Preparedness, do any practise it?

[Steve M]

My preparedness falls into the following simple categories:

Plenty of first aid and medicine
Plenty of fuel for the fire/rayburn for heat and cooking
Sterilisation options for water, though I'm a bit short on closed storage
Plenty of food in
Candles and lamps for light
Plenty of fuel in the car (not so good at that one)
Keep the mobile topped up with power (and credit)

My kids also know the plan if there is a fire.

I also get on with my neighbours

 

[Bimble]

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes." ----Senica

I think this sums up preparedness/survivalism and how this thinking can taint your view of life. If nothing happens you have wasted your one and only short life paranoid about possible future events, never really enjoying the here and now.

That said, if you develop your rational thinking skills and emotional intelligence, you can overcome pretty much anything life has in store, if not you will die and then you can’t worry about anything anymore.

 

[gunslinger]

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes." ----Senica

I think this sums up preparedness/survivalism and how this thinking can taint your view of life. If nothing happens you have wasted your one and only short life paranoid about possible future events, never really enjoying the here and now.

That said, if you develop your rational thinking skills and emotional intelligence, you can overcome pretty much anything life has in store, if not you will die and then you can’t worry about anything anymore.

Rational thinking skills and emotional intelligence will not feed you if there is no food.

As to wasting and not enjoying your life,sorry thats BS. Being prepared is not about paranoia,its about preparing to make any event as easy as possible or yourself or your loved ones.
I for one am always prepared to cover 30 days without shops,water,electricity. And I still have time to enjoy a few hobbies and the company of my friends and family.
No anti zombie weapons just stores of food and more important water,a genny, candles,etc. Plus a plan and stores to get out if ever necessary.

At this moment tell me who knows where this economic crisis is going to lead.Only a fool would assume nothing bad could possibly happen.

To quote from a sig on another forum

Some people may think that our preparation is a waste and that we are being alarmist, I can only say that these people are right-until they're wrong. And the consequences of them being wrong are greater than the consequences of us being wrong.

GS

 

[Barney]

cool set up Scott, love your blogg.

 

[Bimble]

Gunslinger, you can horde food but in a real crisis someone will rob you of it.
You may arm yourself to protect your food, but a better armed gang will still overpower you and take your food or worse.

Are you the sort of man who will stand by and watch your innocent neighbour’s child starving to death, just because you have food and they do not?

I think I would rather die, as it will have ceased to be worth living......

Better to use rational arguments and calm persuasion (sadly lacking today in most quarters) to prevent a ‘nightmare’ from ever happening, learning to work together for a common group good (we are social beings after all, least anyone forgets)

This is why learning to think properly and not being a victim of your own base emotions, paranoid terrorists are a contemporary example, is critical to everybody’s ‘survival’.

As for the current economic crisis it is a wonderful opportunity to see what people are really made of. I suspect that for every selfish type (banking execs and survival nuts) there are two good people who will show generosity and kindness to the less fortunate around them.

This has nothing to do with fluffy religion, it just makes good sense in an unpredictable world.

It’s a fact of life that you to may fall on bad times through no fault of your own; regardless of how ‘prepared’ you think you are. Your child may need the one medicine you forgot to pack in the survival kit containing the fifty most common medicines you thought you might need. You then may be glad for the humanist generosity and sympathy of strangers.......

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
- Helen Keller

 

[rik_uk3]

Good post Bimble

Am I prepared? To a degree, around 12 weeks of food and a clean natural water supply, am I a survivalist? No, not really.

A bit of snow bought a lot of the UK to a halt last week, imagine a winter like 62/63 with three months of arctic conditions and its a grim prospect but life would go on. I store around 100 litres of paraffin, but I collect stoves so it will get used and the food stock I have is used and replaced on a rotational basis as part of family living. With a base interest rate of 1% and food prices going up at >5% food in the cupboard makes financial sense if nothing else. Most supermarkets carry less than 48 hours stock two or three days of heavy snow and ice would bring many places like my home town to a halt with little on the shelves after initial panic buying by people (Aberdare last week had run out of bread and milk by 10 in the morning and the Tesco bakery had used up its stock on in store bake mix by five I was told)

Live off the land in the UK? Won't happen, you would starve to death without back up food and long term organised agriculture. Move to the country? Do you think that would be allowed? Thousands of people running around killing sheep and making pine needle tea; won't happen.

My idea of keeping the cupboards full is to provide me and the family a buffer zone of comfort but if T**** the local community had all better start helping each other out or face a dire future. My idea of the future does not include drawing up a 'Bimble' list of stuff to steal when things go pear shaped, perhaps I'm becoming an optimist in my old age?

