Fletch runs the YouTube channel OzarksTactical Homesteading, the description of which reads, “Liberty-minded, faith-based, pro-Second Amendment, pro–home school.” He posts videos on prepping and reviews tactical gear from his property somewhere in northwest Arkansas. Occasionally, Fletch records rants in the car. The mainstream media and Walmart door greeters—the “door gestapo”—are recent targets of his iPhone manifesto. He’s gained more than 5,000 subscribers since launching the channel in 2011.
Fletch runs the YouTube channel OzarksTactical Homesteading, the description of which reads, “Liberty-minded, faith-based, pro-Second Amendment, pro–home school.” He posts videos on prepping and reviews tactical gear from his property somewhere in northwest Arkansas. Occasionally, Fletch records rants in the car. The mainstream media and Walmart door greeters—the “door gestapo”—are recent targets of his iPhone manifesto. He’s gained more than 5,000 subscribers since launching the channel in 2011.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
“I was a computer jockey,” he says. “So for example, when you think of press 1, press 2, press 3 on the phone: I built one of the first systems in banking on the East Coast, and I apologize for that.” Finelli’s company began securitizing debt portfolios, a process that began in the ’80s and fed into the mid-2000s financial crisis. Finelli didn’t like that. “That’s when I had that moment of, ‘This is a house of cards,’” he says. So in the late 1980s, he quit and became a farmer, first out East, then in Grovespring by 2005.
This kind of focus on the problem at hand is used by some of the best sports coaches in the world. Bill Walsh’s book The Score Will Take Care of Itself dedicates its title to the idea. Phil Jackson describes in Eleven Rings how he’d make his team focus all their energies on the current practice or current game and not on any championships. He even had his team, some of the best athletes in history, meditate in order to do this more effectively. The best way to a better future is focusing on the current step, which is only available in the present moment.
At the beginning of the video, I show a winter drone photo of the cabin in the snow in December. Then I flashback to the first balsam fir tree I cut down with a saw and axe near the cabin. I drag the trees into place and clear the cabin site. All summer, I cut the notches in the logs as I built the cabin up, offsite. Once I was finished notching the logs with a log scribe, saw, axe, adze and wood carving gouge, I loaded up the entire cabin of logs and moved them to my land near Algonquin Park, Ontario Canada.
Emerson advocates his readers to avoid blindly following the paths of others and instead to trust and follow their own instincts and blaze their own path. Conformity, according to Emerson, is death to an individual. Both hope and optimism is the essence of self reliance. Emerson admonishes his readers to avoid debt as debt will rob them of opportunities and self confidence. Self reliance is the foundation of a productive, efficient, and self sustaining society.
I do understand, out of my friends and family I’m the most prepared. I constantly go out to the middle of nowhere and put my skills to the test. Just for argument sake, but what if someone is more equipped than you? What if someone else is better prepared ie: more knowledgeable, more practical experience, time in the field putting skills to use than all others in your group? What then, does it mean that you would sideline someone more equipped mentally than you and all others to lead over your own pride?, Or would you go against what you have said and actually not jeopardize your groups well being and let the more experienced person led. To give your group the best possible chance of survival, or would you possibly condemn your loved ones and friends to a fate of death or even worse over your pride?
Not taking a cheap shot at the author, but wouldn’t the author fall into 1 or 2 of these categories? I think the human character of every individual harbors a little bit of all or several of these. Most, if not 100% of anyone prepping has in their specific individual plan – their family members. Each family member brings their own set of considerations (assets & liabilities) to the table. Are we to avoid/cast out these family members due to their nonconforming attributes? This eludes me to one of the categories you left out – The resistant/reluctant prepper. Because if you have a family there’s a strong chance you will have one of these, but they too come around in time.
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.' They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
Having the right companions can mean the difference between survival and death when disaster strikes. While it can be an “every man for himself” scenario during this time, it’s still safer to be with people you trust literally with your life. We hope this post will help you identify the warning signs for the types of preppers you should avoid when SHTF.
In his professional opinion, the next big development in prepping will be the arrival of entrepreneurial capitalists, and this made me think of Fabian Illanes and Roman Zrazhevskiy, two men in their 20s I met at the show-and-tell. Former classmates at George H. Hewlett High School on Long Island, Mr. Illanes and Mr. Zrazhevskiy have been prepping since their teens and recently created Readytogosurvival.com, a Prepper Web site that sells prepacked bug-out bags with paramilitary names like the Tactical Traveler ($439.99) and the Covert Defender ($629.99). They told me that they had been visiting Prepper meetings across the New York region in order “to discover their customers.”
