Doomsday Preppers: Kenny

Season three barrels ahead with episode “No one will ever know’, beginning with Kenny (no last name) of the fittingly-named Gun Barrel City, Texas.
There’s very, very, very little worth mentioning in this episode, so I’m going to try and keep this short.
Kenny—who uses antlers in all of his decorating!—is preparing for a hypothetical second American Civil War, of citizens against the guvvmint. His strategy for preparation takes a form identical to the western-style civilization that bore the American system: namely, massive weaponization. Or in other words, if you’re worried about your future ability to survive unforeseen contingencies, the best way to prepare is ‘firepower through purchasing power’. Kenny has $135,000 worth of firepower (65 guns?), a ‘scuba room’, and 40,000 rounds of (as Kenny says) amma-nition, plus a damned-impressive bullet-reloading setup. However, I don’t think he has ‘everything’ to produce his own bullets—all the empty brass, powder, and bullet molds in the world aren’t worth much without primers.

There’s a moment of squeamishness when Kenny lets his daughter draw blood for his private blood bank—to complement his collection of medical supplies, y’know, to patch up all the anti-guvvmint freedom fighters he expects to get shot up in his civil war scenario.

Rest of profile: build “ultimate rooftop command center” onto his existing house. This amounts to a 13,000-pound plywood box with walls full of sand.
Required stunt 1: testing bulletproof window material (friend stands behind glass while he shoots. Friend survives).
Required stunt 2: shooting at armed friends ‘invasion drill’ + exploding ‘mines’.

Because all that^ is stretched out and constantly recapped, there’s really not much to talk about. Like I’ve said before, this kind of southern-fried, heavily-armed Type 1 survivalism really has zero appeal to me.
Anyway, dude, assuming even half of your 65 guns were bought from federally-licensed firearms dealers, the guvvmint has about 30 or so 4473 forms with your name on them.
Ergo, the guvvmint knows you have a lot of guns. Thanks to your appearance on this show, they know you’re all puffed-up about being ready to violently defend your rights. Should your little civil war scenario be preceded by a nationwide gun-grab (and/or ‘neutralization’ of potential troublemakers), your little plywood rooftop box isn’t going to protect you from a UAV strike or a helicopter rocket or pretty much anything more powerful than a single infantry rifle squad.

And in the interest of food for thought, here’s a good enough place to raise the issue that self-identified Preppers seem to be by-and-large middle-aged White Men—who historically have been, for the last 6,000 years or so, the sole group at the top of the pyramid. So what are all these guys so afraid of that they feel the need to buy scores of weapons and stock up on supplies?

At the end, Kenny says something about “working together to take back the country”, or something; but to my eyes, he seem more interested in being in a position to shoot trespassers than in working together.
Meh.

Doomsday Preppers: Mike Adams

Up next we have Mike and Jessica Adams from Salem, Oregon, whose family runs a barbecue restaurant, Adams’ Rib (I’m not sure if that’s intended to be a biblical pun?, but if so, ha!).
Adam’s doomsday scenario is a “terrorist occupation”, which he seems to think will be a good excuse to smear ketchup on his face, Rambo-mascara-style. Why not yell Wolverines! while you’re at it?

I don’t have much to say on this segment itself—there’s just not enough ‘material’ there for me. The fact that he openly admits his concern originates from a jingoistic artifact of 1980s Hollywood should give you a good indication of what to expect. Really, a lot of this segment is flavored with the kind of naïve adolescent speculation I remember from similar ‘what-if?’ discussions, back in high school or whatever. Y’know, we’d be hanging out down at the river and my friend would say, ‘If a zodiac boat full of Bad Guys came around the bend right now, how would you defend this position?’ And I’d make up something about holding the high ground with a belt-fed machinegun with help from my camouflaged sniper buddies.

