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DHS Is Gaming Civil War…Are You?

by David Morris on May 10, 2012

There was some big news this week that I want to address about DHS “Preparing for Civil War.”

In short, a highly respected security expert was recently approached by a DHS informant who told him that DHS is preparing for Civil War due to a collapse of the dollar, hyperinflation, and the resulting chaos that they expect to happen as a result.

The thing that has surprised me this week is, frankly, why people are surprised about this.

One one hand, the economic collapse in one form or another has been in process for several decades and it’s been the subject of novels and fiction for at least 2 decades. Over the last few years, economic collapse has changed from being a fringe concept to being mainstream and generally accepted that some sort of crash is going to happen. The main question is how bad it will be, how long it will last, and how it will play out.

On the other hand, since millions of preppers, including current and former military, law enforcement, and government employees are preparing their families for financial turmoil and breakdowns in civil order, why wouldn’t we EXPECT federal agencies to do the same?

And this isn’t a new thing. I’ve worked with guys who have done Red Cell wargaming since 9/11 and controlling the population in the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or economic disaster is ALWAYS one of the factors that has to be taken into account.

When you see that unknown economic turmoil is on the horizon, one of the things that you want to game out is what your family would do in the event of civil disorder/civil war. In fact, this is one of the things that I strongly encourage people to do in the SurviveInPlace.com course.

Don’t get me wrong…I don’t get warm fuzzies about DHS preparing for civil war. I’d much rather it was local agencies who actually know and live among their population rather than some Federal agency making centralized policy for the whole country anonymously. At the same time, while I can’t flip a switch and do anything to change what DHS is or is not doing, I CAN flip a switch right now and make positive changes in my life and the lives of my family that will help make us more resilient in the event of natural disasters, manmade disasters, and economic disasters.

This is a VERY important point that I want you to understand and encourage you to embrace…there are things that are within your realm of control right now and many things that are NOT within your realm of control. You will probably never be able to do anything but prepare for and react to the things that are not within your realm of control.

What DHS and other government agencies decide to do is outside of your realm of control. You can vote for representatives who you agree with, write letters and make phone calls to your elected representatives (and I encourage you to do so), but when it all comes down to how things will play out after a disaster, it’s much more important that you take action on things that are within your realm of control.

In other words, instead of being concerned about DHS having plans for a civil war, maybe you should work on your own plan.

What’s that mean? Get your stuff in order, do it quickly, and do it in such a way that you won’t regret the time and money you spent on preparing if nothing horrible ends up happening during your lifetime.

I’ll give you some guidelines in a second, but I want to point out that this whole prepare-without-guilt-if-nothing-ever-happens concept is foundational to everything that I have written and I strongly suggest that you check out the www.SurviveInPlace.com course and or the www.FastestWayToPrepare.com course if you want a detailed roadmap to follow.

As a general guideline, become more resilient so that you can bounce back from whatever happens to the world around you. Here’s some steps:

Figure out what it would take for you and/or your family to survive if cut off from civilization. This is harder for some than others. Accept it and deal with it if you’re in this group…as soon as possible.Here’s an example. A friend of mine who I think the world of is married to an incredible woman who takes anti-rejection medication for an organ transplant. If a collapse happens that knocks out future supply of her medication, it means that her clock has started ticking. At this point, she has the choice of denying that there’s a problem and quietly fading away or completely embracing life and squeezing as much as is humanly possible out of her remaining days.
Another example is if you’re body is decades older than your mind. In this case, you need to take inventory of your strengths, find able bodied people who fall short in those areas, and team up.

In any case, you are going to want to both stock up on water, food, heat, medical supplies, entertainment, mental health, spiritual health, physical health, and the tools necessary to provide the above AND figure out long term sustainable solutions. It’s easier to simply stock up on stuff that you use and need, but it’s much less expensive to create sustainable solutions.
Once you’ve figured out your needs, start picking off the low-hanging fruit first. Disaster may strike next week and you’re much better having SOMETHING 100% done and usable than a bunch of items 80% done and unusable.A few pieces of low-hanging fruit are entertainment, mental health, and physical health. If you take up reading and body-weight exercises and cut out SOME TV time, you could very well end up going to bed earlier, getting more sleep, and feeling much better.
In the process, you might end up cutting back on your cable package, working out at home or outside and cutting your gym membership, not need as much caffeine to stay awake or as much alcohol to relax and save a bunch of money on subscriptions in the process.

From a grid-down perspective, you would have made yourself more resilient as well since your life wouldn’t change as much after a disaster. It’s important to note that entertainment withdrawal is a very real thing among both children and adults. In fact, in some Southern hospital systems, 80% of their ER carbon monoxide poisoning cases are kids who got CO poisoning when the electricity goes out after hurricanes because they ran generators in attached garages so that they could power their video game systems.
Decide if doing a strategic relocation is a possibility. Successfully bugging out after a disaster is a low probability venture, at best. Between packing time, packed roads, panicked people, and getting everyone together in time to leave, you must have a plan to SurviveInPlace, regardless of how un-ideal your current situation is. If things work out and you are able to relocate to a superior position, that’s even better…but don’t count on always being able to.If you absolutely do not want to ride out a disaster in your current location and you have the ability to, you may want to seriously consider strategic relocation. Strategically relocating is moving to an area that is more survivable BEFORE disaster strikes. It’s relocating when you want to, instead of when you’re forced to.
For many, it means downsizing, simplifying, and making dramatic changes in lifestyle. This may be great if does disaster strikes, but has made many people miserable by cutting off more than they could chew too quickly. I suggest that, instead of immediately moving from, as an example, a walkable urban neighborhood to a mountain retreat that’s 20 miles from the nearest paved road, you might want to think about finding somewhere that feeds you emotionally and that allows you to start making changes that allow you to become more self-reliant like gardening, learning handyman skills, and basic “survival skills”. This might look like a 1 acre horse property close to a city, or a small farm a few minutes out of a small to medium sized city. In any case, look for a source of water that you can get access to if everything falls apart.

