Surviving The War

There was a time when normal Americans thought about how to survive a nuclear exchange with the Russians. During the Cold War, this seemed like a real prospect, so there was a reason to think about it. Into the 1960’s school kids had to do the hide under the desk thing, which was mostly about conditioning people to accept permanent war, but it conditioned people to the idea of being nuked. How to make it through a nuclear war became something of an industry.

There were two schools of thought on the subject back then. One said that any hint of a nuclear attack by either side would result in a mag dump by both sides. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a prisoner’s dilemma. If either side showed restraint, then they risked the other side striking first and possibly making it impossible to retaliate, so logic said to send all of your missiles first. Both sides accepted this logic which is why a system was put in place to prevent it.

From a survival perspective, such a scenario made the prospects for anyone living through it extremely low. The arsenals at the time were larger than today and the assumption was they could wipe out all life on the planet. The initial blasts would kill most people, but the fallout and nuclear winter would kill the rest. Even if people survived somehow, the numbers would be tiny. There was simply no point in preparing for what would be instant death for almost everyone.

The other school of thought was more optimistic. War would escalate with an initial exchange that might not lead to a mag dump. Even if the will were there to send all the missiles, many people would refuse to push the button. The disruption from the initial strikes would also render communications useless. The example of Vasili Arkhipov seemed like proof that a full scale exchange was unlikely. That meant it was possible to survive a nuclear war if you were prepared.

Today, that last scenario is more plausible. Nuclear arsenals are much smaller than during the Cold War. No one is really sure that the antique systems on which these weapons rely would work under stress. The American ICBM system still relies upon 1970’s technology. The Russian systems are similarly antiquated. The most likely scenario is that the major powers are no longer functional after a nuclear exchange, so lots of people survive the event.

The first step in surviving a nuclear war is to avoid a direct hit. Washington DC will get several direct hits and the initial flash will vaporize most of the population. The shock wave will level most of the city. By now, the Russians and Chinese know to target Northern Virginia, so it will be a saturation bombing. The five percent that survive the initial blast will be radiated and die soon thereafter. Therefore, the first rule of nuke club is to be outside the target zone.

The safe bet is to be away from the coasts. The Rockies or Appalachia are the best bet for making it through the first stage. Denver will be nuked, for sure, but the damage will be contained to that plateau. People in the mountains will escape the flash and the blast, even if Denver takes multiple strikes. The Green Briar will get hit, for old times sake, but most of West Virginia will be spared. There are lots of places to escape the flash and the blast in the mountains.

Once things settle after the final missile strikes, there will be four key things to surviving the aftermath. You will need water, shelter, food and a way to defend yourself from the people who were not prepared. Imagine a land ravaged by mask wearing Covidians and you get the picture. You will have to be prepared to kill a lot of people in order to avoid ending up like them. This means you need to pick a spot that has access to water, a food source and is defendable.

Since a post-nuclear America is going to look like the frontier as far as you are concerned, you are going to need frontier skills. You will need to know how to make a fire, provide yourself basic medical care and know how to hunt and fish. If your location is near a river, then you can initially get by with fishing and water from the river, but you have to boil the water and cook the fish. The ability to make fire without modern items like a lighter or matches is essential.

Once you have sorted the location and provided yourself with the frontier skills required to live in the wild, you need to think about the defense issue. A man alone is easy prey, even to desperate city people roaming the countryside. It would be better to have a tribe that can work together for common defense. That means you either need the skills to create a tribe from who is left or you have to create a tribe now. One way or the other, survival will depend upon community.

This basic framework of preparedness is just scratching the surface, but it does provide the basis for building a survival plan. For example, you will not want modern firearms for defense in the post-nuclear world. Making your own gunpowder for modern ammunition is not realistic. You can make black powder from raw materials. That means the old fashioned muzzleloader is a good weapon to own and master. Of course, older range weapons like spears and bows are an option.

The same applies to tools. Creating your own electric for powering modern tools is possible, but not very practical. If you assume society takes generations to bounce back from the holocaust, then it makes no sense to rely upon modern tools. They will break and you will not be able to fix them. The same would apply to vehicles. Old cars need gasoline and lubricants. Even if you stock those, they will run out eventually and your vehicles become lawn ornaments.

This is why forming communities in advance of the holocaust is critical. You can plan for the two general scenarios. The first scenario is the world steps back to the pre-industrial age and does not bounce back. The other scenario is the people responsible manage to survive and quickly set about recreating the modern world by bringing things like the power grid on-line. Do you want to play a role in that rebuilding or do you want to seek vengeance on them?

Community building in advance lets you wargame these issues. It also makes survival much more likely. No one man can know everything or prepare for everything, so having help increases your odds of survival dramatically. It also provides the means for surviving what comes after the initial devastation. In a post-nuclear world, tribalism will be the key to survival, which means the best tribe wins. Of course, that is also why the world was blown up, but that is a story for another day.


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280 thoughts on “Surviving The War

  1. Pingback: Enjoying the National Holiday 2022 in China – Metallicman

  2. Pingback: Surviving the War | American Freedom News

  3. “If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer.”
    Really, “work?” You’re a Cuckservative blogger
    Get bent, you panhandling grifter.

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    • LOL! Produce 1/5th of the content this guy churns out DAILY, try just 5 articles a month that are not sh-t tier quality, and do it for years at a time. Go ahead, I’ll give you a cookie. It is nowhere near as easy as you think smooth brain. Now fuck off back to wherever you came from Wignat poser.

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    • Heh. Found the guy who doesn’t tip at restaurants because the “servers should get real jobs.”

      The Z-Man puts out a ton of free content. If you don’t want to support him, that’s your business. But plenty of us feel that the modest contribution we make through SubscribeStar etc. is money well spent.

      It’s important to support dissident content creators, not as charity, but as patrons of the written word. If you’re too poor or cheap to support this effort, fine. But for the love of God, please stop embarrassing yourself.

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  4. It finally occured to me that the long term impact of this, assuming we avoid nuclear war, is to drive Germany away from the US. Just as the Russians have learned that they can’t trust us, now so have the Germans.

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    • That is delusional.

      Most Germans believe Russia did it as the media tells them.

      If people will willingly walk around in a retarded paper mask for years selling Russia bombed their own pipeline is a simple 1 week repetition exercise.

  5. And in totally unrelated news to blowing up NS1 & 2 it looks like Netherlands has just pulled the operating license for the Dutch registered owner of the Turkmenistan pipeline that runs into Hungary and Serbia via turkey.

    Means they can’t do any repair work or maintenance on the pipeline at all if it has issues.

    That is the final Russian gas pipeline into Europe.

    They really have managed now to as they say “finally remove European reliance” on Russian energy. It only took them 3 months.

    Great, a complete industrial depression is here and not a single real pushback.

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  6. And a Cold War anecdote from Denmark:

    Back in the mid-eighties, we jokingly told each other that the defense plan was to amass our troops at Køge Bugt, where the East Germans were expected to land, only to get nuked en masse. Danish defense ministry war gamers assumed that Denmark would be hit by 8-10 warheads, targeting both our two cities and the bridges over the sounds, which are mined to drop a fashion that blocks off the exits from the Baltic.

    When the East German archives were opened in the nineties, it turned out we were right about being nuked on our own beaches, but the number of warheads coming our way would be 20-50, depending on the scenario.

    As you might imagine, Denmark wasn’t the kick-ass martial powerhouse it is today, the military was a standing joke confirmed by everyone who joined the circus: fun as hell because you got to play with firearms and explosives, but lame as hell too because nobody took it seriously. A friend of mine was in the artillery, they spent three weeks building a ballista out of truck mainsprings.

    When I got my draft notice I was on a long-line boat in the Arctic, much like the one in A Perfect Storm, except rigged for salmon. My friend and I were beside ourselves with mirth: we were up here, doing a man’s job and they wanted us to join the circus so we could be screamed at by some retard Jute?

    No thanks. My friend called the draft office when we got back ashore, screamed into the phone until he got some colonel on the line and told him: “You can have me arrested, handcuffed and delivered to your barracks, aye. But I’m going to break all your shit, everything you have. Your cannons, your tanks, your machineguns, I’m going to fuck it up. I’ll set fire to your shit.”

    The colonel: “May I assume your inclusion in the armed forces will not be of benefit to the military?

    “You may.”

    They gave him a twenty-year deferral.

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    • … I was on a long-line boat in the Arctic…

      I’d sometimes get a routine steering watch. The boat was on autopilot, all I had to do was watch the radar and wake the skipper if I saw anything. But I was still sitting in the skipper’s chair like a boss, behind an old-school oaken steering wheel, the only guy awake on the boat.

      Damn, it made you feel like a salty dog – an adult. Doing push-ups, crawling through mud and playing pew-pew was for children.

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    • There’s a lot to be said for a democracy small enough that any citizen may make an appointment to visit the Prime Minister or the Queen/King (or so I’ve read; perhaps another nation?) This may have been a few decades back. Some of these nations are (were) quite democratic. In one of them the PM rode his bike to work 🙂

      • The bike-riding was a stunt but in my lifetime, the PM – Anker Jørgensen – took the bus to work every day. When chairman Mao visited Denmark, he was invited to Anker’s three-bedroom apartment in the working class district of Copenhagen. His wife served coffee for them.

        He’s dead now but I’ve seen him multiple times in the street outside the state retirement home he lived in, walking one of those wheelie-things old people use.

        Another time there was a summit meeting in Paris and Anker was to be interviewed by someone. The state broadcaster didn’t have the funds to send a camera crew to France, so they borrowed a crew from the French state broadcaster. They knocked on the hotel room door of the Danish delegation and was received by this weird midget in in stockings who fetched them coffee, showed them the sofa and bid them take a load off. It was the Danish prime minister.

        And up until the early nineties, our Wise and Benevolent queen Margaret, when residing in her summer palace, would shop at the local market in Gråsten with only a lady-in-waiting for company.

  7. One of the first things I bought, after I started reading SHTF/zombie novels for relaxation and entertainment, was a box of caltrops. Still have them in our laundry room. What that says about me, I’ll leave to individual commenters.

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  8. I live far, far from all this, but it disturbs me that today’s essay had me nodding in agreement. Does it truly seem this dire up there?

    I live in an area likely to survive a full-scale nuclear war, and although it’s not an easily accesible area, it is accesible. Coincidentally, I was recently approached with respect to advising a local political campaign. I wasn’t really interested, but today’s essay changed my mind. I wouldn’t like to say I plan to draft a sort-of “Committee of Safety” for our village, but I admit that would be my intention. And save for the mayoral candidate, I plan to keep it quiet unless it appears necessary.

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    • “I live in an area likely to survive a full-scale nuclear war, and although it’s not an easily accesible area, it is accesible.”

      Define “survive.” And define “full-scale.”

      • “Survive” as I used it here equates to remaining alive and not experiencing any significant fallout. It means access to potable water (our own well), food (community co-op and our own fruit and veg), fuel (wood) and freedom of movement within my local area.