In his imaginary scenario, Mike imagines that the terrorists will coordinate a series of dirty-bomb attacks across the country…and then close all the grocery stores so nobody can eat. Of course, because his family owns a restaurant, he thinks they’ll get special treatment…because you know how much terrorists love barbecue! ???
However, I would guess that unless his restaurant uses all fresh, local ingredients, that wouldn’t last long because they’d be just as subject to the just-in-time, three-day supply chain as everybody else.

And besides, I think Mike is fundamentally confused regarding how terrorism works:

To the US&A occupiers in Afghanistan today (or the Soviet occupiers 30 years ago), the Taliban, Mujahideen, and their lot are terrorists.

Terrorists.

To the German war machine 70 years ago, the partizaners of occupied eastern Europe were terrorists.

Terrorists.

To the white expansionist settlers in pre-1890 America, the indigs playing erratic retaliator were terrorists.

Terrorists.

To the English lobsterback officers 230-odd years ago, those pesky colonial squirrel hunters shooting them from behind trees were terrorists.

Terrorist.

Really, I could do this all day.

In other words, sudden out-of-the-blue attacks (often directed against the empire du jour) fall nicely under the umbrella of terrorism… …Occupation, however, does not. That’s definitely an actual standing army-type deal. The whole point of hit-and-fade attacking is ‘if you stick around, you’ll be a target’. Had the Cuban/Nicaraguan/Soviets of Red Dawn parachuted in, assassinated a bunch of government officials, and then had gone to ground, they’d be terrorists. But as soon as they started rounding up citizens for reeducation and patrolling the streets, they became occupiers, and thereby easy targets for a gang of high school terrorists.

Remember: one’s definition of terrorist depends entirely on which ‘side’ one is on.

Mike shows his brother how to install filters on their home’s rain barrels—hey, it’s Oregon, makes sense. This gives us yet another scene of preppers clinking glasses and drinking something.

Apparently Mike’s stockpile of doomsday food is skimmed off the top from the restaurant? So it’s all smoked and jar-canned meat? That’s fine, I guess. Personally, I’ll stick with my homemade jerky (ham, venison, beef, take your choice). Aside from pemmican or a properly-cured country ham, it’s about the only long-term survival meat I’ll stick with. And why not?: no mess (I’ve worked my fair share of barbecue festivals; smoked meat is greasy and has no part in a discussion of long-term survival); no glass jars; keeps forever.

About this point, we come to the standard “not everyone takes prepping seriously” part of the segment. And oh, what a surprise, enter the girly sister. Jennifer even gets her own bugoutbag from Mike…and it’s even pink! And so is the duct tape inside! Her rationale for not thinking about issues of survival is apparently, “If something happened I don’t see us surviving, so what’s the point?” Ohboy.

Thankfully, Mike’s wife is on-board with his prepping…but she has the serious kind of epilepsy. That’s all I’m gonna say on that topic, because the association of certain movements with certain 20^th century political movements effectively make it impossible to ever talk about improving genetic health without being branded a monster by most folks.

While Mike grows St. John’s Wort in the garden as a maybe-backup to her month’s supply of medications, in Mike’s ‘occupying terrorists’ scenario the terrorists have also occupied the pharmacies! Mike and Jessica then go exploring Salem’s storm sewers with map in hand, hopefully coming up near one of these ‘occupied’ pharmacies (they don’t). I mean, it’s fun to explore sewers and such, but in this case because it’s as part of such a weird hypothetical situation…I dunno. Meh.

The experts give them 52 points for five month’s initial survival time.

