. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

It’s a real buzzkill to watch all these prepper videos on YouTube show you how to build a rain harvesting system, only to realize that you can’t do it. Why? The rainwater from your shingle roof contains an ungodly amount of deadly toxins and poisons. Or maybe it doesn’t. But it probably does. We kept getting different answers. We emailed some rain harvesting specialists a few years ago and asked them if there was any way to do it. They said, “Don’t bother…” That felt conclusive. Like I said, a real buzzkill… And then there’s all the survival and homesteading guides that _kinda_ tell you how to build a rain harvesting system, but not really… My family brainstormed, but we kept running into walls. Then finally, we started piecing together a plan. After all, we’re not interested in drinking rainwater every day. We don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cisterns, pumps, and special plumbing. We don’t want to ditch the grid just yet. We just want a simple backup water source for emergencies, and now would be the time. If you’ve been going through the same frustrations, hitting the same dead ends, then maybe this post will help. We’re laying out the plan in maximum detail. We barely got any rain last week, and our barrels have already filled up. 100 gallons. We’re getting ready to send a sample off to a lab for a full test. (I’ll post the results here.) Meanwhile, let’s get into it: First, dig out your foundation. Add paver base and paver sand. This step helps you level the ground and provide a good substructure for your barrels. You want to dig below the topsoil and into the harder clay. If it’s too hard, soak the area with a hose and leave it for 24 hours. You can also use a pickaxe, but don’t swing it overhead like they do in the movies. Use it more like a hoe. Letting a 5 lb mattock drop into the ground will help break it up. Use a level to get the bare dirt as even as possible, but know that the paver base helps the most. Tamp it down. We used 24 x 16 inch pavers for the base. They’re heavy as hell (50 lbs), but they’re worth it to create a large, even footprint. Lay cinderblocks on top. Two cinderblocks with one turned perpendicular match the paver size. The cinderblocks give you the clearance for hooking up hoses, filling up buckets, etc. You’ll put another layer of pavers on top for a smooth surface. Remove the bottom section of gutter. You’ll probably have to unscrew downspout straps. You might be able to simply reconfigure your gutter pieces like the image shown above. We placed our barrels 2 feet away from the house to help protect the foundation. We wound up using a hacksaw on a downspout to get the right length. It can be frustrating to cut gutter, but it works. We tried aviation snips, but a hacksaw provided the cleanest cut. If you don’t want to mess with cutting gutter, you can buy precut lengths from places like Gutterworks. Make sure to measure the gutter heights. You want a few inches of space between the barrel and the gutter exit. Remember that your gutter will be heading down at a 75-degree angle. Don’t use a 90-degree elbow. Water will pool… Some people skip this step and just buy diverter kits. We couldn’t find a diverter kit with consistent reviews. Biggest complaint: They’re either flimsy, or they don’t collect much rain during light showers. We’re building for extreme droughts, which means a free-flowing gutter. We also skipped the first flush. My full illustrated guide talks about them, but we opted for something simpler. You can buy barrel nets that fit over the entire top part of the barrel. They’re easy to put on. All the debris from the first gutter gush ends up on the net. You just pull it off and shake it. Your barrels will also have a mesh screen over the top entry hole. It’s two layers of protection. You can buy rain barrels from almost any hardware or big box store now. We decided to go with Epoch. They have a strong reputation. They use upcycled food barrels. Ours arrived clean, with all the parts already installed. We could’ve drilled out the holes ourselves, but it can be a real hassle if you’re also digging a foundation and working on other projects. These are tough barrels that will last a long time, and that’s the goal. They’ll take a beating. Remember, these things will be holding hundreds of pounds of water when they’re full. You can link the barrels at the top and bottom to ensure they fill at the same time. Just add hose splitters to the faucets. Get a short hose for the top link. You can cut it and then add a female hose repair to the other end. You technically only need one splitter, but two means you can draw water from either barrel. The second barrel is probably going to have the cleaner water. Unfortunately, most preconfigured barrels come with tiny garden hose outlets for the overflow. They’re not going to handle a major storm or a flash flood if you’re using a free-flowing gutter. Companies assume most people will be using a diverter kit. If you’re using a full gutter, then you need a bigger overflow. We did the math and arrived at a 2-inch hose. Combined with our two-barrel system, it can handle up to 3 or even 3.5 inches of rain per hour. Believe it or not, even during a drought, you can expect some pretty intense surges. That’s part of the problem. The rain comes in short bursts and flash floods. It’s not steady. You don’t want a flood to send water gushing over the top of your barrels. It’ll soak your foundation and ruin all that hard work. It’s not easy to find a 2-inch heavy duty hose, but we finally got one from Gloxco with a male NPT nipple. It’ll fit right into a 2” bulkhead union. For that, we’re drilling a 3-inch hole on the backside, just the first barrel. A closeup of the hose splitters. Pretty standard. But if you want a heavy duty one that’s lead-free, try Morvat. The hardest part was coming up with a way to filter the roofwater. Most pump systems we looked at were expensive and impractical on a budget. Then we got the idea to use a battery pump. It would give us the pressure and gpm needed to push the water through inline hose filters. While a battery pump will ultimately overheat and die if you run it like this for hours, we’re not doing that. We’re running the pump long enough to fill up a bucket for emergency drinking water. Or we’re running it long enough to feed our plants with a soaker hose. That’s 10-15 minutes max. The filter setup looks complicated, but it’s not that bad. * First, add a 60-mesh hose filter to the pump intake. This step keeps grit from the barrel water from ruining the pump. The phrase “60 mesh” means 60 openings per inch of screen. You can go as high as 400, but don’t. If the screen is too fine, it can choke pumps and deflect water. * Next, a Camco tastepure filter (20 micron) acts as a sacrificial first defense. It removes finer sediment. It also strips out some of the VOCs and heavy metals. Its main job is to protect the other filters. * The Envig Catalytic KDF55 uses a stronger type of carbon that strips out a lot more VOCs and heavy metals. * The Clear2O does a final sediment mop-up to catch anything that got through the first two filters, including any carbon particles. These filters don’t strip out any viruses or bacteria. They do prefiltering for our gravity-fed setup at the end. You can add a little beach (about 1 ounce) to each full barrel to help knock out those threats early. Be careful. Bleach can interact with roof runoff to create toxic byproducts. That’s another reason why you have to do so much prefiltering. The good news: All of these filters use garden hose thread. They come with garden hose attachments. So does the pump. You don’t have to fuss with adapters. _Simple_. Battery pumps offer convenience, but you might wind up in an emergency with no power _and_ no water. That’s why we got a manual pump. It took a long time to find something capable of delivering the right pressure to push through three different inline filters, but we finally landed on the Bosworth Guzzler. There’s a model with a short handle for around a hundred bucks. It’s moderately hard to operate. We shelled out the extra money for the upgraded version with an extended handle, because… who knows? Maybe we’ll get injured. Maybe our kid will wind up needing to run the pump. The upgraded version makes operation way easier. The filter line feeds into a bucket. We got 2-gallon and 5-gallon foodsafe buckets. Some days, you’ll want to filter several gallons. Other days, you’ll just want something light. For the hoses, we went with Camco 4-ft premium RV drinking hoses. They’re foodsafe. You don’t want to run standard garden hoses into your pump or your bucket. They can reintroduce contaminants. On the filter end, if you need any adapters, look for ones made with lead-free brass or 304 steel. That way, you keep it all clean. The inline filters remove heavy metals and VOCs, along with sediment. They don’t remove viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc. That’s where the gravity-fed systems come in. We spent a long time untangling all the claims and ad copy to find out which gravity filters actually do what they say. Our conclusion: Alexapure does the most. Their filters will strip out any remaining VOCs and heavy metals. They’ll also strip out viruses, bacteria, parasites, you name it. But you have to read the fine print. While the filter technically works for thousands of gallons, they only filter the really dangerous stuff up to 200 gallons. Berkey/Boroux once promised a similar level of protection, but they ran into trouble with the EPA and had to remove their claims about viruses and bacteria. British Berkefeld (Doulton) has the best certifications from NSF/ANSI for safe materials that remove lead and other heavy metals. Unfortunately, they don’t promise anything when it comes to viruses or bacteria. You can find other gravity-fed systems, but all of them come with tradeoffs. That’s why we decided to go with Alexapure for our trial. We’re going to run this whole system, and then send the water off to a lab for testing. It’s going to tell us just how much we can trust our setup. The entire setup costs about $1,000. That probably sounds like a fortune. I guess it is. But it’s a fraction of what a full system would cost. Wells can run dry. Reservoirs take a long time to recharge. After fifteen minutes of rain, we had dozens of gallons of water. We’re going to look at the results and then decide on the next steps. We might have to make some tweaks to the system, but we think it’s going to work. If it does, those of us cursed with shingle roofs might finally be able to make rain catchment work for us out here in the suburbs. In a week or so, we’ll know for sure. Let me know your thoughts… * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Our drought has officially reached emergency status. Soon, we’ll be seeing mandatory water restrictions. Meanwhile, toxic wildfire smoke from Canada shrouds the horizon. Our air quality index drifts toward “hazardous.” A birthday party moves indoors. A hiking trip is postponed (let’s be honest, canceled). My social media is an endless stream of fire and ash. All this while the president airs conspiracy theories and openly plots to take over this fall’s elections. And tech companies plan hyperscale data centers in our backyard, with the intention of piping out all of our available drinking water. Otherwise, it’s been a nice week. I feel fine. Needless to say, we spent the last few days finalizing our rain harvesting plan. We installed two barrels. For those of you following my natural disaster plans, we built a filtration rig that uses: 60 Mesh Sediment Pump Prefilter; Camco TastePure inline filter; Envig Catalytic Carbon KDF inline filter; Aqua Crest 5 micron Hose Water filter From there, we’ll filter the water one last time through an Alexapure rig. We might add several drops of bleach. All of these filters use garden hose thread. We’re using foodsafe hoses from Camco. Finally, we’re using a Milwaukee M18 battery-powered pump to push the water through the filters into a collection bucket (then it goes into the Alexapure). As a backup, we finally found a good manual pump that generates enough forward pressure for the filters: The Bosworth Guzzler GH-0400N-5 with an extended handle. One day, my daughter will use it. Next week, we’ll send that filtered rainwater off for testing to make sure our system works well enough. Then we’ll be done. For a while… We have our N95 masks. We have our half-face respirators with 3M P100 filters (60926) for organic and acid vapors if the air turns hazardous. We’ve been dealing with these threats for years now. This is the way. Sometimes, people ask: > _How long do you plan to survive?_ This question comes from the newly initiated. They ask me if there’s any point in going through all this trouble, in doing all this research, in testing all these strategies, in developing all these systems. > _Are they actually going to work? > > What if they don’t?_ The answer has wafted around in the back of my head. Now it’s finally on my tongue and in my fingers. Do I think these plans will protect my family forever? How long am I planning to survive? I have a response: > _20 years._ That’s how long our equipment will last. It might last even longer if we take good care of it, but 20 years feels like a nice, solid number. Beyond that, all bets are off. By then, we’ll be living in a different world, one more like the futures that actuaries and dystopian novelists warn us about. That’s when the threats will probably, finally, begin to outpace our ingenuity. It might happen sooner, but so far we’re keeping up. It’s not easy. Digging the foundation for the rain barrels took days. It took another day to lay the cinder blocks and pavers. It took days to research the filters and pumps we would need. A lot of people either can’t or don’t want to do it. I can’t worry about that, not anymore. All I can do is figure out what works, and try my best. > _What happens if someone steals your barrels?_ Then we’ll get new ones. The barrels aren’t the point. The point is knowing how to use them. The point is knowing how to filter the water. > _What if a fire burns down your house?_ Then we’ll bug out. We’ll take what we can. We’ll start over. > _What if it gets so bad that your neighbors turn on you?_ I don’t know. We’ll figure that part out. I’m not going to worry about that because other people’s actions are beyond my control. I can’t shoot them. If I shoot them, I have to bury them somewhere. Once you start shooting people, I think it’s over. It’s only a matter of time before someone overpowers you. You and I can predict a lot, but we can’t predict what Todd or Heather are going to do when they run out of food and water. I hope they start cooperating with us, and accept our help with grace. All we can do is try to build a community that protects them. We can’t force them to join it. One day, someone might murder me for a bean burrito. It’s easy to get lost inside the doomscroll. It’s easy to tell yourself it doesn’t matter what you try to do, because life will just get harder and harder until it finally beats you. Once, someone tried to tell me none of this mattered because if you can’t live until your 80s then you might as well die now. I refuse to accept that. I’ve got a family. I’ve got a life. Even on the bad days, we still have a good time. It’s worse than ever out there, but there’s still something to live for. This year has taught me one thing. Even during an historic drought, it still rains. Things still grow. Things still live. For how long? As long as they can. Duh. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._

In March, Google made it official. They’re going to build three giant, hyperscale data centers in western Virginia. They’ll sit down the road from the George Washington & Jefferson National Forest in the kneebend of the Appalachian Mountains. The plans are underway, even as our state trudges through its worst drought since 1941. Our governor, Abigail Spanberger, urges ordinary people to conserve water while publicly rejecting proposals to ban new AI data centers because it would “hurt the economy.” She would know: We’re home to the largest data center hub in the world, and soon we’ll be giving our water to the biggest one of all. Unless we stop it, and we _can_ … I’ve donated $500 to a local alliance. They have top-shelf legal representation that’s challenging the data center in the courts. I’m going to donate another $500. They’ve already stopped one giant data center project in the state. I’m going to keep donating until they win. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up. The Google site also happens to reside roughly three miles from Carvins Cove, a protected park and reservoir that supplies the main drinking water for the Roanoke Valley. These data centers will start pumping 2 million gallons per day (MGD) out of the cove by early 2028. Google wants the option to expand their water consumption up to 8 million gallons per day to quench the project’s thirst. They’re already planning a pipeline big enough to accommodate that. Botetourt County officials told Google yes. They did it in closed sessions. If all this goes through, and Google realizes their dream, this data center site will become the biggest water guzzler in the entire world, easily surpassing the 2-5 MGD used by other giant data centers. Even at a baseline of 2 MGD, the Google project debuts as the eighth largest worldwide. Their goal of 8 MGD puts them in the lead. They’ve also recently bought the entire output of a nearby wind farm, which falls around 600 megawatts on any given day. Google has already said it probably won’t be enough. In fact, the entire wind farm might not even cover half the electricity demand. They’re going to pull the rest of it from local utilities, i.e., _my_ utilities. _Your_ utilities… The cove’s treatment plant can generate 10 million gallons of daily drinking water right now. By 2030, Google’s gigantic data centers could be gulping down 80 percent of that. Before the data centers, experts projected that our water supply would last into the 2060s. It includes a backup spring, forming a total of 9 billion gallons or more. Now, we’re on track to run out by 2030. Officials with the county and the water authority have promised it won’t come to that. We have our doubts. Fortunately, local journalists and lawyers pressured the county to give a more accurate timeline, and that’s when they admitted the truth: we’ll need more water by 2030. In February, an alliance of water conservationists in Virginia compelled the water authority to finally release a full, unredacted agreement on Google’s water usage. The spear: An indie journalist named Henri Gendreau of _The Roanoke Rambler_ filed a complaint against the water authority, and a circuit court judge decided in his favor, requiring the full release. You can read that agreement here. (You might have to open it in Chrome.) I’ve also uploaded the full document: Utility Services Funding AgreementUtility Services Funding Agreement.pdf250 KBdownload-circle This agreement explicitly grants Google up to 8 million gallons per day, under its “Day N Water Solution Plan.” The exact wording: > _“The WSP will analyze all aspects of water supply planning… in order to assess and evaluate viable alternative water supply sources and needed water supply infrastructure in order to meet the Day N Water Solution, which the Parties understand could require up to eight million gallons per day, or six million gallons per day above the Day 1 Water Solution, without impairing the utility’s ability to meet the current and future water supply capacity needs for future system demand.”_ In essence, at some vague point in the near future, our water authority will do everything in its power to help a tech giant use more water than our entire valley population. They promise it won’t hurt us. Pinky swear… Save Carvins Cove Google has a poor track record of sticking to their original water usage agreements. For example, their data center in The Dalles, Oregon area tripled over the course of five years. Ultimately, Google wound up hoarding up to 40 percent of the city’s drinking water. The city even tried to sue a local newspaper to keep the public from finding out about it. You can find similar stories all over the country. Google moves in and starts using up everyone’s water. Local officials bend over backward to try and please them, but it’s never enough. Let’s stop and summarize: Before Google started barging in, the Roanoke Valley enjoyed an abundance of water. Now authorities are scrambling for a way to feed three giant data centers that will gulp down more than the combined consumption of three entire counties. It’s a massive sign of corruption and incompetence. Our water authority was trying to hide the full 8 MGD amount, because they knew it wouldn’t go over very well. They knew they didn’t have a sound strategy for protecting our drinking water, but they were going to let Google build the data centers anyway. It amounts to a hostile takeover of our region’s entire water supply, with only the vaguest of plans about securing more water for ordinary residents. They could solve the problem preemptively, but instead, they’re going to open the site and then worry about the water shortages later. Many of our state leaders are doing less than the bare minimum to address the drought crisis. For example, Virginia will soon require data centers “to try and limit their water use” in “water scarcity areas.” They have to “show they’ve minimized the use of any water for cooling purposes” by 2032. Look at this map and tell me what parts of the state aren’t experiencing “water scarcity.” And yet, our governor has tried to introduce amendments to bills that give these data centers _more_ leeway in using water for evaporative cooling in water-scarce areas. Correct, she wants to make the laws nicer to tech giants. Neither the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) nor the governor currently claims the authority to shut down data centers, even during severe droughts. There’s some good news: Nearby cities and counties that rely on the cove are speaking up and mobilizing resistance. Action groups are putting pressure on the governor and state assembly to do more. That’s just the beginning. The Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance and the Botetourt County Data Center Information Group have mounted a legal challenge. They’ve retained Chap Petersen & Associates. The firm just recently stopped The Prince William Digital Gateway, another massive data center corridor that would’ve dropped up to 37 data centers on the edge of a Civil War memorial park in northern Virginia. Pestersen and his team beat them. The team included law partners, homeowners associations, historical societies, environmental councils, national parks associations, and conservation alliances. From _The Prince William Times_ : > _"We stood up to some of the largest companies in the world, and we were able to pull off essentially a miracle,” Petersen said Thursday afternoon._ What can you do? Well, we need to make this a national story. It’s a big deal. What happens here will provide a template for what happens across the rest of the country. We’re at a pivotal moment in the legal battles against data centers. The tide is turning in our favor. A victory here will resonate across the country and send a clear signal to tech giants that they’re not going to sneak in and take our water. They’re not going to hoover up our electricity and drive up utilities. They’re not going to poison our parks and forests with their massive backup diesel generators. They’re not going to torment our neighbors with light and noise pollution. You don’t have to share my post if you don’t want to, but you could share this one, or this one, or this one. You can also donate to the legal fund for Chap Petersen & Associates. They’re already doing work on the case. These cases succeed because they don’t target the tech giants directly. They contest the zoning law changes. Finally, support the local alliances and independent journalists fighting data center expansion in your towns and cities. Sadly, when we were researching this piece, we learned that _The Roanoke Rambler_ came under new ownership and drove off their small underpaid staff. They’ve largely ceased publication. This paper was essential in compelling the truth on Google’s water usage. Now, they’re gone. But this is life. When the torch falls on the ground, someone has to pick it up and relight it. They have to carry it for a while. Honestly, I’m probably not the best investigative journalist. I haven’t filed a FOIA request since my college internships. I’m not very charismatic. I’m weird and abrasive. It’s why I didn’t stick with hardcore journalism, instead gravitating into academia, and I was even too weird for that. But this newsletter is one thing I’ve got that can help. I know how to tell a story. As Erin Brockovich has written, movements to stop data centers are winning. Communities are banding together. These efforts are showing me something I haven’t seen in a while: People _do_ care. People _are_ willing to put in the time, the energy, and the tears to save their futures. We _can_ stop these things. When my family moved back here, we were just trying to find a place less vulnerable to droughts, heatwaves, and storms. We were trying to find a place closer to our aging parents. We wanted to live in the mountains again. Our child plays here. She learns about nature. It’s beautiful, it’s safe, and we want it to stay that way. For years, we’ve tracked our water usage. All three of us combined use less than 100 gallons a day. Now Google wants it all to cool their new hyperscale data centers. Where does it end? When will the data centers be big enough? A hundred years ago, lumber barons stripped the mountains bare in their quest for money and power. They clearcut entire forests. They drove out local sawmills and brought in massive engines of destruction. It’s taken generations to restore the land. Now a new group of profiteers and tycoons wants to destroy it all over again. We’re not going to let them do it this time. We didn’t expect to wind up on the front lines of the data center battles. But, here we are. We’re not moving. We’re not running. We’re going to stand our ground. We’re going to make our leaders do their jobs. I’m a private person, and I didn’t want to tell anyone where we live. But this matters more. We’re going to stop tech giants from taking our water and ruining our future. Not just here. Everywhere. We’ll win, even if we have to do it county by county. If you make a donation, please drop a comment down below. It would be great to keep a rough tally. I’m $500 in and counting. Also drop a comment if you’re involved with a group fighting a data center. Billionaires don’t own this planet. And they don’t own us. Let’s show them. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Recently, I’ve heard these questions: > _When should we start preparing? When is**it** going to happen? > > Can you actually survive what’s coming? > > What if nobody listens to you? > > What if **it** never happens?_ These questions used to keep me up at night. Now, they don’t. They’re obsolete, relics from an age bound for the archives. In my life, the more I think about it, the more I realize, it’s not _going_ to happen. It’s _happening_. It’s not future tense anymore. It’s the present. I’ve already walked through a 117F heat index (47.2C). I’ve already driven through a brushfire that made one of our mountains look like an erupting volcano. Rare storms and F3 tornadoes already knocked out our power and tore apart the homes of our neighbors. Hurricane Helene already destroyed the cities where my friends and family live. For us, it’s not theoretical. Not anymore. Right now, my town is going through the worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Friends and acquaintances are starting to ask us for advice. We’re the only ones who look like we know what we’re doing. As our county starts to implement water restrictions, we dust off the Berkey we’ve only used for disasters. We give it a permanent home. We start cycling through our stored water earlier than usual. We dig places for a full rain catchment system. We rig up a battery-powered pump. We research portable, in-line filtration systems. We research how to chlorinate barrel water if necessary. We’re already running a water generator on solar power. We’re already testing a DIY model. We’re not preparing for the worst drought since the Dust Bowl. We’re _in_ the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, and we’re dealing with it. We’re not preparing for storms and tornadoes that might never happen. We’re recovering from ones that have already hit us and will hit us again. We’re not preparing for heatwaves that might never come. We’re putting plans in place for the ones that we’ve already lived through, and we’ll live through them again. It’s my reality now, and that reality is shared. Nobody looks at us like we’re weird anymore, even if they’re not taking the same steps. At least here, my family doesn’t have to warn anyone. My spouse doesn’t fret over cutting the gutters anymore. He doesn’t wonder if we’re going too far. He’s worried. He’s glad we’re doing all this. There’s no more urgent conversations in hushed tones. There’s no more panic. There’s no more sleepless nights. Everything we ever worried about is here. We’re at war with a country that owns a chokehold on the world’s fossil fuels. We’re in the worst droughts and heatwaves in a century. We’re ruled by puppets in service of billionaires who fantasize about the apocalypse. It’s all out in the open now. We plan. We execute. We live. Family conversations about doomsday events used to be stressful. Now I casually mention, “The idiots are bombing Iran again. Should we go ahead and get the other rain barrel?” He says, “Sounds good.” My daughter learns about water filtration. Not because we think she might need it. We know she’s going to need it. We already need it. In all honesty, people like me aren’t experts. We never intended to live like this, but it’s what the situation calls for. We’re adapting. We’re figuring all this out as we go, doing our best to sort through all the information and misinformation on the web. It would’ve been nice to learn this at school, or from our elders, but that didn’t happen. The world raised my generation to hustle and grind, not collapse. So, we hustled and hustled. Now we have to learn a different way to live. Earlier generations had decades to figure out homesteading, and they had the assurance of a grid to fall back on when they messed up. We don’t have that. We’re actively losing the assurances and safety nets that would catch us when we mess up. I’m not saying that to be confrontational or bitter. I’m simply stating a reality that needs airtime. If you’re trying to do this, if it feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. As I previously wrote, millions of us are trying to figure out survival on the fly. We’re doing it in backyards in the suburbs or downtown apartment blocks. Some of us are going about it in a cavalier, reckless way. Others of us have some sense of what we don’t know. We still get it wrong, but we learn. There’s an interesting term in psychology. It’s called the third layer of fear. The third layer of fear also goes by the name “anticipatory anxiety.” Basically, you develop a fear of being afraid. For example, you’re so afraid of the future, you don’t even want to think about it. Or you develop unhealthy coping mechanisms, like toxic optimism or hoarding. Some of us have broken past the third layer of fear. It helps when you actually start to wake up. When you move into the realm of certainty, your mind stops racing. A peace comes over you, even if it’s not the certainty you wanted. At least, that’s open. It’s better than continuing to dwell in that third layer. Us? We’re not preparing for dystopia and disasters. We’re living in them. The anticipatory anxiety has drained out. It’s gone. In the old era, you packed a bugout bag that you hoped you’d never need. Now you repack a bugout bag you’ve already used. This is life beyond the third layer of fear. It’s a life where you no longer have to justify your decisions or spend hours scrolling to validate your thoughts and emotions. The thing you were scrolling is right in front of you. You’re not scrolling doom anymore. If anything, you have entered the scroll. You are the content. They told you to go outside and get some fresh air. They told you to touch grass. Now you go outside and touch the crisp, sun-beaten grass. You hear it crunch beneath your feet. You go inside and check yourself for ticks. That’s why I’m no longer prepping. It’s not prepping anymore. It’s just living. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._