        “Full-scale” means a strategic nuclear exchange largely in the northern hemisphere.

    • In a major nuclear exchange, most of the details are problematic, but some general assumptions can be made One of these, I would assume, is that if you live in a rural area, you really won’t have to worry much about carloads of survivors from closer to the big city driving around looking to evacuate. It doesn’t take much brilliance to figure out that virtually all the trappings of civilization would very quickly go to shit. This is true even if the direct attacks were relatively small. Goodbye electricity, communications, water, sewer, transport of goods even locally, and much more mayhem. Law enforcement will be non-existent: they will be trying to save their own, and bugger everybody else.

      Long story short: in the sticks, I surely hope you have do-or-die friends or local networks set up in advance. Because it’s your neighbors who will pose the biggest danger to you.

      Would life in a post-nuclear world even be possible? Yes, of course more likely if the war were limited. But I suspect the worst culling would be the loss of civilized amenities necessitating a return to barbarism. Survivors will be what? 1/100, 1/1000 of the pre-war population. Maybe less.

      Just need to get it out of your heads that we could just revert to an 18th century Jeffersonian democracy. I doubt it’d be quite that simple.

      • Yup.

        Cue up the movie, “The Survivalist,” and settle in for a realistic preview of what’s coming.

        Mia Goth’s excellent in this one.

  9. Here’s 5 stars to Compsci’s “…and a list of all the Mormons…”

    Shhh. Don’t tell ’em about the one-year food supply and Mormon girls’ unique outlook. (“Making babies is God’s plan.”)

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  10. The real X-factpr in any nuclear war is –

    Exactly how good are Russia’s anti-missile capabilities under combat conditions?

    We know they have them. We have also seen some pretty impressive air defenses and cruise missiles from Russia in the special military op.

    If Russia had an effective anti-missile defense, they could conceivably defeat a limited nuclear strike from the West.

    I don’t think the same applies to the West. The Patriot was proven crap in the Gulf War, and the Houthi continue confirming that reputation to this day.

    Heck, the Houthi did such a number on Saudi earlier this year that MBS began making lots of noise about buying Russian air defense gear.

    • I’ve heard it suggested that the Russians may not be using their latest technology in the conflicts they’re currently involved in; so as to prevent the West from understanding their full capabilities.

      • I’ve seen many reports of their using S-300’s not any I recall of S-400’s and I believe they started training troops on the S-500 system a few months back.
        But who knows?

        It’s almost as if they spend their military budget on the military rather than on real estate in Northern Virginia and California.

  11. I was wrong again. And they were right after all.

    Ya know, a slave merchant culture would be the penultimate survival culture.

  12. The Finns have an excellent word: Sisu.
    Grit, resolve, strength of will, stoic determination and perseverance in the face of extreme hardship and difficulty.
    I can’t imagine that the ruling class will fare well.

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    • They don’t have to “fare” anything. The soldiery will protect and provide (when they’re not busy murdering your children).

      • Good point. They are brilliantly evil, greedy and indulgent.
        Within the past 2 years, the fact that they want us dead has become more and more evident.

        Sisu is in short supply and can’t be ordered on Amazon.

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    • Given the exiguous distribution of sisu throughout the general population of the West, I don’t imagine many people faring well.

    • When you have a bear waiting on either bank of the river and you’re in the middle of it, it helps to have a sense of humor. An old Finnish saying.

  13. Step one. Learn Spanish.
    Step two. Buy the cheapest safest house I can buy in Uruguay.
    Step three. Live in Uruguay six months out of the year. This will reduce my odds of dying in a nuclear exchange by 50%.

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    2
    • Southern Chile is beautiful and safe.
      There are charming German villages and it’s far removed from the madness.

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        • I’m not saying you’re wrong, but especially in that part of the world, many such bureaucratic requirements, rules and regulations and even minor violations of the law, can be readily addressed with the proper amount of cash. Beyond a few moving violations in Mexico, I boast no first hand experience. But if it’s important to you, there probably are ways to obtain the needed information.

  14. Something happened to me last night when I saw the twerking negress with the flute. Even having no cable news, I’m exhausted. In the words of that meme, “it’s all so tiresome.” I’m going to cut out my internet for a month and find a cabin somewhere. It’s my own version of “self care.” I absolutely believe that we’re in more danger than any time since the Cuban missile crisis. In hindsight, the peaceful collapse of the USSR was a happy and lucky aberration. Would this empire go so quietly? A place so shameless, stupid and ignorant that we clap like seals for some fat disgusting negress like that?

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    • ” In hindsight, the peaceful collapse of the USSR was a happy and lucky aberration. Would this empire go so quietly?”

      For a quick insight, compare and contrast the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan to the United States’ exit. The multiply that disparity times infinity. Selfishly, I hoped it would not happen in my lifetime but that looks more and more unlikely unless a nuclear war says “hi.”

      15
    • This is all about stuffing the heritage population’s nose in their victory. The flute was owned by James Madison. It is itself a work of art – a flute made of crystal. The “first person who ever played it”, twerked her 250 pound ass while playing a trill executed with the skill, dexterity and cleanliness of a typical, 11 year old, second year, junior conservatory student. Then, after that display she bleets out, “biatch.” It is all Jacobin revenge. The hard liners during the civil rights era told everyone this was not about rights, but about revenge. It is hard not to conclude that they were right.

      This event was organized by the same people who use our tax dollars to abolish whiteness – which means the values that make building up nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles possible as they make possible surviving a nuclear war.

      I agree with you. You can’t get away from it. I just audited a GNN conference at Stanford highlighting the cutting edge in research and applications that utilize GNNs and AI. The third speaker was an administrator focusing on the terrible problem of lack of “diversity” in CS – it is bad at the undergrad level he claimed and even worse at the graduate level. Of course, “diversity”, was just black people. So, they are partnering with HSBCs and industry to give them mentorship and paths to careers. Ironically, there are significantly fewer white men represented at the conference than east and south asians. Most of them are Eastern European.

      We are going to have to get our act together and dominate in these fields, and we are on our own in doing so. Still, the man who gets no handouts but utilizes his resources wisely and applies himself comes out stronger in the end. I’ll take a small group of truly elite/best-in-class over an army of sinecures. One of the most critical battles now is in getting the money to follow the student starting in Kindergarten.

      Back at the conference, another researcher is applying graphs to identifying hate-speech and misinformation – a problem he classified as major and serious. So, we get to pay for him to hunt us down and de-platform us along with the people who define, “hateful speech”, and “misinformation.” When the intellectual and scientific elite use the terms whose premises destroy the previous regime’s premises, (free speech replaced by hate speech), it is game over.

      In closing, I am with you JR Wirth. It is unrelenting and there is no place in life you can go to escape this. A month of being unplugged with not a billboard, computer, tv or any media in sight is a welcome respite. I’ll be in the old world next week so I am not sure I will get it.

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  15. Disaster scenarios are fun on paper.

    Start with chickens and a piece of rope now. While you sit and watch your chickens and practice knots, learn enough Bible verses to bluff your way into or out of any congregation. If you can’t manage chickens and tie knots, you’re not going to make it. But maybe you can use your new scriptural sagacity to talk your way into a churchlady’s pants and/or pantry. There are worse places to wind up.

    Forget about heading to the Rockies. You’re not going to make it. The climate is too harsh, too arid, and the learning curve is steeper than the slopes. Also, the Mormons are organized and dug in deep in a lot of places that might surprise you, and may or may not be well-disposed toward those they think of as Gentile interlopers. Remember Mountain Meadows.

    Look instead towards the western slopes of the Appalachians and along the Ohio River. More water, greater bio-diversity, milder climate, better soil. Maybe the Ozarks, like RamzP.

    If you are out West, better to set your sights on re-conquering the Willamette Valley and the watersheds along the western slope of the Cascades in Washington.

    But if at all possible: stay put. What we don’t give up doesn’t have to be re-taken.

    The upside of a conflagration and breakdown in order is the window it will create for score-settling against usual suspects and trouble-makers at the local level. Maybe you already know the names of some of these. Maybe your newly acquired knot-tying skills can come in handy here.

    When the rest realize that no one is coming to save them, a decorated overpass may be a powerful motivator for to flee. This is not some mindless revenge shtick. It is better to be the stampeder than the stampeded.

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    4
    • You’re wrong about the Rockies.

      I’m currently living in a small town in the North Fork Valley of the Gunnison River, on Colorado’s western slope.

      Lots of sustainable agriculture in a temperate micro-climate, scads of deer, law-enforcement is strongly pro-Second-Amendment, very few minorities. Mormons are no longer an influence.

      • I seriously doubt there is a PD anywhere in the United States who are strong 2nd amendment supporters. Even if there are, they follow orders and do what they are told. They get rid of anyone who isn’t a “team player” or who starts trouble in any way.

        Maybe there are some good sheriff departments, but they usually have to play ball too. The PDs have ways of getting to them:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoYE2Q4HL80
        like refusing to back them up. Look at how petty they are. They allow a house to be robbed to make some retarded point about who gets into the jail first. Every single one of those cops and sheriff deputies are paid by the hour. I’d sit there all day and night (overtime) waiting. Ain’t no sweat off my back.

        • All the original firearms legislation in the UK all the way back to the 1920s and the more recent ones for other weapons (now up to sharp spoons being a weapon) were pushed very heavily by the police forces around the country if you read the Hansard minutes about them.

        • You may be right about most police departments; certainly an urban areas.

          OTOH, Colorado’s liberal legislature recently passed a ‘red flag’ law, allowing judges to confiscate firearms solely on the basis of a third-party’s uncorroborated testimony.

          Around 2/3 of the sheriffs in the western part of the state publicly announced that they didn’t plan on enforcing it.

    • For the Willamette valley, the area around the Columbia river is going to be a no go. Upriver is the Hanford Nuclear Site and the Grand Coulee Dam. Hanford is full of nuclear waste, and the dam is likely to be targeted by a ground detonation that would create a lot of fallout. That means lots of bad stuff flowing down the river for a while.

    • If you are not already there when the balloon goes up, you won’t be welcome after the fact unless you are a dentist or mechanic or natural pharmacist/doula or a long ranger sniper. On an aside note, did anyone else notice the irony in the aftermath of hurricane Ian when everyone reverted to their dna indicated roles, that is, the MEN went out and rescued and protected, and the WOMEN huddled together and cried…I don’t know what happened to the Drag(gled) Queens…

  16. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Surviving the War

  17. JFC, This reads like a mid-Covid Greg Cochran FUD piece. FFS, Z, Get ahold of yourself. None of what you wrote is inherently wrong, but the media is running the hysteria machine with the Russian nuke threats as they do with everything; compounded with the usual contradictions and “anonymous sources”. You know all about that, you spent the last six years covering the nonstop Trump Derangement Syndrome and Covidiot happenings; don’t go full retard over this.

