Category: Emergency Preparedness

Has The Threat To America Of A Repeat 9-11 Increased Since Hamas Assaulted Israel?

America, Emergency Preparedness, Headlines, Law and Order, World Affairs

Simple answer…yes! They skyrocketed when Biden came into office and renewed the weak, pandering policy towards radical Islam that Obama initiated.

Having so recklessly diminished our security and squandered our sole-superpower role, every rogue nation itching to increase their position in the world has plotted and prepared to take advantage of our having turned in our Sheriff’s badge. Russia-Ukraine, China-Taiwan, NORKO missiles flying over Japan, the invasion of the West by the Third World, and now The Islamic Brotherhood/Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran’s move on Israel are all manifestations of Joe’s abrogation of our responsibility to maintain order.

Since 9-11 there have been 34 incidents of Islamic terrorism in the U.S. [1] 139 people were killed in these incidents, 506 people injured. If we were to add what happened on 9-11, of course, the numbers would be much higher: 3132 killed; 9039 injured. The number of incidents, perhaps even the deaths and injuries, on paper, may appear relatively small, but the horror of the Boston Marathon bombing, the mass shooting at an Orlando Nightclub in 2012, the 2015 San Bernardino attack…we all recall the images, overrides the numbers.

With all the illegal aliens Biden has allowed to swarm across our border do you have any doubt that “sleeper cells” of terrorists assembled in countless one-bedroom apartments in chaotic cities but also in bucolic suburban towns are real, not just bad guys in Netflix movies?

Now we’re on the precipice of World War Three. Have any doubts about that? What are the chances of the following playing out over the next few weeks and months?

  1. Israel commits the majority of their resources in Gaza.
  2. Iran gives the signal for Hezbollah to launch a full scale attack from the North.
  3. The U.S., facing diminishing weapons stocks increasingly redirects resources to Israel from Ukraine allowing Russia to prevail and directly threaten NATO.
  4. Iran successfully galvanizes the Arab world, uniting Sunni’s and Shia in Jihad against Israel.
  5. The U.S. is forced to support Israel with air resources.
  6. China, holding backa at the moment, moves on Taiwan.
  7. The U.S. is forced to put tanks, artillery, Patriot missile batteries and even ground troops into Israel.
  8. Israel takes out the Iranian energy infrastructure.
  9. Iran together with other Arab states declares overt war on Israel.
  10. Israel nukes Iran’s uranium enrichment sites.

There are myriad scenarios with these elements being war-gamed in the basement of the Pentagon and elsewhere around the Western intelligence planning centers and they all sound like they were made for MSM prime time, “if it bleeds it leads”, “follow the money” programming. In short, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, and with missiles and bombs flying, tunnel-rats gearing up and moving out, war ships mustering…we’re sitting on a powder keg.

At what point do the mullahs of the Islamic Brotherhood give the signal for those terror cells to simultaneously come out of the woodwork and attack our highly vulnerable soft targets: churches, malls, theaters, stadiums, schools, etc.?

Are you aware that there are nine power substations in American that, if destroyed simultaneously, would knock down the ENTIRE U.S. power grid for from anywhere between three months and a year? And do you know how vulnerable these substations are to conventional small arms attack from 2-3 man squads of terrorists, or to cyber attacks such as the one that brought down the Colonial Pipeline in July 2021? Do you know how relatively easy it is/would be to blow up vans full of explosives in the tunnels or on the bridges leading to Manhattan thus bringing New York to a screeching, panic’ d halt? Many of us have felt the disruption and pain of natural disasters like Sandy, Katrina, Isaias, Maui, etc. but even more of us felt the effects of COVID and of course, 9-11. But have you ever seriously considered the implications of a 3 month + national grid down situation?

With things as precarious as they are in the world right now, with so many of us going about our daily lives as if nothing was going on, with our guard so down… if you were a terrorist wouldn’t you figure this would be a good time to assault America?

I implore my readers to contemplate the situation and PREPARE as best you can for those awful consequences that would attend YOU if what’s going on in the Middle East and elsewhere escalates into full blown kinetic, cyber and psychological war.

Get help and advice from whomever and wherever you trust (I would NOT trust government resources – the cavalry didn’t come over the hill in the knick of time for any of the disasters I mentioned earlier), but remember:

It’s too late to plan and prepare once it starts happening, whatever “it” is!