In 1968, the Beatles recorded “Revolution.” It became one of the most misunderstood songs in modern music history, because most people didn’t actually take the time to hear what John Lennon was saying: > _You say you want a revolution > Well, you know, > We all want to change the world… > You say you got a real solution > Well, you know, > We’d all love to see the plan… > You tell me it’s the institution > Well, you know, > You better free your mind instead_ More than fifty years later, on the eve of an Independence Day few of us feel like celebrating, these lyrics make perfect sense to me. Don’t they make sense to you? Everywhere you look, someone wants a revolution. But they don’t really have a plan. They only want to push their cause. They’ll yell in your face that all the things you care about don’t matter. They drag their own biases and prejudices behind them like chains, along with heaps of arrogance. That’s what John Lennon meant when he said you’d better free your mind instead. Unless you can learn to practice basic compassion and self-awareness, you’ve got no business trying to charge up a revolution. It’s just going to get people killed. I’ve been trying to figure out how we can actually change the world. I’ve been diving back into history, and I’ve been finding answers. Here’s two: ### The first history lesson John Lennon ultimately rejected violent revolution, because he knew where it led. He wasn’t some naive hippie. He studied history, and he knew all about the French Revolution. Americans often cite it as some kind of benchmark for American activism. According to more serious historians, it’s a perfect example of how a revolution can turn into a nightmare. During the Reign of Terror, Jacobin revolutionaries turned on each other and started sending their own allies to the guillotine. They couldn’t agree on what to do with the outgoing aristocracy. They couldn’t agree on how to redistribute the country’s wealth. They couldn’t agree on how to organize a new government. Even when they agreed on basic points like freedom of religion, they couldn’t agree on the details. Some groups wanted to impose atheism. They vandalized churches. They tried to make public worship illegal, even punishable by death (via guillotine). Some of them wanted to declare war on neighboring monarchies. Others didn’t. Instead of working out their differences, they started killing each other. With guillotines… Maximilien Robespierre emerged from that bloodshed, executing anyone who argued with him—even a little. When groups tried to tell Robespierre they supported him but he was killing too many good guys, guess what he did? Yep, killed them. By the mid 1790s, the revolution grew so bloodthirsty that you could be executed for anything, without evidence or even a trial. You could be executed for serving beverages to an enemy of the state, even if you didn’t know they were an enemy of the state at the time. You could be executed for having too much food. You could be executed for “spreading defeatism.” You could be executed for “lack of enthusiasm.” You could be executed for selling bad wine. You could be executed for crying. In the end, what was left of the original revolution got so sick of the gorefest that they overthrew Robespierre and then executed him, via guillotine. And that was just the end of the beginning of the revolution. So many guillotines… Execution of Maximilien Robespierre After the Reign of Terror ended, The White Terror began. Vigilantes tracked down and murdered Jacobins and former executioners. A weak coalition government called The Directory tried to restore order, until you know what… Napoleon showed up. Napoleon took control. He was a mixed bag. On the one hand, he introduced reforms that laid the foundation for modern democracy. On the other hand, he completely stripped away women’s rights. Napoleon eradicated freedom of speech and freedom of the press. He put his own family members in charge of the countries he conquered. He locked up his critics and political dissidents without a trial. He plunged Europe into ten years of total war that led to millions of deaths. He committed war crimes as bad as any we’ve seen recently. For example, in Jaffa, he ordered the mass execution of nearly 4,000 prisoners of war because he didn’t want to feed them. Finally, Napoleon reintroduced slavery to the French colonies and did his best to crush the Haitian Revolution. In the end, Haiti won its independence in 1804 at the cost of 200,000-300,000 lives. Some estimates suggest it was nearly half of their indigenous population. So, that’s the cost of revolution. That’s what it can take. ### The second history lesson A lot of Americans (and international observers) like to cite the Civil Rights movement as an example of citizen power. They want to know why we can’t do that _now_. They suggest that Americans today are just lazy, entitled, or uninformed. In reality, it took centuries to build the Civil Rights movement, going all the way back to the foundation of the NAACP in 1909—even earlier. You could say it was a tad more successful than the French Revolution, and a bit less violent. It was 100+ years in the making. Historians tend to agree that the American Civil Rights movement succeeded where the French Revolution failed precisely because Civil Rights leaders spent generations building deep, resilient communities and alliances. For them, the community wasn’t a means to an end. It was the whole point. The French Revolution rushed it, putting ideology first and either abandoning or executing anyone who got in their way. They built fragile communities only to use them as a means to an end. The Civil Rights movement didn’t start with marches in the 1960s or even the bus boycotts in the 1950s. You have to go back to the early 1900s and even the 1890s. In fact, you could trace the roots of the Civil Rights movement all the way to the foundation of the Bethel AME Church in 1791. The 19th century was filled with conventions, organizations, organized protests, and boycotts. Before _Brown v. Board of Education_ , Benjamin Roberts filed the very first anti-segregation lawsuit in U.S. history. He lost, but he inspired a grassroots movement that led to school integration across Massachusetts in 1855. It took Frederick Douglass. It took the Harlem Renaissance. It took W.E.B. Du Bois. It took Langston Hughes. It took Nella Larsen. It took Aaron Douglas. It took Richard Wright. It took Ralph Ellison. It took Zora Neale Hurston. It took James Baldwin. It took Rosa Parks. It took Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It took Thurgood Marshall and John Lewis. It took writers, poets, musicians, artists, organizers, and activists. All of them had different ideas and approaches. Sometimes, they disagreed. Churches and schools made up the backbone of the Civil Rights movement, a network started in the 1790s by pioneers who were sick of how they were treated in white churches. The networks grew across hundreds of years, providing spaces for ordinary people to form deep social bonds over generations. It was decades of showing up to help each other and build things together. It ran across the entire country, every city, every town, every neighborhood. That’s how you get the power of a movement that can change things across a country this size. It’s slow, until it’s not. When Martin Luther King famously said the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice, he was drawing from an 1853 sermon by Theodore Parker who used the same metaphor. That was the meaning. So when I say we’re not ready for a revolution, that’s what I mean. We have a lot of heavy lifting to put in. We have a lot of damage to repair. It’s not always about marching in the street. It’s often about just taking care of people and making them feel seen, respected, even loved. If you want to run a marathon, you have to get in shape. Unity and solidarity are more than cheat codes to make other people do what you want them to do. It means _you_ have to change, too. _You_ have to give. Before you get to the boycotts and protests, you have to build the bonds. You have to build the friendships. You have to build the communities. You change the world along the way, every step. It’s radical _and_ it’s incremental. It’s also harder than ever. More obstacles than ever. I’m not saying we need churches, but we need something more than our phones and our snark. You have to show people you care about them. You have to do that for years and years. You can’t fastforward to the revolution. Even as the world barrels toward climate hell, we have to take this steady approach. I don’t think there’s any other way to do it. Go to your protests. Organize your boycotts. Don’t forget to take care of people. For some of us, that’s a full time job, it’s a lifelong commitment, and it’s even more important. Understand that a movement draws its power from generations of love and support and mutual respect. You say you want a revolution? Well, you know… * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._

There’s a new strain of hopium going around. It sounds like this: We’re probably on track for 3C of global warming by the end of this century, and we should celebrate. The apocalypse is canceled. Well, they’re wrong. Anyway, 3C is just a number and a letter. It almost sounds like a bra size. What does it _look_ like? And is 3C likely? Yes, that’s the new scenario we’re being sold. That’s the consensus. Not 1.5C. That’s dead. Forget that ever happened. The new goal is 3C. It was always 3C. Who ever said 1.5C? Lol, ridiculous. It’s entirely possible that most of the planet could breach 3C of warming as early as the 2050s. One major study by scientists at Stanford, Colorado State, and ETH-Zurich analyzed 10 different climate models and found that the majority of Earth will blow past 2C of warming by the 2040s, landing firmly in 3C territory by the early 2060s. The German Physical and Meteorological Societies issued a joint warning that the planet could go 3C over preindustrial levels by 2050. Work by James Hansen and Leon Simons has predicted the planet will start hitting 2-3C of warming by the middle of the century. Simons has also commented on the 3C scenario and finds it plausible. In early 2025, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the University of Exeter released a report laying out the worst case: We hit 3C of warming by 2050. According to the actuarial report, 3C of warming would result in 4 billion deaths, leading to “significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states… and extinction events.” They also predict a 50 percent drop in GDP. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries isn’t a bunch of Reddit doomers. They’re one of the most respected groups in the world. They assess financial risk and uncertainty for institutions. It’s their job to be right. When they’re wrong, they face consequences, unlike podcast bros who can say whatever they want. The University of Exeter is one of the best universities, part of the Russell Group, considered the “American Ivy League.” They’re known for their intellectual rigor. You can trust them. If you want to see the world at 3C, I would recommend three books: _Our Final Warning_ by Mark Lynas, _3 Degrees More_ edited by Klaus Wiegandt, and _Racing to Extinction_ by Lyle Lewis. Let’s go ahead and paint the picture: We can already expect 4 billion deaths coupled with a 50 percent collapse of the global economy, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to happen over a period of decades, a slow grind punctuated by disasters like Hurricane Helene. At 3C, large parts of Europe and North America turn into deserts. Dustbowls reminiscent of the 1930s in the U.S. become permanent, with a 40-50 percent collapse in agricultural production. According to a 2020 study in _Frontiers in Sustainable Food_ Systems, “the United States depletes nearly all of its wheat reserves” within four years, triggering a larger “loss of 31 percent of global wheat stocks.” According to a 2016 study in _Nature_ , soy and corn drop by 40 percent. Every degree above the preindustrial average would make it 25 percent worse. Famine ensues. At 3C, cities like New York experience catastrophic flooding on a regular basis. High tides invade large areas of downtown every night. Eventually, they’re underwater. Dangerous heat waves envelope large parts of the world during their springs and summers. Power grids start to buckle. In large cities like Phoenix, up to half of the city could wind up needing a hospital. In a 3C world, a billion people around the planet routinely endure "temperatures that exceed the workability threshold, where it becomes impossible to safely work outside artificially cooled environments, even in the shade.” We see four times more floods. They cause 10 times more damage, killing at least 20,000 people a year, and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless. That alone guarantees the collapse of the insurance industry. Pandemics become routine events. Mosquitoes and other insects migrate north, bringing everything from malaria to yellow fever with them. Ticks become an ever-present threat in your back yard. Diseases we thought we conquered with vaccines will mutate and strike back harder. F5 tornadoes become normal. Category 5 hurricanes become normal. Catastrophic floods and fires that used to happen every 100 or 1,000 years happen almost every year. Supply chains won't withstand the bombardment. Neither will power grids. A 3C world pushes us beyond many of our tipping points. The ice sheets melt. AMOC collapses. Permafrost thaws. The rainforest dies. The boreal forest moves north. We know for sure these events will release even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They'll unleash new pandemics. Most of Africa and the Middle East will become completely uninhabitable. That’s what a 3C world looks like. It is not a fun place. There is no reason to celebrate this. Even suggesting so is either deeply naive or deeply disingenuous. That’s not fearmongering. That’s not doomerism. It’s science. It’s reality. It’s a hard look at the future, unadulterated by our hopes and wishes about what happens. That’s the path we’re on. We’re currently not on a plan to avert this world. This is the world that most scientists agree we’re heading toward. The only disagreement now is whether we’re going to get there by the end of the century or the middle of the century. Anyone who tells you that renewables alone will save us doesn’t know about Jevons Paradox or the corruption of climate conferences by the fossil fuel lobby. Accept this reality or don’t. It’s your choice. Is there hope? When the party that promises to save us from fascism engages in climate hushing and completely ignores anyone who talks about degrowth or steady-state economies, I think we have to be honest. That won’t work. This is the part where emotionally fragile adults start whining and demanding that we, the ones who pay attention, present them with solutions that they find convenient and acceptable. Well, sorry, buddy, there are no convenient or acceptable solutions. There are difficult solutions. There are solutions that require some sacrifice and hardship. There are solutions that require cooperation. There are solutions that won’t save everyone or prevent every bad thing. There are solutions that won’t seem fair. These solutions require us to do things we don’t want to do. They’re the only solutions we’ve got. Everyone knows what they are at this point. They’ve been said over and over. People just don’t want to do them. I’m not saying this to scare or panic anyone. Do I sound scared? I’m not. I’ve been living with this news for a long time. I’m doing what I can to prepare, and I realize the limits of preparedness. I’m getting ready to die. I’m not letting it stop me from enjoying my life. I’m doing all the things I enjoy. I’m doing all the things I find meaningful. I’m not sitting on my phone doomscrolling. But I also can’t just sit back and let toxic optimists and climate hushers control the discourse. They’re wrong, or they’re lying, and they deserve to be called out. When someone accuses you of being a doomer, you can say: What would you rather have? Do you enjoy being lied to? Do you enjoy being treated like a child or a small pet that can’t handle the truth? Do you enjoy being coddled? Or do you want to join the adult table and have real conversations every so often about what we can do to make the rest of this century a little less painful? I like the adult table. Many people prefer the kids’ table. That’s the real reason we keep seeing all the hopium and goalpost-shifting on the climate targets. It’s why the new climate optimists want you to throw a party over 3C of warming, when it’s actually going to kill half of us. We already have all the solutions. We just won’t do them. * * * _Sentinel Intelligence is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._

The dad works from morning until night. The mom works from night until morning. The mom grabs as much sleep as possible, then she picks her kid up from school. She runs what errands she can with the energy she has. She picks the dad up from work. They share one late dinner, then she goes back to her job. Two jobs, one car. Imagine telling that family it’s their moral duty to resist fascism. Imagine lecturing them on their carbon footprint. Imagine telling them to start a garden or collect rain. Imagine telling them there’s going to be a famine and they’re going to starve in eight weeks. Imagine telling them they’re complicit in genocide. Imagine giving them an extra list of things to do to save the future. If you spent your day getting yelled at by entitled customers and bossed around by entitled managers, then standing in line for groceries, dealing with toddler tantrums, and you knew you’d have to do it all over again tomorrow, how would you want to spend the one or two hours you had free? Would you want to spend that time reading about how screwed you were, and how it was all your fault, or would you want to watch husky videos? I know what _I_ would want. When you make your living from a laptop or a garden, it’s easy to forget how life actually works for a majority of Americans. It’s easy to judge them. Most Americans live on the brink of homelessness now, one car problem away from ruin. And it’s not just them. Everyone they know does the same thing, working multiple jobs, barely getting by. They don’t have a retirement fund. They don’t have savings. They have enough to afford this month’s bills. They’re keeping their heads above water. They’ve got enough energy left to fight the next data center or the next direct corporate assault on a family member. That’s it. We know these families. They’re our friends. They’re in the communities we’re building. They’re the plumbers and electricians who open up to us, because we actually talk to them. They’re my dad. They’re my brother. They’re my in-laws. They’re my readers. They’re not living in carefree oblivion. They just don’t want to hear it anymore. They don’t want to hear about protests. They don’t want to hear about boycotts. They don’t want to hear about elections. They might not even get a day off to go vote. They don’t want to hear theories about what they’re doing wrong and why they aren’t doing enough to save democracy. They’ve had it with all this. They’re done. I’m saying this because I think some of us need to come back down to reality. We spend so much time wondering why Americans don’t seem to care or why they’re not fighting back like the citizens of some other country with a higher relative minimum wage and nationalized healthcare. There’s a simple reason. It doesn’t take a team of political strategists or a bunch of psychologists to see what’s going on with everyone. In fact, political strategists are probably the least qualified group on the planet to diagnose our problems. I’m in the laptop class for now, but my membership remains tenuous. I often feel like I don’t belong here. I come from the working class. I’m probably returning to the working class eventually, and I foresee a future where I don’t have the time or energy to bang out opinions online. My brother works all the time. Like me, he’s finally rebuilding his life after decades of trauma. My dad spent his entire life working 12 hours a day and taking care of a mentally ill wife who hated him. He’s done. He has a few years left to relax. He’s not going to spend it trying to fix the world. Can I blame him? When I talk to my friends with ordinary jobs and ordinary schedules, they’re not talking about wars and scandals. They’re talking about small things because that’s all they can handle anymore. They’re squeaking out a living. They’re not joining movements because they don’t trust the movements. Are they going to risk getting thrown in jail and fired? There’s this thing called survivorship bias. You and I see the Americans on the internet who have the time and energy left to run our mouths about everything. We see the trolls and the bots. We don’t see the ones who are just keeping their heads above water. We don’t see the ones who don’t have time to swipe and gripe online. That’s the bias. If we want to change things, that’s where we have to start. We have to make them feel safe again. We have to make them feel seen and heard. We have to start doing things for each other again without expecting it to trigger a revolution overnight. In other words, we have to rebuild the foundation of actual kindness and caring before we ask anything else of them. We have to build a society that doesn’t reward narcissists and psychopaths, and we have to do it from the ground up. We have to do it in the age of instant gratification and dopamine hits. It’s going to take a long time. I’m not sure we have enough time left to get it done. Then again, all we’ve got now is time. So, remember: Every time we’re condescending and inconsiderate, every time we mistake politeness for kindness, every time we exempt ourselves from basic human decency because we think we’re right and it’s justified, every time we don’t do what we’re demanding everyone else to do, we’re putting a dent in the future we want to see, and we’re sabotaging the society we need to create. The corporate fascists spent decades wearing us down and grinding us up precisely so we’d all be too tired and irritable to unite. It’s going to take a generation to undo this damage. Maybe before we can expect the boycotts and the protests to have any bite, we have to rebuild the social infrastructure that made that kind of resistance possible in the first place. We have to build it from nearly scratch, with almost nothing. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be slow. It’s going to be frustrating. So if you’re wondering why Americans aren’t doing more, that’s why. They work all the time just to stay alive a little longer. They don’t have time for gardens and book clubs. We could spend all day arguing about how we got here, but we’re here. Not everyone willfully signed up for it. They were just born into it. Heads above water. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

We figured the billionaire bunkers would fail, but get this… _It’s happening early._ I’ve been following bunker stories ever since Douglas Rushkoff wrote about them. Soon after, someone sent me a 2017 article from _The New Yorker_ that revealed the secret bunker culture of bankers and hedge fund managers. They really do get together over tapas and brag about their doomsday plans. And then there’s the story of C. Wesley Morgan, a Kentucky bourbon baron who advertised the bunker under his mansion on Zillow. It attracted the attention of an ex-military dude who invaded his home. Morgan’s daughter died in the gunfight that ensued. The bunker is now an Airbnb. Maybe you’ve heard of Vivos xPoint. It’s an old bunker site in South Dakota where the military used to store bombs. It’s home to hundreds of bunkers. About ten years ago, a real estate grifter named Robert Vicino bought the place and started advertising it as the safest haven on earth, somewhere the super rich could bug out during an extinction event, like nuclear war or a global famine. Things haven’t gone so well. It’s been getting some attention lately. According to recent news, a bunch of bunker bros have filed a class action lawsuit against Vicino. Why? Well, he promised them a doomsday utopia with a medical facility, a laundromat, a general store, a security force, even a gym. He didn’t build any of it. Instead, he took their money and required them to “improve” the bunkers by installing their own plumbing and utilities. Then he used predatory lease contracts to evict them. He kept the upgraded bunkers. And leased them again. (Lol…) The tragi-comedy of Vivos xPoint recently graced the pages of _The Wall Street Journal_. Canadian Prepper also did a beautiful takedown. When you put a $55,000 downpayment on a bunker at xPoint, here’s what you get. Have a good laugh: There’s not much going on at xPoint. No guilds. No orchards. No farms or gardens. No ranch. There’s not much in terms of lakes, rivers, or streams. It’s really just a bunch of bunkers out in the middle of nowhere. Look at the history, and you learn that the military built them for an entirely different purpose than survival. The high altitude and low humidity of South Dakota maximized the shelf life of bombs. They put the bomb depots in the middle of nowhere so they wouldn’t kill anyone if they accidentally exploded. The bunkers were designed to keep explosions on the inside, so they didn’t damage other depots. The bunkers themselves don’t come with the modern infrastructure and air filtration systems to protect anyone from radiation. That would fall under the “improvements” that residents have to add themselves. About the community: According to the reports, residents have been getting into a lot of fights and feuds. They’ve been litigating each other. They’ve been harassing and threatening each other over things like failing septic systems. They’ve been pulling guns on each other. In one incident, a bunker bro even shot a contractor during a prolonged confrontation with the site management. It’s exactly what you’d expect to happen when you put a bunch of entitled jerks together in a remote location. They don’t know how to cooperate. They got where they are by exploiting everyone and everything around them. Of course they weren’t going to make it out there. They never were. The same goes for the rest of them. By now, we’ve all heard about the bunkers. Stories have saturated the internet. The mainstream media can’t stop talking about them. Some of them are carved into mountainsides. Some are built into old missile silos. Some have actual drawbridges and lakes of fire built around them. Celebrities all have them now. So do all the tech billionaires and their friends. None of them will make it. Many of us predicted these bunkers would fail at some point during the collapse of civilization. It’s just a bad idea to put a bunch of rich people together in a remote location on the premise that they’ll build a community. That’s not how they accumulated their wealth. They built their wealth by extracting it from us, and then flattering themselves. What’s interesting is that they’re already failing. It’s ahead of schedule. Places like xPoint have already collapsed. The doomsday events they fantasized about haven’t even started happening yet, and they’re already pulling out their guns and trying to kill each other. Another bunker project failed a couple of years ago. Maybe you remember a piece in _The Lever_ about Barrett Moore, a doomsday tycoon who tried to build a bunker community, conning hundreds of thousands of dollars out of rich people. He wound up drowning in lawsuits. Bradley Garrett wrote an entire book on bunker culture called _Bunker_. He spent months touring all the bugouts and came to the conclusion they wouldn’t last six months inside these things. They were already joking about making dungeons and chaining up teenage girls in them. Some of them were even fantasizing about going Rambo on nearby neighborhoods and putting everyone’s heads on pikes. Sounds lovely. There’s a definitive lesson here: Don’t envy the billionaires and their bunkers. Don’t envy their security teams. Don’t go around believing they know something the rest of us don’t. They know nothing that climate scientists and activists haven’t been screaming for decades. That’s all they know. And they know because they’re the ones who’ve been committing all the destruction. It’s all liability dressed up as privileged. In almost every case, you’re better off where you are. You’re better off doing what you’re doing. It’s sad that the groups with the power and resources to undo some of this damage are, instead, choosing to build bunkers and weep into the arms of Davos prostitutes about how screwed we are. They’re not going to change. So, there you have it, rather conclusive evidence that bunkers aren’t going to help anyone. Not only were they a terrible waste of resources in the first place, they’re already failing. They were always going to fail. It’s just happening early. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