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    • ” but the media is running the hysteria machine with the Russian nuke threats as they do with everything”

      I actually agree with this. They plant the seeds, same thing they’re doing with narratives of a “civil war”. I heard democrats talking about that back in 2017 before i saw any mention of it on alt sites.

      • Correct.

        They’re literally striving to weave the narrative into reality. A kind of magic, if you will.

        It could also be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

        • Yep. But my guess–and that’s all it is–is that the (((neocons))) plan a ground war of attrition in the Ukraine to “weaken Russia” (one of their magical incantations) so they can “break Russia apart” and get (((their))) mitts on Russia’s natural resources.

          I don’t think they envision nuking the world into a radioactive, smoking ruin.

          And their underground “bunkers” wont save them, and they KNOW that.

          How long would they have to stay down there? And when they came back up, what would thy find? Total devastation of EVERYTHING.

          Who would drive their limousines and sail their yachts? Where would Hillary get her wine? On whom would they look down and feel smugly superior to?

          They might be malevolent, but they are not stupid. They have arranged the world so that they have been able to steal EVERYTHYING from EVERYBODY and fix it so that nobody can get near them or stop them. Does that spell “stupid”?

          They have ZERO interest in incinerating the world, and they have no plans for such a stupid thing. They just want to get rid of US, but after that, they have to have a world to live in. And they know that.

          They are going for a ground war of attrition.

          Fifty-odd years ago, you could buy an anti-war poster that said, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”

          We might just be about to find out.

          Annalena Baerbock, the German Foreign Minister, has stated publicly that Germany’s commitment to the Ukraine war was unshakeable and that she didn’t care what German voters thought or wanted.

          Now, suppose that same government now says to you, “Get up, boyz! We’re going to WAR in Russia during winter time!”

          And what if nobody came?

          What if young men throughout Europe weigh prison at home (physically impossible for such large numbers) against certain death on the Russian Front?

          Will Sergeant Schulz finally be sent to the Russian Front? And if he is, will he go?

          I don’t think so. Germans are in the streets of their cities demanding an end to the sanctions and to their growing unease and general deprivation. Businesses are closing b/c of sky-high power bills.

          What possible motivation would young European men have to obey a government that publicly states its contempt for them? Go to war for them? Die and kill for them? Freeze to death for them in a foreign land?

          It will be very enlightening to see what happens if NATO governments order a general mobilization. Or even a partial mobilization. Or even open talk about that.

          I don’t see NATO being able to field an army at all.

          “Pride goeth before destruction, and vanity before the fall.”

          The (((neocons))) are in the process of overplaying their hand BIG TIME.

          “Act in haste; repent at leisure.”

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          • Now, suppose that same government now says to you, “Get up, boyz! We’re going to WAR in Russia during winter time!”

            And what if nobody came?

            What if young men throughout Europe weigh prison at home (physically impossible for such large numbers) against certain death on the Russian Front?

            The kind of war they play is done with few highly qualified human resources + many technological devices. The USA don’t need to mobilize huge numbers.
            As for the EU, the EU has been demilitarized, and kept so, by the USA. EU’s “participation” in wars only means to nod in agreement to anything decided by the USA, to do it visibly and officially, and to allow the USA full use of their ground and air space (which they don’t really have a choice about, as they are informally but very materially occupied by the USA anyway).

            I don’t think they envision nuking the world into a radioactive, smoking ruin.

            That’s hardly questionable.
            However, where pride & survival instincts are into play, it’s way easier to know where things begin than end.
            Nothing can be said to be impossible, among even the least likely scenarios.

      • The opposite rule of liberalism: whatever they are claiming the right is doing to justify the current antiwhite pogrom, they are themselves doing. How much strum und drang is there about “white supremacist neonotsee semifascist” domestic terrorism, insurrection, and rebellion? Oh, the whole media, secret federal police, and congress are obsessed with claiming the right is doing such things? Active duty generals have discussed “fortifying” left wing election wins? The left has country-wide armed and organized militias? Interesting.

        • Reb, it really is astonishing. I’ve istened to ConInc and now Lefty programs for years, and they are word-for-word exactly the same. The sentiments, the phrasing, the spin.

          Almost as if the same scriptwriters.
          Both sides seem to believe the same things- as in really believe them, in their hearts.

          The Spirit of this age truly sees through a dark mirror: everything, every truth great and small, is inverted, flipped on its head, turned inside out. A near perfect reverse mirror image.

          Uncanny. How does one tell the dedicated projecters they’re projecting, the inverters inverting?

          • Alzaebo: “Almost as if the same scriptwriters.”

            If we’re gonna win this thing, we simply must start speaking in simple straightforward declarative tones of voice.

            No more passive tones of voice; and especially no more subjunctive moods.

            In particular, “ALMOST AS IF the same scriptwriters”, must become simply, “THE SAME SCRIPTWRITERS”.

            Both the Left & the Right of the professional political class were chosen for their personality types, personalities which are willing [and even eager] to regurgitate whichever script is produced for them to regurgitate.

            The only politician who’s gone off-script in the last 25 years was of course Donald Trump, which is precisely why the Donald Trump phenomenon had to be destroyed.

            Professional politics in this country is nothing more an extension into meatspace of Central Casting Inc & the Screen Writers Guild, as funded by the Usury Industrial Complex.

          • @bourbon

            Professional politics in any country by its nature is this.

            The move to paid politicians is the very thing that allowed the complete takeover.

            It completely entrenches the party machine and central control through the financial control of the employees (aka laughingly representatives).

            They are employed and directed by the private corporations called parties. 99.99% of people fail to get this even when you explain it.

          • How does one tell the dedicated projecters they’re projecting, the inverters inverting?

            That’s what I inquired of myself every day when I was in a relationship or married with someone as well, to be fair.
            The answer being that you can not, or in other words, than if you attempt to, only extra harm will come out of the attempt 🙂.

    • You are dead wrong on this one. Putin is not some limp wrist Dr. Fauci faggot who is talking BS and is ‘created’ by propaganda and the full force of the media machine and western political system.

      He unambiguously stated that he is not bluffing and will use his nuclear arsenal to defend ‘newly acquired’ Russkie territory. Ignore Russian seriousness and single-mindedness at your own peril. You cannot seriously be equating a Western propaganda campaign with the centuries old will of the Russian Bear. You DO get the difference, right? Did you even watch the video? This is not something cooked up at CDC, Langley, or the NYT.

      Will we have a full scale exchange, likely not, but who knows? I’ve seen all manner of crazy stuff in the last few years I could never imagine.

      This falls squarely under “Fuck Around and Find Out”, you want to run that gamble against the backed into the corner Slavic mindset? I wouldn’t take those odds…

      28
      • This, a thousand times. The Russians know that the people orchestrating this war against them are kin descendants of the ones who destroyed the indigenous Russian agrarian socialist movement overwriting it with murderous Bolshevism under which they suffered for 70 years, then pulled a con job with ‘neoliberalism’ for a decade causing their own ‘white death’ of about 5 million of their people.

        The Russians are not going to surrender to these people, and if it looks like they are going to lose and be destroyed, I think that they will pop as many nukes as necessary to ensure the specials are no longer in this universe. The ignorant fools in our country siding with the likes of Blinken and Garland simply have no idea of the structure of the actual battlespace. The penalty for civilizational stupidity is civilizational death.

        15
        • Horace: “I think that they will pop as many nukes as necessary to ensure the specials are no longer in this universe.”

          This thought might give me an even bigger hard-on than I experienced as a kid, some time in the 1990s, when I got invited to a VCR showing of Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in “The Hunger”.

    • Everyone gets goofy over something, Lord knows I do, and Russia-Ukraine may be working on Z’s head too much.

      Even the Thrill Kill Kagan Kult much prefers going to Washington cocktail parties rather than underground bunkers.

      4
      1
      • Marko: “Russia-Ukraine may be working on Z’s head too much”

        Personally, I wouldn’t make fun of the idea of taking prudent precautions concerning SHTF worst case scenarios.

        I believe it was Robert Malone, the other day, who was speculating that the Georgia Guidestones crowd missed their mortality goals because the supply chain wasn’t able to keep the vaccines properly frozen at -60°C to -90°C.

        Which would mean that the millions of Amurrikkkunz who have already died from the vaccines were supposed to have been tens of millions by now, if not several hundred million.

        Never misunderestimate the propensity for mendacious murderous mischief on the part of a genetically sadistic & psychopathic tribe of hominids with a one standard deviation advantage in verbal acumen.

        3
        1
  18. Arizonans are in the cross hairs and most will not survive. The government that is actively inviting sabotage reprisals on American soil knows this, too.

    What makes Arizona ‘critical infrastructure’ like the Nordstream pipeline, and an exploitable target in the Progressive’s global war? Here is my list.

    The entire state is one, giant military base. Arizona’s airspace is devoted to Federal military uses. Here it trains personnel in the use of advanced radar and ‘listening’ systems, and familiarizes both national and international pilots in America’s latest air and land attack techniques. That makes it ‘fair game’ as a target, and its regular citizens ‘human shields’ in the globalists’ Big Game.

    In similar fashion, 85 percent of Arizona’s terrain belongs to Joe Biden’s radical government now. Leave aside the mineral wealth on those lands, and focus on just the military assets on those lands alone. Consider that hundreds of thousands of current and retired military personnel and their accessory hires reside in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area alone (and that Phoenix is full of Germans) to see the parallel with the Nordstream pipeline sabotage threat up close. If one counts lower level personnel in local military barracks in with the dispersed resident enlistees/retirees living off-base in Vail, or Chandler, or Sierra Vista too, then the number of high-value Federal ‘assets’ in Arizona swells to around one million.

    These personnel are easy targets, too, massed as they are inside fragile population centers, or confined in renowned desert bases that are easy to identify. Their fragility makes them a low cost target, too: the Desert State’s regular military, like our regular civilians, depend too much on subsiding aquifers, USDA subsidies, fragile electrical grids, and surface roads to persevere for long. The systems will not require repeated ‘strikes’ to fail completely.

    But, Arizona’s real value lies in its mineral wealth, and its federal mines can be restarted quickly after and atomic blast by using robot labor and human labor wearing currently available personal protection equipment. Arizona is like Nevada in that it is chock full with precious minerals, like copper, uranium, silver and gold. Arizona is not ever going to be a “farm” or timber state, so the soil contamination effects of nuclear fallout will not substantially affect the territory’s valuation in the Global Speculator/Federal asset portfolio.

    Arizona’s other strategic value is its ‘pinch-point’ on the Colorado River and the state’s position in the compact that governs water-rights between rival SW states. As I detail below, this, too, puts the state in the cross-hairs of a globalist, ‘saboteurs’ plots.

    Arizona has been on the front lines of the The Progressive culture war for a long time. After SB1070 passed into law in 2010, both the Federal government, under Barack Obama, and the State of California, then governed by Arnold Schwarzenegger (neither one a friend to free people), undertook to embargo our state. To them, in 2010 Arizona equaled 2022 Russia. And Jan Brewer, the ‘fascist supremacist’ then equals Vladimir Putin now. It also needs to be said that the radicals in Sacramento that have haunted Californians for too long, want to renegotiate the state’s access to the Colorado River’s water resources. But they know that it would require an act of war between states to reopen the Colorado River Compact.