 

[Draven]

Live off the land in the UK? Won't happen, you would starve to death without back up food and long term organised agriculture. Move to the country? Do you think that would be allowed? Thousands of people running around killing sheep and making pine needle tea; won't happen.

My idea of keeping the cupboards full is to provide me and the family a buffer zone of comfort but if T**** the local community had all better start helping each other out or face a dire future. My idea of the future does not include drawing up a 'Bimble' list of stuff to steal when things go pear shaped, perhaps I'm becoming an optimist in my old age?

You're right, I couldn't move to the country, I'd curl up and die here Honestly! What would you suggest I do? First of all, we don't have anywhere to store food for any period of time - I live in a ground-floor flat in a four-in-a-block house, we have a kitchen the size of a 1/2 bathroom and no decent storage space. And like I've already addressed, it'd be free-for-all hereabouts, and it'd be next to impossible to defend this house - the one thing it has going for it is a gigantic field behind it which could be used to make a relatively quiet escape. If I have to choose between dying here or dying in the countryside, I'll take the countryside, ta, but I'll be damned if I die anywhere without a fight

 

[rik_uk3]

You would curl up and die after a while, living off the land is not a practical long term solution in the UK.

Would the powers that be let you move to the country? Much easier for them to control a city than have people running around the woods perhaps

Perhaps you could rent a lock up garage nearby for storage?

You're right, I couldn't move to the country, I'd curl up and die here Honestly! What would you suggest I do? First of all, we don't have anywhere to store food for any period of time - I live in a ground-floor flat in a four-in-a-block house, we have a kitchen the size of a 1/2 bathroom and no decent storage space. And like I've already addressed, it'd be free-for-all hereabouts, and it'd be next to impossible to defend this house - the one thing it has going for it is a gigantic field behind it which could be used to make a relatively quiet escape. If I have to choose between dying here or dying in the countryside, I'll take the countryside, ta, but I'll be damned if I die anywhere without a fight

 

[Draven]

You would curl up and die after a while, living off the land is not a practical long term solution in the UK.

Would the powers that be let you move to the country? Much easier for them to control a city than have people running around the woods perhaps

Perhaps you could rent a lock up garage nearby for storage?

Yknow now you mention it we have an unused lockup garage, I just forgot about it, being unused
Tbh I don't think the powers that be would have a choice, I don't have a car so on-foot is my only option and when I say a big field, I mean a biiig field Plenty big enough to get out of the way, at least.

Upon re-reading my post, I came off like an *** - my apologies, it was not my intent (I just seem to have a way with words lately...) and kudos for not being one back. I agree, that living off the land isn't practical in the long term, other than farming - I'd still head north, but it's completely correct to say that I'd be doing that because I see it as my best chance, certainly not a 100% chance. I like to think that I'll be in the states if and when the world goes to pot anyhoo.

Atb
Pete

 

[Bimble]

Rik, I agree, it’s not that I don’t think taking responsibility for yourself isn’t your personal duty, after all how can you help someone else if you are yourself in trouble, it’s just that as a modern community human beings flourish by joint effort and this should be the focus when the chips are down.

I myself never go anywhere without matches and a swiss army knife, a habit I have been thankful for on numerous, though hardly life threatening , occasions. Last week I even put my wellies and a sleeping bag in the boot of my car, just in case the snow suddenly got bad. In effect, I am a 'prepared' person by nature.

My original point is that you need to be self aware of any tendencies towards taking these ‘preparations’ to excess. Most sensible people realise that you can’t really predict what’s going to happen and therefore worrying about it just makes no sense. Also on a tiny island of 60 million inhabitants, no one can actually ‘survive’ for long without the aid of a large support group and social structures/order being maintained. The disease from all the dead bodies would scupper any survivalists grand plans for starters.

We don’t live in the land of our aboriginal forefathers, thousands of hectares of mature forest per person, clean streams filled with salmon, wild game all over the place. To think you could survive for more than a few weeks in modern britain is just deluding yourself.

Buy the way Darven, the states is mostly scrub desert, picturesque, but bloody hard to survive in. Add to the fact you would be competing for the limited productive wild space against 300 million people all armed with guns, I'd stay in blighty.:AR15firin

 

[galew]

Buy the way Darven, the states is mostly scrub desert, picturesque, but bloody hard to survive in. Add to the fact you would be competing for the limited productive wild space against 300 million people all armed with guns, I'd stay in blighty.:AR15firin [/quote]

I don't know what part of the US you have looked at, but there are thousands of square miles of great farm land, thousands more of forests, and thousands more of great mountians, all with lust grasses, trees and running streams. And as far as the 300 million with guns, I would say that only about 20% of the adults have guns and most of them would never make it out of the cities. So as probably 50% of the population if not more are kids, and 20% are too old to get out of the cities, So that puts us down to about 60 million and only about 10 to 12 million with guns. I live in Texas and there is enough land here that they say that the entire population of the earth could live in Texas and each person would still have a space of 100 feet by 100 feet. So don't paint the US as being only scrub desert. There are lots of places where you would have no problem if you know how to set up a trap line.
You also can carry knives here without any harassment.