Head on a swivel, watch your six, STAY VIGILANT!   

[1] See https://johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html

Chaos – Ratcheted Up

Emergency Preparedness, Government, Law and Order, World Affairs

In case you haven’t noticed yet, the chaos ushered in by the Biden administration just got worse. The implications of Iran/Hamas’ actions aren’t yet fully known, but they will no doubt be significant. I’ve been asked over the last 48-72 hours for my “take” on the events.

1. First, the global implications. It’s really quite basic. When the sheriff leaves town the bad guys have a field day. In other words, when the cat’s away the mice will play. Stupid aphorisms but, regrettably, true.

When the world’s sole superpower squanders its righteous dominance and relapses into a “can’t we all get along” attitude instead of pointing out right from wrong and acting in support of the former and against the latter…when we don’t enforce sanctions on evil empires…when we sleep with the enemy by continuing to engage in trade as if their malevolent acts are benign…when we don’t use our abilities to covertly and overtly counter the buildup of arms and other offensive capabilities in which they’re engaged… this is what we get.

Now the situation is so bad we may very well be on the brink of world war. I don’t say that lightly. We may actually already be in it. Technology having transformed EVERYTHING, it may not be so much as a boots on the ground conflict but rather a “my drone is bigger than your drone” kind of war.

Everyone is condemning both the U.S. and Israeli intelligence apparatuses for the surprise aspect of the Hamas incursion into Israel. The condemnation is justified, IMHO, due to the abandonment or at least decreasing reliance on HUMINT (human intelligence using people,) and increasing reliance on TECHINT (the use of technology to obtain and analyze intelligence). As I’ve stated often, “Artificial Intelligence” is just that, “ARTIFICIAL”. There is absolutely no substitute for eyeball to eyeball, belly to belly human interaction in developing and using intelligence. Its deficiency is why Hamas was able to pull off what it did.

With a destabilized world, morally bankrupt governments….check that… AMORAL governments, the “mice” will seek to take advantage. China really could invade Taiwan. North Korea really could start lobbing missiles. The Venezuelans really could invade Colombia. The countless enemies that have infiltrated America through our open border(s) really could launch coordinated attacks on malls, on our electrical grid, on soft targets around the country.

And Israel really could nuke Tehran.

In summary, my take is that the world is in a more precarious situation than it has been in my lifetime and we should ALL be preparing for the unthinkable.

2. Domestically, the Left has obviously infested all of our institutions such that “Bizarro-world” is where we now live. Alternatively, it can be said we live in a “post-truth” society. Again, IMHO, each and every one of us, and our families and true friends, need to prepare to become as self-reliant and independent of the government and all our other institutions as possible.

What do I mean by that?

I don’t mean we need to go live “off the grid” in a mountain cabin. I don’t mean we need to prepare for TEOTWAWKI or a complete SHTF situation. I don’t mean we need to start building bomb shelters (yet), but I DO mean we need to be prepared to suffer supply chain disruptions, for civil unrest, for extended power outages, for shortages of all kinds. We need to prepared to take care of our own health in the absence of adequate or effective health care provider, i.e. doctor and hospital support. We may even need to take the education of our children into our own hands.

 It also means we need to start drinking coffee from cups which are labeled, “No More Mister Nice Guy”. And we need to wake up and smell that coffee! In case you haven’t noticed, the Left are really really good at three things: in 1. “community organizing”, 2. in ignoring the rules as “the end justify the means” and 3. getting every one of their ilk to march in lockstep. The first includes beating conservatives and traditionalists to the nursing homes to harvest ballots. The second involves cheating, lying, stealing, engaging in fraudulent tactics. The third involves using high-production-value propaganda and mass-brain-washing techniques to prey on an increasingly dumbed-down, dependent, lemming population.

We have to fight back (and, as much as I hate to say it), use the same tactics. If the rules are that there are no rules, we’ll just have to play by the lack of them as well. If we have to recruit, bribe, cajole legions of young people to knock on doors and solicit votes/ballots, so be it. If we have to show up in great numbers at polling locations to demand, by force if necessary, that vote presentation, counting and tabulation are legitimate, then we must.

Either we wrest back the levers of power by bringing the Sheriff back both on the world stage and here at home as well, or else the chaos will result in the further destruction of everything we hold dear.