    So, we should expect one.

    Take it all in: (1) The regime’s pet monkey, California, has imprinted overt, governmental aggression to Arizonans’ sovereignty onto California’s unionized civil services and education cartels. (2) Arizona’s primary extraction industries and the related export ‘markets’ can be jump-started soon after a nuclear attack at little cost to the speculating Federal state. (3) The state’s territories and skies are one single engorged, inviting, military asset, making them and their residents ‘fair-game’ in a false-flag, or reciprocal, ‘just-war’ munitions exchange. (4) Arizona’s population centers cannot survive without local farms and operational surface grids. For these reasons, Arizona – and Russia and Texas and Florida, and Italy, too, notably – are all Regime targets, and if November’s elections don’t go the way it wants, I expect it to execute its “insurance policies” to set things “straight.”

    Arizona had better harden-up for the big one. We’re on the ‘short-list.’

    Note: The Left’s campaign against Kari Lake relies on selling the same anti-borders, transnational narrative the Globalists deployed against Russians in 2020, the same binary morality plays-out on different continents. Watch out!

    10
    • The ruskies have 5000+ nukes. “Where they WONT hit” is an easier game if the assumption is a “mag dump” where they dont just hit the banking and government centers.
      Also, the typical 20 megaton soviet icbm hydrogen bombs have a blast radius of about 25 miles, according to internet experts.

  19. So, basically, act now to become quasi-Amish without the debilitating pacifist streak. If the English come looking for your stuff, go all Agincourt with the vollies of arrows. Then, hitch the horse to your plow and get back to work on those furrows.
    Kunstler says “howdy.”

    18
    • “If the English come looking for your stuff, go all Agincourt ”

      The English were the archers, dipshit.

      4
      12
      • English is the term the Amish use to describe non-Amish because they speak a dialect of plattdeutsch. I am fully aware of the role of the longbow in the defeat of the French at the battle of Agincourt. I was using a metaphor to riff on Zman’s analysis of bows and spears over firearms. So, who’s the dipshit in this situation? I’m guessing my tribe and yours aren’t gonna be working together.

        19
        • It’s not a metaphor when it’s the exact opposite. Your metaphor makes the Amish the arrow catchers.

          • Bilejones: “Your metaphor makes the Amish the arrow catchers.”

            Ackshually, I do worry about our Amish brothers in the event of an SHTF eventuality.

            Their pacifism has never yet had to face the raw naked brutal reality of Darwinian Nihilism, and s/p a true SHTF situation, when several million apes come flooding out of Philadelphia & Pittsburgh & Scranton, in search of food & potable water & White women, our Amish brothers are gonna hafta make a very difficult decision as to whether they continue to honor their ostensible moral code, or whether they decide instead to defend & preserve & continue propagating their own families.

            I don’t know how badly mentally ill the Amish might be [e.g. whether they have any suicidal personality traits in common with White sh!tlibs], but if the Amish do suffer from mental illness, then it’s gonna be a struggle for them to abandon their pacifism and embrace instead the Darwinian methods which will be necessary for defending their families from the apes fleeing Philadelphia & Pittsburgh & Scranton.

          • “Ackshually, I do worry about our Amish brothers in the event of an SHTF eventuality.

            Their pacifism has never yet had to face the raw naked brutal reality of Darwinian Nihilism, and s/p a true SHTF situation, when several million apes come flooding out of Philadelphia & Pittsburgh & Scranton, in search of food & potable water & White women, our Amish brothers are gonna hafta make a very difficult decision as to whether they continue to honor their ostensible moral code, or whether they decide instead to defend & preserve & continue propagating their own families. ”

            Don’t you worry for them, my son. The rest of us will be queueing round the block to defend them, and they know it.

            They will be the go-to group to trade with or to learn the skills we will need. so are far to valuable to lose. Smart cookies, those ‘ backwards peasants.’

      • “English” is the term the Amish use to refer to all non-amish people.
        Also, theres this thing called a “metaphor.” Maybe look it up.

        • And Maus replied while i was typing. Lol.
          From z’s prediction I’ll be a supermutant or a ghoul, so I doubt I’ll be in your tribe either.

    • Kunstler would never say howdy. He would send one of his peasants from his castle up on the hill to say howdy for him.

  20. A worst case scenario of magdumps of the whole strategic arsenal will be very difficult if not impossible to recover civilization. Humans always target the best and easiest first. That means all the easy stuff has been mined and consumed already. A collapsed civilization simply could not maintain off shore oil drilling or continue the horizontal fracking of tight oil and gas. All the coal that could be removed from the ground with pick-axes was removed from the ground and burned 150 years ago.

    Almost all of the resource extraction we do is of low quality deposits requiring a lot of technology, lots of spare energy and a highly specialized workforce. How much food could our dirt, unfertilized and un-irrigated produce using horses? (those giant machines need highly refined fuel)

    28
    • Good point, except there is still plenty of open-face coal fields, even in Europe. Iron will be a lot harder to come by.

      I read a book by a guy who survived two years in Sarajevo during the war. He gave this one advice I haven’t seen other survivalist mention: once the balloon goes up, there’ll be checkpoints everywhere, private enterprises essentially working as a toll booth where you’ll have to pay to get through. If you give the nice man a silver coin, he’ll think “gee, I wonder if he has more of those babies stashed away somewhere?”

      So you’ll want a lot of cheap jewels instead, stuff you can pull off your finger and say “here, take my wedding ring.” He’s not going to suspect you have a bag of them in your pocket.

      23
      • Felix: Selco’s book is short and well worth reading, particularly for the “It can’t happen here” crowd, and “Murricans will pull together in a crisis.”

        12
        • Also: your stash is a big liability if you don’t have the means to protect it, viz a militia of your own. You must be ready to leave all your material possessions behind at a moment’s notice if your life is at stake, something most people struggled with and paid for.

          One difference is that Sarajevo had Red Cross supplies coming in. They were all appropriated by gangsters and black market crime lords, but they were available at a price. This will not be the case after the big kaboom.

          12
      • I don’t know about coal fields, but open pit mining involves absolutely enormous earth moving machines sucking diesel fuel by the ton and tons of explosives, which I think are made with natural gas.

        I do know the mountaintop removal method uses this type of earth moving equipment and I think the explosives too.

        Whether or not enough civilization can exist (after such a catastrophe) to build steam locomotives, I don’t really know. We could build them in the 1850s, so maybe. OTOH, we had a lot of cheap coal to power it all.

        • Yes, but the coal is there, accessible with a pickax.

          Off topic, but Iain M. Banks wrote an excellent novel about a freak planet located thousands of lightyears outside the galaxy – hence they had no hope of ever leaving their solar system. The planet had gone through several cycles of civilization-barbary and now they were mining the refuse of the refuse of the refuse of all the civilizations gone before them, digging through ancient slag heaps for metals.

          Very dark, very philosophical, very funny: Against A Dark Background”

          • With a username like that, you should definitely check Iain M. Banks out.

            And don’t forget the “M” when you search for him – he wrote crime fiction under “Iain Banks” – with no “M”.

          • Oh Yes, another gem is Star’s Reach by John Michael Greer, which has a similar backstory. You’re welcome.

      • That sounds good in theory. But in an anarchic situation, it would be a short time until highway robbery made a comeback. Even if you were armed, if alone and you met a band of bandits, you would be lucky to be searched, divested of your valuables and perhaps your vestments as well, and not left injured or dead.

        Consider that what I’ve just described is not at all uncommon in the more backward parts of the globe. In fact, it’s not unknown in our supposedly “civilized” countries, either.

    • Our species of primate engages in hostage-taking instinctually.
      For arch examples see the harem-keeping baboon troops of Eastern Africa.

      In today’s case, its German economic prowess that’s been abducted and flaunted as a prize and a challenge.

      If while studying these troops’ behaviors, you don’t see a diorama of Human tribal society, or yourself in the crowds, you’re not looking closely enough.

  21. It is quite something to contrast pop culture propaganda from the Eighties with today. Back then, television movies such as THREADS, THE DAY AFTER and movies a few decades earlier like ON THE BEACH and DR. STRANGELOVE warned of the threat of nuclear holocaust. Western leaders sometimes claimed they were fearmongering and propaganda but allowed them to be aired.

    Try to imagine these even being produced today. All would be denounced as racism or Russian propaganda or whatever and they never would be permitted to be disseminated to a wide audience. My, how times have changed, and we are closer to a nuclear exchange than any time throughout the Cold War and I include Cuba and the Andropov plans there. Old Yuri supposedly died of a previously unknown illness shortly after he floated to the Politburo a plan for a first strike.

    Putin and the Russians appear, on the surface at least, to retain the sobriety of that earlier era. What passes as the West now does not have the maturity and intellect of that past era. This really bodes ill and has been an ever-present danger since the United States finally provoked this war. I’m watching for what Russia does in response to yesterday’s pipeline attacks and how the rump West responds in kind, and fully expect it to go sideways.

    32
    • There is a RUMOR that tomorrow (30th) Putin will make a speech after signing the papers of accession into Russia of the new oblasts.
      the RUMOR is that he will say if there is ANY trouble about the new territories, he will cut off ALL gas and oil into Europe. ALL of it.

      That’s the rumor I’ve read today.

      • Its already gone and Europe did it first.

        The last pipeline has just had its license revoked by the Netherlands.

        You can’t threaten someone who has a death wish with death.

        They welcome it with open arms.

    • The timing of those films is interesting. Both ‘Fail-Safe’ and ‘Dr Strangelove’ hit the theaters in 1964, quite coincidentally as LBJ was running against Barry Goldwater, pitching the idea that Goldwater was a right-wing madman who would start a nuclear war with Russia.

      When, in late 1982 in 1983, Reagan pushed for the deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe to offset the overwhelming conventional strength of the Warsaw Pact, suddenly – and again, coincidentally – ‘The Day After’ emerged, as did ‘Threads’ from the UK, and another one, called ‘Testament.’ Note of interest: the actress who starred in the later picture, Jane Alexander, an ur-lib, went on, if I recall, to become head of National Endowment for the Arts under Clinton. All coincidence.

  22. “ The American ICBM system still relies upon 1970’s technology. The Russian systems are similarly antiquated. ”

    I’ve commented on this before. I’m not so sure. Under Obama, that’s 10+ years ago, Congress passed a $1T nuke upgrade bill—dark money, off the books, to upgrade our nukes. That’s a lot of money specifically allocated to a specific task—workable modernized nukes—and the results are not public. And as I remember hearing the bill description at the signing, it was for strategic and “tactical” modernization.