The entire world is already dealing with killer heat waves. There’s no need for me to run through all the news stories. We’ve all seen them. It’s not just “a little hot.” These heat waves are killing people and destroying infrastructure. How bad could it get? Well, a 2023 study predicted that a heatwave accompanied by a blackout in major cities like Phoenix would send half the population to the ER. According to a separate analysis covered in _The New York Times_ , two-thirds of North America already face “shortfalls in the electrical grid, particularly during periods of extreme heat when demand for air conditioning spikes, straining resources.” That was before the world’s billionaires started mass-building data centers. Europeans are now facing the hottest summers in recorded history, in places that were never designed or built to see such temperatures. Odds are, you or someone in your family will be living through something like this in the foreseeable future—an intense heatwave accompanied by a blackout, or at least a grid flickering as it buckles under energy demand. So, how do you survive? Here’s what I know. ### Yes, you can survive Melissa Norris and her family survived several days at 120F degrees without air conditioning. Their indoor air temperature topped out at 88F degrees. It wasn’t comfortable, but they made it. They explain what they did in this video, and it covers a range of simple strategies like blinds and blackout curtains, limiting stove use, and strategic use of fans at night to promote air exchange. ### Frozen towels and sheets do the job Melissa Norris is spot on with the advice about frozen towels. If you’ve heard this before, there’s a fancier term for it in emergency medicine. It’s called ice sheet cooling (ISC), and the military considers it a standard intervention in field medicine to treat heat-related illnesses and injury. A 2023 study in _The Journal of Emergency Medicine_ found ice sheets effective in treating heat stroke and preventing mortality, and it’s a good alternative to the “gold standard” of cold water immersion. If they’re reasonably effective in treating someone already suffering from heat stroke, then it stands to reason they’re even better at keeping you cool to prevent it in the first place. A 2022 study in _Military Medicine_ reached a similar conclusion. In this study, participants exercised in a heated chamber until they underwent “exertional hyperthermia,” and then they were treated with “bed sheets soaked in ice water… at the neck, chest, and groin with another sheet covering the body.” So, get soaking. ### Leverage your freezer if you can It’s worth keeping this method in your playbook, because brownouts and grid failures will increasingly accompany heat waves as cities that aren’t prepared for the climate crisis struggle with thousands of residents blasting their AC all day. Air conditioners are a modern luxury that we probably can’t count on for the indefinite future, especially as grids start to flicker and fail. Even before grid failures become the norm, power bills will soar and price a lot of us out. It’s difficult to keep an air conditioner running with solar power. I’ve done the math. A decent, affordable portable battery setup with a handful of solar panels can produce 750-1000 watts per hour. A window unit or portable AC would consume most of that, and probably all of it, depending on the size and the circumstances. Even a fully-fledged rooftop solar system would struggle to power a central AC unit during a heatwave. Central AC needs roughly 3-4 kWh to keep a house cool. If you can afford rooftop solar and you live in a good location, it’s doable. If you don’t, it’s not. _But…_ You can power a freezer with a few solar panels. Your average chest freezer uses half the electricity of a window unit, at 80-200 watts per hour. Depending on size, a freezer can even use a third or even less electricity. Freezers are far more energy efficient because they cool air and then keep it insulated. So, freeze something and then put it next to your body’s hot spots to cool you down, around your neck or under your arms. You can still try to run a portable AC with solar panels, but you can leverage an energy-efficient freezer as a backup. It could save lives. ### Take a bath Just like ice, liquid water cools you down. According to science, it takes 3200 times as much energy to heat water to the same temperature as air. It also transfers heat away from your body at a high rate. Water’s density also makes your body work harder to heat it up. This piece in _The Conversation_ recommends water at 26 or 27C degrees (80F) for someone suffering heatstroke (to avoid cold shock), but you can go lower if you’re not having an emergency. Generally, your tap water comes out at 10-20C degrees (50-70F). So, just taking a cool bath or shower could save someone’s life. If you can’t take a bath or shower, you can just submerge your hands or feet in a tub of water or wrap them in sheets. You can also use a mister. They all work. ### Turn off the lights and appliances During a heatwave, you want to add to the problem as little as possible. According to HVAC experts, people don’t think about the significant amounts of heat they’re adding to their homes throughout the day with lights, electronics, and appliances, especially ones like dryers and stoves. Even a high-performance PC in a closed room can feel like you’ve got a heater running. This article also explains the way overlooked appliances and lightbulbs add heat to your home. So in our dystopian, low-energy future, it’s going to make sense to use less electricity so you don’t cook yourself in your own home. Not fun news, I know. ### Use fans strategically Fans can help with air flow, but they work better if you understand the basic principles of positive and negative air pressure. Simply parking yourself in front of one can actually speed up dehydration and heat illness. Above 35C degrees (95F), they start to pose more of a liability than anything. It’s a little counterintuitive… Just putting a fan in the window often doesn’t do enough. This article from Instructables explains how to create pressure systems to manage the air in your home depending on the time of day. So, use fans to exchange air in your home. For example: If you want to cool one room, like a bedroom, then open a window at the other end of your home. Seal the other rooms. Put a fan _near_ but not _in_ the far window opening to create a vortex, then open the bedroom window. That creates a windstream that replaces warm, stuffy air with fresh, cool air. Do this at night, and then keep your place sealed during the day to keep that cooler air inside, and the hotter air outside. Let’s repeat that part: Don’t try to do this in the middle of the day. Develop a system. Vent your house at strategic times, like at night and early morning. It works. ### Invest in good curtains Sunlight heats rooms. It’s called heat gain. The more you can do to block out sunlight during a heatwave, the better. Even basic curtains can reduce heat gain by 33 percent. Window quilts do an even better job. ### Make a zeer Cultures around the world have been keeping goods cool with zeer pots, or pots within pots, for thousands of years. You can cool food, or you can cool water, and cool water can help you stay alive during a heat wave. Drinking cool water lowers your core temperature. This guy shows you how to make one. So does this article. The inside temperature of a zeer pot can be 20-30F degrees lower than the outside temperature, especially in drier climates. They can chill down to 40F degrees (4C), even during the summer. They still work in more humid environments, just not quite as well. So, that’s a powerful tool. They’re simple and robust. ### Make a terracotta cooler According to a 2024 study in the _Journal of Engineering Sciences_ , terracotta has resurfaced as a material for cooling as the world cooks. Research has found that terracotta coolers can lower indoor temperatures “up to 6-10C in arid and semi-arid regions,” or up to 18F degrees. They work best in areas with low humidity. Some companies like Team Solstice have even designed air conditioners with terracotta that use much less energy while lowering room temperatures to 22-27C (mid-upper 70s in farenheight). Other companies like CoolAnt have designed terracotta beehive structures to cool the air up to 15C (27F). This video shows you how to make a “mud pot air cooler” that can cool air from 40C down to 15C and distribute the air with a simple DC fan. Here’s an alternate design. Some versions use a water pump, but it’s not essential. You basically mount two small fans on a clay pot, fill it with water, and take advantage of terracotta’s natural cooling properties. The terracotta option is going to work better under certain conditions than others, but it’s a good option to know about. You can also scale it up. ### Other long term options Go downstairs, or into a basement if you have access to one. For the long term, it’s not a bad idea to find a home with some kind of underground level. It’s always going to be cooler. You can also grow a vine trellis outside your home to provide shade. Vines do a great job of blocking heat, and growing them on a trellis means you don’t have to worry about them damaging your home itself. Studies have shown that vines on a building can reduce inside temperatures by 3-4C degrees (6F) or more, when you cover 40-70 percent of the walls. According to an article in _Interesting Engineering_ , earth-sheltered homes offer a wide range of advantages for our dystopian future, especially when it comes to disasters and heat waves. Native Americans built quite a lot of these structures across the plains, further demonstrating how much better they understood this continent and how poorly adapted our lifestyles remain. Also, improve your insulation. Seal any windows you don’t plan on opening up. If you can afford it, upgrade them to reduce heat gain. Look at the R value (5-7 ideal). Also inspect your walls for gaps around power outlets or other areas where your living space could be bleeding cool air to the outside. The more seals, the better. So, that’s what I’ve got. To survive the heatwaves and grid failures of the future, the kind that’ll send half the populations of major cities to the ER, I would start implementing these strategies and helping other people do it. If you’re building community, share this information and help your friends ruggedize their homes. Think about setting up some cooling centers, even underground ones. Other strategies exist, and I can’t cover them all in one article. These work. They’re some of the simplest, most immediate things you can do. What are your heatwave survival strategies? Let me know. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Someone recently told me: > _You’ve got it all figured out. You have a left brain. You can do physics and engineering. Your ideas look so impressive, but they intimidate me. I can’t do any of that. I keep failing. Maybe I should give up. Maybe I’m just going to starve._ It’s funny, because that’s how I often feel when I read posts or watch videos from preppers and homesteaders further along than me. I’ve got a few things to say about all this. Let’s face an uncomfortable truth, shall we? All of our prepping and homesteading plans amount to squat if we don’t have regular, reliable access to clean water for drinking and growing food. It’s also not going to matter much if we have no way to dispose of our pee and poop. I’m sorry if this sounds blunt or negative, but it’s reality. I like reality. We’ve been struggling with these fundamental problems for years, and they’re exactly the kind of problems swept under the rug by all the doomsday slop out there that presents perfectly organized root cellars, workshops full of clean tools, and blossoming food gardens. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone. We’re very much on the suburban homesteading bandwagon, growing food, composting kitchen scraps, and developing DIY plans for emergencies and disasters. But we have limited resources, and we have to manage our priorities. We still wouldn’t last a month on what we manage to grow, and that’s reality. Like I said, I like reality. For us, solving the water problem is a priority. It goes on the top of the list. Because we don’t want to invest huge amounts of time and money, only to wind up in a drought so bad we can’t even run a drip irrigation system. Given that the UN has officially declared a water bankruptcy, given that many parts of the world are now living through their worst droughts in history, given that our leaders are doing almost nothing about it, given the growing threat of data centers, it feels like a logical place to put our efforts. Water first. I’ve grown increasingly fatigued with the doomsday slop that’s been taking over the internet, promising easy solutions wrapped in fear. So I’m going to tell everyone what has actually worked for us—and what hasn’t. I think there’s a lot of untapped value in talking about what _doesn’t_ work. We should be doing it more often. Let’s go. ### What hasn’t worked: dew harvesting After months of trying to make it work, I’m finally pivoting away from dew harvesting. Not because I failed. Because I finally succeeded. We found the right material. We ironed out the science. We built a prototype that reliably catches dew every night. So, what’s the problem? This: By the time we scaled up our concept and ran the math, it was going to cost thousands of dollars. It was going to take up 500-800 square feet… to collect a few gallons of dew, on an average night. If we had the budget, if we had the space, we could do it. But we don’t have either. So, when you see those doomsday slop videos promising dew harvesting at pennies on the dollar, don’t listen to them. It’s mostly hype. You need to know this so you don’t spend countless hours trying to make it work and then judging yourself. Physics doesn’t answer to our whims. It only answers to itself. Moving on… ### What works: rain harvesting Rain harvesters can actually help you in a drought. We think of droughts as periods with no rain. But that’s wrong. Here’s what actually happens during a drought: Warmer air holds more moisture, and the “rain” gets trapped in the atmosphere. You go long periods without rain, and then it dumps down on you in violent storms. The parched ground can’t absorb the water, so it runs off. The problem compounds, and that’s why it takes so long to recover. Rain harvesting helps with that. When you harvest rain, you store some of the water that would normally run off. You’re not hoarding water. Plenty of it still reaches reservoirs and aquifers. Meanwhile, you’re watering crops and keeping the soil healthy. So, it’s actually a good idea to build one if you can. Here’s the problems: You need a very specific kind of roof to eliminate contaminants and toxins if you plan to use harvested rain for growing food and drinking. I’ve covered that in our illustrated guide. Most of us don’t have these roofs. Further research has shown that you _can_ use a shingled roof to some extent, but you have to be extremely careful filtering your water, and that’s the hard part. We looked into in-line hose filters as a solution, but they only work with city water pressure. They won’t work with gravity-fed systems. We’re currently looking into the feasibility of rigging other types of gravity-fed water filters to a barrel or IBC tote, but it’s slow going. Sometimes, we find something and… It’s out of stock. So. We’ve troubleshooted and come up with alternatives, but none of them are foolproof. None of them work 100 percent of the time. None of them completely eliminates the risks of contaminated water. But we’re working on it. That’s the point. ### What works: an atmospheric water generator We’ve been running a commercial atmospheric water generator for about a year now. It’s an H2O Machine from here. It really does generate several gallons of drinkable water a day. We tested the water, and it’s safe. You can search online and find a few different brands. I can’t speak to all the different models, but they all use the same tech and draw about the same amount of power. Paired with a beefy solar backup system, you’ve at least got water to sustain a small group over a long period of time. Upsides: You’re not storing hundreds of gallons of water. You’re not managing complicated harvesting and storage systems. You plug it up. You follow the instructions, and you have water. Downsides: Ours takes 72 hours to cycle when you first turn it on. So, you can’t just mothball it and then roll it out for emergencies. You turn it on, and leave it on. Fortunately, it’s a lot like an appliance. It’s _not_ consuming huge amounts of power when it’s not actively generating water. We use just enough water to cycle through the tank once a week. This keeps it in good working condition and prevents anything from growing in stagnant water or ruining the filters. For us, this makes the most sense. It’s not going to water your garden. If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars, this feels like a better investment than building a dew catcher. Sure, the dew catcher doesn’t use any electricity. But at 800 square feet for a few gallons, the AWG wins. So, that’s our solution. ### What works: A Dehumidifier There’s a lot of debate about the utility of a dehumidifier. Some say that’s what an atmospheric water generator _is_ , a glorified dehumidifier. We tried a new dehumidifier. We tested the water, and it was clean. But we’re going to do a more extensive test before recommending that. For the money and space, it’s vastly more efficient than anything else. A solid water filter like Boroux or GSR’s Guardian, or Grayl, will reduce the risk of metal contamination. These companies have said that while it technically works, they can’t recommend it as anything other than a last resort. Yes, it requires power. It’s risky. ### What works: composting toilet Some people are so sure they’ll always have a working toilet. Well, maybe. Then again, there’s no harm in having a backup. You don’t want to wait until there’s actually a problem before coming up with a solution. So, we adapted a cheap, portable composting toilet design for a long-term emergency situation. It works. Here’s the design. We’re still fine-tuning aspects of it. But it works. ### Ignore the doomsday slop Here’s one of the most important things I’ve learned over the last few years, trying to prep for various disasters and emergencies. Ignore the doomsday slop. Doomsday slop promises dew harvesting for pennies on the dollar. It shows you a root cellar full of vegetables while downplaying or completely hiding all the time and money invested in building the thing. It willfully overlooks how most of our systems still rely on some kind of functional grid and a network of supply chains while touting itself as “self-reliant.” It pushes batteries and generators that cost thousands of dollars. It ignores all the backend deals these influencers use to get their stuff for free, because their job is to market it to _you_ , regardless of whether it really works, regardless of whether you actually need it. In the real world, prepping is hard. Homesteading is hard. Survival is hard. You have to budget your resources. You have to drive to the hardware store and get the stuff. You have to endure the trial and error. You have to do it when you’re tired. You have to expect failure. You have to keep going. Sometimes, it feels like the homesteaders and market gardeners look down on the rest of us who don’t already have 20 acres and a greenhouse. It’s a little irritating when they go on and on about how “anyone can do it,” because when we try and then fail, it makes us feel like losers. It feels a little condescending when they lead us to believe composting kitchen scraps will save humanity. Look, we’re composting the kitchen scraps. We’ve done it for years now. But: If someone built their homestead 20 years ago, they were doing it in a vastly different landscape. Land was cheaper. Materials were cheaper. Your money went further. You could hold down a simple job to supplement your garden hustle. In most places, you had a reliable grid to fall back on when your crops failed or something broke. In fact, many of the original homesteaders actually worked seasonal jobs for part of the year to pay for their supplies. Nobody tells you that. We’re dealing with a completely different picture. We’re trying to build in an era defined by resource scarcity, buckling supply chains, unprecedented political instability, endless war, historic inequality, and endless inflation. No, it was never easy. But it’s harder than ever now. I can’t tell you how many times, just over the last couple of weeks, I’ve sighed when something I needed was out of stock or on back order—or it cost double what it would have just a few years ago. It’s really, really frustrating. This doesn’t mean we give up. But I think it’s important to be honest about the challenges and obstacles we face now. That’s why I’m trying to be honest about my trials and failures. My warka tower failed. My next design worked, but it’s not scalable. Fortunately, I’ve already got plans to repurpose all the parts. I’m moving on to the next idea. We’ve got a couple of things in place that work, and it’s better than nothing. It’s important to talk about the failures along with the successes. To me, that’s encouraging. Not the doomsday slop where everyone pretends they’ve already got it figured out and everything works the first time. In the real world, sometimes you come up with the perfect idea, but it costs too much to make or it takes up too much space. The materials you need are out of stock. Or a tariff has made them expensive overnight. That’s prepping in the real world. It’s messy. I love it. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Five years ago, it hit me. Despite attaining a PhD, despite earning tenure, despite winning all kinds of research and teaching awards… > _I didn’t know how to do anything._ Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zero. Several years ago, our air conditioner shut off. I called an HVAC service. They sent someone out. They charged us about a hundred bucks. All they had to do was… flip a circuit breaker. That’s all. It was just a little embarrassing. What else? I didn’t know how to fix a toilet. I didn’t know how to wire an appliance. I didn’t know how to grow a tomato. I didn’t know how to build a computer. I didn’t know how to do, well, anything. I had two skills: I could write a viral article, and I could write a long, boring one for an academic journal. Honestly, I barely knew how to change a tire. It was a little ironic that the book I enjoyed teaching most wasn’t a novel. It was _The Mind at Work_ , by Mike Rose, a book that uncovered the overlooked intellectual demands of blue-collar jobs. My developmental students loved it. (Well, most of them.) While my colleagues went around bragging about their degrees and demanding everyone address them as “ _Doctor_ ,” my students called me by my first name. I lived in quiet awe of the plumbers who came out to our house to install a sink or a water heater. Part of me wanted to be more like them. I’m not sure when exactly it occurred to me that my decades of book learning were about to become useless. Living through pandemics, wars, spiraling inflation, a boom in artificial intelligence, and other disasters certainly helped my awareness along. More and more, with every service call, with every visit from a plumber or electrician, my helplessness felt more and more like a death sentence. I was going to have to confront it. More than any prediction of deadly disease or famine, more than any fear of starving or going without water, what I really feared was the helplessness. That’s what kept me up at night, my lack of real-world, practical skills. > _I didn’t know how to do anything._ If the apocalypse erupted, if civilization collapsed, or we just had a week without power, I wouldn’t know what to do. I would feel like an idiot. I would contribute nothing to my community. I would have zero leverage with bandits. But that was five years ago. What changed? Everything. Two years ago, I quit my job as a professor. Deep down, beneath all the other reasons, there’s the core reason. I didn’t want to waste another minute of my life writing academic articles that nobody, not even the peer reviewers, really wanted to read. I didn’t want to spend another minute writing reports for deans who would rather go to wine tastings in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t want to spend another Friday stuck in an endless department meeting, talking about problems nobody was ever going to do anything about. I didn’t want to spend another weekend grading papers that students didn’t want to write, and I didn’t want to read. Not because they were bad papers. Because there were other things we needed to be doing. There were other things my students needed to be learning. > _How to do things._ Today, I passed the final exam for an electrical wiring course that was designed to take a year, with a 99 percent. I finished the course in a few months. I also finished a 200-page graphic novel that I made with Blender, one of the hardest programs out there. Oh, and I made a 200-page survival guide. My head feels like it’s going to melt. I gave myself a case of “mouse shoulder” that’s going to take a few weeks to heal. (I’m going to pace myself a little going forward…) But I did it. I’m not done by any means. I’ve got a lot more to learn. But: Now, I know how to build a computer. I know how to grow a tomato. I know how to rig up a drip irrigation system. I know how to change a tire. I know how to fix a toilet. I know how to wire appliances. I know how to fit pipes. I know how to install a receptacle. A few weeks ago, I installed a Level 2 charger for our EV, saving us about a thousand bucks. When we met with plumbers to talk about a permanent composting toilet, I could offer to design parts for them with 3D software. I could actually have conversations with them. One of them kept asking: “What do you do for a living again?” “I’m a… writer.” “Ah.” My experience might feel familiar to others out there, those of us who grew up in the suburbs in the 90s, with busy parents. It’s strange how fast generational knowledge can evaporate. My dad grew up in farm country, getting chased by bulls, using out houses, hunting ducks on rickety little boats. He knew how to fix just about anything in our house. When he didn’t, he had friends who could show him what to do. My grandpa was a car mechanic. He even knew how to fix a tank. My other grandparents knew how to grow vegetables and skin fish. For various reasons I won’t bore you with, these skills never made it to me. I’ll just bore you with this reason: Millennials like me were sold hard on book learning and fancy degrees. Everyone around us, including the television, assured us that we would do just fine as long as we studied hard and made good grades. Everything would turn out okay. My high school didn’t even have a vocational program. There was no shop class. There was no home economics. Not even a chemistry lab. Instead of learning how to replace a car battery, I learned how to play the piano and the cello. I learned how to run a mile in five minutes. I learned how to operate a cash register. I learned how to take tests. Now, everything has changed. The skills that were going to guarantee us long, lucrative careers have turned out to be complete liabilities. Now it’s the ones who _didn’t_ go to college that look smart. The ones who went to trade school, the ones who learned a vocation, they’re the ones least likely to be automated out of a job. They’ll be the last ones replaced. My brother wasn’t like me. Although we both hated school, he hated it even more. He refused to cooperate. He barely graduated high school. He never went to college. He studied electrical wiring at a tech school. Then he sort of drifted for a while, and now he works on cars for a living. Out of all my friends, with all of our fancy degrees and awards, he’s the one with the best career prospects. My dad often said he wished my brother were more like me. Now I wish I were more like my bother. If I had it all to do over again, I’m not sure I would’ve gone into teaching. I’m not sure I would’ve subjected myself to the endless hours of studying for exams and writing a dissertation. After all, I was always going to wind up here. If you’re someone who pays attention to the climate news, if you’ve been following the trajectory of AI, then you don’t need me to predict the future for you. It’s pretty clear where things are headed. While this or that viral article will tell you all the reasons why you should fill your house with canned food, there’s something even more important, and it’s a lot harder. > _Learn how to do something._ It’s the most important thing you can do. Learn how to do something that will serve you in the future. Learn something that will make you harder to replace with a robot. Learn how to do something that will help your friends and family. Learn something that you can use to trade goods and services. You don’t have to learn it in one day. You don’t have to learn it in a month. You don’t even have to learn how to do it well. Not at first. Learn how to do it badly. Learn how to make mistakes. Learn how to get frustrated. Learn how to give up and then come back to it a few days later. There’s another good reason you should learn how to do something: The technofeudalist overlords don’t want you to learn how to do anything. Not anymore. They want you to rely on their robots. They want you to keep delegating your life to them. They want you to be helpless. When you’re helpless, when you don’t know how to do anything, you’re easier to control. There’s one more reason: When you learn how to do something, you gain more than a skill. You gain confidence. You gain a sense of self-worth. You gain a little peace of mind. You’re not worthless. You’re not helpless. When disaster hits you, you’ll be able to figure things out. You’ll be able to keep learning how to do things. You don’t have to learn how to do everything. Just learn how to do one thing. Go from there. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

The richest man on earth is now worth $1 trillion. We’re talking about a guy who stinks at coding, despite constantly bragging about it, a guy who pays gamers to level up his characters for him. Think about that for a minute. The richest guy on the planet doesn’t even truly enjoy games. He doesn’t seem to understand that leveling up your character is part of the fun. That’s the problem with this brand of guy, the kind that ultimately has to amass $1 trillion in order to feel any sense of self-worth. Elon Musk hates himself. You can tell. If it takes a trillion dollars to fill you up, to make you feel good about yourself, you’ve got massive problems. Unfortunately, instead of dealing with them, he inflicts them on us. Imagine hating this planet so much that you devote your entire life to trying to escape it, to go live on a dead red one. Imagine hating people so much that you want to replace them all with robots. That’s our billionaires. So far, nothing we’ve tried has managed to get rid of these parasites. Nothing is working. We can’t seem to build a team. We seem to be stuck in a loop where we constantly fight each other, over the most trivial things, while the parasites have an odd way of banding together in order to protect their own interests. Isn’t that weird? Bezos. Altman. Gates. Thiel. Karp. Zuck. Trump. Vance. They can barely stand each other, and yet they seem to find ways to cooperate to further their own collective goals. And so, in this moment, we see a lot of people desperate to find something to hope for, and very quick to judge anyone who doesn’t offer it. Personally, I have a very troubled relationship with hope. I’m suspicious of it. I’m suspicious of the word. I’d rather talk about reality. That’s my calling. One day, I got curious about the word _hope_. It’s such a polarizing idea. It inspires some of us, and it makes others cringe. I wanted to know why. So I looked it up. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ancient philosophers defined hope “mostly as an attitude to reality that [was] based on insufficient insight into what is true or good.” That definition hits you in the face. It’s not how most people in the world today define that word. But it points to why many of us cringe when we hear it, especially when it’s used to dismiss us. Hope makes an appearance in Greek mythology. Most people probably know the myth of Pandora, but they don’t know the full story. They know the gods made her. They know she was the first woman. They know she was sent to earth as a punishment (sigh). They know about the box, even though it’s actually a jar. They know she opens the jar out of curiosity, letting loose evil spirits and diseases—along with hardship and sorrow. But they forget about hope. Hope doesn’t escape. Once Pandora realizes that the jar contains evil, she seals it shut. She traps the last evil inside the jar, and that’s hope. > _Alone there, Elpis, in her indestructible home, > remained within, beneath the lip, nor by the door > escaped, because the vessel’s lid had stopped her first, > by will of aegis-bearing, cloud-compelling Zeus. > Among the people wander countless miseries; > the earth is full of evils, and the sea is full; > diseases come by day to people, and by night, > spontaneous, rushing, bringing mortals evil things > in silence, since contriving Zeus removed their voice. > And thus from Zeus’s mind there can be no escape._ _—Hesiod, Works and Days, 700 B.C._ Of course, scholars have debated the word _elpis_ (hope) for centuries. They’ve suggested it might not be hope so much as “expectation” or “awareness.” In that case, the myth makes more sense. Hope isn’t really _elpis_ itself. It’s the absence of _elpis_ or awareness, meaning that if everyone knew the full implications of opening the jar, they would all give up and just sit around waiting to die. Instead, hope (or the absence of _elpis_) keeps everyone living in varying degrees of stubborn defiance or blissful ignorance of all the evils in the world. And that sounds pretty much like the situation today, doesn’t it? When you’re going up against a trillionaire… Where do you find hope? Hesiod’s original myth leaves the meaning of hope ambiguous, and it’s probably on purpose. On the one hand, the ancient Greeks saw hope as essential to coping with the world’s evils. On the other hand, they also saw hope as a temptation and a curse. Hope could lead to false expectations. It could nurture passive acceptance and complacency. It wasn’t inherently good. The Stoics also regarded hope with suspicion. As the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, hope always accompanies fear. He described the two as “bound up with one another… like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to.” Hope by itself didn’t make things better. For Seneca, both fear and hope “belong to a mind in suspense… Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.” That’s another interesting definition of hope: the act of projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present. Creating a mind in suspense… Nietzsche believed hope “prolongs the torments” of humanity, because it distracts us from the present with promises of future salvation. There’s a lot of truth to that notion. By the medieval era, Christian theological approaches to hope focused largely on enduring the world’s evils instead of changing them. Hope was more about patience and tolerance than activism. You just had to get through this life so you could reunite with your god in heaven, and then you could live forever in eternal happiness. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine still paid some attention to action, but it rarely got put into practice in ways we would recognize. That’s the kind of hope that Nietchze inherited. That’s why he was so harsh. We see it a lot today. Unfortunately, the passive version of hope has come to dominate our discourse. Everyone throws that word around, without really stopping to think about its history or its complicated meaning. Often, someone uses that word to put themselves in a position of authority over us. They use that word to judge us. They use that word to get us to shut up when we’re talking about things they don’t want to think about. In other words, it’s a silencing move. Authoritarians often use hope and vague promises about future utopias to dismiss criticism and silence dissent. They use it to reject solutions that call for too much sacrifice or inconvenience. They use it to pacify resistance. If you can channel everyone’s energy and emotions into the passive version of hope, then you can defuse actions that threaten your power. And your wealth. Why else would these billionaires talk about colonizing space and unleashing boundless productivity with robots, while building bunkers to hide from the world they control? They’re floating false hope and empty promises. Deep down, maybe they don’t even believe their own promises. We’ve seen how these authoritarians weaponize hope in order to shut down hard conversations about the future. They use hope to advance false solutions to problems, ones that aren’t even designed to work, like carbon capture or aerosol injection. They call solutions they don’t like “pessimistic.” They don’t want solutions that work. They want solutions that sound good. That’s their version of hope. It’s been effective. ### Daoism over doomism Next, I got interested in hope described in other cultures. That’s where I ran into Confucianism and Daoism. In these philosophies, hope becomes a responsibility, not a passive emotion or an expectation of eternal happiness. In Confucianism, you have to cultivate your best self to help bring about balance and harmony. That’s the ultimate goal. Hope isn’t personal. It’s a group project. It’s not about how things turn out for you as an individual. It’s social and communal. Your hopes have to align with the greater good. Hope isn’t an escape hatch from struggle. Daoism treats hope as an expectation or anticipation for nature to restore balance and order to the world. For Daoists, it’s mostly about getting out of the way. There’s really no room for your own personal wishes and desires. Pursuing those tends to put you at odds with nature, and it leads to bad things. If you just want to stand back and let industrial civilization collapse, then maybe you’re not a doomer. You’re a Daoist. The same goes for “fighting fascism.” I’ve only started reading through the _Tao Te Ching_ , but it has some interesting things to say about oppression. You’re never going to beat fascists in a direct confrontation—not unless you have an army. (We don’t.) Instead, you have to outlast them. Daoist hope isn’t about getting back to brunch in 2029. It’s not about stopping the climate crisis or preserving our way of life. A Daoist doesn’t hope for everything to turn out the way they want. They hope for things to turn out the way they _should_ , even if that means they don’t turn out so great for us personally. You focus on freeing yourself of the personal, selfish desires that make the natural order so… hard to deal with. There’s a difference. As Daoists might say, we’ve already unleashed the destructive forces that are eventually going to wipe out industrial civilization, maybe even within our lifetimes. If that’s the case, then it’s arguably a good thing. Palantir doesn’t stand a chance against what the planet has in store for us. The forces we’re talking about make Musk look like an ant. So if you doubt our ability to overthrow the fascists, rest assured that nature will finish the job. To take comfort in that, you have to let go of the outcome you envisioned. You have to let go of brunch ‘29. Of all the approaches to hope I’ve seen, Daoism resonates the most with me. The more money you amass, the more data centers you build, the more killbots you make, the more stuff you’re just giving nature to blow apart. So, what do I hope for? At this point, my hopes don’t rest in elections. They don’t rest in activism. We might continue to engage in all of these things. But a Daoist would say you have to let go of your emotional attachment to the outcomes. Do these things because you believe they’re the right thing to do, not because you think they’ll bring back your carefree weekend brunch. Some of us never had that anyway. I’m hopeful that as the world crashes through tipping points, as ocean currents deflate, as glaciers melt, as land bakes, as the earth unleashes its full power of destruction against us, that some version of humanity will manage to hang on and build something from the rubble of this civilization. It’s iffy. There’s a growing chance that humans will end all life on earth, but that’s where I choose to be hopeful. Not brunch ‘29, but in preserving life on the planet. Elon Musk won’t be the last trillionaire. So… If you’re looking for hope, you don’t have to find it in promises you don’t believe in. Not tonight. And if you’re just looking for comfort, you don’t even need hope. Just learn to let go of the outcomes you wanted, and see the world the way it is. See how small the trillionaire is, and understand that he’s even more miserable, even more doomed, than the rest of us. Everything here has its own beauty, even the violent storms. The guy who pays gamers to level up his character, the guy who spent the best years of his life selling daydreams about Mars, will never sit still and enjoy watching the lightning for an afternoon. Not even one. You _can_. He'll never know what it feels like to actually be good at anything, other than lying and stealing. You probably do. In that sense, you have more wealth than he’ll ever have in a thousand lifetimes. That’s not just a platitude to make you feel better. That’s the kind of truth that doesn’t care how you feel about it. I hope the trillionaires die in their bunkers before they can finish destroying all life on the planet. Given their trajectory, that seems likely. You can’t live on a scorched planet with killbots and mercenaries. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. Nature will make it all worthless. It will restore balance. I hope life outlasts them. That’s my hope. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