Doomsday Preppers: Brian Murdock

Up next is Brian Murdock, late twentysomething from Massachusetts.
His segment doesn’t have much material, most of it is occupied with generic ‘reality’ show drama, which I have no interest in.
He’s worried about a third world war looming on the horizon. Honestly, I don’t think it’s such an outrageous concern. In fact, my cousin told me about an article she recently read in a popular magazine that pretty much said a world war would be likely in the next forty years or so. Brian sees it beginning with an early US&A-on-Iran strike, followed by Tehran retaliating with a strike on Tel Aviv. I think that might be a little simplistic by not factoring in nations like Russia, backer of both Iran and Syria—and let’s keep in mind that as I write this, signs are good that Assad is preparing to deploy chemical weapons on his people, possibly forcing the hand of the US/UN.
Allow me to springboard. However and whenever stuff goes down, I remember Einstein’s famous quote, “I don’t know what weapons World War Three will be fought with, but I know that World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones”. That may be true—eventually—but there are several things wrong with our notion of being “bombed back to the Stone Age”. First, ‘Stone Age’ societies don’t just spring out of the ground, they’re products of three million years of evolution, and they’re societies that Our Culture has been doing its damnedest to annihilate for the last eight thousand years or so. How many people in Our Culture, given a core of flint and a hammerstone, could craft a workable projectile point? Hell, I can barely knap an Olduwan chopper if I’m lucky—something my ancestors 2 million years ago would’ve had little problem doing—and I study this stuff! Second, calling them ‘Stone Age’ is to misunderstand how these cultures work. Sure, stone plays a part, but it’s like calling our society the ‘Glue Age’—glue plays a part, but it’s hardly the foundation of our way of life.

Anyhow, Brian has an prediction about this forthcoming war—he claims that it will claim exactly 2.3 billion lives.

Huh. That’s oddly specific.

Because he lives near a major city, Brian is an ‘apartment prepper’. The narrator informs us that to get started as an apartment prepper usually costs $1,500. The very fact that this can be so easily estimated just makes me go ‘Ugh!’: It’s prepping-by-numbers; it’s like saying, ‘If you want to be ‘indie’, just buy x, y, and z!’ There is more than one way to ‘be prepared’ for unseen situations, and believe it or not, sometimes it has nothing to do with how much stuff you’ve bought.
Anyway, instead of being stuck in his apartment, Brian sells apparently all of his belongings for $75,000, and uses the money to buy an RV and 50 acres in New York. Awesome!, now I’m interested. Is he going to be a mobile, nomadic rubbertramp with the NY land as a home base? Is he going to use the RV as temporary housing while he builds his offgrid earthship?
Nope. He’s going to get a Columbian mailorder bride, bring her to Boston, and then whisk her off in the RV to the property in NY. Whoah-oh, culture-shock time!!!
Brian says he really likes this girl because “her culture’s way of life is already well-suited to prepping”. I hope that’s so, because I don’t see Brian doing much in the way of growing potatoes or raising goats and chickens. But apparently, the idea of ‘prepping’ is a foreign concept to Tatiana because back in Columbia, it’s ‘bad times all the times’! So, when the WW3 bullets start flying and she has to hit the ground, she should be right back in her element?

They do some target practice…shooting bananas. Way to waste food, bro.
The experts give them a 43 (including 4 points—a new low—on food storage), computed to eight weeks initial survival time. Now, we know the points don’t matter, but it still seems a little harsh.
In their post-filming update, we learn that they’re now married, and they’re planning to move into the RV in NY in a matter of days. Good luck, guys.

Sky-god versus the Almighty Uterus

Let’s start with a nice quote from an interview I read with Gloria Steinem in TIME magazine a few months ago.

“…what I believe, which is that things are a circle, not a hierarchy: the women’s movement and the antiracist movement and the gay movement and the environmental movement are all linked.”  –10 Questions, August 15, 2011.

     I agree completely with Ms. Steinem.  I actually just finished reading an excellent book on pretty much this same topic, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade. If you have any interest in women’s rights, anthropology, comparative religious studies, environmental philosophy, social sciences, or just history in general, I’d highly advise checking it out.  While parts of it are a little dated (it was first published in 1988) and a bit repetitive at times, give it a try if you’re into any of those sorts of things.  I’ll try to sum it up and not to bore you with too much anthro-talk.