 

[British Red]

Not to mention galew that the US is a net exporter of food, rather than a net importer like the UK

But don't let the facts get in the way Bimble

 

[gunslinger]

Gunslinger, you can horde food but in a real crisis someone will rob you of it.
You may arm yourself to protect your food, but a better armed gang will still overpower you and take your food or worse.

You make these statements with no knowledge of my character or my plans, bit insulting do you not think

Are you the sort of man who will stand by and watch your innocent neighbour’s child starving to death, just because you have food and they do not?

I would hope I could provide some small amount of help if it ever got to that stage,which is highly unlikely. However given that survival scenario and a choice between me and mine and you and yours. I would have no choice.

I think I would rather die, as it will have ceased to be worth living......

You obviously have never been in a situation with those choices,no more have I. But human nature is to survive at all costs,not give up because you cant save everyone.

Better to use rational arguments and calm persuasion (sadly lacking today in most quarters) to prevent a ‘nightmare’ from ever happening, learning to work together for a common group good (we are social beings after all, least anyone forgets)

Totally agree,but lets be realistic ,it's not going to happen is it.Refer to human nature.

This is why learning to think properly and not being a victim of your own base emotions, paranoid terrorists are a contemporary example, is critical to everybody’s ‘survival’.

Who exactly is paranoid ?? It certainly isnt me. I have prepared a few days grace on the basis that I dont know what may happen in the future,no more do you.

As for the current economic crisis it is a wonderful opportunity to see what people are really made of. I suspect that for every selfish type (banking execs and survival nuts) there are two good people who will show generosity and kindness to the less fortunate around them.

As would we all,to a point.But I would also expect others to make the effort to provide for their own. I sincerely hope the tag survival nut is not aimed at me,because if so,it proves you havent really read my post.

This has nothing to do with fluffy religion, it just makes good sense in an unpredictable world.

Sorry chap but it really does sound like fluffy religion to me,or why mention it???

It’s a fact of life that you to may fall on bad times through no fault of your own; regardless of how ‘prepared’ you think you are. Your child may need the one medicine you forgot to pack in the survival kit containing the fifty most common medicines you thought you might need. You then may be glad for the humanist generosity and sympathy of strangers.......

Yes it is a fact of life that I am well aware of after 54 years in some fairly inhospitable places, and situations at times.

Nobody could be prepared for everything,my main priority is 30 days food ,water ,warmth and light, some medicines neccessary for the kids are available too.
There is no possible way I or anyone else for that matter could cover every possible eventuality. But making some kind of effort to prepare will minimise the odds

This is just my opinion and preparation is my reponsibility,that does not make me a survivalist, no more than spending thousands on kit and kipping under a tarp makes anyone a bushcrafter.
GS

 

[Shambling Shaman]

I have not had time to read all the posts, But back to the thread question,
yes I/we do but then we live in a location that dictates we are well stocked.

 

[Bimble]

I've travelled around America by train, oddly unlike most of the natives. I admit some of it was nice, but an awful lot of it was sage brush and stunted trees and endless prarie from what I saw.....

Without oil to pump ground water and make fertilizer a lot of what is termed 'farmland' in the US would be very 'thin' land.

If you don’t believe me here’s a fact for you. The Colorado River drains 629,100 km². Due to abstraction, mostly to create artificial farmland from desert, it has not reached the sea for years, that’s right totally 100% abstracted.




As for guns,

Gun deaths per 100,000 population (for the year indicated):​

-------------------Homicide ----Suicide-- Other (inc Accident)​

USA (2001)-------------3.98-----5.92------0.36:AR15firin ​

Italy (1997)------------0.81------1.1-------0.07​

Switzerland (1998)-----0.50------5.8-------0.10​

Canada (2002)----------0.4------2.0-------0.04​

Finland (2003)----------0.35-----4.45------0.10​

Australia (2001)--------0.24------1.34-----0.10​

France (2001)----------0.21------3.4-------0.49​

England/Wales (2002)-0.15------0.2-------0.03​

Scotland (2002)--------0.06------0.2-------0.02​

Japan (2002)-----------0.02-----0.04-------0​

I know where I don't want to be if things go pear shaped!