So……. Remember back in early May, when a Substack newcomer penned the doomiest essay of all time, predicting a global famine by early July? That post went viral, inspiring discussion threads all over the internet packed with panicked Americans. Everyone was asking if they should take the author’s advice and stop paying their rent, abandon their financial responsibilities, and start forming “communities,” even though they had no idea where to start. As one redditor posted, “Is there gonna be a famine in America? I genuinely can’t sleep right now bro.” For months, we’ve seen active debates across the web, everyone trying to decide how bad it’s going to get. Should they brace for a total collapse of the financial system? Was money going to become worthless overnight? Would local courts and eviction hearings grind to a halt? In the viral author’s own words: > _If you can hear me, your life depends on what is in this article. I am not being dramatic. I am not overstating this. I am telling you that the data says the United States of America will run out of usable oil by July 4, 2026. Europe will run out this month. The food system that feeds you runs on diesel. Diesel runs out first. Read this. Understand it. Act on it today. Not tomorrow. Today. > > This is not a probability assessment. This is a warning. And the difference between a warning you act on and a warning you dismiss is measured in whether your family eats in August. > > Stop what you are doing and start acquiring the things that will keep you and your family alive. > > And hear me on this: stop treating your debt as your priority. Your credit card payment is not your priority. Your mortgage payment is not your priority. Your priority is physical survival. Food. Water. Fuel. Shelter. Community. Every dollar you spend servicing debt to financial institutions is a dollar you do not have for the things that will keep your family alive. > > In a systemic collapse, the institutions holding your debt will become insolvent. The currency you are using to pay them may become worthless. The enforcement mechanisms that collect on debts require a functioning legal system, and a functioning legal system requires a functioning society. When the diesel runs out and the shelves empty, the society you know stops functioning. Use every available resource to acquire what you need to survive the next months. Redirect what you have toward survival, not toward keeping a credit score alive in a system that is collapsing. You can settle debts in a depreciated currency later, if the creditor still exists to collect them._ Well, you can relax for now. There’s not going to be a famine, not as originally described. Since May, the author has steadily walked back his original claims. Very recently, he issued what amounts to a full retraction: “The tanks may not go dry in July as I predicted.” Apparently, the author didn’t account for demand destruction in his original analysis. Honestly, I’m not sure he knows what demand destruction is, but that’s what he describes. There’s a dozen reasons why the original predictions of tank bottoms were off. Here’s the important point: No, everything’s not going to be just fine, but you were never going to starve to death this summer. We still have a lot of problems to deal with, but that notion doesn’t lend itself to clickbait. So, no tank bottoms. No famine (this summer). No supply shock. No currency collapse. Just more inflation. Just more unemployment. Just more disruptions and supply rattles. Meanwhile, you are entirely expected to continue paying your rent, your mortgage, your bills. Even if you formed an off-grid commune last week, you’ll still pay property taxes. Count on it. The legal systems and enforcement mechanisms are all still functioning. Your mortgage and your debt were your responsibility and your priority this whole time. It was never going away. It will never go away, barring extinction-level events, in which case, your food stash won’t help much anyway… The retraction may never get half as much attention as the original prediction, so I want to amplify it. People who were getting ready to blow up their lives with the irresponsible advice laid out there should understand that there’s a better, calmer, more systematic way to get ready for these kinds of events. They’re coming, but you can’t approach them with the mindset you saw in that excerpt. That’s a highly flawed way to make it through the next decade. So, if there’s not going to be a famine, does that mean you stop preparing? No. Now is the _best_ time to prepare. Not for a complete collapse of legal and financial systems. Not for money to become worthless. Not for your rent or mortgage to disappear. Not for some Hollywood-infused hallucination. We’re going to go through something like this every year, and you need to adapt. You must find a way to sleep, even under the threat of famine. I’ll try to help with that. ### Heed the famine follies Let’s address the most dangerous notions, that somehow government systems will collapse or evaporate during a famine or a similar crisis, and that money will become worthless to the point that your debts dissolve. It’s a common talking point among preppers that gets repeated a lot. It’s simply not true. That hasn’t always happened during previous collapses. Your money may no longer buy you a loaf of bread, but I wouldn’t count on your debt going away. It’s naive, even wishful thinking. You should very much anticipate a government to remain active during any kind of crisis, and for it to get in your way. A famine didn’t keep Stalin from executing Ukrainians over allegations of food hoarding and cannibalism. It didn’t stop Mao Zedong from guarding silos full of grain, letting peasants starve at the gates. It didn’t alleviate the Irish from their jobs. The British government even forced them to work on construction projects in exchange for meager food rations. Starving men, women, and children built what are now called “famine roads,” paths that lead nowhere, just because the crown thought it would corrupt their souls to “give” them food to eat. On top of the “famine roads,” wealthy philanthropists also hired starving families to construct fake little castles, churches, monuments, and even ruins that served no real purpose. They’re called “famine follies.” Nobody would give you food if you were starving. You still had to earn it, even during a famine. Either the government or some wealthy individual commissioned these things. You’ll find plenty of other examples in the history books. Power structures don’t evaporate. If anything, they resort to increasingly oppressive and even ridiculous measures in order to maintain power. And so, a famine won’t stop your credit card company from seizing your assets if you fall behind on your payments. As the famine follies reveal, it doesn’t even matter if money becomes completely worthless. They’ll make you pay anyway, because _capitalism_. The cruelty is the point. So, how does it feel to know that even during the Irish famine, 1845-1852, seven long years, the Irish were still expected to show up for work, often to do completely pointless yet utterly grueling labor for starvation wages? ### What you _should_ be concerned about If that viral article was your first initiation to collapse and emergency preparedness, there’s a silver lining here. You’re awake now. Don’t lapse back into complacency. Now is the time to pay attention to the world of problems that the original author either didn’t mention, or barely touched on. For example: At least 60-70 percent of farmers across the U.S. have reported fertilizer shortages. They can’t get enough to plant all their crops. That’s a real number, not a bunch of AI hallucinations. How is that going to show up in supply chains this fall? Ah, we’re still not sure. But we know it’s not going to be _good_. That alone gives you enough reason to learn how to build a bulk food storage system and start growing your own, something you can do even if you live in a big city. (Scroll down...) But you can’t pretend a famine will dissolve your debts. Or free you from your lousy job. Even if it should. ### Here’s how you _don’t_ prepare There’s a problem with trying to talk about collapse in terms of absolutes: You can’t. When you try, it often generates only fear. For example: In 2022, the Vance family thought a full collapse of civilization was imminent. Scarred by the pandemic, followed by a major war and global supply shock, they wanted to escape modern life. They declined a family member’s offer to try living off the grid in a mountain cabin. Instead, they took their 14-year-old boy and vanished into the wilderness. Months later, authorities recovered their malnourished, mummified bodies. None of them had any real experience living outdoors, foraging, growing food, or even camping. They thought they could wing it. The Vance family’s tragic end resonates with me, and perhaps you, for a simple reason. Many of us have wanted to vanish into the woods over the last several years. The year 2022 was especially rough. Many of us were starting to realize, in our bones, that things weren’t going to get better. Nobody was coming to save us. We’ve scrolled all the doom. We’ve clicked all the clickbait about oncoming famines and black swan events. We’ve dreamed about life off the grid. Collapse trolls have unsubscribed from my newsletter and called me names because I dared to suggest staying on the grid, but they don’t really understand. Nobody believes you should just stay on the grid forever. You should stay, **until you have a plan ready**. It needs to be _executable_. Don’t be in a rush to escape. Take this valuable time to develop skills and build knowledge. As I wrote a few months ago, if you can’t leave the grid, _become_ the grid. Learn how to strip wires and install outlets. Learn how to hook up your own solar panels. Learn to grow. Learn to sew. Learn how to repair bicycles. Take a course in emergency medicine. It’s a gradual process. You often have to juggle it with your other responsibilities. There’s probably never going to be an event or a situation that allows you to devote 100 percent of your attention to preparing for a famine. Look at me. If I could do it, I would. I wouldn’t be here writing a newsletter. I would already be in my cabin in the woods, living the collapse life. Instead of disappearing into the woods, consider moving into a career that helps you prepare. Start training to become a nurse or a paramedic. Become a plumber or an electrician. Learn carpentry. Learn risk assessment. Make collapse your job. These days, I’m stripping my own wires and wiring my own devices. I’m halfway through a course on residential electrical systems. It’s going to be a while before I’m a licensed electrician, but I’m already on the way to knowing how to maintain our solar panels if the need ever arises. Power is power. Power to run grow lights indoors. Power to run hydroponic and aquaponic systems. Power to run water pumps. Power to run medical equipment for vulnerable family and neighbors. Power to run micro laboratories to manufacture medicine. You don’t learn this by sitting around trying to predict when a famine will hit and then revising your predictions over and over. Not everyone can move away to a farm. So what? ### Have you ever heard of Ron Finley? For years now, he’s been showing city dwellers how to grow gardens in urban food deserts. He started regenerative agriculture in the heart of downtown L.A. When the city tried to stop him, he took them on and won. So, don’t tell me you’re doomed because you live in a city. Don’t tell me you can’t do anything to prepare for a supply chain shock. You can. Ron Finely probably wouldn’t call himself a prepper, but he offers a vision of how communities would function in a collapse. > _Aren’t you worried someone’s going to take your food? > > No, that’s why it’s on the street!_ Later: > _If kids grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. > > If they grow kale, they eat kale._ And for the win: > _Don’t call me if you want to sit around in some cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit. If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit._ You can spend all your time in a cushy chair revising expectations for when this or that catastrophe is going to hit, or you can spend your time getting ready for the shitstorm you know is coming sooner or later. The shitstorm you’re already in… ### What really matters What matters is what you have ready when the time comes, whenever it does. That’s why some of us are already planting some shit. We already have our atmospheric water generators humming. We already have the dehumidifiers with water filters ready to go. We know what to do when another deadly virus starts spreading everywhere. Some of us never stopped doing it. I’ve spent years getting ready for all kinds of disasters. Not because I sat around trying to predict them with absolute certainty. They simply started happening to me. We got hit by an F3 tornado in the middle of a pandemic. We got stuck in a brushfire on the way home from school. My in-laws were living in Asheville when a hurricane flooded the mountains. We lived through the aftermath of Helene. My friends across town got their roofs blown off. That’s why I’m learning, and I put it all in a guide. I’m still working on it. By the way, did you hear a vet caught bird flu from a cat last month? Bird flu has learned how to jump from pets to their owners. Some of us predicted that years ago, and now it’s quietly happening, but nobody cares yet. They will. Bird flu is a great example of how a prepper’s mind actually operates. You make your preparations, and they become part of the background tapestry of your life. By the time the actual disaster drops, you probably won’t even be thinking about it. But when it happens, you’ll be ready. That’s why I love the Ron Finley approach so much. If you start building that now, even without the threat of immediate famine, then it’s going to be ready for you. Ron Finley isn’t talking about growing taters on your windowsill. He’s talking about taking over all the abandoned lots of a city and converting them into food gardens that everyone has access to, and everyone helps sustain. As he says: > _That’s the funny thing about sustainability. > > You have to sustain it._ It might sound naive, overly optimistic, or utopian to talk about converting unused city land into food gardens. It might sound unrealistic to talk about riding bicycles out in the country or making a composting toilet with a five-gallon bucket and a piece of foam. Here’s the blunt part: What else are you going to do? Are you going to keep doomscrolling? Are you going to keep leaving snarky comments on homesteading videos, reminding them that, no, most of us don’t own 20 acres in the country? Are you going to keep falling for articles that predict a famine in 60 days, and desperately cramming MREs under your mattress? It’s your call. ### Here’s the hard part It would be easy, at least by comparison, if you could just take the advice from that viral article and abandon all your responsibilities, just make prepping for a famine your sole purpose, your only priority, but that’s not it. That’s not how it works. You’re going to have to plan for a slow collapse, develop your skills, and form your communities, while continuing to participate in a ruthless economy that expects you to pay all your bills on time, famine or no famine, pandemic or no pandemic, hurricane or no hurricane, food or no food, utilities or no utilities. You’re also going to have to fight data centers and deal with local politicians, as well as corrupt local institutions. You’re going to have to fail and try again. Learn how to talk to your friends and family about these threats without activating their defense mechanisms and triggering their denial. That’s what I’m working on. At some point, a disaster will finally exceed our resilience. It won’t matter how much we prepped. It won’t matter what communities we built. We’ll die. Prepping also means accepting mortality. Does that make all your efforts worthless? That’s a question only you can answer. Some of us will want to fight for every day of life we can. Others will want a graceful, dignified exit from the struggle. For them, it’s enough to simply see their end and have time to accept it. We now live in an age when anything can happen. All bets are off. Remember the famine follies of Ireland. Maybe they’re not pointless. Maybe they’re living testaments to what we can expect, monuments to the inane attempts the current ruling class will resort to in order to retain the illusion of power, and the illusion of wealth, even as it all crumbles. As for the summer famine… That appears to be… Canceled. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

It’s hard to write a post about _nothing_. I’m going to try. A long time ago, I read entire books about silence and nothing. At some point, I came across the research on how our brains process silence. Our brains treat silence like sound. So, silence isn’t nothing. Neither is nothing. Right now, it’s exactly what many of us need. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of vapid noise hitting me from all directions for the past few weeks. Everyone has an opinion and a prediction, but 99 percent of them no longer connect with reality. The algorithms hit me with everything from “we’re going to starve in 8 weeks” to “Trump is totally going to resign in six months” to “buy a gun for democracy.” And… I’ve had enough. No, I’m not going to go buy a firearm and join the fictitious armed revolution. I’m not going to cheer any politician’s latest bid for attention. Honestly, I don’t feel like protesting anything at the moment. I don’t feel like getting involved with any movements. I don’t feel like endorsing anyone’s side in an argument. I’m glad to hear that data centers are falling behind schedule and getting canceled, and this or that politician is finally getting some stuff done. I don’t feel like forwarding someone else’s cause. Right now feels like a time for reflection, because whew boy, did all the talking heads just recently get a bunch of stuff wrong, or what? The bad predictions and fruits of false hope have really been piling up lately. The stench is… So, it’s refreshing not to have any new opinions on anything for once. At the moment, I have no new predictions. I have no new warnings. I have nothing to prove that we haven’t gone over a dozen times. Based on what I’m reading, neither does anyone else. They’re simply regurgitating. What we have in front of us is enough. It feels like the world needs to be quiet right now, but it’s not. It’s loud. To paraphrase David Byrne, everyone’s talking a lot—but they’re not saying anything. They’re not listening. They’re just pouring thoughts into a landfill. There’s a moment that feels like this: You’ve already expressed your opinion. You’ve already explained your research. You already cited your sources. You already tried to convince the world, and the world rejected all your solutions to all the problems. Now, here you are. Silent. That’s a great time for silence. It’s a great time to stop trying so hard. It’s a great time not to do anything. Nothing is a great space to fill. Currently, I’m trying to organize our garage to make room for more garden planning, more seed saving, more survival projects. I’m finally getting rid of the last things from my old office at my old job as a professor. It occurred to me what I’m doing. I’m making nothing. I’m emptying. Sometimes, you have to empty before you can fill. You have to create the nothing before you create the something. The world often expresses discomfort, even fear at the idea of nothing. Studies show that the average person would rather shock themselves than spend 15 minutes in solitude. They would rather babble and gossip than sit in quiet reflection. We constantly occupy ourselves. We fill our heads, even if it’s with garbage. We mistake clutter for substance. That’s how scared we are of nothing. But nothing isn’t a void. Empty can be good. So can meaningless. Maybe we have far too much meaning in the world already. Maybe we should stop and simply look at or be with parts of the world before we try to ascribe meaning to them. Maybe we should stop asking what every single event “means.” From my perspective, this endeavor seems to be driving us crazy. Can’t things just happen? Can’t they just exist? If we would just focus on that part, without all the need to make noise and find meaning in everything, we might finally find the peace we’re so desperately searching for. It’s right in front of us, and we can just take it. You don’t need to say anything. You don’t need to join anything. You don’t need to save anything. You don’t need to predict anything. If you just want to lie or sit somewhere and stare for a while, or you just want to go for a long walk, or you just want to clean out your closet… You can just do that. You don’t need to prove anything. Not right now. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

A ton of articles out there tell you _what_ to stock up on. Many of them will tell you _why_. They don’t tell you _how_. Over the years, I’ve watched a few people build panic stockpiles based on lists of items that “will run out soon.” The items sit in the back of their pantry for years, and then they wind up throwing them out. That helps nobody. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing wrong with maintaining a strategic stockpile of food and supplies. The Amish and the Mormons have been doing it for generations. But they don’t simply rush out to stores and fill their carts with perishable foodstuffs based on fears generated by the latest headlines. For them, it’s a mindset. It’s a habit. It’s a lifestyle. It’s just what they do. In a recent article, I pushed back on the idea of “stocking up” and presented a different approach that focused more on utilizing what was right in front of you, learning to do without some items, and putting our energy into localizing production of things like medicine, where it’s just not feasible to “stock up” for more than a year—and even that’s often difficult. That article stopped several times to make clear that we’re not rejecting the idea of keeping extra food and supplies on hand. Neither are we under the impression that we can survive by exclusively dining out on weeds. But “stocking up” is often not sufficient. When we focus on that exclusively, it ignores all the other things we could be doing. But if and when you decide to build a food reserve, there’s ways that work and ways that don’t. There’s sustainable ways, and wasteful ones. We might have a difference of opinion about what’s going to hit us and when. But most of us reading these kinds of articles agree, it’s wise to keep a deep pantry. As of now, in early June, the shelves aren’t empty. The trucks are still driving. You still have time to execute a plan. That’s the thing: “Stocking up” isn’t a plan. I’ve covered bulk food in my guide, but it’s worth revisiting under the circumstances. Years ago, I remember watching a documentary on preppers who stockpiled canned food. Every few years, they threw out the expired cans and bought new ones. This would be an example of an expensive, wasteful way to prep. I remember reading a handful of articles about people who filled their pantries with canned beans at the beginning of the pandemic, didn’t eat them, and then threw them away. I also remember reading at least one viral thread about a prepper couple who spent hundreds of dollars on canned chili and survival food, but then wound up in the Texas ice storm with no way to prepare it, not even a can opener. Don’t be like them. ### Simplify your diet, permanently Food storage gets less complicated when you don’t have a problem eating black bean soup and dried tomatoes every day for weeks, even months. Americans have gotten a bit spoiled. They’re used to rotisseried chickens and sushi on demand. I haven’t picked up a rotisseried chicken in ten years. I’m doing okay… This suggestion falls into the broader category of John Michael Greer’s popular adage, “Collapse now and avoid the rush.” The sooner you can simplify your diet, the easier time you’re going to have stocking up. First off, I would recommend adapting your diet to foods with a long shelf life to the extent you can. Over the last several years, we’ve cut out meat, dairy, and eggs completely. They’re not sustainable on any scale. So when egg prices go up, or beef goes up, we see it as a bellwether, but we’re not freaking out—and that’s a good thing. My spouse likes tofu, and they’re currently learning how to make their own. It’s easier to store soy beans than soy products. My daughter likes frozen veggie nuggets, but she’s fine eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and apple sauce. It’s not difficult to stock up and rotate through those items. We focus on dry goods: Beans, lentils, quinoa, oats, rice, pasta, wheat berries. We can grind our own flour with a stone mill, and we’re going to start doing that more often. We keep rather deep stocks of these items. It’s not super difficult or expensive. On top of that, we donate to local food banks. In fact, we’ve given thousands of dollars to them over the years. We also finally have a family or two we feel comfortable enough telling about our stocks, and we’re sharing. We also stock dehydrated lentils, beans, and chickpeas that cook up fast during an emergency, if we lose power. You can heat water to a boil with tea candles and a small folding stove in about 15-20 minutes. ### Figure out where you’re going to put it Next, you need a place to store your food. As I’ve explained in my guide, you can convert part of your house to storage. You can convert a closet or part of a basement. Avoid garages, sheds, and attics. They get hot. Put up shelves. Before you put up your shelves, measure the kinds of items you’re going to store. Make sure you’re putting enough space between the shelves. Nothing would stink more than to put up a bunch of shelves, and then realize none of them will actually fit what you need to put there. ### Calculate how much food you’ll need You can find plenty of food calculators online. They’ll tell you what to stock for how long, based on the number of people in your family. You can adjust it for your diet. Nutritionists have noted that most foods will start to lose vitamins after a couple of years in storage, but they retain protein, carbs, and fiber. Most of us just won’t have space to store food for longer than 6-12 months, especially if you’ve got a bigger family. 6-12 months: That’s considered a good goal for preppers. If you have more space and the resources to store more, that’s great. ### Figure out where to get your food Many of us would rather not hoard food from local stores. Instead, focus on retailers that offer bulk foods, even if they’re online. You can try Harmony House, Wheatland Seed, Palouse Brand, Country Life Natural Foods, North Bay Trading, and similar outlets. I would avoid too many emergency food buckets. If you’re extroverted, you can try farmers’ markets. I’d suggest telling people you’re interested in bulk foods. Skip the whole “we’re going to have a famine” bit. Focus on sustainability and self-reliance. They’ll understand. We also found a couple of local stores that let us order foods in bulk and either have them shipped directly, or we can pick them up. That way, we’re not depleting shelves and contributing to the panic. We’re just preparing. ### Develop a rotation system You’ll want to store dry goods in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, inside 4-5 gallon buckets. You’ll either want a bucket opening tool, or just buy buckets with gamma seal lids that are easy to open and close. You’ll also want a container system, so you can transfer food from big containers into smaller, usable ones. We keep a lot of our dry goods in big steel canisters with scoops, and we scoop into mason jars as needed. You can save a lot of freezer space by transferring frozen foods into mylar bags. We started doing that, and it doubles our capacity. We don’t keep a lot of frozen or packaged food, because it’s more of a liability if the power goes out. We keep my kid’s food in a chest freezer, connected to a backup power source. That’s about it. ### Make sure you have ways to cook your food You also need a way to cook your food. This is one reason why we keep dehydrated goods—not just dry goods. It’s easier to cook dehydrated food during an emergency. You can buy dehydrated beans and lentils, etc, without having to break your budget on expensive freeze-dried pouches or food buckets. It’s cheaper, and it’s healthier. What else? Tea candle stoves, camping stoves, candles, fuel tablets, and plenty of matches and ferro rods. We also have a couple of solar cookers, and we know how to make a decent one with foil tape and boxes, or even an old satellite dish. We don’t use propane stoves. Propane goes fast, and it takes up a lot of space. It’s also flammable. I’m not a fan of keeping large amounts of highly flammable, pressurized containers in my house. But if you want to, that’s your call. ### Start small You don’t have to build a famine-proof pantry overnight. Start small, with a few items you know you’ll need. Make the space. Go from there. Often, it’s not about what you store. It’s how. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

_I don’t want knowledge. I want certainty._ —David Bowie, _Earthlings on Fire_ When I was a kid, my first introduction to David Bowie was the album _Earthlings on Fire_. I listened to it every night when my mom was having her first schizophrenic episodes. It was so weird, it made me feel normal. The lyrics from “Earthlings on Fire” have stayed with me over the years. Eventually, I learned that Bowie was alluding to British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who once wrote “What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.” I didn’t really understand that observation. But now, I get it. Boy, do I get it. You? That line explains so much about what’s happening now. All the strange behavior, all the bizarre positions and hot takes, all the hills people are choosing to die on, all the arguments over trifles, it’s all because so many of our friends and families aren’t seeking the knowledge that would save us. They’re seeking the certainty that makes coping easier, even if it makes things worse. It’s also gotten very fashionable to try and predict things. Recently, there was another round of speculation about Donald Trump’s health. A handful of writers and journalists started to insist that he’d died (again) and that the government was trying to cover it up, only for Trump to emerge back into public life the other day. We’ve been through this a few times. This time, I was struck not by the possibility of Trump’s death, but by the certainty of the writers who turned out to be wrong. They just wouldn’t let it go. And it’s not just them. Everywhere you look, a growing number of people in every political party and ideology are increasingly certain about their beliefs, hungry for arguments, and completely unwilling to consider the possibility that they’re wrong. It’s almost like the more chaos we endure, the more stubborn everyone gets. Have you ever heard of Scott Galloway? A marketing professor with a reputation for predicting things and telling the rest of us how to live, Galloway enjoys a net worth of $100 million. Back in 2023, he predicted that Donald Trump would withdraw from the 2024 election as part of a plea deal, citing all kinds of evidence and presenting his call as fairly certain. We know the rest… It’s interesting how the same handful of “experts” continue to dominate our feeds with their increasingly conspiratorial headlines and lousy predictions. A few years ago, they were the ones bashing doomers and telling everyone to be cautious before running with sensational headlines. Now they’re the ones doing it. They’re still making the same mistakes, though. A few years ago, someone told me about dragon king theory. Introduced by Didier Sornette about two decades ago, dragon king theory describes events like black swans, with one important difference. You can predict dragon king events to some extent. You have to pay attention to the outliers. 99 percent of experts out there dismiss anomalies and outliers because they assume they know how systems operate, but those small factors often reveal patterns or principles that explain why an unlikely event can happen, something big, without apparent warning. It’s not that the warnings weren’t there. They were just subtle. Dragon king events are becoming the norm now. So many of our beloved podcast hosts and opinion columnists are trying to understand this world with outdated paradigms. They still don’t get it. The record floods, the storms, the wars, the surprise upheavals in politics, the fact that the Epstein files didn’t spark a revolution, and so on, all these things that were confidently predicted didn’t go the way anyone said they would, because they’re not looking at reality. They’re looking at a version of the world they want to be true. They’re clinging to certainty, not truth. It’s strange. We live in a time of prediction markets, where you can bet on everything from basketball games to wars. Everyone wants to know what oil and gas prices will do. Everyone wants to know how a crypto will perform. We’ve got endless online grifters running around acting like prophets. As the world becomes more and more unpredictable, everyone seems to crave more certainty. People who offer certainty are enjoying more popularity than ever. Even if they’re wrong… I’ve been digging through social psychology again, and it confirms this behavior. Humans value certainty over objective truth. The less they know, the more confident they feel about their opinions. They don’t want to read more or learn more, because that introduces complexity and ambiguity. It’s the opposite of certainty. So it makes sense that as the world unravels, people will seek certainty over nuance. Haven’t you noticed it? They don’t want to consider three or four points of view. They don’t want to hear the both/and arguments. They want either/or. They don’t want to acknowledge that three things can be true. They don’t want to stop and examine their assumptions. They want to make up their minds, and they want to proceed on that. If you complicate their narrative, they’re going to lash out at you. They’re going to feel threatened. They’re going to attack. It doesn’t help that our minds often conflate being wrong with physical pain. Put it all together, and you have a recipe for the current mess. People will accept a bad prediction over a nuanced one. They’ll seek a bad explanation over an honest one, especially if it lets them preserve their ego. They want certainty, not knowledge. That’s a bad recipe for the 2020s and 2030s. One thing we know for sure is that the world is going to become more unpredictable. The billionaires and their puppet politicians are going to act with increasing indifference toward all the old principles that govern the world. More and more, they’re going to act out of motives that only make sense to other psychopaths, or the motives will be entirely hidden from us. It won’t stop an army of podcast hosts from trying to predict what’s going to happen next, and an audience increasingly convinced that they know better than everyone else what’s going on and what we should do. These days, it feels like overconfidence is the new currency. It doesn’t matter how right you are. It only matters how confidently you say it. How certain… Meanwhile, I’ve found myself going through a strange transformation. Yeah, all the threats remain real. Pandemics. Famines. Ferocious storms. You name it. But my family has found peace and even comfort in focusing on preparations, and not just the kind you can buy, but actually learning skills. For the last several months, I’ve been building things, planting things, stripping wire, and making plans. When you do that, then your worldview changes. In a world that craves certainty, I’m choosing knowledge. Honestly, I’m not sure what’s going to happen later this year. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the 2030s. I know what I’ve read. I know what’s likely. I know what I can learn and what I can make to prepare. That feels like enough. I’ve made some predictions that turned out to be true, and I’ve made some that weren’t true. I don’t regret preparing, because it was always a path to knowledge. It wasn’t sitting around trying to predict the date of some politician’s death or what month famine will arrive at our door. You can’t predict things like that. All you can do is stay informed and keep learning. The most important thing right now is to avoid certainty. Avoid groupthink. Question yourself. Consider multiple viewpoints. Resist the urge to make up your mind. Listen. I’m choosing to be okay with uncertainty because I’ve got knowledge. It alleviates the need to predict things or speak with beaming confidence. It helps you plan for multiple realities. It helps you sleep at night. In my experience, the certainty doesn’t solve anything. It only makes you more anxious. It only makes you angrier. It only makes you more scared, not less. You want knowledge. Not certainty. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

When you’re trying to learn about survival, you hear this a lot: > _Cities will become death traps._ It’s not helpful. We have to face an unpleasant truth, that 300 million Americans aren’t going to move out to the country. If we all did that, it would collapse rural ecosystems. 300 million people and counting can’t homestead. From there, conversations mutate into platitudes about building community and the fate of the lone wolf. I’ve got a few things to say about all this. I’ll keep it interesting. Let’s talk about community. It’s probably the core aspect of surviving in a city. Everything else depends on your ability to cooperate with your neighbors. Growing food. Obtaining water. Quelling violence and unrest. And so on. In a city, other people not knowing how to survive will absolutely have an impact on you. Their problems will become _your_ problems. Forget the warm, gooey emotional stuff. Maybe your neighbors will never come running to your defense in the middle of the night. Still, you want to do everything in your power to prevent them from becoming a threat and a liability. And if you happen to be a good person, something inside you just can’t stand to watch suffering. Some of us already have plenty of experience on that front. We know it’s not easy. In fact, some of us who’ve actually managed communities might want to run screaming from that word, because we’ve been there. It’s rough. I’ve never managed a commune, but I used to run an entire program that oversaw dozens of teachers and hundreds of students. I’m learning how to grow potatoes, but I already know how to manage people. It’s not fun. I kind of hate it, and I’ve wanted a break from it. For a few years, I even trained and supervised AP English teachers all over the state. I planned conferences, workshops, and festivals. I drove around and observed classrooms and offered constructive feedback to adults who weren’t always receptive, and often mistook me for a subordinate. I scheduled all the classes. I wrote all the reports. I managed all the interpersonal conflicts. I oversaw the discipline issues. I attended all the endless meetings. It was a lot. During the summers, I helped run academic camps with dozens of staff and hundreds of kids. I started out as an RA and worked my way up to a site supervisor. In my 20s, I was putting other people’s kids to bed, taking them to the hospital, dealing with their nightmares and anxiety attacks, planning activities for them, and controlling my anger when they told me off. I had to manage athletes with affluenza who were twice my size, who sometimes threatened to “whip” me for my attitude. Then said they were “joking.” I’ve dealt with men in their 30s throwing tantrums in their own classrooms and bullying their own students, then quitting halfway through the semester. I’ve calmed down vice chancellors screaming profanities at their own interns. I’ve talked down potential school shooters with real mental health problems and real guns. I’ve put my own life on the line, because I didn’t have a choice. I’ve wrangled with bureaucrats over paperwork. I’ve comforted students who were dealing with homelessness, terminal illness, dying parents, extreme abuse, suicide, you name it. I’ll never forget the day one of my teachers came into my office, closed the door, and told me one of her students had exposed himself to her. So, I get it. Even when I was a kid, my mom didn’t take care of me. I took care of her. I took care of my brother. Toward the end of high school, I was doing the cooking and cleaning. I was buying the groceries. I was doing the laundry. I cleaned up after my mom’s bathroom accidents. I took her to the hospital when she fell down and cut herself. When she got lost, I drove her home. When she forgot to pick me up from track practice, I backpacked the three miles. Then I started dinner. When she said I was an alien clone and tried to kill me, I didn’t get to run away from that. I had to stay. Not because it felt good. Not because I got points for building community. That’s just how we survived. When someone starts talking about the virtues of community, it’s easy to tell if they’ve mainly stood on the receiving end—not the giving. They have no idea what it takes to run one. They have no idea how many nights and weekends you give up, and how much of yourself you sacrifice for it. For some of us, community often means other people standing around complaining while you do half the work. It’s people promising to do things and then backing out at the last minute. It’s people not showing up. Or it’s the wrong people showing up and getting in the way, slowing everything down. It’s listening to the ones who did nothing tell you how to do everything better next time. If you’ve been here, then you might smirk a little when someone else warns you about being the lone wolf. Are you kidding me? You mean I don’t have to worry about everyone? I can just take care of myself? Sounds kinda _nice_. I’ve been trying out the whole lone wolf thing, and I gotta tell ya. It’s been refreshing. I’ve enjoyed it. I _like_ not having to solve everyone’s problems and deal with all their bullshit. Part of me wishes it could go on forever. So when someone starts talking about how I can’t survive without community, I think what they mean is _they_ wouldn’t survive without people like _us_. Anyway: That’s the life that awaits anyone who wants to build a community. Those of us who’ve been responsible for communities in the past aren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of doing it during an apocalypse. We’ve already seen people at their best and their worst, and the worst is a lot to handle. We know how it’s going to go. Collapse is a group project where you’ll get stuck doing a lot of the work, mainly so that your neighbor doesn’t bash you over the head for your carrots one day or start leaving big poops in the middle of your yard. That’s why you’re going to build the community. Not because you want to. Not because it’s going to feel good. But for simple, practical reasons. To keep those around you from getting you killed. That’s why. For months now, I’ve wondered why it irritates me so much to hear the word “community” thrown around with such a casual tone. I’ve wondered why a big part of me is so reluctant to engage in community building. Well, that’s why. For many of us, the ones who’ve run the communities in the past, we know how much of ourselves we have to give in order to make them functional. Maybe you understand all this, and it’s why you’re in no hurry to start doing that just yet, even though you also understand that it’s going to be imperative. I didn’t have the option of not taking care of my mom. If I didn’t, she would literally just lie on the couch until you could smell her from the driveway. She would sit and smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and eat candy. She would crap on the carpet. She would fall in the bathroom and start to bleed out. It was hard to love someone who constantly berates you and threatens to kill you, but for me it was a crash course in a fundamental truth. Your well-being is bound up with the well-being of others, no matter what you think about them, no matter how much you want to get away from the responsibility. It’s there, always. You have to take care of the people around you, even if you don’t want to, even if you don’t love them, even if you don’t like them very much. That’s the hard side of community. Building a community and taking on a lot of the work yourself might be the only way you preserve some sense of order and calm in your corner of the world. It’s how you’re going to keep yourself alive. Why on earth would you build a community? That’s why. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support ##