Preparedness Isn’t Just For Preppers

Emergency Preparedness

In case you hadn’t noticed, the world is a mess. The Left has successfully created so much chaos that here in America, while the “fundamental transformation” Obama promised isn’t complete, virtually everything we’ve held dear all our lives has been damaged and if we don’t arrest the metastasis, we WILL reach a point of no return.

The COVID pandemic didn’t meet the most dire predictions or result in what Preppers describe as the TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World As We Know It) worst-case scenario, but it most certainly exposed many of the problems of which they have long warned. Illness, death, flaws and inadequacies in the health care system, contradicting expert opinions, supply disruptions, economic distress, societal breakdown and lawlessness were all manifest. Life as we know it for most of us may not have ended, but it certainly changed.

Add to the pandemic the impact of hurricanes, wildfires, shells and bullets flying in Ukraine, inflation that we really feel (1/2 gallon of milk and a gallon of gas above $4.00!), strikes, the Russians and North Koreans getting cozy with one another, the Chinese continuing their hegemonic aggression not just in the Spratly Islands but in Latin America, Africa and even Europe, and everything else that has increased tensions and insecurity, and things are pretty damn unstable!

The Left has infected and corrupted all our institutions: not just politics and government, but the military, education, healthcare, banks, corporations, the judiciary, sports, journalism, entertainment, agriculture (yes, even agriculture) and on and on. Just about EVERY aspect of our lives has been infected with a virus far more deadly than COVID…WOKEISM, or LEFTISM, or the euphemistic “PROGRESSIVISM” or “SOCIAL JUSTICE”.

ALL OF IT, really, reflects the age-old battle between the have’s and have not’s, between the makers and the takers, between the productive and the indolent, between people of faith and the godless, even between Mars and Venus!

Tech and the Internet have amplified/given a megaphone to a whole generation of “victims” of oppression, of racism, of corporate cronyism, “white male aggression”, repression, institutional bias, etc. giving rise to a hyper-acute and hyper-active “grievance industry.”

It’s a mess! The guardrails, the yardsticks we used to have to separate right from wrong, good from evil, are almost gone.

Against this backdrop there is one vulnerability we ALL have, one that truly could transform our society into a scene from The Walking Dead minus the zombies…

THE LOSS OF POWER.

Everything we do from morning to night is dependent on electricity.

We’ve all experienced temporary power losses in our homes. The impact ranged from minor inconvenience to life-threatening. When Isaias hit in the Eastern U.S. in 2020 it knocked out power for millions of people for as much as two weeks. If you were affected, you know how bad things were. But even if you weren’t, the anxiety, misery and even devastation caused by the storm was felt across the nation.

Natural calamities that we have absolutely no control over, (notwithstanding the nonsense spouted by the climate alarmists to the contrary), are one thing. MAN-MADE calamities, such as the cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline in May 2021, and just yesterday, the ransomware attacks on two casinos in Las Vegas, are another.

Cyber-attacks/cyber-crimes are rising at an exponential rate. So long as we can go about our daily lives unimpeded, we don’t pay attention to the war being waged in front of computer screens at all levels of government and industry. Only when there’s a blip or significant outage do we even raise an eyebrow.  Even then, aside from salty words mumbled under our breaths, the refrain “they’ll figure it out” is the standard response with an expectation that the disruption will only be temporary.

But have you ever contemplated what would happen if the power went out, either from a natural disaster or a man-made one, for, say, 3 weeks? I’m not talking about TEOTWAWKI, but an outage beyond what we’ve already seen becoming more and more commonplace. What would you do? How would your life and the lives of your loved ones be affected?

The impact would range from inconvenience for those with backup generators and enough fuel to last through the crisis to catastrophe for those without electricity to heat their homes, power their well and sump pumps, refrigerators and medical devices.

Would civil unrest be a possibility? You bet it would. Could your bank account be frozen, your ATM card useless? Yup. Would grocery store shelves empty? Unquestionably.

“Grumps, you’re fearmongering” some of you may be thinking.

I urge my readers to take heed not to the grifters trying to make a dime on your insecurity (the purveyors of “72 Hour” survival kits come to mind) and not to turn their lives upside down, but to think about these questions.

The Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared” has never been more apt.

And if you’re serious about wanting to figure out how you’ll deal with emergencies beyond inconvenient and shy of TEOTWAWKI, I have a suggestion for you: get in touch with our affiliated entity: https://graybriarassociates.com.