    Under Bush the Lessor, when he came into office we had 15k nukes. Even he was amazed. Last reports I’ve read puts our current nuke numbers at 4-5k at the highest, 3+k lowest. Of course, numbers are secret. Point is that there are perhaps 100+ cities of any size worth a nuke here or in Russia. That’s a lot of leeway to account for “duds”—assuming we have launch capability, which seems credible with our sub fleet and our “v1” drones.

    12
      • ” … and the results are not public.”

        So it comes down to agents of globohomo at the scene of the crime either snacking or feasting on a massive pile of cash when there is no one to observe which choice they make. Given the complete insincerity and hypocrisy with which they are publicly stealing all the money meant for climate change mitigation, ostensibly one of their core issues, I know which way I am betting.

        20
        • At some level, one must assume some sort of rationality/legality wrt the premises of the argument, otherwise all discussion simply becomes “crazy talk”. I believe there is some rough oversight from Congress on “dark money”, but the specifics are secret and might not even be in the budget—but I’m beyond my depth here. An all too frequent occurrence these days unfortunately.

          • Oversight now consists of Congress persons in on the graft. Whoever is putting the program together is sure to put his compliant, stupid and greedy friends in the Congress on the oversight committee.

          • Who are these models of probity in Congress on the committees who provide the oversight?

            Can you name a few?

      • That assumption has the same probability of being true as the assumption that 80% of the nukes won’t function. In short, no one knows. We could assume for example that the F-35 program was 80% waste, yet there are squadrons of operational F-35’s now in service. Similarly, if only 20% of the nukes—say the low estimate of 3k—are functional (600), then we are probably overstocked for world destruction.

        15
        • One can probably assume the naval part with medium range multiwarhead missles are more up to date. We have built new missle subs recently.
          But I could believe everyone on the icbm side saw the whole thing as a pointless execise in compliance as “it’ll never happen” has been the mantra since 1989. They even publicly post the silo positions on the FAA no-drone map up northeast of Greeley AFB and south of Cheyenne WY; I guess they know the other side knows, and have known for 50+ years, so why bother too much.

    • As I understand it, the nuclear disarmament treaties we entered into
      with Russia to reduce the number of nukes each country possesses, do not have a provision for verification.

      In other words, we simply have to believe the Russians when they tell us how many nukes they have disarmed, and how many they have left.

      It seems unlikely that the Russians would target our cities.

      Rather, they go for places like DC to remove our governing infrastructure, our missile silos, and our air bases.

      And they’ll very likely start with an EMP attack that would plunge the civilian sector into chaos.

      Could it be that they are relying on the logic that the country with the most nukes would win?

      On a slightly different note, some observers are suggesting that the ‘dark money’ in our defense budget is going towards satellite-based defensive systems.

      So it’s possible that we do have a protective system to shoot down incoming Russian missiles from space.

      But from what I understand about what’s known, is that the Russians have developed hypersonic missiles with multiple war heads capable of eluding any known defense of ours.

      • The nuke upgrade $$$ I mentioned was specifically for nuke upgrades. Other monies might be in the mix for satellite warfare.

      • I’ve been wondering why Russia has allowed our satellites which pass over Ukraine to remain in play. I would think our helping Ukraine with real time battlefield information relies heavily on satellites.

        17
      • “So it’s possible that we do have a protective system to shoot down incoming Russian missiles from space. ”

        I do like well done satire, play again soon.

        Do you think the Russians knew what the US astronauts had in their back packs when they were hitching a ride on Russian rockets?

        • I do think it’s likely that our military is working on developing satellite-based defenses; I certainly hope so.

          And if so, it’s not surprising that they’re trying to keep it secret.

          1
          1
    • The Russians have been engaged in seriously upgrading their delivery systems in recent years, with Sarmat and their various hypersonic weapons systems coming to mind. I am certain that, knowing as they must how credible deterrents are vital to their continued national sovereignty, they have been assiduous attending to the viability of their nuclear devices themselves, and as a large part of credibility is clearly the delivery systems, they have also been sedulous in their efforts in that area as well.

      For a finger on the pulse of Russian military systems, read Andrei Martyanov’s blog. He has written three books on these matters.

      18
      • Yeah, and if he’s right, our oppressive ruling class has bigger issues. If Russia can drop non-interdictable hypersonic 5000 lb conventional HE warheads anywhere in CONUS at will, what are “we” going to do about it? If every time spongebrain in the white house threatens something stupid a coastal urban center gets the WTC treatment and we lose a nimitz carrier with all hands, how long before we unconditionally preemptively surrender? Respond with nukes? Purportedly the s500 sams can stop everything we can launch through the air or near-outer-space.
        We are the indians now; the cowboys have us outgunned, though how outgunned remains to be seen.

      • It’s Christmas at Ground Zero
        There’s music in the air
        The sleigh bells are ringin’ and the carolers are singin’
        While the air raid sirens blare
        It’s Christmas at Ground Zero
        The button has been pressed
        The radio just let us know
        That this is not a test
        Everywhere the atom bombs are droppin’
        It’s the end of all humanity
        No more time for last minute shoppin’
        It’s time to face your final destiny
        Well, it’s Christmas at Ground Zero
        There’s panic in the crowd
        We can dodge debris while we trim the tree
        Underneath a mushroom cloud
        You might hear some reindeer on your rooftop
        Or Jack Frost on your windowsill
        But if someone’s climbin’ down your chimney
        You better load your gun and shoot to kill
        Oh, it’s Christmas at Ground Zero
        And if the radiation level’s okay
        I’ll go out with you and see the all new
        Mutations on New Year’s Day
        (Hat tip to Weird Al-)

        It’s Christmas at Ground Zero
        Just seconds left to go
        I’ll duck and cover with my yuletide lover
        Underneath the mistletoe

        It’s Christmas at Ground Zero
        Now the missiles are on their way
        What a crazy fluke we’re gonna get nuked
        On this jolly holiday
        What a crazy fluke we’re gonna get nuked
        On this jolly holiday

      • Funny correction, Bilejones. Let’s go with the fact that Bush leased out his administration to the Neocons.

  23. 1. Have light breakfast and a cappuccino
    2. Pull up and review next week’s travel itinerary
    3. Check Slack and wrap the penultimate thing I need to do this week
    4. Make 2nd cappuccio and read ZBlog
    5. Confront how utterly useless and helpless I would be should I survive a nuclear strike.
    6. Think of who I know who would be useful and be prepared to be useful to them in their defense system and as a hard working quick study acquiring skills and carrying them out efficiently and reliably.

    19
    1
    • Certainly that’s an option. Another option is to have a good rifle and a list of all the Mormons in your area. 😉

      (Yes, I’ve been told my sense of humor is deficient)

      10
      • Stop for a moment, man.

        Mormons don’t like Irishmen, and vice-versa. And, at least in Arizona, the Moor-men are intrinsically wrapped-up in rent-seeking at the government trough. You can’t fund the wards and missionary work on seamstress-ing and logging anymore. These types gotta go for the big-Gov bickies!

        Not sure how the McGillicuddies and the upland prudes’ll be able to work together to defend the SW’s population centers with the special “chosen ones” in the face of national catastrophe.

        Watch your backs around the landed Mormons, Patriots! Remember the opportunistic, Mormon role in dispelling Arizona’s nascent Confederacy towards the end of the civil war. And heed the Church’s politicians’ snake-like attempts to insinuate itself into the Regime’s good graces.

        Being mostly of stern German stock, most think they’ll just ‘purge’ anyone who won’t join their ‘wards’ after the disaster, and they will relish the chance to finally rid their ‘keeps’ of them: to execute the ‘final solution’ to its non-believer problem that most can entertain, but cannot openly voice.

        The historical feud carries on today…watch Mitt Romney flail in the months ahead, ask yourself, is this someone I want behind me in the fox hole?

        My answer is no.

        13
      • Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Probably right. I guess all of Italy is doomed. I don’t like my chances – hoping that some realism, self awareness and better preparedness improve them.

      • I always just assumed the headache and irritability of caffeine withdrawal would make me more amenable to butchering my neighbors for their precious human meats in a post-nuclear scenario.

  24. If Vlad wants some truly nasty retaliation without nuking anybody, he ought to go to the UN. No, really, stop laughing and think it through. Russia’s a permanent member of the Security Council, right? Which is somehow a thing that still exists. Call a meeting. This is obviously an American caper — Pudding Head Joe was on tv promising it back in January, and that loopy c*nt Anne Applebaum’s husband, a Polish MP, was out on Twitter bragging about it. I’m sure there’s lots more, and Russian forces have no doubt found all kinds of juicy stuff as they pushed into Ukraine — US-sponsored biolabs and the like. Hell, they’ve probably captured more than a few American “contractors” at this point, or at least have the bodies…

    Call up the UN. Lay out the case, and demand an international investigation of the Nordstream incident. Demand that the US recuse themselves, and Russia will follow suit. Can you imagine the chaos? The US have their mouthpieces, of course, but the Chinese are also on the Council. Put a bunch of Eurocrats and the Chinese in a room to “investigate” and watch the fun. Putin can leak all kinds of stuff to the Chinese delegation at his convenience. Imagine Vlad up there in front of the most international of international bodies, the one the Left still gets moist panties over, declaring that it’s on the US to prove they didn’t do it, and this isn’t an act of war. Hell, do the same thing at the “International Criminal Court” in the Hague, because this is obviously “state sponsored terrorism,” no?

    It’ll be absolutely hilarious.

    35
    • Taking down the power grid for Martha’s Vineyard would be a hoot, too.

      As to your point, I’ve already heard it seriously suggested that Russia should be removed from the Security Council. Build your own UN, it seems.

      11
    • They already did that with the biolabs and the entire west aligned block walked out before the presentation.

      No one cares.

      When you are able to go out in public and get every senior pol to shout “how dare you” about a pipeline you yourself just bombed a few hours earlier and they all know it, stiffing even video evidence is a breeze just through repeated denial and flinging wild accusations around in the media.

      The NPCs are already coalescing around Russia did it frame the US as a narrative on the civnat sites, as they can’t really believe their govt would do it.

      They also seem to have the entire European vassal states by the balls, so none will even raise it as a possibility.

      Its a combination of “your lying eyes” and “fuck you what are you going to do about it” to your own populace anyway.

      20
      • This is why the U.S. never wanted the per-nation funding of the U.N. to be re-graded: he who pays the piper calls the tune.

      • trumpton: Agree. Demonstrating the left’s hypocrisy – yet again – proves nothing to no one. They have no shame and there is nothing they will not brazen out. Proof? What, like Hunter’s laptop? Whether it’s the US Congress, or the UN, or some sort of financial audit, the answer is either 1) It will never happen, 2) No one will pay attention or care, 3) The proof will be denied and gaslit. Probably all of the above.

        People still like to think that proof of malfeasance matters. It doesn’t – neither to the malefactors themselves nor their NPC followers nor to the Normals. Remember, all ‘truth’ is relative, and genuine evil, outside of individual people, does not now and never did exist. Thus sayeth The Science.

        11
        • You are that one in a hundred who’s aware that it’s genuine evil, Evil, to pull the strings, and evil people (or “evil” people) are instruments, rather and before than actual actors.