I almost can’t believe I wrote this, but I did. It’s been a long time coming. Every day, the internet dumps another bucket of survival slop on our heads. Lists of items we should buy before stores run out. Things we should start growing _now_. Various ways that billionaires are going to kill us off. There’s something missing from it all. We’ll get to that in a minute. But first: If you’re worried about starving, do you know what foods could feed most Americans that already grow in their back yards (if they would just stop dousing them in chemicals)? I’ve got a whole section on that here. So, while everyone else is sprinting through stores and bodyslamming each other over the last pack of beef jerky, you can just walk into your yard and pick dandelions. Just let them grow. You can just transplant some kudzu stems and then do the bare minimum to keep them from dying. If you live in the south, you know what’ll happen. Your neighbors will hate you, but civilization is going to collapse anyway, right? They’re all going to starve in a few weeks, so what does it matter? Let the kudzu grow. Eat it. Just don’t tell them that the ugly invasive vine taking over the subdivision is actually a super food. Or, if you want to build community, tell them that you just did everyone a big favor by rewilding the place. Does that sound absurd? It’s interesting, because what I find absurd are all the articles telling us to spend money we don’t have on more stuff, because the stuff is going to get more expensive, but they leave out the fact that it’s never going to get cheaper again, and maybe you don’t actually need some of that stuff…? We don’t have to kill ourselves with homesteading. We could grow potatoes and beans, cultivate weeds, and that would just about do it. Yes, an experienced gardener will grow a wider variety, but you can just start there. It’s fine. There’s an idea here, and it runs against the American groupthink. Instead of thinking about all you have to buy, all you have to do, all you have to prepare, stop and take a step back. Think about what you could _not_ do, what you could _not_ buy, what you could make easier, just by adjusting your perspective. Consider that dandelions and kudzu both pack more nutrients than most other greens we’re taught to see as “food.” I’m not saying don’t grow kale or spinach. I’m just saying, maybe you don’t have to do that. Maybe learn to like weeds. Isn’t that easier than clicking on all these articles about oncoming famines, and then feeling guilty for not starting your edible garden? If you didn’t mow your lawn this month, then odds are you have food. I’m speaking in hyperbole, but you get the idea. If civilization is going to break down, if the rule of law is going to evaporate, then the first thing on my list isn’t going out and buying guns or stocking up on food. It’s not even planting a bunch of potatoes, although that’s a logical #2. It’s weeds. It’s planting weeds and ugly plants everywhere I can, plants that don’t require a lot of maintenance, plants that are, in fact, hard to kill, plants that 99 percent of everyone around me would never consider edible, unless I told them. Now, that’s a collapse plan. It makes as much sense as any other collapse plan I’ve seen out there. And yes, of course, stock up on items. But also… Consider _not_ stocking up as the default move. Start thinking about the day you simply won’t be able to get that thing anymore. Again, you’d be stunned at what plants have medicinal applications, backed by peer-reviewed research. I’m not going to list them all here, but they’re covered in the guide, and that’s just a starting point. Every day, a dozen articles slide across my feed warning me about oncoming supply shocks. It happened during the early days of the war in Ukraine, and it happened during the bird flu crisis. It happened with tariffs. Not one of them has asked the key question: > _How do you live**without** that thing?_ How do you live without beef? How do you live without eggs? How do you live without wheat? How do you live without milk? How do you live without coffee? That’s the real question. Some things you can’t live without, but there’s another way to get them that doesn’t feed the machine. For example, the Open Insulin Foundation has been working on an open-source formula for years. Maybe instead of trotting out “stock up on prescription meds” every time we get scared about supply chain shocks, we could actually make open-source insulin happen. Imagine if communities could produce their own insulin or blood pressure medication. Imagine localizing those supply chains. Now, _that’s_ community. That’s prepping. Instead, what do all the prepping channels promote? They plug Jase Medical, a company that will build you a personal stash of prescription meds. I’m not bashing them, but look, it’s a stopgap. That medication will run out. It will expire. The real solution to supply chain shocks, when it comes to medications like insulin, is to localize production and make it open source. I’ve seen practically every pro prepper plug Jase. I haven’t seen any talk about the Open Insulin Project. Have you? In 2009, Andrew Szasz came up with the idea of “inverted quarantine” to describe an attitude that’s now endemic to Americans and their response to disasters. His book _Shopping Our Way to Safety_ focuses mostly on how corporations market protection to us through organic, greenwashed products. Instead of solving the problems that put us in danger, Americans and westerners in general try to buy their way out of them, insulating themselves from the world as it collapses. That attitude has taken an especially toxic turn among billionaires, like the ones Douglas Rushkoff described, who think they’ll sit out the apocalypse in bunkers with mercenaries, drones, and shock collars for their private guards. Forget the Strait of Hormuz for a moment. Forget Ebola. For those who’ve paid attention in class, we’re just living the preface to the dystopian novels. We’re somewhere in the middle preface now, where the fascists take over, and the world devolves into constant warfare. Simply stocking up on emergency food buckets and antibiotics won’t cut it. If you’re anything like me, you’ve done some deep dives into the notion of long-term food storage, and you learned something. Guess what? Yeah, dry goods like beans and pasta can last a decade or longer when they’re sealed and stored. They’ll stay safe to eat, but they still _lose_ nutrition. The carbs and protein don’t degrade, but the vitamins _do_. The companies that sell the emergency food buckets don’t tell you that. Do they? Once you’ve gotten the “stock up” out of your system, realize something. You’re not going to shop your way to safety. We’re always going to be prepping for disasters, but that’s no longer sufficient to keep us safe. Not really. In some ways, it never was. I don’t want to live in a bunker with years of stockpiled meds that go bad in a few years. I don’t want a slab of concrete filled with food buckets. I want to live in a world where a local nonprofit makes insulin and blood pressure medication for my neighbors in a high school science lab. I want to eat dandelions from my yard. I want to go for a walk through my neighborhood picking weeds for salad, without worrying what’s been sprayed on them. For me, that’s prepping. That’s the super skill. That’s survival. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

If you haven’t heard of Bryan Johnson yet, he’s worth checking out as an example of everything that’s wrong with the world. A tech entrepreneur worth $300 million, he decided that instead of using his wealth to make the world a better place, he’s going on a different journey. He’s going to become immortal. At one point, he harvested a liter of his son’s blood for plasma therapy. Johnson is in his late 40s. Now, let’s talk about looksmaxing—an internet subculture that’s gotten a lot of attention lately. The extreme version of it refers to unhinged and sometimes illegal pursuits to enhance your physical appearance. Most of the leaders in this little movement are in their 20s and 30s. They’re zoomers. And now finally, let’s talk about Ronald Reagan, the man who kick-started many of the world’s current problems and initiated our descent into the current dystopian hellscape. He belongs to “the greatest generation.” Millennials like me often feel like we got one of the rawest deals in history. Many of us graduated from college and entered the workforce during the Great Recession. Just as we were finally getting our feet under us, a pandemic came along and pulled the rug out. We’ve been in freefall ever since. For the last few years, the statistics have been landing hard. Many of us will never own a home. If we do, we’ll live in constant fear of losing it and winding up homeless, no matter how hard we work. We don’t expect to ever retire. We don’t expect to ever have affordable healthcare. From life expectancy to trust in public institutions, all the numbers are going in the wrong direction. Every day, we wake up to stories shaming us. Many younger people are deeply angry, filled with despair, and looking for someone to blame. The mainstream media knows this, and so they churn out a steady stream of articles that target our online spaces, talking about how older generations (boomers in particular) are hoarding our wealth. And yet, who is actually hoarding our wealth? It includes members of our own generation. We have the Kardashians. We have Mark Zuckerberg. We have Sam Altman. All those tech bros out there pushing data centers and artificial intelligence? Quite a few of them come from our own beleaguered generation. They’re millennials. Every generation has its own greedy individuals, its outlier movements, and its contributions to the bleak state of the world. And every generation probably feels like they’ve had it the hardest. Every so often, we go through a cycle. The internet fills our feeds with stories trashing us for not living within our means and daring to talk about our struggles. Last week, the algorithms showed me a handful of stories telling me that my problem isn’t capitalism, it’s my attitude. I should just sell everything and move into a 600-square-foot house on the plains. It was written by someone who has never lived on the plains. Meanwhile, I _have_. Yeah, it’s a lot cheaper out there. There’s also a lot of reasons why some of us eventually choose to leave. Here’s the really interesting part: While the algorithms were getting me worked up over my alleged avocado toast and Starbucks habit, something else was happening to many of my senior colleagues. The algorithms were filling up _their_ feeds with a very different set of stories blaming them for the world’s problems and accusing them of hoarding wealth. They got very justifiably upset, because guess what? Most of them aren’t rich. Many of them are simply _doing okay_ , but we live in a world where _doing okay_ looks like immense privilege to someone who _isn’t_ doing okay. We live on the edge of a sword. If we don’t talk about our struggles, everyone assumes we don’t have any. If we ever open up and admit that life is hard, well, nobody wants to hear that either. They tell you to “buck up.” You just can’t win. You’ve got to wonder who it serves to keep every generation at each other’s throats, constantly pointing fingers over the world’s problems. Perhaps it benefits the tech bros and their families. We’ll never unify against them as long as we’re busy trolling each other and getting offended. Researchers have been documenting this effect for years. A recent article in the _Journal of Public Economics_ puts it right out there: > Algorithms care about engagement. > > Not truth. They describe a “feedback loop between user behavior and ranking visibility.” In other words, algorithms don’t make decisions based on the quality or depth of an article. How could they? Algorithms are best at tracking clicks. Platforms have tried to make them do otherwise, but that leads you into a really messy debate over personal opinions about quality, and it reintroduces gatekeepers. I’ve watched a long line of CEOs try to escape the algorithms, only to end up promoting a version of what they said they were against. So, there’s no magic answer. Algorithms will continue to serve up what we like. If you could talk to an algorithm, I bet it would tell you it’s awfully confused. Because humans often treat things they hate the same way they treat things they like. The algorithms want to make us happy, but we don’t often engage in behavior that makes us unhappy, and algorithms can’t tell the difference. The tech lords in charge of the algorithms don’t care about this problem. For them, engagement is engagement, and engagement is money. We’re a very confusing species—and highly profitable. So, algorithms think you and I want to sit around reading stories that trigger our emotions. Why would they think that? Because we engage with it. Lately, I’ve felt and observed this phenomenon firsthand. I know it’s true. We just got served up a big batch of “generation war” stories. Older generations admitted that these stories make them want to give up, to stop trying to help anyone younger than them because they won’t express any acknowledgment or gratitude whatsoever. They’ll just keep fuming. I’ve felt that same sense of futility reading the articles that cast aside my lifetime of dedication to education and frame my problems as personal failures. That’s the point. This cycle of strife seems to erupt before major elections, almost on cue. That would make sense. After all, the super rich certainly still care about elections enough to try and influence or rig them, if only to make it easier to maintain the illusion of democracy a little longer. Maybe you could write that off as a conspiracy theory several years ago, but now? The billionaires own all the newspapers. They own all the social media platforms. It makes perfect sense. Maybe they don’t even fully realize what they’re doing, but they’re still doing it. Now would be the time to start pushing out a bunch of misleading, sensational clickbait articles that infuriate anyone who might be trying to build coalitions. It gives them plenty of time to go viral, to sink in, to resonate, to harden stereotypes and reinforce divides between groups. We often talk about the tendency of these articles to oversimplify issues and advance stereotypes. What if these aren’t accidental shortcomings? What if they were the goal? Let’s be clear, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t sitting around talking about all this while stroking hairless cats and daydreaming about doomsday lasers. They don’t have to. They’ve simply built a system that rewards content creators for generating controversies and running every idea through a bullhorn or a slop engine to make sure it’s legible to algorithms. As readers, we fall into this trap and share the articles that either validate our righteous indignation or feed our rage. This behavior stacks, and it produces the intended result. Instead of helping each other, we fight. We fight and fight. Here’s a feeling you probably know: > _Well, eff them. If all I’m going to get is trashed for my privilege, lectured about my naivety, and told I’m the one making the world worse, maybe I’ll just quit trying altogether. Maybe I’ll just do nothing and see how they like that. I won’t cooperate with them. I won’t support them. I’ll do nothing. I’ll just let the fascists win, and we’ll suffer in this dystopia together. We’ll see how they like that._ The super rich folks who control the algorithms love it when you feel this way, regardless of what they say in _Entrepreneur_ or _Inc_. They want parents against their children. They want children against their parents. They want men against women and vice versa. They want optimists against doomers. It’s hard to build actual unity when, so often, the word “unity” is simply code for strongarming someone into adopting their beliefs and voting for the things _they_ want. I’m not talking about that kind of unity. I’m trying to talk about the real thing. Maybe it looks like this: You vote if you want, but you don’t judge anyone else for what they do with their vote. You just encourage everyone to make a decision about what to do with their vote. That would be a good start. That sounds like a good example of a unifying statement. It’s hard. In fact, there’s probably nothing harder than putting aside your anger or your need for validation, especially if you were right about something and nobody listened to you. Boy, have I been there. It’s an awful feeling. It really sucks to find yourself drowning in evidence that you got it 90 percent right, but it doesn’t matter, because admitting you were right would cost everyone else too much self-esteem. I’ve learned something firsthand over the last couple of years, and I’m still processing it. Being right about something actually makes people like you _less_. That goes double if you were right about something big, and everyone else vehemently disagreed with you. My own experiences confirm what psychology says. Our need for that validation often drives even the smartest of us to abandon that little nugget of truth and strive for the validation anyway. It backfires. By the way: There’s a big difference between someone who was wrong and someone who lied. You can forgive someone who was wrong. You don’t _have_ to, but you can. It’s not so simple for someone who lied. Neither is it that simple for someone who tried to hurt you. They have to prove they can be trusted first. But that’s a different article. Here, we’re talking about people who just screwed up. Anyway… The algorithms elevate this deep desire to be right, even though it only ever seems to ingratiate us with the ones who already agreed while alienating everyone else. They push the most confident stories. They show us the articles written with certainty, not the ones with hedges and qualifications. The algorithms know you like this. They know you like to feel validated, and they sense that you don’t get enough of it in your “real” life. So it showers you with validation online. They want all of us to feel validated, at the expense of each other and the larger truths. In the end, the internet often winds up amplifying the worst of us. It’s ironic that the tool that was supposed to make connection easier has also fueled so much division and strife, but that’s how it works. So, when these stories come across your feed, I’m not telling you to ignore them. I’m not even telling you not to share them. I mean, come on. I live in the real world. I know you’re going to share them. We all like to sound off. It’s even good for us. _But…_ While you’re complaining about that poorly written, divisive, overly simplistic article that bashes you for your avocado toast or blames you for hoarding wealth, you might want to remember the bigger truth. This article was written and shared explicitly to make you feel indignant while validating someone else. Or it was written to validate you while making someone else indignant. As psychologists have shown us, our own brains often struggle to distinguish between wholesome joy and righteous anger. They produce the same chemicals. So, how could we possibly expect an algorithm to get it? So when you respond to the article, which is your right, and fills a need deeply rooted in your psyche, don’t stop at the clapback. Don’t just take the (click)bait. Point to the larger machine running behind that article. Talk about the bad arguments and poor logic. Also, talk about the echo chambers and information ecosystems responsible for these bad articles and the urge to write them. They want us against each other. It’s how they win. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

In 1956, Leon Festinger published _When Prophecy Fails_. Maybe you know the story, but it never gets old. It narrates the ordeals of a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin and her cult, “The Seekers.” They believed an epic flood was going to destroy the world, but aliens were going to save them. Cult members quit their jobs. They sold their homes. They gave away all their belongings. They moved in with Dorothy. They waited and waited. The UFO never came. Instead of giving up or admitting they were wrong, the cult members entrenched. The failed prophecy strengthened their beliefs. They worked overtime to bring in new members. They proselytized louder. Eventually, they told themselves that their resounding faith had saved the world. The cult dissolved. In 1975, psychologists ran an experiment on high school girls who believed in the divinity of Jesus. They showed the girls convincing evidence that challenged their beliefs. Many of the girls even agreed that the evidence was compelling and that they might be wrong. But during their final interviews, the girls didn’t renounce their faith. They said the experience deepened it. It made them believe _more_. Social psychologists have called this response “the backfire effect” or “belief perseverance.” When you try to educate or inform someone, it can backfire. They can wind up clinging even harder to their beliefs. A major 2010 study found that it happens a lot, and it’s often politically motivated. If someone considers you their enemy, it doesn’t matter what you tell them. They won’t believe you. There’s a corollary to this, and we’ve all seen it. Even if you’re not someone’s enemy, if you start expressing ideas that someone associates with their enemies, they’ll reject the ideas, and they’ll reject _you_. There’s one more study we need to talk about. In 2020, researchers ran a similar experiment on Trump supporters. They presented them with substantial documentation of his crimes and wrongdoings. Those supporters responded by focusing more on his opponents. Learning about Trump’s crimes made them more eager to talk about the alleged crimes of other politicians. Actually, one last study: In the late 1990s, researchers identified a phenomenon called spontaneous trait transference. It works like this: The more you try to warn someone about a bad person, the more likely they are to transfer those negative traits to _you_. It doesn’t make sense, but it happens all the time. For decades now, time and again, over and over, social psychologists have documented these glitches in human thought. We’re only scratching the surface here. It goes far deeper, but you get the idea. We could also mention the Asch conformity experiments, where peer pressure managed to convince participants to willfully choose the wrong answers on a test, just to fit in. Maybe you see where we’re going. For about a year now, practically every podcaster and political strategist has predicted that the Epstein files would be Trump’s undoing. It was supposed to be forming irreparable rifts in the MAGA base, something we could exploit to wake them up and get them to turn on their dear leader. Well, look, I’m not in the business of telling everyone what they want to hear. I’m in the business of telling them what they need to know, and what they need to know is this: It’s not happening. There’s plenty of reasons to keep pursuing the Epstein files, but unseating Trump isn’t going to be one of them. I’m sorry. Some of us have spent the last few years studying social psychology, to understand what on earth has been going on with everyone lately. We weren’t really surprised to observe what’s unfolding, whether it’s Thomas Massie losing a primary or Marjorie Taylor Greene fleeing the country. From psychology to communications theory, we’ve already seen how this story plays out. Once a group settles on an ideology, almost nothing can dislodge it. Members will even start ousting and exiling their own leaders who reject the shared ideology. There was a brief moment when MAGA was starting to turn on Trump. Unfortunately, the Epstein files have become a liberal talking point now, and MAGA has responded exactly the way 70 years of social psychology would predict. They’re denying reality and digging in their heels. They’ve decided to wait for the UFO. Again… Thomas Massie was right to break with Trump, but let’s be clear about something. His heart and brain didn’t suddenly grow ten sizes like the Grinch. He does not deserve praise or respect for standing up to Trump. He was doing what he and his team considered politically expedient. They banked on the podcaster logic that the Epstein files were hurting Trump, and that he was polling low nationally because of his bogus tariffs and wars. But Massie made a critical mistake. He started to believe his own hero narrative, and he forgot the role he played in creating this mess. Ultimately, Thomas Massie served in Congress for 14 years. He spent that entire time fostering ignorance and cultlike thinking among his constituents. He conditioned them to reject logic and compassion. He trained them to conform to groupthink at every turn. Thomas Massie has a long history of unhinged behavior. You can look up his voting record, and his hate mongering. It’s despicable. His legacy is that he helped drive America into conspiracy land. He has led the charge on climate denial. He promoted conspiracy theories about masks and vaccines. He spread Trump’s election fraud allegations. He claimed January 6 was an “inside job.” The point here is not that Thomas Massie is a terrible person who got what he deserved, although that’s true. The point runs deeper. He didn’t just get what he deserved. He brought it on himself—and us. He did that by nurturing the very kind of thought you see in these studies on social psychology. He helped Trump build a cult. When you spend your entire political career promoting conspiracy theories and training your own voters to behave like a cult, then they’re going to behave like a cult. They’re going to think like a cult. And as nearly a hundred years of social psychology tells us, cults learn to reject evidence and logic in favor of their own beliefs. They’ll choose their beliefs over their friends and family. They’ll choose their beliefs over their own interests. That’s what cults do. It’s true that billionaire tech bros spent huge sums of money to unseat Trump critics, and it’s true that the GOP manipulates elections, but that’s not the full story. We’re not doing ourselves any favors by ignoring the social and psychological dimensions at work here. Thomas Massie wasn’t a reasonable Republican standing up to fascists. He wasn’t someone with “a different opinion.” He was a raging conspiracy theorist who made a career out of tearing down our democracy, stripping away human rights, assaulting public health, and destroying the planet. He was also an opportunist. Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie never had a crisis of conscience. They had image problems. They built their political brands on being the craziest voices in the room. But they ran out of gimmicks. It’s hard to stand out when everyone in the GOP sounds as crazy as they do now. The only way for them to stand out in their party was to start sounding halfway sane again. But it was too late for that. The cults they built don’t want sanity. They want their beliefs affirmed. The full story is that Thomas Massie forgot that he was in a cult. He forgot that he helped build that cult, and that’s his legacy. He saw populist sentiment drifting away from Trump, and he tried to mobilize that for his own campaign. He underestimated just how far to the right he had dragged his own district. The Epstein files were never going to save Massie or Greene, because they spent their entire political careers working to eliminate the compassion, logic, and sense of justice that would’ve made their voters care. Even now, Greene is out there hawking ivermectin to treat viral infections. We’re seeing the backfire effect in real time. Someone could stand on the floor of Congress and read out the entire Epstein files. They could show every photo. They could name every name. It wouldn’t move MAGA one inch now. A piece by David Gilbert in _Wired_ makes some similar observations. In short, the liberal podcast world has been reading this situation wrong. Trump has, despite all logic and reason, managed to manipulate his base and much of the Republican party to dodge the Epstein bullet. He has already shifted blame onto scapegoats and deflected the personal attacks. For the researchers and journalists who’ve been writing about the Epstein files because they’re important in their own right, I say carry on. They’re doing valuable work. But if you’ve been wondering why the Epstein files seem to be having a muted impact on the elections, much less than anticipated, please look beyond the low-hanging fruit of saying the election was rigged. Perhaps it was, but you can’t underestimate the power of cult logic. It’s the backfire effect. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

“The atmosphere went from nothing to the darkest red cloud of fire.” That’s Francois Auroux, describing his harrowing escape from the Palisades fire in early 2025, one of the worst fires in California’s history. He didn’t escape on a helicopter or a motorcycle. He escaped on a bicycle. His home burned to the ground. Here’s the video: The story prompted a flurry of interest among preppers, eager to explore the potential for bicycles and e-bicycles for disasters and emergencies. A few of our readers have suggested them as well, and it makes sense. Wildfires don’t just pose a risk to the west coast anymore. With severe droughts now hitting the east coast on a regular basis, almost anyone could find themselves dealing with one at some point over the next few years. Last year, we were astonished to wind up stalled in traffic one afternoon because of a wildfire. Then they closed the road altogether. It took us an extra two hours to get home, following backroads. We watched the giant plumes of smoke from our house, trying to keep up with the news, and wondering if we’d have to evacuate. Fortunately, we didn’t. Still, it was a major wakeup call, yet another disaster to plan for. A few months later, another wildfire erupted one county over, burning thousands of acres. So… For my family, that now makes a pandemic, an F3 tornado, a hurricane, and a wildfire. All in five years. And people ask why we’re into prepping… Trying to escape a wildfire in your car? It’s probably the first best option, but it’s certainly not without risks. From Heatmap News: > And when people die in wildfires, they are often found in their vehicles. In Portugal, 47 of the 64 people killed during a 2017 forest fire were in their cars, trying to escape. At least 10 people were found dead in or near their cars after the 2018 Camp fire, the deadliest blaze in California’s history. And in Lahaina, Hawaii, this month, in what the Los Angeles Times has called “surely … the deadliest traffic jam in U.S. history,” the lack of advanced warning combined with inexplicably blocked roads led an untold number of people to perish in their cars while trying to evacuate, including a 7-year-old boy who was fleeing with his family; a man who used his last moments attempting to shield a beloved golden retriever in his hatchback; and a couple who were reportedly found in each other’s arms. Look, conventional emergency advice still says you’re safer in a car than a bike during various disasters. But more and more people are seeing the liabilities of cars, especially in big cities, and they’re looking for alternatives. Here’s Maylin Tu, writing in _KneeDeep Times_ : > Transportation and urbanism journalists (including me) have fixated on that scene at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Palisades Drive — people abandoning their cars and fleeing on foot. When thousands of people try to evacuate by car at the same time via one of the only ways out, what you end up with is gridlock. > > When I picture evacuating on my e-bike, cars are in the way, but I go around them. I’m wearing the P100 respirator I bought during the wildfires. Maybe I am carrying someone on the backseat. We move slowly but surely around stopped traffic till we reach the open road. I’m sure a few trolls will flutter around in the comments telling you and me how dumb we are for not accepting the gospel and never imagining the problems inherent in making a car our only form of transportation… Wildfires or not… The U.S. remains on track for “tank bottoms” by early July, thanks to the war with Iran. Everyone has their own predictions for what that means. Meanwhile, some of us know the importance of backup transportation systems, regardless of what international crisis has everyone’s attention. Fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and other disasters aren’t going to stop and wait for the Strait of Hormuz to open up again. We’ll just pile one disaster on another. Rather than sitting around trying to predict exactly what’s going to happen, it makes more sense to just go ahead and imagine the worst—not as a certainty, but as an exercise in logic. Let’s assume that the worst happens. Gasoline and diesel shortages hit us at home. Maybe there’s panic buying. Maybe we see severe disruptions to supply chains and logistics. Maybe another Helene hits us at the worst possible moment. Now think about what you’d do if that happened, and what tools you’d like to have with you. That’s what I’ve done, and it helps. So, I’m researching bicycles. Why? Bicycles don’t need gasoline. They don’t need electricity. They can go places that cars can’t. They don’t get stuck in traffic jams. Not everyone can ride a bicycle, but anyone who can pedal one is putting themselves in a better position during any kind of crisis or disaster, including prolonged ones. A human can move at about 3 mph on foot. They can carry a limited amount of gear. On a bike, a human can easily quadruple their speed. They can carry several times more weight with a wagon or a trailer. You don’t need to get a fancy bike. In fact, the simpler the better. Simpler bikes are easier to repair, and easier to find parts for. At first, I thought it was going to be difficult to find bicycle trailers. It’s not. You can find them at most stores, even hardware stores. Trailers. Carts. Wagons. Many of them are compatible with a wide range of bikes. You’ll probably have to order it online. If you’re working against early July as a deadline, you’ll want to order it soon. In a worst-case scenario, you’ll at least have _some_ options. You won’t be stranded at your house or reliant on someone else with a drivable vehicle for everything. You’ll have a way to transport some basic gear around. If other people in your area do the same, then you could even build a relay network to haul around goods and services. How do you fix a bike? I’ve spent the last few days browsing forums and sites. I’ve landed on a handful of good bicycle repair guides. Here’s a list: * _Sutherland’s Handbook for Bicycle Mechanics_ * _Zinn & The Art of Road Bike Maintenance_ * _GCN Essential Road Bike Maintenance_ * _The Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair_ * _UCSB Bike Shop Manual_ * _The Bike Book (Haynes)_ You can find these guides online at sites like Archive.org and Scribd. You can print sections of them out, or you can order hard copies. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reading through these and making a very simple, generic guide for doing some basic bicycle repairs like changing tires, etc. If you predict hard times soon, I wouldn’t wait. Get these guides now. If you have a backup electricity plan, then go to YouTube and look up Park Tools. Download them for future reference during a prolonged grid outage. They put out the big blue book, and they have a reputation for providing one of the biggest libraries of bike repair videos on the internet: There’s one more thing to think about: E-bikes. A standard e-bike costs more than a generic bicycle, but it gives you more options. They come in three classes: Class 1 has pedal assist up to 20 mph. The motor only works when you pedal. Class 2 has a throttle feature, up to 20 mph. You can engage the motor even if you’re not pedaling. Class 3 has a throttle plus pedal assist up to 28 mph. So, class 1 is the simplest. Class 3 is the fastest. You can buy trailers and wagons for e-bikes as well. Just check compatibility first. E-bikes offer a good option for anyone who needs some assistance on the pedaling front. They let you make longer trips without wearing you out. Francois Auroux escaped the Palisades fire on an e-bike. Of course, you might opt for a regular bike. It’s a judgment call. An e-bike will help you go faster with less effort, but if the battery dies, many brands are harder to pedal. The motor and battery become dead weight. So, that’s a consideration. In a prolonged situation, like the one we’re walking into this summer, you might want a simpler bike with fewer things that can break. Here’s the main point: Even if the worst doesn’t happen now, it’s a good idea. Many of us believe there _will_ be a day when fuel becomes scarce, regardless of what happens with Iran and Hormuz this year. A bicycle gives you options that a car doesn’t. A bicycle works no matter what happens to oil. A bicycle means resilience. It means community. It means getting places. It means transporting gear and supplies. A lot of preppers out there are talking about gold and silver. They’re talking about stockpiles of gasoline. Today, I’m talking about bikes. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