ELECTION INTEGRITY, ELECTION INTEGRITY, ELECTION INTEGRITY…NOTHING MATTERS MORE!

America, Elections, Emergency Preparedness, Family, Politics

Oh, and in case the headline didn’t get my point across, ELECTION INTEGRITY has to be the paramount subject! Not enough is being done about this, especially in the swing states which will determine the outcome of the 2024 Election.

Every day there’s another poll, another talking head explaining how there’s no way Biden could win next year. “Trump will win the Primary but lose the General” is another meme.

I can’t overstate what underlies all of this posturing and campaigning and polling, etc.

IT’S WHO COUNTS THE VOTES, NOT WHO VOTES THAT MATTERS!!!!

As Jay Valentine points out yet again in his straightforward, persuasive, common sense  and thoughtful way, (see article in American Thinker HERE), there isn’t ANY Republican candidate: not Trump, not DeSantis, not the Lord Jesus Christ, who can win in 2024 the way the Democrats have rigged the system.

If what happened in 2020 and in the Supreme Court of Wisconsin election this year doesn’t hit us in the face like the Binaca blast, we’re dreaming, in denial or have just been so ground down to the point that we’ve given up.

Can anything be done about this? Is there any way our election system can be repaired in a few short months so it reflects the will of the American people, not the will of the Leftist Cabal?

I honestly don’t think it can. No amount of money put into advertising, in pointing out the obvious, in trying to inspire the electorate…means a damn thing if the corruption is not rooted out of the election process.

I continue to maintain that either a Black Swan, Unknown-Unknown Event or Divine Intervention will be needed to neutralize the corruption, send the cheaters and criminals back under their rocks and repair our constitutional republic.

By definition, if we can speculate what that Black Swan might consist of it wouldn’t be an Unknown-Unknown. Truly, something monumental, a universal ‘tipping point’, a cataclysmic Paradigm Shift is what will be needed to save our country.

God help us if a woke or incompetent Democrat is seated in the White House come January 2025, if true conservatives don’t have supermajorities in the House and Senate. Even if the GOP controls both the Executive and Legislative branches It will still take a generation to reverse this slide down the slippery slope to ruin.

But we must not, we cannot, we may not stop fighting to retrieve what’s left of our sanity, our integrity, our humanity.

And what does “fighting” mean? It means sending letters to the RNC, to Trump, to DeSantis, to the other candidates, to our senators and congressmen placing Jay Valentine’s article in front of them.  It’s also sending letters to the major and minor media outlets giving them a piece of your mind. It’s attending Town Hall meetings and not just listening, but speaking up when woke idiocracy is spouted by those on the dais. It’s courageously speaking up in a restaurant or McDonalds when some green-haired snowflake begins acting out and telling them to “shut up”, sit down and behave themselves.

It also means preparing for the worst, placing our heads on swivels and being prepared to physically defend ourselves, our loved ones, our friends and our homes if the Leftist mob comes down our street to attack us.

Now is the time to prepare. If and when things go South, it will be too late.

A Black Swan May Be The Only Thing That Will Stop This Madness

America, Economy, Emergency Preparedness, History, Society & Culture

In my previous post I concluded that it may take a cataclysmic event to restore sanity to our nation. I’m not talking about the price of eggs or gas skyrocketing, or store shelves being empty for a few days. I’m talking about something that will cause even the most dumbed-down, brain-addled, handheld-screen-addicted person to pick his or her head up and say, “Wow, maybe some things are more important than what the Kardashians are up to this week!”

I’ve long said that Economics is the dismal science, an academic exercise in futility, and while it may be fun and may earn a whole raft of propeller-heads an income, even wealth, it’s really only mental masturbation of the highest order.

Why do I say this? Because economics deals with building “models” that describe what the panoply of pulled levers have caused in the past with the hope that those models will help us predict the future. The fundamental problem with these models, however, is that they depend on two flawed assumptions: 1) the “rational man” and 2) the “absence of an outside shock”.

In case you haven’t been paying attention let me state the obvious:

First, there is no such thing as a rational man (or woman). All human beings are driven, at least in part if not entirely, by feelings, perceptions, etc., what I’d characterize as “squishy stuff”, NOT rational, analytical thought.