It is difficult to write a review that is worthy of the greatness of this book. Poetically written, each essay is uniquely beautiful. It astonishes me to read a book from so long ago that is still so relevant today. I wish I could go back and have conversations with Emerson and Thoreau. Imagine the conversations they had with each other! It took me a while to read this, but it was important to me to take my time and understand each point he was making. This is the kind of book that one should reference throughout life. Emerson reminds us to trust in our soul above everything and let its force shine through. Only then will our lives have meaning.
Carlyle has learned to repudiate, and he would have others repudiate, 'The Everlasting No,' the materialistic attitude of unfaith in God and the spiritual world, and he proclaims 'The Everlasting Yea,' wherein are affirmed, the significance of life as a means of developing character and the necessity of accepting life and its requirements with manly self-reliance and moral energy.
For years I blamed Mr. Sideways — and the money fever of the 1980s — for this weird episode of hucksterism in English class. But that was being unfair. Our teacher had merely fallen under the spell, like countless others before and after, of the most pernicious piece of literature in the American canon. The whim that inspired him to lead a seminar in house-flipping to a stupefied under-age audience was Emerson’s handiwork. “All that Adam had,” he goads in his essay “Nature,” “all that Caesar could, you have and can do.” Oh, the deception! The rank insincerity! It’s just like the Devil in Mutton Chops to promise an orgiastic communion fit for the gods, only to deliver a gospel of “self-conceit so intensely intellectual,” as Melville complained, “that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name.”
Not only are natural disasters a threat, but widespread terrorist acts have turned the concept of safety into question. Any large-scale national disaster is going to strain the resources of local and government relief services. Your survival and certainly long term comfort depends on just how prepared you are. Emergency and Survival Preparedness can be as simple as moving to a better location, creating a food storage program or developing an emergency exit plan. Preparation doesn't need to be stressful or overwhelming. On the contrary, that is why survival preparedness is an important part of living well.
Practical Preppers, LLC is a survival and preparedness consultative company that sells products and services for those interested in advancing their skills and resources. Practical Preppers, Scott Hunt, or any of its affiliates provide these resources as is and under the protection of copyright. The website has been produced and is maintained by Rapptor Studios. Copyright 2015.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
To find out, Mills placed ads on some popular prepper websites, recruited his cohort, and started his road trip. His goal wasn't a quantitative study; it was ethnography, which is largely talking to people, spending time with them, and seeing whether there are commonalities in how they think. It's important to note that regardless of how popular these prepper sites are, they probably won't produce a full cross-section of the prepper community, either, nor will selecting people based on willingness to talk to a researcher. That said, you'll still probably get more depth than you would by selecting for great TV.
A good prepper always strives to acquire new knowledge and skills. For many people, prepping simply means going on a shopping spree: they buy extra food and water; they prepare a bug out bag and get themselves a cool machete or combat axe and camo outfit, and do nothing other than that. They don’t practice their skills, and after a while, the novelty wears off and they forget all about survival.
This type of prepper prides himself on how prepared he is for any apocalyptic event. He finds it hard to keep his mouth shut about his food preparation, water supply, and his self-sustaining environment that he built as a whole. The problem with this is if a disaster does happen, those ill-equipped groups will surely come for these religious preppers first.
A Prepper takes steps to mitigate the long lasting effect of a severe impact on their world. They do this through stocking items that are critical for their continued well-being – called Standard of Living Insurance. The most notable and important of these items are Food, Water, and Shelter. An established Prepper will have large amounts of food stored, will have water filters and access to water established and will have taken steps to create or maintain the livability of their shelter, or home.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;--though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked Dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
“Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful. It by no means consists in rushing prematurely to a showy feat that shall catch the eye and satisfy spectators. It is enough if you work in the right direction.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude
10Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry. Hospital Preparedness Program - Public Health Emergency Preparedness – Supplemental Guidelines. CDC-RFA-TP17-1701. 2017 Feb [cited 2017 Jul 10]. Available from: http://www.kalhd.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2017-HPP-PHEP-FOA-Supplemental-Documents-1.pdf
