Today’s riff-tastic starting point:
“Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.”
Looking at a prediction success rate of the above that makes weather men and stock market analysts seem like Nostradamus, if anyone can’t take that data point and extrapolate the predominant maximal stupidity and mental powers of the above-referenced groups, I cannot help you any further.
(For Reference:
Iron Curtain
fall of China
Korean War
Cuba
Berlin Wall
Sputnik
Missiles In Cuba
Vietnam debacle
at least three Mideast wars
Rise of OPEC
Berlin Wall coming down
Fall of Soviet Union
Invasion of Kuwait
9/11
Most major life emergencies can best be solved with a passport, a credit card, and $20K worth of small bills in cash, in your hand.
(Concealed pistol optional.)
Everything else is second best.
But that’s still only most emergencies, not all.
For the rest, canned goods (both #10, and the olive drab kind) take rather more precedence.
A prudent person who prepares for not only the worst case imaginable, but also for the unimaginably bad case (what Mr. Sec. Rumsfeld referred to perspicaciously as unknown unknowns), will always do the best, overall. Because the main preps for SMOD versus looting at the local Food King versus an F5 tornado coming up the road are remarkably similar.
This is why your great-great-great-grand-relative and mine all still trace their ultimate ancestry to Noah & Sons Cruise Lines, LLC.
So, for anyone’s general reference, a cubit is a unit of measurement 18 inches long.
And you should know a wee bit about marine architecture, in a metaphorical sense.
Because everyone laughs at the ark-builders.
Until it starts to rain.
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It was coincidence, I imagine, but I had just started “working” as a technical editor for a government contract in Oklahoma when a big tornado tried to take me out.
I’d planned to stay a couple hours late to make up my time. Around three o’clock, the skies darkened and I watched people leave early, taking PTO or LWOP (one never runs out of Leave Without Pay, do they?), but I was determined to stick it out. My manager, whom I referred to as Dumbo the Blowhard, told me to go into the men’s room (was on an inner wall) for safety if the tornado hit the building.
But, I figured I’d lived in tornado alley a good 20 years and could make it through that one just fine.
Around 5 o’clock, my team member called me from her home and asked me to move all her music CDs from the top of her desk into a drawer. Just in case. I decided to turn on the radio and heard the local news dudes telling people to get out of their cars and into a ditch if they were at a crossroads about two miles from where I worked.
I tossed my friend’s CDs into her drawer and decided I could afford an hour of LWOP. I got in my car (it was almost dark and the roar of the winds was deafening but I still wasn’t overly worried) and headed east. Within a mile or so, the skies brightened and I felt a bit relieved.
Until I took the exit off the interstate (I-40 at Anderson Road) and heard the radio dude tell people in their cars at I-40 and Sooner to GET OUT OF THEIR CARS NOW.
The building I worked in at I-40 and Sooner was hit and while I might have ridden it out in the men’s room, I’m not sure my friends CDs all made it, nor would I have been just fine at my desk. There were paper napkins driven into the drywall near my desk. If you’ve never seen what the winds of a tornado can do, imagine a paper napkin driven into drywall.
Relieved, I hurried home and my husband was glad to see me. He and my son had dragged a mattress into the
closet closest to our fireplace and planned to hunker down there in the event of a direct hit. I told him that I thought my workplace had been hit and then, on the news, we heard the same tornado had ripped across GM plant and part of the Air Force base and was heading for, gasp, Choctaw.
We looked out our front windows at the open pastures between our little subdivision and the Air Force Base a few miles away and all I saw was a big black stormcloud. Then, I realized that big black stormcloud sitting on the pasture was churning up trees and dirt and was maybe a half mile away. It was like nothing I’d ever seen and I grew up around tornadoes here in Missouri, then lived in tornado alley for almost 25 years.
We grabbed our son, put a helmet on him and got under that mattress in the corner of the closet next to that fireplace. We listened to the freight train roar over our home and prayed.
Less than a quarter mile away, homes were completely destroyed. We found debris in our yard from people we KNEW who lived in Moore, Oklahoma, almost twenty miles away. The silence… lack of bug noise, bird noise, animal noise, even lack of car and siren noise was crazy, almost deafening. As our neighbors began to come out and we all began to assess what was happening, looters started driving our streets looking for opportunity. Fortunately, we were there and they didn’t stay long. We took license plate numbers and the men waved rifles at them to let them know we were armed and ready.
Just a reminder that LOOTERS are always prepared for crisis. Always.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_outbreak_sequence_of_May_2003#May_4_event
Now that would be an adrenalin rush.
In ’84 I had just left Sicily and was going to C school in Millington. I stayed at a motel over-looking the Mississippi that night, getting ready to check in to the base the next morning. Right across the river in Arkansas that night there were 26 – frickin’ twenty-six! – tornados, in an area about 20-30 miles NE of Little Rock. Some came within a couple of miles from the motel. I didn’t sleep that night and kept the tv on all night. I found out later that, because the Tennessee side is on a bluff right there, the tornados never come that way. True or not I don’t know, but the locals swear to it. That’s a sound you never forget.
My butt was puckered tighter than a bull’s ass in fly time.
Looters should be shot on sight. And in the Great Conniption a-comin’, they will be.
it was surreal… I was thinking about it tonight while the rain was pouring down here, again. No tornadic activity, but…
The looters were in old beater cars (three different arrivals… which is why the rifles came out after the first carload of them) and they had obviously targeted our neighborhood already. Some folks had left to go to the community “shelter.” Am kind of glad I’d gotten home late or we might have been there too.
You are right… that freight train sound is unmistakeable and unforgettable.
Several years back Grand Island, Nebraska was hit by one tornado after another. They even made a movie (very) loosely based on it. My cousin was living there at the time, and reported that cars full of looters were coming in while the tornado procession was still in progress.
Is true. I saw it in person that day. It is why we put a safe room in here. We will STAND here. No matter what.
Sage advice delivered ever so drole.
If there hope, it lies with the droles.
Prepare for a poor harvest this fall; looks like 10% lost at minimum. Prepare for the worst winter on record in most places, bad earthquakes and volcanoes; it all comes naturally with a Grand Solar Minimum. Preppers, prepare your welcome for the liberals (the Schleppers) who are incorrigibly stupid.
Well, you have a lot of advice for most. What advice do you have for avoiding yourself?