And, as we have all seen, “outside shocks” OCCUR ALL THE TIME! They differ in magnitude, of course, but they destroy models’ explanations of the past and their usefulness as predictors of the future.

Nevertheless, thousands of economists and bureaucrats pontificate endlessly on the overarching topics that impact our daily lives and GET PAID TO DO SO! Sometimes they’re right, more often they’re wrong, but they persevere.

In his famous book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a Black Swan as an improbable event with three basic characteristics: it is unpredictable, it has massive impact, and after the fact, explanations are concocted to make it appear less random.

Examples of past Black Swan events include: the 2000 Do-Com Crash, 9-11, the Fall of Lehman Brothers, the Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear Disasters, BREXIT, and most recently, COVID.

None of these were severe enough to wake people up. The effects, though severe, were not of such duration that people got serious about paying attention to things that matter.

Now we’re sufficiently far down the slippery slope, there is sufficient chaos, there is enough “information” flak in the air, that only a really BIG Black Swan of significant duration will, in my opinion, bring us back to REAL Reality!

So, what might such a Black Swan consist of?

China invading Taiwan
Israel nuking Tehran
The North Koreans launching a nuke at Japan
The San Andreas fault creating Nevada beach-front property
Tactical nukes get used in Ukraine
NATO deploys troops to Ukraine
The Stock Market crashes
The Yellowstone Volcano erupts
Biden resigns and Harris becomes President and Michele Obama becomes Vice President (threw this one in because it is such a frightening nightmare!)
A terrorist attack on the 9 key substations takes down the electrical grid for from 3 months to a year
Another, more deadly virus gets out of a lab
A coronal mass ejection REALLY hits Earth and wipes out much of what is electronic

I could conjure up more… These are just some “known unknowns”. A Black Swan is by definition an “unknown unknown”!

That one about a protracted blackout is the one that worries me the most. Three weeks without electricity and we’re in trouble. Three months without electricity and we’re in a shit-hit-the-fan, possibly even TEOTWAKI (The End of the World As We Know It) situation. I urge my readers to think about this stuff. The time to prepare for a Black Swan walking up your driveway isn’t after it’s already at your front door. It’s not as if we haven’t been forewarned and as if we don’t see how vulnerable our country and society is.

No Silver Bullets, No Easy Answers

America, Emergency Preparedness, Government, Headlines, Reason, Society & Culture, Values

Since the election, through the Holidays, now well into the New Year, I’ve been thinking about the answer to the question, “What now?”.

Sorting through the “news” each day, I can’t help but see more and more confusion over what is true, what is falsehood, what is sensationalism, what is understatement. The one word to describe our state of affairs is: CHAOS.

I don’t see any cohesive strategy, any clear direction, any comprehensible plan to either ‘make our country great again’ or ‘take it back’ or ‘drain the swamp’ or ‘root out corruption’. I see little to no consequences for malfeasance, for lying, for theft, for waste, for self-abusive destruction of what has since its inception been the greatest country in the world.

‘Common sense’ is no longer common.

Demagoguery,, self-delusion, obsequiousness and self-centeredness are common.

Psychologists call it ‘other-directed’. Fewer and fewer people think critically much less skeptically. Individualism has given way to herd instinct. Emotions rule – no one spends the time to think rationally.

What was fringe is now mainstream. Pushbacks against what would in other time be considered lunacy are met with overwhelming, crushing condemnation. It’s as if the one reasonable person standing in the middle of a valley is being charged by thousands of buffalo. Just read the responses on Twitter or any other social medium to a ‘traditional’ statement or viewpoint.

I’ve long thought that the way to change the course of our national ship is with good leadership, with the development of new Hollywood heroes who successfully fight and win against the encroaching and increasingly pervasive evil infecting our society, with ‘reality’ hitting Gen X and Gen Z such that they awaken from their folly.

It ain’t happening! The megaphone afforded by the Internet puts power in the hands of the deleterious, the destructive, the Evil. On one hand it improves lives. On the other hand, it destroys them.

It’s not just artificial intelligence that has supplanted real intelligence. Social media and the ubiquitous handheld phone/tablet/computer combined is now an addiction.

Pew Research tells us:

  • 46% of teens say they use the internet “almost constantly”
  • 48% of teens say they go online several times a day
  • 48% of teenage girls say they’re online “almost constantly”
  • 43% of teenage boys say they’re online “almost constantly”

Look around you. It’s not just teenagers. So long as our society continues to descend into an artificial reality, fundamental human priorities will be back-burnered, what’s important neglected, what’s moral diminished, what’s good scoffed at.