No offence to our American friends, it's just not any worse or better for 'wild survival' than most other places on the planet in reality. If I were to pick a place to survive it would be central Africa, its our natural range.

Unfortunatly the USA isn't the Shangri-La some of the survivalist types seem to think it is....

 

[gunslinger]

As for guns,

Gun deaths per 100,000 population (for the year indicated):​

-------------------Homicide ----Suicide-- Other (inc Accident)​

USA (2001)-------------3.98-----5.92------0.36:AR15firin ​

Italy (1997)------------0.81------1.1-------0.07​

Switzerland (1998)-----0.50------5.8-------0.10​

Canada (2002)----------0.4------2.0-------0.04​

Finland (2003)----------0.35-----4.45------0.10​

Australia (2001)--------0.24------1.34-----0.10​

France (2001)----------0.21------3.4-------0.49​

England/Wales (2002)-0.15------0.2-------0.03​

Scotland (2002)--------0.06------0.2-------0.02​

Japan (2002)-----------0.02-----0.04-------0​

All from different years,could that be deemed a bit selective

Wonder what the gun stats in the UK for 2008 would say so far.
Yes the us is an armed (well most states anyway)population, the difference being they have the right to self defence in law, we dont.
In the UK its only the bad guys who have guns,I sincerely hope you never have a problem with one of them.
I think in that situation you might change your view.

GS

 

[Broch]

In the UK its only the bad guys who have guns,I sincerely hope you never have a problem with one of them.

GS

That's not quite accurate - there are plenty of legitimate owners of guns in the UK that use them very regularly (unlike the baddies) for competition and/or hunting. I would think that the number of legal shotguns and firearms in the UK exceeds illegal ones by an order of magnitude; every farmer around here has at least one shotgun and a .22 (but I have no data to prove that). Also, I would think the figures in the UK are likely to be better than quoted now.

 

[ZDP-189]

It's telling that when we think of survival preparedness, we think of different scenarios. Depending on what culture you live in, a different movie probably comes to mind.

American: Red Dawn/ Terminator IV/ World Trade Center (i.e. external hostile forces destroying your world)
SE Asian: Killing Fields (i.e. local hostile forces destroying your world)
Hong Kong: Outbreak (i.e. Chinese disease destroying your world)
UK: Flood (Nature destroying your world)
Anywhere in the M.E.: Jarhead (i.e. Americans destroying your world)

 

[gunslinger]

That's not quite accurate - there are plenty of legitimate owners of guns in the UK that use them very regularly (unlike the baddies) for competition and/or hunting. I would think that the number of legal shotguns and firearms in the UK exceeds illegal ones by an order of magnitude; every farmer around here has at least one shotgun and a .22 (but I have no data to prove that). Also, I would think the figures in the UK are likely to be better than quoted now.

Sorry I should have made myself clearer. I was referring to handguns,as these are the guns normally used for self defence in the US.
And no ,people do not have them for target shooting or otherwise in the UK,post Dunblane.
I myself lost my sport to the ban.
Since the ban gun crime has increased year on year. So the figures will be considerably worse for the UK than the examples stated.
Your claim that the legally held guns,exceeds by a magnitude the illegal ones. What do you mean by a magnitude? Twice .three times,hundred times ? There are many more illegal guns in this country than you think.
The governments own estimates vary between 3 and 4 million.

Also farmers and sport shooters are in the minority so it still leaves a huge percentage of the population without any means of self defence against a scrote with a handgun.

They are easy to get and cheap,you can even rent them.
GS

 

[scoops_uk]

Bimble, in my opinion, you've made some sweeping and quite offensive generalisations in your posts.

Despite your assertions and quotes everyone, including yourself by your own admission, anticipates and prepares for misfortune. Even if it's just putting an umbrella in your car.

This winter I have made use of the alcohol gel dispensers provided by my employer and I have missed out on the colds and flu that have passed through the office. I have some alcohol gel at home, sensible or silly?

The observation I am trying to to make is that some choose to prepare more than others. The distinction is in what 'risks' an individual considers worth making preparation for. I have done a lot of jobs involving driving and have done in excess of 50k miles a year for a decade. I never had need of a sleeping bag, that doesn't mean that I think you carrying one isn't sensible neither does it make you paranoid. It is down to your perception of risk.

There is a stereotype of "preppers" and "survivalists" as being socially inept, paranoid individuals of debatable character. My experience is quite different, there are people who fit in with that stereotype, but they are to the "prepper" what the SAS wannabee is to "bushcraft". As an advocate of "rational arguments and calm persuasion" you do yourself a disservice perpetuating an ill informed stereotype.

Scoops