You know what’s interesting? Last February, Elon Musk “accidentally” cut Ebola prevention funding while leading his murder of tech bros on a rampage through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In his own words, “one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.” Remember that? According to the news reports: > He grinned, smirked and laughed as he put his fingers up in air quotes around the word “accidentally.” Now, with news of Ebola spreading fast through African countries, you’ve got to wonder. Did they actually restore the funding? Believe it or not, there’s an answer to that question, and the answer is _no, they didn’t_. A follow-up investigation by _The Washington Post_ found that, wait for it… Elon Musk was lying. His DOGE team never restored the Ebola funding. USAID officials said, “Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments.” Even though the Trump administration granted a waiver, it was only on paper. The payments never went out, and “the teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled.” That’s the first thing they don’t want you to know. And by “they,” I’m referring specifically to the Trump administration’s public health officials and the billionaires who helped elect them, including Musk. They don’t want you to know they’re likely responsible for the Ebola outbreak. If it winds up in the U.S., they’ll be responsible for that, too. They would hate for you to know that. (So definitely don’t share this…) Even after Musk stood in a room full of journalists, grinning about his snafu and promising everyone he’d already fixed it, statements were going out to healthcare workers in Africa that their contacts were canceled. So, the U.S. has spent the last year ignoring Ebola, letting it spread without detection. Now we have a major Ebola outbreak. How predictable… It’s all over the news now, except for the important parts. The World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency of international concern over a recent outbreak in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. An American doctor has tested positive. Just over the last few days, cases and deaths have skyrocketed. Global health officials have reported that the actual numbers could be “much higher than reported.” Yes, that makes sense, because Elon Musk and his tech goons dismantled the teams and tools we would’ve used to track and contain exactly that kind of outbreak. Even Trump says he’s concerned. It gets worse. The current outbreak concerns the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which we have no approved vaccine or treatments. The incubation period runs up to 21 days. During the first stages of illness, symptoms look very similar to a cold or flu. Patients can spread the disease once they’re symptomatic. In the past, doctors have misdiagnosed the early stages of Ebola. It’s hard to detect. Experts are going on the news and insisting that Ebola only spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids. There’s a big _but_ here. Here’s the second thing they don’t want you to know: Ebola has airborne potential. As the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reports, the debate is far from settled. Some research shows that “airborne infectious particles are likely to play some role in transmission.” You really have to hand it to academics for phrasing bad news in the nicest way possible. Let’s translate that into plain English, shall we? Airborne particles can infect you with Ebola. The article’s lead author is Michael T. Osterholm. He’s not a grifter. He’s not a mystic. He’s not someone who wants you to panic. He’s a legit scientist who works at the University of Minnesota. In 2014, Osterholm wrote an opinion piece for _The New York Times_ explaining the risk in simple terms for the general public, in plain English. There were two paths for the future of Ebola. Here’s the second one: > An Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. > > The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice. In the research article, Osterholm and his team go on to say: > It is very likely that at least some degree of Ebola virus transmission currently occurs via infectious aerosols generated from the gastrointestinal tract, the respiratory tract, or medical procedures, although this has been difficult to definitively demonstrate or rule out, since those exposed to infectious aerosols also are most likely to be in close proximity to and in direct contact with an infected case. They also state that “Ebola viruses have the potential to evolve in the future into pathogens that spread mainly by the respiratory route,” especially if the virus is allowed to spread and mutate. Topping it all off, the researchers also found evidence of Ebola “superspreader” patients, and that Ebola has an incredibly low “infectious dose.” It takes as few as 10 particles to infect you. So, there you have it. Ebola viruses can already spread via the air to some extent. They’re undergoing hypermutation. They’re spreading faster than they have at any point over the last thousand years. They have the potential to become truly airborne, like the flu or other respiratory diseases. And the richest country on earth just recently killed all funding to deal with this mounting threat. The head of WHO has explained the outbreaks we’re seeing as a direct result of these cuts. It’s just perfect that Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, gold member of the Epstein class, a man who espouses eugenics at every turn, the man building data centers and pushing AI like there’s no tomorrow, has also poised us on the cliff of another pandemic. Working with the CDC, USAID played “a key role in flagging outbreaks of unidentified diseases.” Under normal circumstances, the CDC and USAID worked together, responding to these disasters. They didn’t always get everything right. Now, that system doesn’t even exist. While Musk was destroying USAID, RFK Jr. was dismantling the CDC with deep cuts, layoffs, and purges. I guess he was too busy spreading measles to care about Ebola. Where does that leave us? Well, we’ve never been less prepared for a pandemic. And yet, you don’t need to freak out over this news. That’s not the point. The point is something some of us have made over and over again, ever since we became aware of groundbreaking research on diseases and aerosol science over the last few years. Contrary to conventional knowledge, many viruses can spread through the air. If we allow them to spread, they can mutate. They can evolve. They can gain functions. They develop new ways to infect. They develop the ability to enter new hosts and become more efficient. That’s what viruses do. That’s what Osterholm is talking about. Osterholm’s research on Ebola’s airborne potential goes back to 2015, years before the leap forward in aerosol science led by Linsey Marr, who won a MacArthur genius grant for her pioneering work. She changed how we think about disease transmission, but there’s still a lot of resistance. That’s not surprising, either. Remember how doctors reacted to Ignaz Semmelweiss when he tried to get them to wash their hands before operating on patients and delivering babies? They had him committed. Osterholm was right, and Marr’s groundbreaking work lends new veracity to his warning. That’s just scratching the surface. Here’s the third thing they don’t want you to know: As I wrote early last year, one simple tool can give you peace of mind regardless of what virus is making headlines. It’s an N95 mask. Our politicians and media have gone to great lengths to convince us all that they’re not necessary, or that they don’t work, or that they can make things worse. It’s all baloney. As you’ve probably gleaned by now, the mainstream media has one goal. It wants your attention. Of course, these news sources are also owned by billionaires, members of the Epstein class. They want your eyeballs, but they don’t ever want you or me to do anything actionable based on the fear they spread. They just want you to sit there and panic, then go fight trolls on your phone. We also see many healthcare CEOs saying the quiet part out loud, more and more. They don’t want to cure patients. They don’t want to prevent the spread of disease. They want everyone to get sick. It’s a good business model. Pair this with Naomi Klein’s work on disaster capitalism and end times fascism, and you see the situation clearly. Does it sound like a conspiracy theory? Well, do we not have billionaires like Peter Thiel ranting about the antichrist and building bunkers? Did we not just witness Elon Musk cancel Ebola prevention funding, followed by an alarming outbreak of Ebola? Did he not lie about it? Did he not even stand there and gloat? He thought it was funny. There’s been an awful lot of talk over the last year about Malthusian plots to depopulate the planet, something some of us were once called crazy for suggesting. Maybe the super rich don’t want to actively depopulate the earth, but they certainly _do_ want to withdraw all of their money and hole up in bunkers. They don’t want to pay for things like Ebola prevention, even as they joke about it. They don’t want to spend money on protecting your health. In the end, their negligence translates into a very similar consequence. Whether it’s intentional or not, their greed and myopia will subject us to ever more pandemics and disasters. Meanwhile, they believe they’ll be able to hide from the consequences in their bunkers. Instead of funding global public health, this regime has spent their time manipulating the stock market with tariff extortion schemes, trying to annex Canada and Greenland, and invading oil-rich countries. Their actions speak for themselves. There’s one last thing they don’t want you to know. It’s called elite panic. Researchers at Rutgers University coined this term in the early 2000s. As they documented, institutions go out of their way to suppress justified fear in civilian populations. Why? Because they don’t trust them to act with accurate information about threats. They spread misinformation, out of fear that ordinary citizens will overreact and start rioting, looting, or revolting. The strategy usually backfires, often igniting the exact panic they hoped to prevent. John Barry makes a similar point in his book _The Great Influenza_. Woodrow Wilson’s administration actively suppressed early alerts about the flu in 1918 because they didn’t want it to distract everyone from war efforts. By ignoring the warning signs, they made things far worse. We can see elite panic everywhere now. It’s the primary doctrine of our media, to control the narrative over diseases like Ebola. They follow a simple strategy. Have you noticed? They bombard you with stories that trigger your fear response. Then they diffuse that fear response by telling you not to worry, there’s no cause for concern, and so on. That’s elite panic at work. The elites are panicking, but not about the threat. They’re panicking about how you’ll react. They don’t believe you have the intelligence to protect yourself without freaking out and making things worse. They think you’ll rush out and buy a bunch of toilet paper. They’re scared you’ll drive shortages at stores and gas stations. They’re worried you’ll start riots and damage their property. They’re worried you’ll crash the stock market. They’re worried you won’t show up for work. They’re worried that you’ll also start to do reasonable things. They’re terrified you’ll demand that the government pay for things like N95 masks, because they’re responsible for this mess. They’re worried you’ll want tests, and vaccines. That’s what keeps them up at night. Not the Ebola virus. _You._ The fools in charge don’t want to spend money on Ebola prevention or precautions. They don’t want you to know they’re the ones responsible for this outbreak. They don’t want you to know they’ll be responsible if it spreads to the U.S. They don’t want you to know its airborne potential, because they don’t trust you to handle that information like a mature adult. But they’re also worried that you _will_ handle it like a responsible adult, and demand they do something other than hold press conferences about it and tell you to wash your hands. They don’t want you to know there’s one simple tool that can protect you, because it makes them uncomfortable and it might hurt their income streams if people protect themselves. In fact, there are several tools—and some of us have spent years learning about them. The people like me are not the ones freaking out about Ebola now, because we have the tools we need and we know how to use them. We’re also not spreading conspiracies. Is it strange that hantavirus and Ebola are both making headlines at the same time? No, it’s not strange. It’s the consequences that climate scientists have predicted for years now. As Ed Yong wrote in an underrated _Atlantic_ article years ago, we’ve entered the pandemicene, an era where zoonotic viruses increasingly pose threats to us. Hundreds of these viruses are waiting to spill over into humans as we overheat the planet and destroy what’s left of wild habitats. This is what’s happening. The ones who saw this coming, we’re not the ones freaking out. I’m sure I’ll get criticized for my title, and for the image. But guess what? Americans have created an atmosphere in which the only things that break through to them are packaged as clickbait. So, we’ve created an environment where we force writers to flirt with clickbait to get the message out, and then we trash the ones who are actually telling us something important. If that’s what someone wants to do… Meanwhile, who’s actually freaking out? The Epstein class, that’s who, and everyone who falls for their stories. Go online and look at the Reddit threads. The people freaking out now are the ones who’ve been living in denial for the last four years, pretending that they’ll never have to wear a mask or flip on an air purifier ever again. There’s no need to freak out over Ebola, even if it has airborne potential, even if our dumb Epstein class rulers made this happen with their reckless budget cuts, even if it starts to spread in the U.S. If you still believe in civic action, call your representatives. Ask them why our government let a billionaire with no knowledge or training in public health kill the funding for Ebola prevention. Ask them why they let him lie about restoring it. Ask them what they’re going to do to fix this problem. When they sputter platitudes, tell them what you’ve learned from this article. Action is not panic. Action is action. We know what to do. So, let’s do it. _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._

Earlier this year, the UN declared a “global water bankruptcy.” Look at that map. It’s from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a few days ago. We’re heading into a super El Niño. For many of us, the droughts are going to get even worse. That means water restrictions. It means water pressure problems. It means problems with drinking water and toilets. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon, maybe for the rest of your life. If you can’t flush, that’s a major dilemma. Without functioning toilets, you have a waste problem. A waste problem becomes a disease problem. With data centers popping up all over the country, the threat multiplies. We’re talking about a large portion of the country in severe drought, on a failing grid, on a regular basis going forward. It might be a good idea to think about where you’re going to go. You know, _go_ … My family lives in the suburbs. We contacted plumbers about installing composting toilets. Their quotes ran into the thousands. You see, composting toilets are designed for cabins, RVs, and tiny homes, not suburban houses. And definitely not apartments… These problems aren’t going away. Even as we advocate, organize, and resist, we’re going to have to deal with reality. The reality is that even if a data center never moves next door, even if your taps never run dry, odds are you’ll face some kind of prolonged emergency that renders your toilet inoperable. We came up with a workaround. ### We’ve got answers, and solutions. As many of you know, I’ve spent the last several months working on solutions and putting them in an illustrated guide. I’m still working on it. For the last several weeks, I’ve circled back around to the most important topics to tweak my plans and offer even better solutions. So, let’s talk about a big one: Toilets. Previously, I’ve written about ways to generate water during a crisis. I’ve written about rain catchment systems, water generators, and dew harvesters. You can find all of that information in my guide. For now, we’re focusing on toilets. Because if you and your neighbors don’t have a clean way to dispose of your waste, that’s a problem. Lack of sanitation after disasters drives disease. It can be worse than the disaster itself. So, that’s the reason... ### The simplest solution We covered some of this information in my last post on composting toilets, but let’s review: You can find plenty of online articles explaining the basics of composting toilets, but Joseph Jenkins provides the most detailed breakdown in two books widely considered the definitive guides on composting: _The Humanure Handbook_ and _The Composting Toilet Handbook_. A few readers recommended them to me, so I got them and read them. Then my family started to innovate. So, what’s the fundamental philosophy here? Let microbes do the work. The world is full of thermophilic bacteria that evolved especially to break down organic matter. These microbes don’t pose a threat to us. They reside everywhere, dormant, in spores, waiting for things to die. Then they activate and go to work. They destroy the pathogens that cause diseases, including E. coli and Salmonella. They cleanse the dead. It just takes a while. We’re using the term “waste” in this article, because that’s what most people consider it. Of course, Jenkins and other composters use the term “toilet material,” because what we drop into our toilets isn’t waste. It’s food for healthy microbes, and it’s a foundational ingredient of soil. You can’t compost your waste unless you have a functional compost toilet. We wanted something that would work almost anywhere, in a house in the suburbs, or an apartment in a downtown area. We made one. ### What did you make? We made our first design from scratch. Then we found this: The NettyGo started becoming a popular option for van lifers around 2022-2023. This solves most of your problems. It’s a portable toilet bucket with a urine diverter and a ventilation kit. We modified it, and I’ll explain how. Here’s what it looks like: The problem for most of us is that we have no easy way to vent a composting toilet without drilling a hole through our wall. That’s a dealbreaker for almost anyone who owns a conventional home or rents an apartment. Some composters say you don’t need ventilation, but you kinda do, especially if you want to dry it out faster. Drying your solid waste shrinks it up to 90 percent, and that’s essential for those of us with smaller yards. That goes double if you have no yard, and you have to dispose of your waste elsewhere. We solved that problem. 1. You’re going to vent your compost toilet through a window. First, measure your window. 1. Next, get a piece of rigid foam insulation board from the hardware store. I like 2x4 pieces. Cut it to fit your window. Next, you’re going to use a hole saw to drill a 1.5 inch hole into the board. 1. You’re going to coat the board in liquid Flex Seal or something similar. This protects your board from the elements, etc. Don’t use spray coats. Many of them will dissolve the foam. Liquids are fine. Next, you’re going to take the flange that comes with the NettyGo ventilation kit. You’re going to seal it to the board with Flex Seal. You’re also going to screw it into the board. We did that, and it’s holding nice and firm. The toilet will vent through this port. 1. Here’s the NettyGo in a nutshell. You have to buy the ventilation kit separately. For us, it was worth it. Bring your own bucket and your own milk jug. Install as shown. The vent attachment plugs into the back of the seat. It all snaps together nice and neat, so you don’t have to worry about parts fitting. The ventilation kits come with a hose that you can trim. It’s worth getting a pair of PVC/Pipe cutters. They give you nice, clean cuts. 1. The ventilation kits also come with an in-line fan case that fits your hoses. They come with a fan, but we opted to get some backup fans from Cooler Guys, along with 3-pin to USB adapters. They fit fine. We also had to get some hose clamps (separate) to secure the fan case to the hose. Make sure the hose clamps accommodate 1.5 inch hose. Add a power bank, and you can now run the fan for days on a little battery, during a power outage. 1. The last step: Close your window down over the rigid foam insulation (now coated in rubber). Wrap some insect screen around the hose end, and then plug it into the flange. Remember, the flange comes with the ventilation kit. You get a bunch of other equipment that’s meant for mounting to a wall or ceiling, but we wound up not using anything but these parts here. Now you have a composting toilet for short and longterm emergencies. It’s going to separate your liquids and solids. It’s going to vent outside. It’s not going to smell. It’s going to dry out your solids. You don’t have to buy any of this from Johnny Compost, the company that sells the NettyGo. I have no relationship with them. Once you understand the basic idea, you can design your own and source your own parts. Johnny Compost even sells some of these parts separately, like urine diverters, etc. ### The last steps: You’re going to want compostable bags. Many people say go with 13-gallon size bags for 5-gallon buckets. That’s for your solids. Make sure you empty your liquid jug on a regular basis. The NettyGo comes with a bob to help remind you. You’re going to want cover material. Plenty of compost toilet companies will sell you fancy, expensive stuff. You’re going to want a lot of cover material, and you can get cover material for cheap from stores like Tractor Supply. Many compost toilet enthusiasts recommend you get pine and aspen bedding (not cedar). You can also use coconut coir, sawdust and wood shavings, peat moss, sphagnum, and hemp. Anything with high carbon, that’s light and fluffy. It’s a good idea to keep a second bucket of cover material next to your composting toilet, along with a scoop. Add a layer to the bottom before you start using your toilet. Add a couple of scoops each time you go. If you’re having problems with smell, spray or mist your cover material. Add a little more. ### How long does composting toilet material take? And how much space do you need? Compost heaps don’t have to be big, 4x4x4 feet is fine. The minimum size is one cubic yard, or about 1 cubic meter (.76, to be exact). That’s 3x3 at the base, and 3 feet high. In metric, that’s about 1m x 1m, and 1 meter high. Generally, you don’t want one heap to get higher than 5 feet, or 1.5 meters. A family of 4 would fill one cubic yard in about 3 months. Once you fill an enclosure, leave it for about a year. The microbes will do their job and destroy the pathogens, creating clean compost. Meanwhile, you just start another pile. So, do some simple math. An average family fills 4-5 cubic yards or meters of space in one year. That means you’ll need a second space of the same size to use while the filled-up enclosures are composting. Add it all up… You could do all this in a space of 5-6 cubic yards or meters. That translates into 170—220 cubic feet. That’s about the size of a living room. It’s a fraction of the size of an average back yard. Set up 4-5 bins or bays, and rotate through them. It’s a manageable amount of space. No, not everyone can do it. But many of us could. If you live downtown or you have a landlord, then the major obstacle becomes convincing others to help you make it work. They might act like you’re crazy at first. When they start to envision the alternative… They might come around. ### What happens during that year? So, you fill up the cubic meter. You let it sit there and mature. That’s the precise term for it. You’re not adding to it anymore. You’re letting it mature. That’s what composters say, meaning you just leave it alone. You leave it alone for an entire year. What happens, exactly? Thermophilic bacteria dine out, producing heat. If you provide the right mix of waste and carbon cover material, these microbes will activate and maintain a high temperature on their own, even during cold winter months. It could be snowing outside. The environmental temperature could plunge well below freezing. Feed your compost pile, and it will keep taking care of itself, even if the temperature drops and the microorganisms go dormant. They’ll reactivate in the spring. Jenkins advises keeping the ratio of carbon cover material to waste at 20:1. You don’t have to measure it exactly. Just track it. You can also buy a compost thermometer. It will tell you when the temperature is running low. When the temperature runs low, add a little more material. Pour some water on it to add moisture. Turn it a little. You don’t have to turn it as much as some of the composting gurus say. Jenkins cites research that excessive turning doesn’t make much difference. That’s it. If you compost human waste properly, then you don’t need much except carbon cover material and an enclosure. Cover material for your outside pile means everything from sawdust to kitchen scraps and yard clippings. Your waste provides the nitrogen. Nature provides the carbon. You build your enclosure, using whatever materials you have on hand. You can screw together some palettes. You can use t-posts and mesh. You just need some kind of structure. You dig a shallow pit in the middle. You put down a base layer of cover material. You dump your waste and scraps in the center. You cover it. You keep adding to the center, raking it outward as it grows. You don’t need a thick base layer. In fact, initial contact with soil is good, because microbes will come in and start feasting. #### Here it is, in list form: 1. Dig a shallow pit. 2. Build an enclosure. 3. Put down a layer of cover material. 4. Add waste to the center. 5. Don’t bury it. Cover it with sawdust, clippings, scraps, etc. 6. Keep the ratio 20:1 carbon to nitrogen. 7. Get a compost thermometer to help maintain the temperature. If you have a few heaps, then get a few thermometers. 8. Every time you add waste, rake the pile outward a little. Add more cover material on top. 9. When it’s 4-5 feet high (1m-1.5m), leave it for a year. Keep an eye on the temperature. Add a little cover material or moisture as needed. Agitate a little as needed. Otherwise, let it mature. You don’t need a basin or a bin in most cases, because active composting piles absorb huge amounts of moisture. They police themselves and prevent leaching. If you live in an area with excessive rain, the most you might need to do is add a roof, or even just a tent with a tarp. #### What about local laws and codes? You would be surprised… Where we live, no codes exist for composting. There’s only one law, that you can’t use it in a garden. We live in the suburbs of a mid-size city. So, you just need to manage your piles. Follow the science. Don’t do anything reckless or dumb. If your compost stinks, if it attracts flies, if it starts to look ugly and neglected, your neighbors will notice. That’s when you’ll have problems. Just remember, drying your waste out isn’t the same as composting it. Drying it out makes it easier to manage. It helps with the smell. You still have to compost it, as described in the steps above. ### Staying grounded Between wars and climate disasters, we’re in for a rough time. I firmly believe my family will be using our emergency composting toilet at some point over the next few years, maybe even later this year. We just don’t know, and that’s the point. Panicking is a natural thing to do given the crises we’re facing. After you panic, you have to come up with a plan. That’s what we’re doing. From panic, to plans. Stay grounded. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

Last night, I went outside at 4 am and watched dew form on my mailbox. I watched it form on my spouse's car. I watched it form on some PVC pipe. I've done this for several nights, to confirm with my own eyes what science tells me. I thought, "How do I _drink_ that?" This is prepping. I also caught up on Benjamin's videos over at GrowVeg. As you'll see, he knows his stuff. He doesn't need to spend ten minutes telling you why you're going to starve in 8 weeks. He doesn't just throw out words like "community" and expect everyone else to figure out what he means. He actually shows you how to do it: Not many people would call Benedict a prepper, but he's very much in the realm that preppers should live. On a related note, he has a great video on eating weeds, in the same spirit of my illustrated guide, trying to help people (and my family) take advantage of what's right in front of them. It's what I aspire to do. It's a lot to take on. Even though Benedict and I will probably never cross paths personally, he is part of my community. I'm thankful for him. That's why I've spent the last few weeks trying to scale up dew harvesting with common materials, with mixed results. I've had much more success with dehumidifiers and atmospheric water generators. Those work great, but they also require planning. Without solar panels, they'll fail when the grid does. I've also had success with cheap, emergency composting toilets. I've modified a kit from Johnny Compost. Again, it meant tinkering with things and trying ideas, not waiting until everyone freaks out over a headline or a sensational prediction, but doing the work ahead of time and trying to keep it interesting. That's prepping. Now, I'm going to share something less positive, a note from someone (a dude) who explained why they've decided to leave my community: There's a lot going on here, more than just the loss of one reader. We're going to talk about the beliefs embedded in this comment. It tells you what millions of other people out there don't understand about any of this, whether it's prepping, community, or resistance. They think they get it. They don't. This guy believes that preparing for a famine or a forthcoming collapse means separating yourself from the system _now_ and forming small, self-reliant communities in order to survive in a post-technology world. Nothing I've ever said or written has ever contested that. Yes, it's what we should all be doing. The problem is... how do you get there? That's where voices like this stop. They don't know how to get there. If they did, they wouldn't be shooting hot takes over email. They certainly wouldn't be "saying goodbye" to someone who shares 99 percent of their worldview. Does he expect 100 percent agreement? Sorry, but my spouse doesn't even agree with me 100 percent of the time. If that's how you go about building community, well, good luck. You're going to have a rough time getting along with someone if this is how you react over a 1 percent difference in opinion, after years of presumed alliance. And yet, this isn't just one person. It's a bunch of people. A bunch of people think like this. They go around shouting "community" at the top of their lungs, and then they burn the communities they've got. I get emails like this every week, people packing up and leaving over a single sentence they disagree with. It doesn't matter if they agreed with you for years, 90 percent of the time. If anything, they seem proud to part ways with someone, in search of their true "community." You don't quit civilization overnight. It's a gradual process. Many of you know Jeff McFadden, who runs _A Systemic Approach_. He doesn't consider himself much of a prepper, but he's been doing this kind of work for decades. He'll tell you, as well, that you don't quit the grid cold turkey. Maybe you don't ever quit the grid. But you become less reliant on it. It takes time and dedicated effort. It requires a plan. It requires research. It requires a long process of trial and error. It's hard. You will fail, and when you fail, it's awfully nice to have a grid to fall back on. When Jeff injured himself in a farm accident, he went to a hospital. He took advantage of civilization, what's left of it. I believe you should do the same. That's what I'm talking about. Don't give up hospitals until you have to, but do what you can to prepare for that day. As for "post-technology..." Some of you already understand that we're not going back to the 19th-century version of homesteading. That was an unsustainable fantasy. It seems to be what a lot of people imagine when they talk about "small, self-reliant communities," but it's not practical at all. As someone recently told me, even Amish communities are installing solar panels. They don't reject electricity. They don't refuse technology. They're using it to run their farms. And, I verified it. So, consider that... I'm not saying your survivalist future must include solar panels. I'm not even saying they're a great idea for everyone, and plenty of climate activists have strong opinions about them. But it's just rubbish to go around thinking you're going to live in a utopian community, free from the grid, free from electricity, free from fascists, free from bills, free from property taxes. That's not how it works. And the more people who go around spouting that, the worse off we are. We don't need everyone in the suburbs to abandon their homes and try to live on farms in the woods. That would be a disaster. We need everyone to transform the space where they are. We need them to work together to make the places they already live more sustainable and more resilient. If you want a plan, that's a plan. That could actually work. But only if people can cooperate. Or at least coexist. We're going to be living in the remains of cities, and there's going to be plenty of spare parts. We're going to be using tech, it's going to be junkyard tech. Our back yards aren't going to be manicured blights on nature. The HOA helicopter neighbors will have to deal with it. That's our future. I suspect that the ones leaving these comments have never actually tried to escape the grid. They've never tried to build a community. They've never tried to grow food in their back yard, or watched dew form in the middle of the night. Maybe they've never even gone camping. They just sit back and pass judgment on the rest of us, who are trying, who know better than most how hard it is, and how much we still need the grid, even if we're doing our best to get off it. Until you figure it all out, which may never happen, you need to keep your job. You need to keep a roof over your head. You need your internet connection, so you can watch Benedict over at GrowVeg. At the moment, Benedict on YouTube knows more about growing potatoes than most of our neighbors. He's going to be our source of information. He's going to have the patience to explain it all to us. I doubt local farmers are going to jump at the chance to show me how to keep slugs out of my strawberries. I doubt the kind of person who leaves comments about the importance of community is going to be much good either. I'll stick with Benedict. Most of the public still doesn't understand this. Real prepping and community building is often not what it looks like on television. It's about going outside and watching dew at night. It's about trial and failure in a garage, or a back yard, or a parking lot. It's about listening to people you agree with 99 percent of the time, or 90 percent of the time, or 80 percent of the time, and not flipping them the bird because they said one thing that rubbed you the wrong way. It's hard. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