No hero, no charismatic leader, no game of whack-a-mole is going to turn this around. Artificial reality has become Real Reality!

Thus I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it will take some kind of cataclysmic event to wake up society and get people serious again. A Black Swan. Something that completely shatters what I will call Artificial Delusion and return us to basics.

It’s long past time to prepare for that Black Swan event.

Blackout

Emergency Preparedness, Government, Law and Order, Science, Technology

The attack on the electricity substation in Moore County, North Carolina this past Saturday evening is precisely what I’ve been warning about for years. Conventional arms were used to blast away at transformers and other equipment at the site resulting in a blackout that persists three days later for thousands of North Carolinians.

If you take the probability and likelihood of a disastrous event and multiply it by the impact it would have you get what I call the “Disaster Index”. It’s a measure of just how bad a disaster could be. In arithmetic terms DI=I x P. So while the impact, and forgive the pun, of a meteor hitting the earth amounts to the highest imaginable I (an extinction event most likely), the probability or likelihood of such an event is PDS (pretty damn small). The Disaster Index is thus extremely small.

On the other hand, the impact of a Katrina-like hurricane is both high AND likely, thus the DI is many times greater than the meteor strike.

I have long stated that the event with the highest DI is not an EMP, Coronal Mass Ejection, Reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles…all potentially catastrophic in terms of impact but, unlikely. Rather, it is a terrorist attack on the nine electrical grid substations in the country that, were they to fail or be knocked out simultaneously, would plunge the entire nation into darkness for upwards of three months. The knock-on effects of such an outage would create a chaos and “Walking Dead” scenario only Hollywood could dream up.

The attack in Moore County is being investigated as “vandalism”. Irrespective of whether the attack was that, or a deliberate vulnerability “test”, you can bet the many terror cells already existing in the United States took a very special interest in it.

Study after study have warned of the vulnerability of our power grid. Blackouts have already occurred that should have been wake-up calls that this kind of disaster could happen. But no, our government would rather…you fill in the rest.

God help us!

The “Bruen” Gun Control Decision

2nd Amendment, Emergency Preparedness, Headlines, Reason, Society & Culture

The Left and the Right are immediately reacting to the SCOTUS decision to strike down the New York “must show cause” law that requires citizens to prove they have some kind of special need for self defense to obtain a concealed carry gun permit. Justice Thomas’ opinion for the majority is straightforward and the conclusion obvious. You shouldn’t have to PROVE you have a special need in order to benefit from the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Period! What galls me, however, is the panting whine of the Left that “this will turn New York City into the Wild West”. Nonsense. New York and all the other major cities are ALREADY the Wild West, where LAWLESSNESS RULES! What the possibility of ordinary citizens walking the streets of Manhattan with concealed guns will do is DETER many a thug from playing the “knockout game” (for example) or give a citizen a fighting chance to defend himself or herself when accosted by bad guys. The media doesn’t talk about the deterrence impact, however. They immediately go to the extremes to formulate the debate and controversy. That conflict, of course, like the car wreck by the roadside, is where the money is. Follow the money.

GrumpsReport Now On GETTR

2nd Amendment, America, Economy, Education, Emergency Preparedness, Entertainment, Family, Finance and Investments, General, Government, Headlines, Health Care, History, Media, Morality, Politics, Quips & Quotes, Reason, Religion, Science, Society & Culture, Technology, Values, World Affairs

Dear Readers. Things are moving so fast (still downhill I’m afraid) that to comment and remain current on breaking news and the vast array of insanity infecting society, we have elected to (gulp) dip our toe into the mayhem of social media by establishing an account and presence on the relatively new platform called GETTR. (https://gettr.com/). Enroll and look up Grumps and/or @GrumpsActual. There you’ll see all our commentary.

As our blood pressure rises and corpuscles boil, we’re able to respond/comment/rail quickly using this medium. The jury is still out as to whether we’ll stay on this platform, or any of the others for that matter: GAB, TruthSocial, Rumble, Parler, etc. but we’ll give it a try for a while.

Let us know what you think!

And hang in there!