          • They are still responsible for their actions and should be judged so.

            One makes a voluntary compact with evil, it does not force its servants to make one.

      • That was back in the spring, when a long cold winter wasn’t staring them in the face. Vlad is just doing to the EU members what they do to their own people all the time — “you voted the wrong way; here’s another chance to vote the right way.”

        The big problem with any retaliation on US soil is that the Juggalos in DC would welcome it — they’ll just blame it on “White supremacists” and initiate a huge crackdown. But letting the Eurozone members have another opportunity to break free of Washington… especially since it seems the attack on Nordstream might well have been to keep Germany from concluding a separate peace… that’d be a nice low blow.

        • After the US blowing up the pipes, the only avenues German pols have left is saving themselves by shooting their own population during protests and rolling out martial law or getting strung up by the mass unemployed on the slide into depression.

          I know which one most of the German govt are going to opt for.

          Either way Germany is fucked by this. So for the Kagans it 1 down, n to go.

          • Germany could always invade poland again, lol. Seize the Polish pipelines to replace the ones the pollacks and yankees blew up, and the land supply routes to boot. Germany sets up poland as a marionette buffer state to meet putin’s security concerns and tell Uncle Schlomo to shove off… Turn over ramstein to whatever the kgb is calling itself these days… If only the germans werent completely emasculated.

  25. Here in nyc I have ‘tribes’ all around me although none of them are really mine. Can’t think to much about nukes ‘cos I need all my awareness just to get to the corner and back without being cold-cocked by a tribal yute.

    32
    1
    • Now try to imagine what New York City would be like with the electrical grid down and all the cops staying home to take care of their own.

      21
      • The vibrant population will get a dose of reality on their first attempted looting spree. The cops are the only people protecting those animals.

        49
  26. Contrary to some of the comments here, I don’t think Z has suddenly gone off on some wild tangent.

    There’s a very logical progression from current circumstances— with Putin already justifying his possible use of nuclear weapons, and Joe Biden as president— to the real possibility of nuclear war.

    And there’s a logic that dictates that if you’re going to employ nukes, your first strike had better be devastating; as that’s the only way to prevent your adversariy from retaliating with an all-out strike.

    The ‘nuclear threat’ has been around for so long, without happening, that we as a society have come to believe that it will never happen.

    But that’s faulty thinking: in addition to the Russians and Chinese, the North Koreans have nukes, the Pakistanis have nukes, soon the Iranians will have nukes if they don’t have them already.

    And the technology is already there for a successful EMP attack: it doesn’t have to be precise, just lob a few nukes above the ozone layer. What a great way to bring your adversary to their knees, without destroying any of their infrastructure except the electrical grid.

    It may be comforting to think that it will never happen. But that’s not realistic.

    Being prepared for any eventuality that has a fair chance of occurring, is realistic.

    “Preppers” are scoffed at and ridiculed in many circles; treated as if they were laboring under some kind of delusion.

    That will all turn around in the event of any kind of societal collapse, including a nuclear war

    31
    1
      • Read what I wrote again: I wasn’t bad-mouthing Putin. I actually think he’s justified in not wanting Ukraine in NATO.

        > And what he said or didn’t say *has no relevance* to the point I was making: that nuclear war is a real possibility.

        I can see where the ‘bile’ in your handle comes from….

    • Being “prepared” sounds all well and good. However, even well short of worst case nuclear scenarios, the best it would buy most Preppers is to be among the last to die. Even in rural areas, I suspect most would be dead within weeks, certainly several months. No one is going to rebuild a civilization with a few packets of seeds and a garden. That remains true even if they have running water and a house full of firearms.

    • Jack Boniface: Before she went totally woke, Diana Gabaldon – the author of the original Outlander time travel books – addressed this subject. And because I think it’s an essential truth that too many have forgotten, it struck me years ago when I read it and it stayed with me. There’s a particular situation when the protagonist – an outspoken, somewhat feminist 20th century doctor now in 18th century Scotland and America, inadvertently comes into contact with another time traveler. He notes that he already assumed she was one too, because she lacked any inherent fear of men.

      Fear – that’s something that’s supposed to be bad or that modern life has vanquished. But a healthy sense of fear (and although it gets a bit tedious, the book “The Gift of Fear” is a useful read) is absolutely essential to human survival. And while I certainly don’t walk around in a state of fright, I am well aware that – even in my youth or in my best/strongest shape – I am no match for almost any man. Not merely in technique or fighting experience (I have none), but in basic things like upper body strength or throwing a punch.

      Modern western women have been taught they are strong and tough. Learning they are not – and that they will need to depend on a man for protection and survival – is a vital biological and societal lesson they desperately need to relearn – good and hard.

      22
      • All this is true. There have been many times throughout history and in different civilizations that women have been equal with men. Where they’ve been judges and lawyers and in politics
        and entertainment and in charge but it is also, I’m sure coincidentally, right before the civilization is getting ready to collapse. After the collapse, and the return to nature, your girl power attitudes not going to get you real far so they hunker under the care of the men that will protect them and forget the days of their female ancestors who walked the halls of power. In between the bronze age collapse and the appearance of the new cities was about 400 years that’s about 20 generations. All the feminists today who think that they’re charting new paths, they’re actually just walking on old faded maps. It’s all been done before

        11
  27. Immeidate neighbors:

    Tatted-up White blue collar dude
    Jerry Garcia-lookin’ pot dealer
    Mexican sous chef
    Couple college students (on spectrum from normal to feminine – the guys, I mean)
    Normal White couple
    Normal White family (two little kids)
    Sex worker (stripper & OnlyFans, presumably)

    Not sure if those are good odds, but you go to the apocalypse with the neighbors you have, not the ones you want.

    38
    • I was tempted to say you should move, but it sounds like a representative cross section of the voting public.

      Probably repeated in a myriad of towns across the US.

      20
    • One thing most folks fail to comprehend is proximity to Native American reservations, as Cloud William said on that immortal Star Trek episode “what was ours is ours again”…if you think it’s all going to be friendlies bringing turkeys, corn and tobacco you might want to think again.

      10
      • Native Americans are wards of the state at this point. The fall of the US will be the final chapter in their demise.

        • Arizona’s tribes went full ‘Karen’ after COVID, and most natives in the stores in Flagstaff, Windslow etc. are still masked.

          The poor Navi’s, man. Their men, especially, are wracked by this insanity. If they leave the res, then they’re subjected to quarantine upon their return, so it forces the ‘banishment’ of those who don’t want to comply with CDC/BIA dictates.

          How does a real ‘tribe’ exist in this condition?

          They are salted, prepackaged, and ready to serve up. Just need to pop ’em in the microwave for a minute and they’re ret-ta-go.

    • Good place to start. The tatted-up white-collar worker will make a fine assistant as he clearly is good at doing whatever he’s told. The normal white couples will of course be the core of your team, and you can always trade the sex worker to other tribes for either more food or extra ammo.

      29
    • Ha at least you know your neighbors. More then i can say of most. I know two of the four other people who live in my apartment complex. Though i did just get a flyer from a local church about is this the end times the book of revelations was calling for and is having a lecture series on it. Might go and check that out, maybe meet some like minded people.

      • It’s not a church; it’s a “Kingdom Hall.” 😀

        Pardon if I’ve told this before: many years ago, my home received the occasional Jehovah’s Witnesses. On one visit, I said “You have your work cut out here: you have a Jew and an atheist.” (which, at the time, was true.)

    • Pajeets on one side, pajeets scattered down my street, a couple of stable white families on the street but older couples and one really old guy living alone.
      I figure the Pajeets will cook the Curry and keep the old peoples bowels moving properly and I provide the weaponry.

      10
    • That doesn’t sound bad to me. I’d make friendly with the blue collar dude, the sex worker, maybe the chef. Who knows, the pot dealer could be some libertarian prepper, depending where you live. Couples and children could be a liability if they aren’t the sorts you’d naturally get along with. College students have a lot to learn, generally. My two cents.

  28. Heinlein referenced earlier in the comments. His advice fwiw:
    A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

    24
    2
    • I love that Heinlein quote.

      We’ve become so specialized as a society, that we’ve lost sight of the possibility that we may need to be capable across a wide range of skills.

      10
    • There is a reason we use the disparaging term “small-souled Bugmen” to describe effeminate SJW leftists, because the insect reference is very telling in relation to your quote.

      They live in hives and have this incredibly narrow range of skills, interests, and ideas, all by design and all are perfectly happy that way. There is a large generational element too, but not entirely.

      I’m constantly stunned by the complete lack of basic knowledge about anything outside of their specialized white collar make-work job, useless pop culture, and rigid political view, that your average person has. Doubly so for true Bugmen. This is especially acute among the young, but sadly, has infected the older ones too.

      I have Gen X friends who are full on kool-aid cultists now and they have virtually no useful skills, are as incurious as you can be because they self-police interest in ‘forbidden’ topics, and think that groceries come from Whole Foods, electricity runs of pixie dust, and everything will always be as it is today.

      Those mask zombies that Z describes is a completely accurate assessment of what a post-apoc landscape will look like. The only upshot is they will largely be gone in 30-60 days having not a lick of survival instinct or skill. The ones that last out past the first few months are the truly dangerous ones because they’ve ‘adapted’ to that environment.

      It will be mostly ruthless gangbangers I would imagine. White liberals will walk around in a stupor for the most part while being brutalized viciously by their pets in the first few weeks. Few will make it to month two.

      18
      • I think it would be wonderful to watch the white liberal NPCs have their homes burned by their sacred cows they worship. Seeing the chimp outs ravage them might be the best thing one could ever witness. “But, but, I have a BLM sign in my yard! I care about you!”.

      • This is exactly my neighborhood too. I don’t have any immediate neighbors who are useful as anything but food really. I do go to the local People’s Rights group and those people are extremely based and talented though. I’ll need to drive several miles to get to each one though and my car doesn’t have big zombie crunching tires.

    • Heinlein loses me at “plan an invasion.” I can plan an invasion, at the level that any 14 year old boy can plan an invasion. Anyone can plan an invasion, but you don’t know how good your plan is until you invade. At that point the enemy gets a vote. And, of course, most people will never be given command of an army in the first place. So all the invasion plans that all his readers come up with will never be tested. Heinlein is just encouraging mental masturbation.

      That observation colors my reading of the rest of his list.

  29. The take home message is no matter what the future brings, it’s not going to be good. The internet isn’t a real community that can get us through the tough times. Building real physical communities is key and if nothing bad happens is a very good thing none the less. For me its become my church, which every Sunday is the most heavily armed, like minded, non woke, traditional community I’m in by far.

    21
    • And I should plug the Traditional Latin Mass community. It’s the most conservative (for the lack of a better term) church group I’ve come across.

      4
      1
      • The problem with the Latin mass community is that its own church (which they are supposed to be obedient to) is now actively trying to stomp them out.

        That community is a living contradiction that cannot last.