We’re going to talk about that viral article predicting empty shelves and famine (one more time), because the world needs to hear a full, cogent critique of it—and all the attention it got. We’re not doing it because we like bashing prophets, but because this snafu illustrates a problem that runs deep in western culture, especially American culture. It has plagued us all decade. So, I thought, who better to offer a critique of this mess than the writer once referred to as “the queen of doom,” the one roasted online daily for her “fearmongering?” So, let us begin. Maybe some of you still haven’t seen this article, which has gone super viral, even outside Substack, inspiring urgent and often panicked discussions across Reddit and YouTube about starvation in America this summer. If not, it’s worth skimming, just so you know the context. Read this one, too. The author himself told us he got hundreds of thousands of views just over the first couple of days. There’s nothing too unique about the content. It predicts mass shortages and famine by early July, driven by the Iran War and the ensuing oil crisis. We’ve seen these predictions for years now, since the pandemic began. What’s unique about the article? The tone, and the spiritual element. The author doesn’t just discuss the likelihood or the probability of the famine. He frames it as a certainty, something he’s seen coming “spiritually” for decades. He says fate has selected him to share this message. In fact, he describes all this nonsense as his “assignment” and perhaps the reason for his struggles as an artist and father. No messiah complex there, am I right? He goes on to say that “your” mortgage, “your” debt, and “your” other responsibilities are no longer “your” priority. He commands you to start building community, stocking up on food, and preparing for the end of our financial system, because money will become completely useless, and the entire government system is going to come crashing down. By the end, I was just sitting there shaking my head at how reckless someone could possibly be in their advice. It would be one thing if this article had simply vanished into the ether, another false alarm by another false prophet. Instead, it pleased the algorithm gods. They presented the nonsense to us as truth, and people bit. They liked. They shared. They heaped praise on this guy. And that’s a problem. ### The Collective Failure This is not simply the story of one bad writer. When a platform’s algorithms reward that story, when everyone who allegedly “isn’t a doomer” clicks and shares and heaps praise on the bad writing and research, that’s when it becomes a collective failure. A big one. The same calm cucumbers who’ve disregarded every warning about every real threat we’ve faced for years, suddenly felt that this guy was worth listening to, because something godlike had touched him with prophecy. His age, and no doubt his gender, conferred a sense of authority on him. Everyone started freaking out. In all honesty, it was not a well-written article. On top of all the froth and long-winded explanations, the author drops all their sources in one big pile at the end, poorly formatted, not contextualized, not cited in text, or even discussed. They’re just vomited down at the bottom, with the assurance that he has read them carefully, with the help of AI, to arrive at his conclusion of mass famine by July. Why would you trust this guy? Because he’s an expert in logistics or energy? No. Because he’s a journalist with a reputation for being right? No. Because he explains it all very well? No. Hundreds of thousands of people listened to him because he checked all the boxes of what counts as an authority in America. The author had a chance to apologize, and he bombed that as well. In a follow-up post, he talks about his spiritual and mystical insights into collapse. He says the data “now backs everything I have been tracking spiritually for forty years.” He talks about his struggles as an artist. He also backtracks: > When I talk about bare shelves and famine, I am not talking about the United States in sixty days. That is not what I have said. That is not what I have ever said. I think the idea that famine hits the United States in six to eight weeks is, frankly, kind of crazy. That is not what I see. > > What I see, and what I have said consistently for over two years, going back long before Trump attacked the Strait, is that in the United States, by June and July, things will start getting hard to get. You will go to the store and you will not be able to find this or that. Supply chains will begin to visibly buckle. Not famine. Not total collapse. But friction. Intermittency. Oh, _now_ he tells everyone… Go back and read the original article, if you have the stomach for it. This is _not_ how he frames the crisis. Alas, to sum things up: No, you don’t need to panic about a famine by July. You shouldn’t stop paying your mortgage or your other bills. Unlike the author, I’m no mystic. I haven’t been tracking anything spiritually for 40 years. But now we get to the core of the problem in American culture. If you’re a scientist, or you just understand science, nobody listens to you. They don’t look at your data. They don’t want your evidence. ### A Real Prophet: John Wesley Powell You know who _actually_ predicted all this? John Wesley Powell. We’re not living through a fuel crisis; we’re living through a climate crisis. The fuel crisis is a driver. Empty shelves are coming with or without dumb presidents and their wars. And this was foretold by guys like Powell, long before any mystics entered the picture. A Civil War veteran who lost his arm at Shiloh, Powell led the first major expedition along the Colorado River, explicitly for the sake of determining its viability for settlement. He told everyone: _Don’t do it._ That’s right. The U.S. federal government hired John Wesley Powell to lead an expedition through the west, then come back and tell them whether it was a good idea to develop that territory. His exact words: > “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not enough water to supply the land.” He said that in 1893. 120+ years ago. As the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Powell continued to argue against the settlement of the southwest. He called it unsustainable. Nobody listened. Instead, they settled. They built big cities, exactly where Powell told them not to do it. They built dams and giant reservoirs, thinking they would outsmart nature. They named one after him. Yep, Lake Powell. Lake Powell is now drying up. It won’t supply the land, exactly as Powell said it would. Americans have a long heritage of disregarding facts and evidence in favor of mystical thinking, and it’s exactly why we’re in this mess. Most Americans have no clue what they could be doing to actually prepare for, or even prevent, many of these catastrophes, because they don’t listen. They don’t listen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about. They listen to grifters and charlatans, who are right by accident sometimes, often too late. So, I guess it’s fitting for Americans to continue shrugging off warnings from their actual Cassandras, like John Wesley Powell. It’s fitting for them to completely freak out when some dude with zero training or background tells us he has spiritually foreseen a famine, backed by data delivered to him via AI models designed to validate his thoughts, run by robots that will also tell you to eat pebbles and poisonous mushrooms. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. ### This Has to Stop Please, stop sharing clickbait articles about famines in 8 weeks. Guys like this, who write articles like this, aren’t helping anyone. They’re making it that much harder for the real Cassandras to get their message out. They’re making it that much harder for us to be taken seriously. The next time someone like me talks about real threats now and down the line, like Dust Bowls and failing breadbaskets, or airborne diseases, people are going to remember Mr. Famine and his mystical clickbait article that scared them into thinking they were going to starve. They’re going to remember how they overreacted, and how the author dodged responsibility for predictions he ultimately retracted. They’re going to ignore the next warning. There are times when I’ve gone too far in my predictions, when I was certain something was going to happen. Then again, the most I ever asked anyone to do was wear an N95 mask and take some precautions. And you know what? Most of my predictions _have_ come true, because they were backed by actual data done by real human beings, peer-reviewed, and subjected to intense skepticism. The problem is that the world has simply learned to accept slow-moving disasters. We have various names for this phenomenon. Call it shifting baseline syndrome. Call it normalcy bias. Call it the Region Beta Paradox. I’ve written about them all. The world doesn’t seem to care if you tell them that 6 million children have been disabled by an airborne virus, because it happened slowly and it doesn’t affect them directly. They can ignore it. They can keep blaming social media. The same goes for my warnings about Trump and the flaws of our two-party system, or the cascade of biblical record-breaking disasters we’re seeing every week now. They can continue throwing hopium at each other. If I have any advice: Stop ignoring your real Cassandras for years on end, then freaking out over viral articles about empty shelves in 8 weeks. This is not healthy behavior. It’s not productive behavior. There are things you can be doing now to help prepare for and even prevent pandemics and famines in the future. They require you to put in some effort, not because you’re absolutely going to starve 8 weeks from now, but because you might starve 8 years from now. A related example: We committed tens of billions to preparing for pandemics, and then… we didn’t do it. Our leaders spent the money on everything from cop cities to wrestling tournaments. People didn’t get used to wearing N95 masks. They taught each other to see them as symbols of trauma instead of protection. Universities threw hundreds of air purifiers into dumpsters. I’m serious. If you don’t believe me, look it up. Now, people are wondering if they should freak out over hantavirus. They’re missing the point. If we had done the right thing, then we wouldn’t need to freak out over hantavirus, because we would have the tools to manage it. We didn’t commit the sustained time and energy, and now we don’t have the tools. It’s like this with famine, with pandemics, on and on. Maybe you get it. Between each one of these viral freakout articles over empty shelves or a new virus, there are so many things we could be doing. There are ways to clean the air and make pandemic viruses much less dangerous. There are ways to grow food in parking lots. There are ways to capture water even if it’s not raining. There are ways to localize prescription drug production. Lots of us are working on these ideas, and we need help. We need sustained support. What we don’t need is to be ignored, laughed off, and insulted when we try to talk about all these problems, only for the exact same skeptics to freak out and give all of their bandwidth to the next viral article written by a mystic, with AI insights, who doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about. One day, the mystics will accidentally be right. The shelves will be empty. Then what? * * * _In related news, I've redone the dew catcher with raschel mesh, one of the standard materials used in warka towers. So, we'll see how it does. I was hoping for trash bags, but if they don't work, then we can't use them._ _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

You’re going to starve in 8 weeks. Oh, wait. Never mind. The guy who wrote that essay walked back his bold claims. _You_ won’t necessarily starve. Someone will, somewhere. Turns out, his AI-driven research might’ve been based on some faulty assumptions. Sorry if you already made any down payments on a large wooded lot between those two posts and told your mortgage company to go to hell. But, hey, he got 3,000 likes and a big boost to his new Substack. He appreciates you. Fun fact: A famine is already underway in Afghanistan. Back in January, Reuters interviewed an Afghan family who eats one meal a day, a little bit of bread. They said, “We’re content to die.” So, that’s a real famine. Even then, the media doesn’t say “famine.” They say “the brink of famine.” We’ll get there soon enough. By the time it happens, Reuters will show up to interview you about it. They’ll run the story. Nobody will read it. You’ll welcome death. And that will be that… This debacle over the “eight weeks to famine” article zooming around speaks to an issue we should address, because it comes up over and over. I was reluctant to devote another article to this thing, but it feels appropriate. So, are you going to starve? When is everything going to collapse? How much longer do you have to keep faking small talk at your job? Nobody has an answer for you. Cheer up, here’s another cat in a box: Photo by mary rabbit on Unsplash I’m sure some risk analyst out there has a pretty good idea of when you’re going to starve, but they get paid vast amounts of money to sit around and crunch numbers. They have access to tools you don’t. You don’t have 14 hours a day to sit around and calculate your risks of famine over the next 12 months. You have to make the best decisions you can with the information you have. You have to dedicate a certain portion of your time to staying informed. Then you have to make judgment calls. That’s why it’s hard. Would you like to know the life of a prepper? Some of you already do. As I keep saying, it’s not about bunkers. It’s not about predicting the exact date when a famine or a Cat 5 hurricane is going to hit. It’s not about surviving every disaster and living forever. It’s not even about this glorified notion of “community.” In short, it’s about being MacGyver, but there’s no camera, no dramatic music, no bombs to diffuse, and often nobody even appreciates what you’re doing. You do it anyway. * * * For the last month, I’ve been trying to design a dew catcher. I know that sounds painfully boring compared to the sensationalist declarations of imminent famine we all enjoyed over the last few days. Stay with me. Photo by Fidel Fernando on Unsplash My dew catcher isn’t fancy. It’s made out of trash bags and PVC pipe. That’s on purpose. I want something everyone can make. So far, it’s been a mixed success. It works _great_ as an emergency rain catcher. I’ve collected gallons of rain, with just one trash bag and some pipes. But it fails as a dew catcher. So, we keep working on it, looking for the right material. Will drinking water from a trash bag kill me in ten years, even if I filter it with a Berkey? I don’t know. But I _do_ know that if I have zero water, that will kill me faster. Meanwhile, I’m working on other plans. Soon, I’m going to start learning about growing antibiotics from dirt. Do you want to hear about my emergency composting toilet? Okay, maybe later… I could tell you about my community, with the other homeschool parents who lean toward homesteading and prepping. We have to be careful around them. There’s a good deal of raw milk and Jesus talk. Out of all of them, there’s maybe one family we could probably count on during an emergency. My daughter is best friends with their daughter, and I’ve already made a decision. I am not going to let my daughter’s best friend starve. I am not going to let her parents starve. We will share everything with them. If things get really bad, here’s my plan: Round up the best friend’s family and our aging parents, my brother, a couple of my in-laws, pool our financial resources, and all share one house together with my preps. It will be extremely difficult, but we’ll make it work. My apocalypse team will come together not because they finally saw the truth of my prophecies, but because I’m offering the best chance they have of staying alive. I’ll be taking care of a lot of people, and putting up with a lot of bullshit, and specifically not going around saying “I told you so,” because nobody is going to want to hear that once things cross the threshold. See, I told you. Boring. * * * Maybe your eyes are glazing over. Maybe it’s more interesting to calculate your odds of famine and then fantasize about building a community and starting a vegetable garden. Doing it is hard, and it’s often boring, with mixed results, and that’s why everyone keeps reading the articles without actually doing it. Here’s another cat: captiPhoto by Karen Cann on Unsplashon... This morning, I worked hard to convince my spouse to start storing our daughter’s favorite frozen food in mylar bags. Why? To save space. Because you can store twice as much in a mylar bag, for a longer period. They said they didn’t like the idea of creating more plastic waste with mylar, but ultimately consented. For me. To do it. After all, there’s going to be empty shelves and a famine in 8 weeks. Haven’t you heard? I know what you’re going to say. I should just tell my daughter she should get used to the idea of living without her favorite food, because the world is collapsing. But she’s seven years old. Doesn’t she deserve a few more months of her favorite food? Even if it’s frozen? Even if it becomes hard to get? Even if it creates an extra burden? And no, I don’t just go to the store and deplete the frozen food section of my daughter’s favorite food. Yesterday, I called stores and talked to clerks. I asked them about their supply situation. I asked how many I could get from the back end, what’s reasonable for someone to buy in bulk, without inconveniencing others. Again, that’s boring. It’s a pain to be considerate. But that’s also a specific example of what often gets filed under “community,” actually giving a dam about other people, even strangers, people you’ll never meet. They’re part of the community as well. That’s Schrodinger’s apocalypse. You’re somewhere between stuffing frozen plant meat in mylar bags, and telling your daughter to give up her favorite food. You know she’ll have to give it up eventually. Why rush it? Go ahead, tell me I’m privileged. * * * Prepping would be so much easier without kids, without family, without responsibilities. I could live in a tiny house, with a small solar array, prepping away, eating my beans, and probably do just fine during almost any catastrophe. The guy who wrote the “8 weeks to famine” article opines that his own family is weeks away from eating canned beans. Are you kidding me? I’ve been eating dried beans for years. It’s my staple. I love them. My daughter will get there in her own time. For now, she can have what she wants. That’s the thing… You can’t live life based on someone else’s prediction that there’s going to be a famine in 8 weeks. You can’t make decisions just because they make prepping easier. You have to make some kind of future to live for. You have to live as though there’s going to be an apocalypse, slow or fast. And you have to live as though there won’t be one. You have to exist with those two realities. It’s the quantum physics of doom. I wish it weren’t. I wish the world would wake up and see our predicament. They won’t, except every now and then, when someone manages to get them riled up over empty shelves. Between those moments, when the public oscillates between panic and toxic positivity, we get to reconcile the two realms, every day. At least we have cats in boxes. _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

By now, I’m assuming you know all about John B. Calhoun’s social experiments and behavioral sinks. I’ll try to do a quick recap without putting everyone to sleep. At Johns Hopkins, Calhoun ran a series of projects with mice. He built utopias for them. He gave them everything they needed, even space. The mice didn’t even come close to the utopia’s carrying capacity before tearing each other apart, engaging in the most brutal behavior you could imagine. Mothers even started abandoning their own children. Calhoun called it a “behavioral sink.” For some reason, the mice insisted on clustering into the center of Calhoun’s utopias, forming little mouse gangs, and going on killing sprees. The only mice to survive quit the scene, moving to the outskirts of the utopias, where they could still get plenty of food and water. They groomed. They slept. They didn’t socialize. They left each other alone. Calhoun came up with a name for them. He called them the beautiful ones. After the mouse population collapsed, these beautiful ones didn’t regroup or rebuild. They kept to themselves. That probably sounds bleak to most of us, but I suspect those mice were fine with it. Maybe they knew something we don’t. Maybe they were neurodivergent mice, if that’s possible. Here’s my point: Over the last few weeks, the internet has been overflowing with confident dudes making all kinds of predictions about famines and global economic collapse, just lapping up praise and support for their “insight.” They cite the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Look, it’s bad. There’s no debating it. Some of us were talking about that weeks ago. We’ve processed it. We made our plans, along with our resignations. We cut expenses. We canceled travel. We redirected budgets to prioritize yet another mess we didn’t make. It’s one of the reasons I expedited the completion of my own survival guide, then decided to make it free and open source. A writer named Sarah Connor did some of the best work on the Hormuz crisis (also here), and she didn’t get nearly enough credit. So, it’s just slightly irritating when the podcast bros and the clickbait artists show up at the 11th hour, pretending they’re the ones who figured all this out, when they’re very late to the situation. But the collapse bros have sunk their teeth into it, and they’re preying on the fear that’s finally settling over the American psyche as everyone finally wakes up and realizes what a mess we’re in. But there’s nothing new there, either. We’ve been in a mess for years. It’s just that something new happened to remind everyone of the mess. The bros lay out vague plans for survival. They tell us “exactly” what we should be doing. In one very recent and very popular article, the author tells us our bills and mortgages “aren’t your priority” anymore. Okay, what? The whole system is about to collapse in 8 weeks. Money is going to become worthless. Cities will become death traps. And blah blah blah. We should all be forming “communities,” storing food and gas, making friends with farmers, and hunkering down for the famine that’s going to reset the global order. And I’ve gotta say, that sounds awfully nice. You mean a famine is going to wipe out my bills, my mortgage, and all my loans? Don’t threaten me with a good time. If you’re in touch with reality at all, if you listen to anyone under 40, then you probably know something. A lot of people out there are secretly praying for a famine, a pandemic, or some other biblical disaster to swoop in and annihilate the system that’s crushing them. It’s the only hope they have left. It’s either that, or become a crypto millionaire grifter. They certainly aren’t going to be buying a home. They certainly aren’t going to be getting married. They certainly aren’t going to be raising a family. They certainly aren’t going to be saving up for a nice, quiet retirement. They certainly aren’t going on any vacations. They certainly aren’t going to be starting any rural homesteads. What else is there for them, other than some overwhelming crisis that dwarfs their personal ones, while offering them an opportunity to start over, with all slates wiped clean? Maybe if they can keep their heads down long enough, scurry off to the corners like the beautiful ones… For millions, a crisis offers a second chance. Ironically enough, they put their odds of surviving a famine or a pandemic higher than surviving the status quo. They understand very well. We’re talking about real people, forced to work through tornadoes and hurricanes, and pandemics, without any protection, obliged to work three jobs, doomed to be replaced by robots. Yes, please give us the famine. Give us another raging pandemic. Give us an alien invasion. Anything. If there’s not going to be a revolution, then let there be an apocalypse. I like my chances better. Let’s expedite this collapse. Let’s give our governments something to focus on other than slowly grinding us to a pulp. It’s gotta be better than what we’re dealing with now. If a meteor struck the Met Gala, taking out a good chunk of the Epstein class, even if it killed half of humanity, including me, I wouldn’t immediately dismiss that prospect. Sad, isn’t it? * * * As tempting as all that sounds, a famine or a pandemic resetting the global order, we know it won’t happen like that. Anyone who actually studies collapse, anyone who actually engages in real prepping, knows better. We know our mortgage isn’t going away. Our rent and utilities aren’t going away. Our credit card bills aren’t going away. Not. Ever. The billionaire oligarchs aren’t going to let you starve in peace. They’re not going to let you fend for yourself. Even if there’s no gas, they’ll dispatch a deputy on horseback before they cancel your debt. They’ll throw you in a county jail, even if there’s no electricity to run the jail. They don’t care if you have running water, a toilet, or even a bucket. That’s not how they operate. Study the history of any famine, any collapse. Power structures didn’t evaporate. They became more repressive. They raided your house for food. They arrested you for hoarding. They didn’t leave you alone. I’m not saying any of this to negate prepping. I’m a prepper. My family has preps. We grow food. We have stockpiles. But… We occupy two worlds. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t still be here online writing about collapse. I’d have my doomsday plan all sorted, and I’d be doing it. I wouldn’t be talking about empty shelves and famine in 8 weeks. But it’s not up to me. I have a family, and they wanted… something different. So, here I am. The world that’s collapsing isn’t going to let us go, not just yet. We can’t abandon our responsibilities and obligations, no matter how unfair or futile we find them. If you’re going to unburden yourself from all this, you still have to extricate yourself with a plan. There’s no easy escape “famine” button that’s going to alleviate all of this. The advice suggesting otherwise comes from a place of deep privilege. For the rest of us, it’s incredibly reckless to think like that. If you followed that advice as it’s written, you might end up even worse off than you are now. Most of the advice you see about prepping for a crisis completely misses the point. It doesn’t take climate science into account. It doesn’t take social psychology into account. It doesn’t take history into account. It doesn’t take economics or class privilege into account. It ignores the simple fact that just breathing around someone now poses its own existential risks. Or did we forget all the airborne diseases circulating now, which almost nobody takes any precautions for, even as they prepare for their famines and global economic collapses? Anyway, that’s the most infuriating and dangerous part of this advice. It offers things you “must do” to survive, exhortations that most of us can’t follow, plans that could land us in bankruptcy, jail, the hospital, or worse. Most of all, this advice doesn’t take _you_ into account. It doesn’t care about your life situation. Do you have children, dependents? Are you a caretaker? They don’t care. They just want to scare the shit out of you, then toss out vague ideas like “community” as the answer. They do everything that the true doomers and Cassandras do, but they elevate it to the level of clickbait, somehow making you feel safe and exempt from all the catastrophes on the way. And I’m sick of it. Aren’t you? * * * As I reflect on this content, I’ve realized something: When these dudes lay out their plans, they’re not talking to me. They’re not talking to the atheist, neurodivergent, queer millennial mom with complex PTSD from severe childhood abuse. (Yes, I’m queer. Sorry for not mentioning this more often.) In their scenarios, I’m not supposed to survive. I’m supposed to be the one who dies. If I die, it’s my fault for caring too much about my bills. I’m not supposed to make it. I’m supposed to starve. There aren’t many communities for someone like me. Nobody wants to help me survive. They want to take from me. They want my stuff. I’ve become the workhorse of any community I’ve ever joined. The minute I speak up, the minute I advocate for myself, the minute I become “difficult,” I’m kicked out. Maybe you know the feeling, and it’s why you bristle every time the word “community” comes up, as some kind of magic solution that’s going to save you from the droughts and famines. What if it doesn’t? What if community wasn’t meant for you? The collapse bros have no answer for this, except to remind you that you’re going to starve to death because you’re too weird. For some of us, seeking out community isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds. It’s not even safe. It could even make things worse. It could get you killed. One dude spouting stereotypical advice recently assured me it’s all true, the economy is going to collapse, money will become worthless, and he has a plan to meet up with his relatives at the 120-acre family farm. That’s great for him, but what if you don’t have a family farm? What if you’re like me, and your “family land” is being hoarded by your MAGA uncle, a man who won’t get vaccinated, won’t wear an N95 mask, drops the N-word more than Soldier Boy, and has multiple restraining orders from women he’s fallen in love with over the years? What if he built his bugout cabin across the highway from a meth park, and he routinely has to fend off “curious” visitors? Would you feel safe riding out a famine there? See, that’s how reality works. * * * I’m good at reality checks, so here’s one: A famine won’t alleviate your financial responsibilities. A community won’t always save you. I’m not saying this to be mean. I’m not saying this to be a “doomer.” I’m saying this because some of what the millionaire podcasters and clickbait artists are saying is true. There will be droughts. There will be famines. There will be blood. If there’s a famine in 8 weeks, we’ll be as ready as we can be. I’ve spent years working on a plan, and you can find all the details here. It’s specific. It’s free. I have nothing to sell, only something to offer. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best set of options I’ve got. But I’m going to leave you with something else. It’s the best piece of prepping advice I’ve got: For the last 5 years, I’ve been living as if there’s always a potential famine in 8 weeks. I would recommend you do the same. Before the lists of preps, you have to shift your mindset. Normal is gone. This is life now. It’s a life with prepping, but also joy. That’s how you have to live, if you have any shot at dealing with reality and these constant shocks to our nervous systems. You have to get used to the idea of ever-present danger. You have to come up with a way of dealing with threats that’s not denial, but also not constant dread or panic. That’s not something I can explain in a 5-minute article. You have to get there yourself. I’ll say this: The real collapse isn’t being talked about on podcasts and viral articles. These articles and podcasts about famines or nuclear holocuasts go viral for one simple reason. We all know what’s happening to the planet. We all see what’s happening to our lives, and to the futures we hoped to live. Those futures aren’t going to happen. We’re going to be living through a future that falls somewhere in the vicinity of Octavia Butler’s _Parable of the Sower_. If you really want a good, hard look at collapse and what you should be preparing for, read that. Then read actual science articles. Understand that a vast majority of your friends and family would choose the famine over that any day, and they’re secretly excited about it. It’s a form of displacement. Focus on the famine. Focus on the current crisis or political scandal. Forget the big picture. The big picture is too terrifying. The big picture calls for too much inconvenience, too much sacrifice, more change than the vast majority of our friends can tolerate. It’s comforting to think you can build a community, but actually doing it is incredibly hard. It’s harder than ever. Look around. How many people in your life actually want to start a vegetable garden with you? How many of them would stand there and listen to you talk about famines and pandemics? Some of us tried, and we lost all of our friends… Now we’re the lone wolves we read about, the ones doomed to starve alone. Well, I don’t accept that. There’s a way for us to survive, at least for a little longer, even if we have to become like the beautiful ones. Stop getting worked up over every article that predicts a famine in 8 weeks, then tells you to go out and build community with people who can’t stand you, who would probably eat you during a real famine. For us, it’s not going to be one black swan event or one disaster that signals the arrival of the collapse. We’re not preparing for disasters anymore. We’re living in a sink. Stay beautiful. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