Grumps

Prepping at the Tipping Point

America, Economy, Education, Emergency Preparedness, Entertainment, Government, Headlines, Health Care, History, Politics, Reason, Society & Culture

I’m not a fan of what I call “Prepper Porn”.  That’s the content of thousands of books, websites, articles, etc. predicting the Apocalypse and what everyone must do to survive scenes like those depicted in “The Walking Dead.” On the other hand, I was a Boy Scout in the old days when the BSA was the character and skills training ground for young men. The slogan was “Be Prepared.”

While it’s impossible to be prepared for everything: TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know it), SHTF (‘Stuff’ Hit the Fan), Armageddon, a nuclear holocaust, reversal of the Earth’s geomagnetic poles, a direct hit from an asteroid, EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse), CME (Coronal Mass Ejection), a Zombie Invasion…common sense suggests that being prepared as much and as realistically as possible for life’s emergencies is a hell of a lot better than being unprepared!

Once upon a time I had two 55 gallon drums of water in my garage, several buckets of raw wheat and a few other items that amounted to “preparation.” The fact that I never used them didn’t discount their value, but even if a catastrophe had occurred, they wouldn’t have done me or my family much good.

As I look back on the emergencies that befell us during various times and in various living locations, I’m nevertheless grateful for the preparedness mindset that my Scout days imprinted on me. While the worst hasn’t happened yet, our family was subjected to a lot of natural and man-made problems: hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms, high winds, bad snowstorms, localized floods, heat waves and other harmful natural events; relatively sudden general and personal economic downturns; supply disruptions of food, gasoline and staples; strikes; prolonged power outages; mass transit failures; accidents; pest infestation; injuries; illness; and of course, 9-11 and the Pandemic. Each was a wake-up call.

Yet each time, once the emergency had passed, we retreated into complacency and a sub-conscious attitude that “we weathered it and we’ll do so again when and if it happens.”

Does any of this sound or feel familiar?

Some of the emergencies were man-made, some were natural. We survived them all, and our pain ranged from mild inconvenience to some downright difficult times where we thought our lives were ruined and we thought we’d have to completely change them.

The vicissitudes of life are such that it’s likely we’ll be faced with emergencies, mini and moderate disasters and other trying times in the future.

However, TODAY, the risk of man-made hazards is greater than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime!

If you have any doubt about this, just open your eyes and look around. If you still think everything’s either just fine, or will work itself out as it always has, don’t bother reading any further.

On the other hand, if like so many millions of our fellow Americans you clearly see what’s happening “right here in River City”, right before eyes, and are not just alarmed but pessimistic that for the first time in many generations we won’t be able to give our children and grandchildren better lives than we had; if you sense the threats to our freedom, peace and prosperity are mounting as each day goes by; if you see our very civilization being systematically destroyed (“fundamentally transformed”) then friends, “Be Prepared” needs to become your slogan as well!

If you’ve spent any time thinking about Emergency Preparedness, however, you know how long the lists of considerations, questions and answers are.

There are literally thousands of resources available. I’ve spent countless hours researching the available literature, videos, websites to get answers. The array of products, services and printed/published information dedicated to “prepping” is vast. It’s available from government and commercial sources, some of it general, some of it very specific, some of it good, some of it bad, some of it useful and, in my opinion, some of it useless or even harmful.

The fundamental problem with most of these sources is that they don’t address the individual needs, preferences and budgets of families living in diverse locations, with different circumstances.

So concerned am I about the future of our country and the impact the Leftist juggernaut is having on the lives of my immediate and extended family, however, that I’ve solicited help in making sense of the matter. I have become a practitioner of the principles espoused by a new organization: Suburban Readiness Institute (SRI). One of their key tenets is secrecy – it stands to reason that the more people know about your preparedness, the less secure your family will be if things get bad. All communications and interaction with them have been and will remain discreet. Thus, I won’t be describing their means, methods, etc.

But I urge my readers to visit their website (https://suburbanreadiness.com) for a general overview of what they’re about.

And whether or not you engage with them or some other organization to assist you with your planning and preparation, I can’t overemphasize the importance, AT THIS PIVOTAL TIPPING POINT IN OUR COUNTRY’S HISTORY, of thinking seriously about and systematically, methodically, pragmatically and resolvedly preparing for what may lie ahead.

Once an emergency happens or is about to happen, with or without warning, the time for preparation is past.

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