  30. LOL. Ok, this is a fun exercise but the lack of matches and lighters comment makes me think Z man is just having a good ole time stirring the pot here. Yeah, I doubt those are going away any time soon. Cheers!!

    • I beg to differ: I suspect that Z is being entirely serious in his comments.

      There is nothing implausible about what he is suggesting.

      10
      1
      • The future is so bright, you dont just need shades, you’re going to need welding goggles for the first light pulse.

    • That was the only area I questioned as well. A dozen lighters would be easy to store and would last a long time. OTOH, if those are stolen you’re screwed.

      • There was a blog about the Yugoslavia war.

        The guy basically said the only real exchange mediums were:
        lighters, batteries, medicine, bullets, tinned food, booze and paperback books.

        Even the disposables were re-filled from hoarded fuel.

        10
    • You display a concerning lack of longitudinal thinking on your part.

      How far into ‘Year Zero’ do you think your supply of BiC lighters and matches is going to last? Will you just run down to Target and buy more? Or maybe you’ll go to the factory and just pick up a few cases of each? I’m sure the factory will just be pumping out new product with their pixie dust electrical machines humming away. 🙄

    • prescient11: I’ve read comments indicating up to half of the Chinese Bic knockoffs won’t light at all. Some lighters are remarkably hardy; others – not so much. Some of the longer ones – from the Dollar Tree surprisingly enough – are refillable. Of course it’s useful to have flint and steel and a Fresnel lens as well, but most of us have no experience using them. Funnily enough I was just re-reading a childhood favorite last night – “My Side of the Mountain.” The kid, who runs away from NY city into the Catskills, cannot start a fire with his flint and steel the first night and is cold and miserable.

      I don’t smoke and cannot recall the last time I needed a match. I use the long lighters for Advent candles, and I used one during the Feb 2021 Texas freeze to light our gas fireplace (we had no wood for it at that time). It’s always useful to have a means to start a fire, and to have backups and contingency plans – nuclear apocalypse or not.

      • I actually use flint and steel for my wood stoves, when I don’t get lazy (or too cold on the frostier mornings) and pop a match. It’s fairly easy, but like all old timey ways you need a bunch of little stuff on hand; char cloth, lighting tender, smoldering tender, plus a good bit of flint (it tends to flake out). I usually use a ball of dryer lint in a sheet of packing paper. Old t-shirts for char cloth.
        And for $20, you can buy matches enough to last a decade or more, even lighting candles and fires on the regular during winter months.

  31. The cards are all in for sorts of things that cause escalation to an existential crisis due to the egos of world leaders.

    – 2020 Election solidifying the Washington Ruling class
    – The Afghanistan debacle embarrassing the GAE into wanting a show of power
    – The Ukraine Situation giving the GAE a change to show its superiority against an ancient foe
    – Complete docile subservience of every other western power center to the GAE cause
    – The pipeline escalation, basically destroying any chance of an off-ramp

    It’s like an exponential graph that start slow but soon flies out of control.

    The next parts to look for is:
    – Sabotage of infrastructure within Russia
    – Russia retaliating with destroying facilities in EU countries.
    – U.S. troops in Ukraine (we all know they are already there, but they will make it official)
    – Total military mobilization
    – Nukes

    At this rate, if a nuke exchange is inevitable from this mess, it will happen within the next three years, so best be ahead of the curve.

    14
    • I’d have to think that there’s be some escalation elsewhere. GAE has small-ish bands of troops around the globe that could get punched, and despite NPC programming I’m not sure how war-hungry the imperial subjects would be upon hearing that a thieving band of ZogBots were blown up in Outer Africanistan.

  32. It seems likely that any nuclear attack would start with an EMP attack: nukes detonated above the ozone layer, causing destruction of the electrical grid. That would make retaliating a lot harder.

    It also seems likely that *any* use of nukes would bring a massive, all-out nuclear retaliation of the part of the of the nation that was attacked.

    A partial retaliation doesn’t make sense: since your adversary would then respond to your partial retaliation with an all-out attack.

    So logic would seem to dictate that *if you’re going to attack, an all-out attack— one that prevents your adversary from responding— would make the most sense*

    I believe at this point, the Russians have considerably more nukes than we do. Contrary to what they claim, I don’t think our “experts” have any idea of how many nukes the Russians have. And they appear to have missiles capable of eluding our best defenses.

    And yeah: the consensus seems to be that the old idea of a “nuclear winter” was overblown; that some portion of the population would survive any nuclear strike.

    Joel Skousen’s book Strategic Relocation contains good information on the likely sites in America that would be hit.

    So yeah: being far from cities, being adept at primitive technologies, and being part of a competent tribe— folks who know how to hunt, how to grow and preserve food, and how to defend themselves— would be the way to go.

    12
    • Think it was Darren Beattie who quipped the first secret they tell the president is that our nukes no longer work.

    • The game theory for limited strikes centered around something like the following:

      Russia nukes Norfolk and Charleston, say, getting the fleets wiped out. But also sends a message that they’re done with nukes – no more will be used – unless there is a response. If there is a response, they will escalate tit-for-tat.

      You’re playing the American side. Your move.

  33. James Howard Kunstler of “The Long Emergency” has been talking about this kind of thing for years: the need for community as we enter the post-tech, resembling the pre-industrial, age. It’s unlikely that any of us could survive a nuclear scenario like this, but even if it were possible, the air would have to be breathable and it may not be.

    5
    1
    • I respectfully disagree: plenty of us would survive. Where the air is breathable depends on wind currents.

      10
    • There’s no strategic value to carpet-nuking a continent. American global reach (and economy) would be functionally ended with strikes on just a few port cities. Why proceed to drop a grid of nukes on Midwestern prairie land?

      An EMP attack would be the best thing ever for us. No more Twitter Hivemind, Hollyweird tell-a-vision or Social Credit cashless society totalitarian fantasies. Feminism would end two minutes after Stronk Wimmin Karen tries to pull a wagon up a hill.

      • I would disagree as the elite with the finger on the GAE button have made it clear that they have no issue genociding every Russian (or more). Any such exchange will be for “all the cookies” and it’s doubtful the “satellite ally” would be overlooked in such a scenario.

    • imbroglio: I’m only a recent and sporadic reader of Kunstler, but he had an interesting and honest post, not long ago, about how his solar system has been an expensive boondoggle and ultimate failure. I will defer to those with electrical expertise, of course, but from what I’ve read and seen, solar can be useful for small systems. But trying to power a modern American home with one is ridiculously expensive and not really sustainable long term. For an outside motion light or pump where there’s plenty of sunshine, sure. Unless you have the working experience and finances to install lots of panels and the latest batteries – and to store backups – you are talking about really big bucks that it seems are often better allocated elsewhere.

      We have some solar ‘generators (really a battery and inverter in a portable box) and a dual fuel gas/propane one – all bought after the Feb 2021 freeze (and some in fear of a summer 2022 blackout). Our new property is blessed with a Generac and large propane tank (upgrades from the prior owners after going without power for four days during a large snow storm in 2021). It seems to me a mixture of power sources is useful. All stored fuel will eventually run out, and all solar panels/batteries will eventually degrade and need replacing. Like everything else, it’s a cost/benefit analysis. YMMV.

      • Pretty much. I sank a couple grand on a little solar project, thinking I would use it to heat the chicken coop. Only a 100w 120v heat lamp for 8 hours, right? Didnt make it past the first cold snap in fall. $150 in extension cords and I run whatever heaters the birds need for less than $10 a month.
        Cameras, motion sensors, electric fence, gate opener, and lighting (leds) are workable on a solar system for about $1000 or less. “Whole house” at normal use systems, of 5+ kwh per day with LiPo banks are probably in the “slightly used Ferrari” price range, imho. Better off buying a fleet of tractors, diesel suvs, a couple different generators and huge fuel storage tanks, a new wood stove and chimney and related power equipment – all of which would cost you less than that level of solar power system.

        • Good ol’ Rebel: Thanks for sharing that. It helps to have my hypotheses confirmed by someone with real-life experience. I’ve bought a fair number of solar led lanterns (indoor and out) and the solar ‘generators’ could keep our freezer running for a fair bit. I backed off on a lot of alternative laundry contingencies when I realized that a top-loading American washing machine really doesn’t take that much power to run a load (a front-loader with built-in heater is another story altogether). The big power draws are heating and cooling.

        • All true. However in every serious solar ” off grid ” discussion board, book or blog I have reasesrched number one is looking at what your minimum needs are Next
          Where the system is to be operated. And that gives an idea of what is possible.We are pretty far north in the winter months there are fewer light hours available. So we have to have several ways to get things done..

  34. Z’s in a sunny mood today. The pessimism is tangible, and the spooks are out and about, but what spexifically prompted the prepper posting?

    • Possibly the sudden and totally not coordinated repetition of the words nuclear weapon in every MSM story and govt outpouring in the last 2 weeks.

      15
        • Well, that and “we” our fearless leaders have apparently just used our military to attack Russia in an act of war, giving the most-heavily-armed nuclear power on earth causus belli for WW3: Nuclear Boogaloo.
          Its like when Jaquarius disrespects Dawntavius: the shooting might not have started yet, but a wise man heads for cover.

    • You don’t need to chuck spears. You (modern) firearm will be serviceable for years—if not a lifetime. Z-man understands that anything finite can/will run out in time, but his timeline is faulty. Modern ammo lasts indefinitely under proper conditions and most die hard preppers have a lot of ammo in storage. If for no other reason than “trade goods”. 22 ammo for small game is cheap and easy to store. I simply stopped buying at 10k+ rounds. Mil-spec ammo—5.56, 308–amounts, I keep to myself. But it won’t run out soon.

      15
      • I sent the last of my dad’s 22LR downrange earlier this year. Bought 50 years ago with very few misfires, out of thousands of rounds. Took over 3 years to burn through it all.
        My limiting factors are appropriate amounts of springs, pins and replacement barrels.

      • Legally armed Americans: 300 million guns, a trillion rounds of ammo.
        They will be a problem for someone.
        Any guesses who?

      • Black powder is much harder to store, and much much harder to make, than it is to grab a bucket of 556. And if you have the wherewithal to make your own black powder, then [***fedpoast redacted***]. Its also just as rare: I havent seen #10 caps in almost 3 years.

  35. Where can you get potassium iodine pills?
    I actually do think that over the next year or more we are in much more danger than in1963, and most of the population has no clue.
    It’s sports ball and who will win the Voice.
    In Great Britain it’s the Royals drama play about Megan Markle.
    In the meantime we have zero competent statesmen in the west to pull us back from a nuclear exchange.

    20
  36. Good essay my only question is why would modern firearms not be sufficient if the ammo stashed are sufficient? I am not sure we would need to go back to muzzle loaders for a quite some time?

    14
    • Zman is right about the tech stuff not lasting long, but even if you only got a year out of a car, a generator, or a gun, surviving that first year is the hardest part

      18
    • It depends on your time horizon. If you think life comes back to normal after ten years, then you could plausibly stock enough ammunition and gunsmithing gear to last ten years. If you think this is the end of the modern age for another thousand years, then you need to plan accordingly.