     Basically, way back in the day, a big chunk of Europe and the Near East was following an amazing way of life.  While agricultural in livelihood (normally a red flag to me), these various cultures of ‘Old Europe’ were Earth-worshippers, which is to say that their religion was based around reverence for the life-giving and nurturing powers of what I call ‘the Feminine Divine’ (manifested in Mother Earth, Gaia, or the ‘Triple Goddess’ Wiccans are always going on about’, etc), apparently on equal footing with a sacred king.  Unfortunately for them (and us), about six thousand years ago who shows up on the scene but the Indo-Europeans.  These Caucasian guys come riding their horses into Europe and bring with them their dominating, warlike, male sky-gods (as in the case of Zeus/Jupiter, Babylonian Marduk, and the Abrahamic god), and commence to pretty much wipe out the tree-hugging Old Europeans (I say pretty much because it seems this female-empowering ‘partnership’ model managed to survive until about 1500 BCE on Crete, when that pesky megavolcano on Thera blew up and washed them away, or at least shook them up enough so that the Mycenaean proto-Greeks could come in and finally take over.)

And ever since then, the power has been held by the He-Man Woman-Haters Club. (You could probably get really Freudian with this, and say that the Dominator model of society stems from a bad case of Uterus Envy, or something).

    See, when your god is a vengeful, armed-with-thunderbolts, fond-of-smiting, bearded-guy-in-the-sky, your society is going to be all about those sort of things—namely, exerting control and making war on those who are different.  I’m not just talking about beating up on your brown neighbors and effeminate men, although that’s always been a popular pastime among Taker peoples; this also encompasses Nature, because if you believe your male god created the world, and your enemies believe their female goddess IS the world, and you’re okay with killing them, well then, you’re probably going to have no qualms about subjugating and controlling the earth either.

'Made to Rule', indeed. Fuck you, Creation Museum.

Barefoot in a war-zone

Early last month, I heard a story on NPR about the US Army taking a stance on so-called ‘minimalist shoes’.  Basically, the top brass decided to crack down on these alternative shoes and that servicemen and women must now wear standard footwear.  When the story came on the radio, I thought, “Well, duh.”  I can’t say I was really surprised that the Army made this ruling and prohibited the use of minimalist shoes by its personnel: they claim these types of shoes “detract from a professional military image”, and I’m sure they do – the whole point of a uniformed standing army is that you’re all supposed to look the same.

Apparently, the Army isn’t having a problem with grunts wearing these shoes while out on missions (which would be absolutely silly, but not for the reasons you’d expect), but instead when they’re out doing PT (physical training).  This is where I have to disagree with the ruling.  If you want your personnel to be in top physical condition, minimalist shoes —since there is no way on Earth the Army would let people train while actually barefoot (like hippies!)— are the way to go.  The benefits of this type of running have been espoused byplenty so I won’t bore you with a retread of the topic.  I usually run barefoot and I’ve seen the advantages, but I hate pushy folks who try to convert others to their way of thinking, so if somebody wants to give barefoot running a try, it’s up to them.

Actually, I kind of wish some Army guys had been running missions while wearing these kind of shoes before this ruling went out, so that I could point and laugh.

Honestly, wouldn't you?

Not because of how silly a decked-out-in-full-battle-rattle grunt would look while wearing colorful rubber gorilla feet but because of how incompatible the conflicting ideologies are.

Your average Army man—wearing combat boots and body armor, carrying an 80 or 100-pound ruck and some kinda black rifle—is a product of the ‘civilized’ world’s military-industrial complex.  He carries everything he needs on his back.  He’s big, loud, and heavy, and you can be sure his feet strike heel-first when he runs.

Compare him to your barefoot Bushman.  This fast and light fellow carries little more than a bow and a handful of arrows, because as a hunter in his natural habitat, he is in his element.  Everything he needs, Nature provides.  He’s ‘uncivilized’, but he’s healthier and happier than you or I.  Emulate him.