101 ways to die

101 WAYS TO DIE


Some survivalist writers can be pretty unoriginal. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, if they follow a formula rather than just regurgitate the same old information trying to quickly cash in on the panic of the day. They may not be very good writers, so they use a tried formula, and if they impart new and original and helpful information than all is well, crisis averted, all is calm. The frauds just raising cash are easy enough to spot. And every genre of entertainment and education is the same, it isn’t just survivalists. A hit blockbuster comes out in summer and two weeks later a Hollywood hack that ripped off the original script for the hit and made a schlock piece for below low budget, think daytime soap opera budget, but filmed in less time, pulls his duplicate masterpiece out of the can and releases it to capitalize on the real films success. Look at “business success” books, which usually rip off the boilerplate formula AND the information. You can pick up today’s best selling CEO porn piece and compare it to last years and the one twenty years ago and it is all the same crap with different covers and higher prices.

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Look at TV shows. If there was ever a shark feeding frenzy of rip offs and Xerox copies of ideas, this is it. The stars change, as do the time slots, the ideas stay the same. The biggest change is the increased amount of time devoted to commercials and in show product placement. This is all a roundabout way of excusing my own formulistic slop in the best survivalist book ever, The Frugal Survivalist. The first quarter of the book follows the standard from the early Eighties, listing the many and varied ways we were going to get screwed which justified preparations. I even did it for the same reasons, to puff up the book. I’m not sure why, as the book was originally intended only as an e-book. I had a low price and didn’t need to add mass to justify a higher one. I think I just wanted to write a “real” book, and a longer one was “realer”. Now, of course, this sin was washed away, at least in my own mind, since I didn’t follow the standard concerns of economic collapse and nuclear war, but rather brought forth to the still ignorant heathens the threat of Peak Oil ( it is old news now, except for readers of most other popular blogs, but five years ago it wasn’t on everyone’s minds as stale and repetitive and beaten like a tired nag ). If you had bought my book back in ‘06, read that section, immediate praised the gods that I was so astute and overbearingly correct at all times, and started pondering how the end of oil would be a little more troublesome than just an expensively fueled SUV Sunday picnic drive, then went out and bought cheap land and moved while there was still a job market, you would still love me to this day even through multiple wife breakups, periods of repetitive hack work on the blog, and even disturbing proclamations of unnatural love towards old English military rifles.

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The problem with lists of disasters is the same problem with lists of equipment for bug out bags. Shopping lists are negative and repulsive. As they overwhelm, they push you away and make you defensive. With a grocery list, you have no choice. When it comes down to eating verses saving money, the eating usually wins. But still, that list represents a financial hemorrhage. No one likes then, except perhaps really fat people that have so much mass hanging from their skeleton that the FedGov has little choice but to approve them for Medicare Disability, least they fall and crush people as they are trying to walk on canes rather than get a HoverRound electronic conveyance. Those Hefty Hippos get strange body chemicals secreting at each new box of HoHo’s placed on the list ( if you are grotesquely obese and are offended, let me just suggest one thing- lose some weight you disgusting pig. Until then, you will be ridiculed. In the end you can’t run quick enough to avoid feeding the entire village ).

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Because a list of disasters is so depressing, and because there is little you can do to protect against them all, the list itself is counter-productive for the writer. If they really care about the readers future health, they won’t present a list. Rather, discus the underlying root cause that must be addressed. Most disasters you are preparing for have one basic consequence, which is the destruction of the infrastructure transporting food and supplies to your location. Most everything else stems from that. No food is shipped in, so you store food. No ammunition or gasoline is shipped in to the police, you protect yourself. No juice is flowing through the electrical lines, you have solar panels. No doctors or hospitals are available, you stock up medical supplies. And so on. It doesn’t matter if an earthquake took down all the bridges over the Mississippi, global warming wiped out all the ports, nuclear strikes melted the central rail hubs, a solar flare wiped out all computer chips, the banks failed and lack of credit seized up trade or all the semi trucks ran out of diesel. In the end, the food isn’t shipped in.

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All civilizations rested on concentrating food production and mitigating natures adverse effects on the crops. When those public works are negatively impacted from an unexpected event, it is all over. Because, you see, your list is useless. All those disasters only happen because the infrastructure built to protect against them fail. And because the insurance is void, a multitude hit simultaneously. You don’t just have one disaster, but many. No one thing killed the Roman Empire. Overpopulation brought on by surplus, itself not a disaster, caused soil infertility which caused military overspending for more conquest with caused hyperinflation which caused barbarian invasion due to vulnerability, and famines started which caused pandemics which led to depopulation which led to farms being abandoned and on and on. All our previous modern disasters were averted through cheap and abundant oil. Potential famine averted through petroleum derived food, economic meltdown averted through continued growth based on increased energy, war averted through placating the masses with surplus wealth. And on and on.

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With oil down here to stay, the disasters keep coming. New Orleans and Japan never rebuilt. The Just In Time system fiasco ( the whole globe uses it, and only cheap oil made it possible ). The government only running by doubling the debt every two years. Most oil producing countries facing open and continual revolt over unaffordable food. And that is just recently. Many disasters at once, not just one, are a good enough reason to prep. Enjoy the mystery and surprise as the flock of Black Swans takes to the skies, one group after another.

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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