As you might know, the UN recently announced that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy,” years ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, vast stretches of Europe and North America are going through the worst droughts in their recorded history. It’s safe to say, we’re running out of water. You don’t need a crystal ball to know what severe droughts will look like in the U.S. Go back through history. Look at the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Read about the Texas Drought of the 1950s. It’s scary stuff. We need a plan. So, I’ve spent the last few weeks digging hard into solutions. My illustrated survival guide covers the very basics of setting up a dew harvester, but now I’m improving and scaling up the design. For many of us, you can count on reaching a point in the future when you’ll need more than a few ounces. Rain harvesters fail when it doesn’t rain. Meanwhile, most regions around the world produce dew on a fairly regular basis. Even if the weather conditions don’t reach the exact dew point, you can use materials that capture dew anyway. Civilizations and small communities have been harvesting dew for millennia, even in the desert. It’s a very good way to make sure you don’t die of thirst. When I was going back over my research for dew harvesting, I kept thinking about a structure called the warka tower, an open-source project. Here’s their site. Communities have built these towers all over the world, in water-scarce regions. The project goes back more than ten years, to about 2013, when the project’s engineers started putting out their first designs. You can build them to almost any size, small or huge. The larger ones can generate dozens of gallons of water per day. I’ve paired that with other research I’ve done, showing that black HDPE plastic (high-density polyethylene) works great for catching dew. Guess what trash bags are made from? Yep, black HDPE plastic… I’ll be trying out a range of materials, including raschel netting, but if trash bags work, then that’s something in ready supply, and something that people pretty much anywhere in North America can use. I’ve made a few different kinds of dew catchers over the last year. They work okay, but not great, not enough to fully replace your water source during a real emergency. But recently, I came up with a better design. I’ve made a small version of this, and it works. Now, I’m making the tower version. Soon, I’ll be posting full instructions with illustrations. For now, I’ll just lay out the basic premise and a list of parts: 1. Get a bunch of 2 ft PVC pipe, 3/4 inch works well. 2. Get 3-way and 4-way pipe couplings. 3. Build the outer frame (shown above). 4. Cut some of the PVC pipe into shorter lengths. Use them to make an inside square, to help funnel the big bag. 5. Make a black HDPE funnel bag by cutting a big trash bag (40 gallons or bigger) diagonally, as shown below). Measure the bottom side so that it matches the height. That way, you have a square funnel. 1. Punch holes in the ends, so you can lash them to the PVC structure with paracord or shoelaces, whatever you want. 2. Before you lash the funnel bag: 3. Get a plastic funnel, not too big, not too small. Spray the inside with a good adhesive spray. Put the corner of your bag into the funnel. Pack it with damp sand. That will keep pressure uniform on the bag, so that corner dries nice and flat along the inside of the funnel. 4. Punch a hole in the bottom corner of your funnel bag, once it’s dried to the plastic funnel. Now you have a giant funnel with a nice, structured hole for dew to flow through. You can sit the plastic funnel end into any rigid plastic PVC pipe, and run the pipe into pretty much any container. (I tried a flexible hose, but it wouldn’t stay straight and kept janking up the shape of my funnel.) For my prototype, I used 3M max strength adhesive spray. I know it’s not foodsafe, but we’re just making a prototype. Besides, you’re going to be filtering this water anyway before you drink it. Also, the spray is going outside the bag. It’s not going to be inside the bag, and it’s not likely to leach through anytime soon. I’ll be looking for food-safe spray adhesives for the final version. 5. You might wonder why you’re gluing the bag to the inside of the funnel instead of the funnel to the inside of the bag. My reasoning: You don’t want a lip, bulge, edge, or anything else inside your dew funnel. You want a completely smooth funnel that tapers straight into the PVC pipe. At least, you want to get as close to that as possible. This is what it looks like when you’re done with the first part: 1. For the big bag: Take several big trash bags. Cut the bottoms off. Tape them together. Now you have one very big dew harvesting surface that fits inside your PVC structure. I’m wondering whether it’ll help to turn the big bag inside out when I’m done, so the tape goes on the inside. We’ll see… 1. Poke some holes in the bag, and secure it to the PVC structure with paracord, string, whatever you want. 2. Secure the PVC structure to a deck, a gutter, a tree, whatever you think will help steady it during wind gusts, etc. 3. You can also stake it down. That’s my plan. We’ll see how it works. I’ll update everyone on the process and results. In the meantime, feel free to make your own version or suggest any modifications. We need these things to work as well as possible. * * * _Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support_ here_. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ Support

When I was eight, we were hit by “not a tornado.” Nobody in my neighborhood said the word “tornado.” But we all knew we’d just lived through something powerful. We simply didn’t know which words to use. Whatever it was, it felled a dozen trees across the roads in our subdivision. It shredded roofs and bent basketball poles in half. We spent weeks cleaning up the destruction. In the end, words didn’t matter. The thing didn’t need a name. It was a force of nature. Life lessons can work into us before we even know what life lessons are. For me, it was simple. When you go to bed, the world doesn’t shut down. Forces of nature continue to act. They’ll send threats your way in the dead of night. It doesn’t matter how safe you think you are. It’s a trick we play on ourselves. Safety is a bedtime story. Still, you do your best. You adapt. You develop knowledge and skills to meet the world you live in. The world we live in now requires different tools from the ones we needed ten or twenty years ago. We call those tools “preps,” but they’re not so different from the way earlier generations lived. Forces of nature are ripping through the world now, from energy crises to assassination attempts. The podcast world is finally getting riled up over reality, talking in very urgent tones and throwing around words like famine and genocide, and yet you can hear it in their voices. You can see it in their faces. Sometimes, they even say it out loud: They don’t believe they’ll be affected. They think it’s just going to happen to the rest of us, the ones working two or three jobs, the ones who don’t have six figures sitting in bank accounts, the ones who don’t have a line into the world of insider trading and polymarket grifts. For them, it’s another topic. So, word on the street is that the oil buffer that kept things relatively sane over here in North America is officially gone. It’s a matter of days before things get really bad. The Trump regime has been lying about everything from ceasefire deals to oil production, running pump and dump schemes through warfare, and preparing to saddle us with the outcome after they cash out. The stock market has priced in TACO (Trump always chickens out). But as analysts have explained, you can chicken out of tariffs. You can’t really chicken out of a war where your opponent now holds all the leverage, and they’ve now realized the best way to ensure their own safety is to keep a vital transportation route closed until our military no longer poses a threat. Nobody knows where it ends… It’s a strange thing to watch everyone finally get so worked up over the things you’ve spent years preparing for. You and I prepare because we know we’ll be affected, and we know something else: Nobody is coming to save us. We’ve seen it from Katrina to Helene. These forces don’t simply end. They change the world. For example, Helene carved a path of dead timber through the South up through Appalachia, turning the entire region into a “ticking time bomb” of dead timber that’s now fueling forest fires during record droughts. You see how it works? One record disaster paves the way for another. A hurricane from two years ago, which the podcast world has already forgotten, fuels wildfires today. Even as the podcast world finally catches up to the Hormuz crisis, finally starts asking the right questions, we see them offer up the most worthless solutions. They tell us to buy crypto. They give us investing advice. Why? Because it’s all they know how to do. They would be completely useless during a real emergency. The only kind of “prepping” they do is filling bunkers with gold and food buckets. If the end of the world didn’t kill you, the food would. Meanwhile, what am I doing? Earlier this week, we stocked up on cheap wood shavings and pine bedding for an emergency compost toilet. We rigged up a dew catcher with PVC pipe and a leak diverter. We cleaned up our water generator. We picked our first strawberry of the season. We started shopping for a barometer. This weekend, I’m going to start learning how to fix a bicycle. I’m learning about which bicycles are the best, the cheapest, and the most suitable for different emergencies. We might even get a roof rack, not because we’re adventurists, but because if you’re trying to bug out during a wildfire, and you end up in a traffic jam, then a bicycle just might save your life. This is the kind of prepping we do. I’ve read about preppers who charter helicopters or collect dirt bikes for emergency bugouts. I’m not the kind of prepper. I’m the bicycle kind. We’re not looking for opportunities to get rich. We don’t have a portfolio to protect. We’re living in the real world. We’re preparing for the forces of nature that the podcast class feels insulated from, the kind of events they dissect endlessly in their interviews and financial fearmongering. Me? I’ve lived through almost every kind of disaster now, even a brushfire, and my preps are responses to real situations, like picking my kid up from a mountain that caught fire and shut down roads last year. That’s what I’m preparing for, to rescue my daughter from a burning mountain. I don’t prepare for this by sitting around pontificating about geopolitics. I gather information. I assess threats. I prepare. I share what I’ve learned. That’s a part of life now. Many of you live this same life now, and you get it. Strangely, the very podcast class that sits around predicting famines and energy crises will look at the kind of prepping we do and call us doomers and fearmongers. They sneer at our victory gardens. They tell us to peel open a can of spam and deal with it. For years now, I’ve wondered about this double standard. Then it finally occurred to me: It’s class warfare. The podcast class doesn’t want us to be ready for these catastrophes. They don’t want us to develop resilience. They don’t want us to grow our own food. They don’t want us to make fire escape kits or rain catchment systems. They want to sell us their solutions, which sometimes include overpriced gadgets. They want us to stay glued to their feeds and their channels, clicking on the doom until it finally swallows us up, and then we die. They believe that by the time the famines finally come for us, they’ll be safe on their fortified ranches. They believe they’ll get invited to some billionaire’s bunker, because they interviewed him. Would “what kind of bike is best for escaping wildfires?” ever wind up on a podcast like that? Probably not. It’s too practical. It’s too responsible. You’re not supposed to actually know what to do during a wildfire, a drought, a tornado, a famine, or a hurricane. You’re just supposed to sit around and worry about its impact on your 401K or the value of the dollar. You’re supposed to listen to them talk in circles about it. You’re supposed to clap for Mark Carney or King Charles when they say something halfway truthful about the state of the world. You’re supposed to bash Trump for the collapse of the petro-dollar, even if the petro-dollar is what got all of us into this mess in the first place. The minute you connect this or that crisis to the larger picture, the minute you suggest we would be in deep trouble even without this reckless war, the moment you try to save lives rather than simply predicting death tolls and furrowing your eyebrows, you become the fearmonger. It’s interesting… If there’s one upside, it’s that many of us who’ve been taking the warnings seriously are more prepared, materially and emotionally, for what’s happening now. I’m glad, because it’s perhaps the _only_ upside… As for the validation of those “I told you so” moments, that turns out to be a myth. There’s no real validation to be had. Even if you predicted all this, it doesn’t matter. Everyone just rolls their eyes at you anyway. The ones shouting about it the loudest now, the ones who suddenly discovered it was a bad idea to make the world dependent on fossil fuels, they get all the credit. The MAGA conspirators who suddenly had a change of heart, the agents of misinformation who are finally telling the truth for clicks, they get all the praise. It’s almost like the world rewards you for being wrong. And punishes you for being right. There are many excellent writers and researchers on this platform who warned us about the energy crisis weeks ago. These podcast bruhs? Even as they throw around words like “famine” and “genocide” now, they still don’t believe it’s actually happening. You can tell. You can tell by the way they talk about all this. You can tell by how long it took them to say the word “genocide” in the context of Israel. One minute, they’re mocking you for wearing an N95 mask. The next minute, they’re encouraging you to hoard antivirals. Watching them, listening to them, you get the sense that none of them have dealt with a real emergency. They just like to sit around and talk about other people’s emergencies, our emergencies, our disasters. Our struggles are interesting to them. It’s great content. * * * _Thank you to everyone who reads this unpaywalled newsletter. If you value this content, please help the publication grow by sharing and supporting. I'll always do my absolute best to deliver high-quality, thought-provoking, practical content on a range of issues that matter to us in these unhinged times._ Support

A few years ago, my family lived through an F3 tornado. It passed right by us. Even now, this feels like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Even while sitting there in the bathroom of our one-level home, having gone through dozens of tornado warnings and storms, something felt different. I’ve gone online and traced its path, and we got lucky. A few streets over, and we might not be here. So, that was a wakeup call. Our prepping wasn’t theoretical anymore. About three years ago, my family lived through an F3 tornado. It almost destroyed our hometown, injuring hundreds and bringing life to a standstill. For some, it knocked out power for days. People we knew lost their homes. Last year’s deep, reckless, sinister cuts to the National Weather Service made one thing very clear: As the climate crisis upends our world and brings evermore intense threats to our doors, the super-rich and their political puppets intend to strip us of the tools we need to protect ourselves. And while it’s true that public pressure and legal action forced the current regime to reverse course and approve hires that offset the worst losses from the DOGE cuts, it’s also true that the agency is still recovering—and it’s never going to be quite the same. It’s also true that longterm cuts and efforts to decimate public services will never stop. It's fitting for those of us interested in dealing with reality and preparing for the future to bring that down into the most concrete levels, learning how to predict bad weather before it hits us. That's the whole point. No matter how much we resist, one other basic truth remains. It’s in our interest to know how to deal with disasters when we can’t rely on local or federal leadership. That’s been the theme of my work for a couple of years. So, reading the weather without a forecast? Where do you even start? ### Learn how to read a barometer A barometer could save your life. It gives you one of the most reliable ways to predict severe weather ahead of time. Some of us barely know what a barometer does. Well, it measures atmospheric pressure, and atmospheric pressure indicates the conditions that favor severe storms and tornadoes. This article does a good job explaining how and why barometers can help us predict the weather. In simple terms, barometers rise during dry weather, indicating high pressure and little chance for rain or storms. When they fall, the chances of bad weather rise. If you go out and get a barometer, you’ll need to adjust it to your local elevation. You can do that manually, or you can get a fancy digital barometer that adjusts the elevation for you. It might even be a good idea to get a watch that reads barometric pressure, so you’ve always got it on. A pressure reading above 1013.25 millibars (mb) or hectopascals (hPA) provides the baseline meteorologists use. A barometer might use mb or hPA, but they’re the same. For once, you don’t have to do any conversions Barometers drop when the pressure does. So a falling barometer indicates a higher chance for rain and storms. The faster a barometer drops, the better the chances for severe weather. A pressure reading that falls below 1009 mb indicates a stronger chance of rain and storms. If the barometer drops 4 mb or more over the course of three hours, that increases the chances even more. A barometer will tend to gradually fall for 12 hours straight before a storm rolls in. If it falls slower, that tends to indicate a warm front moving in. If it falls faster, that tends to indicate a cold front. Either one can mean storms. You can be pretty sure of a major storm if: * Your barometer falls 8 mb or more over 12 hours * Your barometer drops below 1009 mb * It heads to 1005 mb or below * It keeps dropping Sudden rises in barometric pressure can also mean trouble. If a barometer swings up 6-10 mb over the course of a few hours, that tends to indicate strong winds. Strong winds and dry weather can fuel wildfires. That’s why you pay attention to sudden changes in a barometer in either direction. It’s a good tool to have. ### Stir your coffee It’s a bit of folklore, but apparently it works pretty well. Make a strong pot of coffee. Pour it into your cup. Stir it until bubbles form. If the bubbles gather in the center, that indicates high pressure and decent weather. If the bubbles move to the walls of the cup, that indicates lower pressure and bad weather. ### Pay attention to the wind According to hikers and farming records, the direction of the wind can provide you with clues about the weather. Winds from the south indicate rain. Winds from the east also indicate rain and bad weather. Strong winds followed by a sudden calm indicate a major storm close at hand. ### Do the dew Heavy dew or fog in the morning or evening indicates decent weather for the next 12 hours. So does frost, during the winter. ### Look at the sun and the moon Haze around the sun or moon at night often predicts rain and storms the next day. A red or hazy moon often indicates dust pushed in from low-pressure systems. On the other hand, a red sun at sunset predicts good weather. ### Look at the clouds Weather.gov Clouds can tell you a lot about the immediate weather you’re facing. Thin, white clouds usually mean decent weather. So do flat clouds. Flat gray sheets of clouds can mean rain and storms, but generally not severe ones. Fluffy clouds shaped like an anvil often mean major storms are forming. A range of cloud types: **Cumulus** : Cauliflower clouds that signal good weather **Cirrocumulus** : Small, white, patchy clouds that signal cold weather **Altocumulus** : Grayish white sheets that signal potential storms **Stratocumulus** : Lumpy gray clouds that signal rain **Cirrus** : Feathery clouds that signal decent weather **Cirrostratus** : Sheets of clouds that signal rain or snow **Altostratus** : Thicker, lower, darker sheets that signal warm fronts **Nimbus/Nimbostratus** : Fluffy dark clouds that signal rain **Cumulonimbus** : Towering clouds often shaped like anvils that signal strong storms. Of all the cloud types, these mean the most trouble. ### Start a fire Smoke behaves differently during high and low pressure. During high pressure, smoke rises straight into the air. During low pressure, it wafts and spirals back down. A smoky fire often predicts bad weather. ### Look at the plants and trees Flowers tend to close up as rain and storms approach, especially common ones like dandelions and tulips. Pine cones open during dry weather and close during humid weather, as rain approaches. During high humidity, leaves will also tend to go limp and turn over more easily, blown by the wind. In general, vegetation gives off stronger scents during impending rainfall. ### Look at the animals and insects Many animals and insects can sense changes in barometric pressure. Cows lie down together in groups. Birds fly closer to the ground. Frogs get louder. Some insects, like cicadas, flies, and mosquitoes, also get louder and more active before a storm. Of course, it can go either way. You’ll also find advice out there saying that flying insects like butterflies and bees get quiet and shelter down before a storm. You’ll also see contradictory statements that cicadas quiet down their mating calls before a storm. In general, it makes more sense for insects sensing barometric pressure to go quiet and disappear, moving to safer locations. ### Other ideas? I’ll be adding this information to the next major update to the guide. In the meantime, if you know other ways to predict the weather, drop a line in the comments. The more information we have, the better. Support

It looks like someone tried to assassinate Trump… Again… The pundits will spend days talking it to death. Conspiracy theories will spin and spin, saying it was staged, calling it a false flag, etc. Countless politicians, celebrities, and “journalists” will make statements condeming the violence. And I’m just sitting here thinking, my god, this has all gotten so… Absolutely, definitively boring. You know? Wake me up when this talking pig is actually dead. Otherwise, I’ve already seen this episode. I don’t care. The writing is poop. The acting is poop. The directing is poop. The soundtrack is poop. I have no interest in this whatsoever. I have a hundred more interesting things to do. I’m sorry to swear, but hopefully you appreciate the sentiment. You get it. This is how you feel, deep down, right? Despite all the self-important podcastarati telling you that you should care, that this incident means something, that it has some relevance to you and all of your struggles, personal, financial, existential. Raise your hand if you don’t care. Perhaps it matters to the extent that it represents a further descent into political instability, assuming it was a genuine assassination attempt. Even if it wasn’t, even if every attempt on Trump was staged, it points to the same unraveling. Political violence has become the norm, politics is the new reality television, and it’s upending every event that attempts to bring any sense of normalcy to our shattered civic sphere. I’ve always hated reality television. I’m not about to start watching it now. If there’s any meaning here: It was always naive, even ludicrous, to think journalists could kick back and have a few laughs with the head of a fascist crime mafia. That was the insane part. The assassination attempt? That actually makes sense. Far be it from any of us to speculate on the “motives” of the shooter, but hear me out: He wanted Trump dead, maybe? Even for those among us who reject violence, who hasn’t secretly hoped Trump would keel over at some point? Who hasn’t openly hoped? I’m not even religious, and I remember praying for any god to take him back in 2020 when he got Covid. I’ve never hoped anyone would die as much and as many times as I’ve hoped Trump would die, via natural causes, via his own political violence. Whatever works for me. I’m not sure Trump really has staying power as a martyr. We thought Charlie Kirk would be a martyr, but instead, he became a meme. I think Trump would go the same way. Anyway… No, Trump’s death wouldn’t bring order to the universe. It wouldn’t solve all our problems. But it would solve a few of the biggest, most immediate ones. Of course, it’s also worth acknowledging that Trump has fundamentally, permanently altered our politics. We’ll never get back to normal. We don’t know exactly what the world will look like without him, but we sure as hell know what a world _with_ him looks like, and there’s a 99 percent chance it would be better if he died, because almost any road we take is better than the one we’re on now. There are plenty of awful people out there, but it’s hard to imagine anyone more universally hated than this man. So, no, after thinking about it for a few minutes, after the initial awe wears off, I’m left with a decided feeling of nonplussed. Unimpressed. Even bored… And honestly, a little disappointed… The only surprising thing about this whole mess is how many times this scourge on humanity has managed to cheat death and defeat, how many times he’s declared bankruptcy, how many times his career has been over, and yet he keeps coming back. It’s really starting to feel like there might be a god after all, and he’s trolling us, he’s rolling on the floor laughing. That’s what it feels like. On a more realistic level, it confirms what some of us know: There’s nobody up there looking out for us. There’s no divine justice. There’s no karma. The only justice in this world is the justice we make. Evil only gets what it deserves if someone gives it to them. Regardless of what we hear over the next few days, we know this: If Trump were actually in jail, where he belongs, then people wouldn’t have to keep trying to kill him. In their own sloppy, misguided way, they’re trying to do the job that our politicians could never bring themselves to do. There’s a pattern here, of course. Like it or not, the system has failed. Everyone sees it now. That’s why Chamel Abdulkarim torched a corporate warehouse, incinerating $600 million. It’s why someone shot a healthcare CEO dead in the street. Even the seemingly senseless mass shootings we see more and more of every year have their roots in a failing socio-economic system that no longer even pretends to take care of us, but instead grinds us up, exploits us, pays us starvation wages, makes us lonely, sells us poison, fills our head with self-righteous rage, drives us nuts, then does everything it can to load us up with drugs and guns. And they wonder why the violence is getting out of control? Lol, okay… That’s why I’m writing this up late at night on a weekend. It wasn’t my intention, but this thing happened, and I think you might like to know that while the internet is blowing up with every sensationalist spin on this assassination attempt, if that’s what it turns out to be, you’re not the only one who doesn’t care, like, at all. Wake me up when he’s finally dead. Otherwise… Meh. * * * _Thank you to everyone who reads this unpaywalled newsletter. If you value this content, please help the publication grow by sharing and supporting. I'll always do my absolute best to deliver high-quality, thought-provoking, practical content on a range of issues that matter to us in these unhinged times._ Support

The title for this essay comes from Earnest Hemingway’s _A Farewell to Arms,_ a book I hadn’t thought about for years. It’s worth rereading, especially now. It reminds me just how many books you read in your teens or 20s that you don’t truly appreciate until later in life. Now, in my 40th year, I understand what Hemingway was getting at. Whatever else you might have to say about him as a person, he nails what many of us are feeling now, so I’m going to talk about it. Here we go: You might remember the basics: An American named Frederic Henry winds up driving an ambulance in the Italian Army during the First World War. That world and its ideals inspire very little in him. From the beginning, Henry cringes at words like “glory” and “patriotism.” And yet, he carries out his duties. Then he gets hit by a bomb while eating a cold macaroni lunch in the trenches, with the other ambulance drivers. During his recovery, he meets the love of his life, a beautiful nurse named Catherine. For once, he feels something, a sense of connection with someone else. She’s also recovering from loss. In just a few weeks, they start a family. It doesn’t matter to the institutions. They don’t care about his injuries or his health, or his future. They send Henry back to the front anyway, knowing he’ll likely die. He walks into a total mess. Days later, Henry gets caught up in an embarrassing retreat as the German army starts to break through the Italian lines. It’s a real shit show. Nobody does their job. Nobody listens. Nobody follows orders. Honestly, there aren’t many orders to follow anyway. Everyone, from commanding officers all the way down to ambulance drivers and engineers, start running scared. They refuse to help each other when their vehicles break down. They leave little girls stranded on back roads. At one point, terrified soldiers simply start shooting each other. The retreat breaks down into further chaos as soldiers begin executing their officers on sight, blaming them for everything gone wrong. Understandably, Henry deserts. He understands something critical: If _this_ is how his own side treats each other, there’s nothing left to fight for anyway. He grabs Catherine, and they escape to Switzerland. “The war seemed as far away as the football games of someone else’s college.” That’s how Henry feels, watching the insanity from afar. It’s exactly on point. This isn’t the story of a coward who abandons his post. It’s the story of a reasonable individual who gets fed up with the massive incompetence and indifference of the people who are supposed to be his allies, supposed to be on his side, who are instead trying to kill him. Henry has already gotten blown up once. He’s already done everything he can do. His own team doesn’t want his help. They don’t want to listen to him. They just want him to shut up and drive the ambulance. They just want him to follow orders, even if they get everyone killed, even if it makes the love of his life a widow for a second time, and forces her to raise a child in a post-apocalyptic world, all by herself, with nobody to count on. And for what? A cause? The story means so much more when you read it in light of the historical context, and when you think about its relevance today. When you come to understand the real Woodrow Wilson, the one described in John Barry’s _The Great Influenza_ , you don’t see a great man. You don’t see a defender of democracy. You see a card-carrying eugenecist warhawk, a reckless tyrant who just might’ve been responsible for catalyzing the 1918 flu pandemic with his abhorrent public health policies and exclusive focus on not only winning the war, but completely annihilating the German Empire and securing American dominance around the world. For Wilson, the war was personal. He wrapped his vendetta against Germany up in a moral crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” Does that sound familiar? Why was it so personal? Wilson was shocked and enraged over the 1917 Zimmerman Telegram, in which Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico, promising to help them reclaim parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—all lost to the U.S. during our territorial and largely unlawful expansions during the 19th century. Germany wanted to promote Mexican sovereignty against American imperial expansion, and that enraged Wilson. More than anything, even unrestricted submarine warfare, that fueled his aggression. It wasn’t about protecting democracy. It was about protecting empire. In many ways, Woodrow Wilson got us involved in a war that had almost nothing to do with us and cooked up reasons for American intervention in Europe, in order to promote American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, all while pushing eugenics at home and completely ignoring all the warning signs leading up to the 1918 pandemic, and continuing to ignore said pandemic as it unfolded. As a bonus, historians widely acknowledge that Wilson “indirectly” helped create the brutal post-war Germany that helped Hitler’s rise to power. Henry was serving in the Italian Army, but Hemingway’s critiques apply broadly. The Italian Army’s flaws provide a metaphor for the futility of global politics and warfare in general. When you understand all that, you start to understand why someone would desert the army and start thinking of a world war as “the football games of someone else’s college.” You’re not fighting for anything. You’re not saving anyone. You’re just helping the corrupt leaders of one side or the other. In that sense, you’re better off getting as far away from it as you can. All of that describes how many of us might feel after reading story after story about: * The Ellison family taking over yet another media platform * The head of the FBI spending his days blackout drunk * Judges undoing state referendums, against the people’s will * Wars and genocides that continue regardless of what we do * Climate disasters already baked into a collapsing ecosystem * A public constantly distracted by superficial headlines * One hollow political promise after another * Trump’s latest meltdowns We start to feel more and more like Frederic Henry, sent off to fight for causes that don’t help anyone but a handful of individuals at the very top, who push those causes for the sake of ulterior motives. We’re told to follow orders that don’t make sense. We’re expected to help allies and comrades who don’t want our help, who don’t listen to us, who abandon us and their values at the first opportunity. Our allies talk a big game, but they flee from every moment that requires them to endure the slightest hardship or risk. They run scared. They refuse to help. And then when we manage to survive their incompetence, they want to blame us for everything. They want to drag us off and execute us. It’s more than a sense of futility. It’s more than a sense of indifference. It’s a sense of having done everything you can, and watching the communities and institutions you sacrificed yourself for shrug you off, while telling you it wasn’t enough, while sending you back to the front, but not with a better plan, not with better tools, not with any promise to make your next sacrifice worthwhile or even valued. Maybe that’s how you feel. You’ve stopped caring as much, but not because you feel unaffected. You’ve stopped caring as a matter of self-preservation. Often, it feels like nobody cares if you care. Nobody wants to hear your opinion. Nobody wants your solutions. Nobody shares your cause. Nobody thinks you matter. They just want you to adopt their cause. They want you to adopt their solution. They want you to follow their plan. They want you to put your life on the line for it, even if they’re not. When their plan fails, they’re going to flee. They’re going to leave you in the broken-down ambulance in the ditch. If you manage to make it back in one piece, they’re going to shoot you anyway. So, why bother? It’s not giving up, it’s letting go. There’s a difference. When you give up, you admit defeat. You do nothing. When you let go, you simply make better decisions about where to focus. You make the decisions for yourself, and you stop joining causes simply because they sound noble at the time, or because they make you feel good about yourself. It’s maturity. I’m not here now to tell you what to care about. I’m here to name a feeling. If you’re thinking that there’s actually no “good guys” in these struggles we’re in, if you’re feeling like you can’t even count on your own party or your own friends, if you feel like everyone is giving all their time and energy to the wrong things, if you feel like it’s time to bail, to grab who and what you care about, and leave everything else behind as if it’s the football games of another college, maybe you’re not wrong. Maybe you’re not giving up. You’re evolving. You’re becoming wiser. Maybe you’re not a coward. Maybe you’re not indifferent or privileged. Maybe you’re not insulated. You’re not jaded, just seasoned. Maybe it’s time for you to stop listening to what everyone else thinks you should do, and to start doing what you know is the right thing. Not the right thing according to politicians and political parties. Not the right thing according to cable news networks. Not the right thing according to slogans and viral posts on social media. But the right thing for you and your family. The right thing for your community, however you define that. Maybe you don’t even know what the right thing is. If so, it’s worth taking some time to figure that out. If you want to vote, then do it. If you want to protest, then do it. If you want to yell at your senators, then do it. But if you’re starting to feel like you’re getting blown up for no reason, just driving the ambulance into one ditch after another, only to make it back and be shot anyway, by your own side, it’s fine to take some time out. It’s fine to find your own cause, and to put your time and energy there. If the enemies are breaking through the lines, but your own side is too busy shooting each other to do anything about it, are you a bad person for bailing? No, I would say you’re not. You’re not giving up. You’re letting go. * * * _Thank you to everyone who reads this unpaywalled newsletter. If you value this content, please help the publication grow by sharing and supporting. I'll always do my absolute best to deliver high-quality, thought-provoking, practical content on a range of issues that matter to us in these unhinged times._ Support