      That is the thing about the collapse of society. Lots of knowledge gets lost. Part of long term survival at the tribal level is about preserving useful knowledge like making gunpowder.

      15
      • Indeed! How long would it take to reinvent even something as simple as the lightbulb?

        People who are seriously contemplating the effects of an EMP attack, are envisioning a return to the Dark Ages. Not a temporary setback, but a true reversion to a prior era in human history.

        It would be quite an inversion: the lawyers and city folk would be helpless— would soon be eaten by the hungry vibrant hordes— while the hunters and farmers and preppers would suddenly occupy the top of the survival pyramid.

        • You would find the lawyers quickly organizing a “share and distribute” committee of a few hundred that they were in charge of and you now had an obligation to provide for.

          wormtongues gonna wormtongue.

          18
          2
          • Another possible scenario is that they will be few lawyers left after a few weeks:

            the water stops running;
            toilets stop flushing;
            grocery stores are empty;
            the vibrant hordes will soon be pouring out of the cities looking for something to eat.

            How long until that “something” becomes “someone”?

            How long will it be until they’re eating people?

            Those well-fed lawyers and their wives will be first on the menu.

          • Which is why, no matter what, we take the opportunity in the early days of chaos to follow Dick the Butcher’s advice and “Kill ALL the lawyers.”

            If they’ve got a JD behind their name, take ’em out. No exceptions, no hesitation. Our future selves will thank us.

          • Lawyers, hunters, and preppers is a valid Venn diagram.
            You people. Its the insane evil bad guys in Lear that want to kill all the lawyers. This is why you illiterates are going to be doing guard duty and burning shitcans in the revolution.
            You realize like 10% of the commenters here are lawyers? Like 1/4 of the falangists leadership were lawyers.

            2
            1
      • You think Juan and Shanikwa will be able to comprehend the specs on how to get the water plant back up and running, or how to make copper wire and string it for a local phone system? Assuming of course you can even locate landline phones. We will be back to homemade carts with old car tires and hand braided bridles and reins when the bicycles wear out, and hand scything your wheat, but on the upside it will create employment. Watch the tv series Revolution from 2015.

      • I think his point was not wether life goes back to normal in 10 years or ever.

        The first year is the most important because that will be the year of anarchy.

        After that first year, communities will naturally spring up, and further violence will be more organized with competing tribes/gangs fighting over territory.

      • .” If you think life comes back to normal after ten years, then you could plausibly stock enough ammunition and gunsmithing gear to last ten years”

        Don’t you just need to stock more than those likely to get to you?

  37. These are fun thought experiments. I’m sure each of us has an idea or two about what we should do.

    Just like we save for retirement and have insurance (even though that’s essentially mandatory for cars, homes, etc), we should look at some level of preparedness as insurance. We keep a months worth of food and stuff at home. I could do better, but it’s a start. The dream is a second home with some average, off the road. In my mind, this is where I start figuring out shit like filtering water and throwing rocks at deer.

    • Mr C: Agreed. People who’ve experienced hurricanes or blizzards know to be prepared. And witness all the DC area denizens who literally did not know what to do when they became stranded in their cars in the snow last winter. Not one had food or water or an extra blanket in their trunk.

      It’s impossible to stock all the necessities of life for ‘x’ period of years unless you’re both wealthy and somewhat obsessed. Just the logistics of moving things, particularly in an emergency (the proverbial bug-out bag or vehicle) are daunting. We really confronted this reality this past summer, when planning to store water in case the power went out while we experienced weeks of 100+ temps. Water is heavy, and needs to be kept from light, and all the 5 gallon containers and 50 gallon barrels of potable grade plastic are made from increasingly expensive petroleum.

      Far better to relocate out of an urban environment to somewhere more sustainable – both for long-term survival and short term mental health. As far as planning further (those who advocate always having yet another back up location and/or burying caches of supplies) – well, we all have our limits to what we consider prudent and what we consider overkill.

      • Yes, but hurricanes and blizzards are relatively short term and isolated so relief is available rather quickly.

  38. I travel A LOT.

    Carry potassium iodine pills in the travel bag in case I get trapped in a major city when a dirty bomb goes off and I can’t get out.

    Never thought I’d need them. Not so sure now.

  39. Useful post. I’m reminded of a few books which I may (somewhat diffidently) recommend. The first is Lewis Dartnell’s “The Knowledge”, which examines the key pieces of knowledge required to rebuild civilisation. The second is just about everything Dmitry Orlov has written, including “Reinventing Collapse.”

    On the sci-fi side I’m reminded of Walter Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” and George Stewart’s “Earth Abides.”

    On a lighter note I’m sure most people here have watched the Mad Max films.

    In Kashmir (north Pakistan) lie the foothills and mountains of the Himalayas. The roads are winding, with steep drops into ravines. Not easy to traverse. If you’re in a bus on those roads, you know the bus is going to drop into a ravine when you see the driver is absent (as he has already jumped outside). That’s the condition of the USA today, with no-one at the wheel except a crash test dummy (that senile old coot Biden).

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    • Well, the Nordstrom thing obviously put us closer to WWIII than we were before.

      If the rockets indeed fly soon, let me be standing right beneath the first one and let Jesus take me home.

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      • I’ve been disappointed in Nordstrom’s service before, but jeez, just go to nieman Marcus, no need to start a nuclear war….

  40. Boy your mind went dark last night didn’t it? Drove you right to the prepper’s sites.
    We have a decent pantry, batteries, ammo and generator. That’s as far as it goes.

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    • How much further can it reasonably go? If you want to survive a complete and utter collapse, then you have to be off grid and sufficient in growing/obtaining your own food. I believe there *are* folks like this, but a man’s got to know his limitations as Clint Eastwood would say. My “limitation” is like you, survive the confusion, hope for relief.

  41. Very true, finding a community/tribe is key. And learn how to do things that require no electricity. Learn how to filter water and hunt/forage for food.

    That being said, I am bougie AF and will not survive long. The ones who will survive are rural folks whose dads taught them country livin’ skills.

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  42. Assuming a limited nuclear war, wouldn’t Germany after world war II be a possible example of what we’d be like? I believe they lost around 7 million people, about 10% of their population. That would be like the United States losing 34 million people.

    Even after so many casualties and the destruction of their industries, they bounced back in a few years. So, isn’t it reasonable to assume it won’t take generations to get back to normal?

    The advice to find a community and tribe you trust is so important. That will be true in the coming years whether we have a nuclear war or not.

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    • Germany had the Marshall plan pumping huge amounts of dollars into the rebuild process, we won’t have that.

    • Germany and Japan bounced back because they existed within a system supported by the winners. If America went with the Morgenthau plan, it would be feudal farmland right now. No such infrastructure exists to rebuild America. Even a limited nuclear strike probably collapses the system and brings the world down with it. Suddenly, it is 1789 again.

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      • Suddenly, it is 1789 again

        1789 B.C. maybe. Current society is already a parasite on the past and it’s highly doubtful that there exists sufficient human capital to redevelop the technologies from even 200 years from a cold start.

        • I don’t think a limited nuclear war would take us back thousands of years or even centuries in terms of technology.

          Assuming “only” 100 to 200 million people die worldwide in a limited war, there would still be a lot of human capital that understood science and technology. It’s not like calculus would be lost. Electricians would still exist.

          At the end of world war II, the world’s population was 2.5 billion. And 73 million had just died. So I think the percentages of dead would be roughly the same.

          Of course, we have imported a lot of less than stellar human capital. But there would still be huge numbers of competent people out there. One difference between now and the past, is that advanced knowledge is not held a few fragile repositories. It’s spread out all over the globe.

    • A successful EMP attack would destroy every electrical transformer in America. Think about that for a moment….

      There are hundreds of thousands of them, weighing many tons. The factories in China that produce them are only used to producing replacement numbers of a few a year.

      How long do you think it will take in an America with no electricity just to replace those transformers?

      It certainly wouldn’t be a quick bounce-back; and an open question as to what extent we would *ever* bounce back.

      It may take decades; it may take centuries….

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      • If i was a sailer i’d be putting out to sea asap.
        The ocean will provide.
        We went inland instead
        I’d like to think we’ve done all we could do, there are at least a million more.
        I grew up having to do the get under the desk drills.
        I wish I could still believe it will never come to pass. But my guts are telling my ass to move.
        God help us.

        • Listen to that “still small voice” of your intuition!
          You’ll be glad you did.

          And check out Joel Skousen’s book Strategic Relocation.

      • Decades perhaps. No reason to think centuries. EMP would probably, in the worst case scenario, destroy a lot of components in the electrical grid. They could be replaced. The problem is a lot of them are made in China!

        But remember, FDR electrified rural areas back in the 1930s. All the components had to be built from scrap and there was no existing grid to plug into. I think that took about 10 years.

    • I would be more worried about being “Borg-ed” by whatever country that did not get nuked. We would be defenseless against a Chinese port city invasion. They are just here to help…

      • Someone reminded me that the Chinese haven’t successfully invaded anyone. Well they did occupy parts of North Korea long ago. But it was Japan that invaded China, not the other way around. There’s something in the Chinese that keeps them from being great warriors. Let’s see the Chinese conquer Japan first.

        Our ancestors conquered the entire North American continent which gives us a lot of freedom from worry about military invasion. It’s hard to cross thousands of miles of ocean to occupy a continent.

        • You last paragraph somewhat contradicts itself. The Europeans did in fact conquer the continent. However, it took a few centuries plus or minus.

    • Also a book titled “One Second After” by William Forstchen. That was an EMP blast, but same idea. All communications down, so you’re on your own – hopefully in a group/tribe.

      • End it seems likely that any nuclear attack would commence with an EMP attack: bringing down the electrical grid, and plunging society into chaos, would at the very least impair their ability to retaliate. So you’d very likely see both.

    • Holy crap that novel is garbage!

      “The group finds that it has not been transported to another world, but instead is in the distant future of their own world. A decadent but technologically advanced African culture keeps either uneducated or castrated whites as slaves.”

      I didn’t know Heinlein was SJWing before it was fashionable.

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  43. So Cormac McCarthy took over for Zman this morning………

    Where did my wife put my damn fishhooks?

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    • You mean McCarthy’s “The Road.” You may have seen the 1983 US film, “The Day After.” In Britain a similar film was made. titled “Threads” (I think), which examined the effects of nuclear war on a longer term basis than the American film.

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      • Hands dwn, “Threads” is the best nukacaust movie out there, old (´84?) as it may be. For some, subtitles might be necessary. But grim… Ooo-wee!

        • I think I recall “Threads.” Is that the one that ends with the midwife presenting the new mother being her baby…um….uh…..?

          I still like the anticlimax finale of “The Day After.” At least the neighbors were friendly.

          • The child of the young mother is stillborn, if memory serves (been almost 40 years since I watched it).

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