“Survival skills” covers a big swatch of canvas. What I’m specifically referring to is learning primitive survival skills like making fire, building shelters, hunting/gathering, etc. One of the biggest reasons isn’t because you’ll be likely to need them on a daily basis in a disaster, but because learning and using these skills helps to widen the range of conditions that your mind and body are comfortable in. If you know how to be comfortable in the woods with next-to-nothing, it’s a heck of a lot easier to be comfortable in a house after the power, water, sewer, and gas stop working. You don’t have to turn into Bear Grylls or David Morris …you just want to condition your mind to be comfortable in a wide range of scenarios.
Focus on practical before tactical. The climax of all survival fiction is the battle between good and bad. Battles happen in real life survival situations as well, but so does eating, drinking, sleeping, relationships, hygiene, illness, injury, and other “boring” survival skills that are necessary to sustain warriors between battles that may or may not ever come.

One common element here is that these steps will help make you and your family more resilient. If you spread the message of preparedness, you can help create resilient micro-communities that will be better equipped to endure long term hardship. If you get your preparations in high enough gear, you will be able to support not only yourself, but others around you. In either case, the more stable your immediate area is, the less bad attention it’s likely to receive.

The problem for most people who see the need to prepare is that their mind gets spinning so fast with all of the potential scenarios and all of the disciplines that they are told they need to learn that they end up overwhelmed and paralyzed. It’s not a shortage of information…it’s a problem of not having a way to quickly and efficiently sift through it and prioritize the information.

That’s why I created the SurviveInPlace.com course. It’s a 12 module course that helps people create a plan to survive short, medium, and long term disasters right where they currently live…regardless of where that may be.

As things in the US started to come unhinged, I found that I was getting more requests for the absolute fastest way to go from 0 to prepared. As a result, I created the 6 module FastestWayToPrepare.com course. It overlaps some with SurviveInPlace, but people who have bought and gone through both have been happy that they did. In other words, they both stand alone as complete products that harmonize with each other.
FastestWayToPrepare.com cuts out a few sections like, “Operational Security,” “Hardening Your House,” and a great section on tactical movement in an urban area after a breakdown in civil order but goes deeper into tools to forge mental resilience and unique and inexpensive semi-secure communication solutions.

If you haven’t gone through either or both of them, I want to STRONGLY encourage you to check them out right now by going to www.SurviveInPlace.com and www.FastestWayToPrepare.com.

What are your thoughts on the announcement this week on DHS? More importantly, what are you doing THIS WEEK to get you and your family more prepared? Learning skills? Practicing skills? Stocking up on items? Have you gamed out breakdown in civil order scenarios for your family? Have you, or are you considering strategic relocation? Share your thoughts, concerns, and encouragement for other like-minded readers who are getting prepared by commenting below:

Until next week, God bless and stay safe!

David Morris

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Food Independence (even if you don’t have a green thumb or time)

by David Morris on May 3, 2012

Welcome to this week’s Urban Survival Newsletter, brought to you by my new book, “Tactical Firearms Training Secrets,” which you can buy on Amazon.com right now for less than $10! Thanks to those of you who bought the book last week and thanks especially to those of you who bought 10 & 15 copies at the introductory price. You can still take advantage of the introductory pricing by clicking on the picture below:

(No, that’s not me on the cover…It’s Dustin Ellermann, who you might recognize as the winner of Season 3 of the History Channel’s “Top Shot.”)

Now onto this week’s newsletter…We’re rolling into May and early spring and, for the most part, people who want to have a summer garden this year are well on their way.

Food is such an important consideration for preppers. Whoever controls your food supply controls how long you live and how productive you can be. In many cases after a major disaster, either nobody is in control of the food supply or there isn’t much of a food supply to be in control of. That’s why it’s so important to have food storage to help bridge the gap in the event that your food supply chain gets broken.

Going one step beyond food storage is generating your own food supply with gardening…which gets into the most efficient way to generate food for your family, especially if you don’t have a lot of extra time or developed gardening skills.

Timing is another important consideration with gardening…plant too early and a late frost can kill your sprouts. Plant too late, and your still-to-ripen produce can freeze in the fall. If you happen to be busy, distracted, or out of town when your zone’s planting season hits, you’re either going to need to find a short season variety of what you want to plant or write off the season.

That’s one of the reasons why I question the validity of buying millions of seeds if you don’t have a solid plan in place to take those seeds from seeds to edible food and back to seed for the next year.

Don’t get me wrong…I’ve got seeds stored up and I’m continuing to buy more, but I’m not holding out the false hope that I’ll miraculously be able to flip a switch and feed my family from our garden if the balloon goes up tomorrow.

–An interesting aside on “when the balloon goes up.” During WWI, artillery spotters would go up in hot air balloons right before an artillery attack to help walk the barrages onto their targets. When the balloon went up, it was a very reliable sign that significant turmoil was soon incoming. Many people know what the phrase means, but I used the phrase for 30 some years without REALLY knowing the history of it.–

Gardening is a peculiar dilemma for the prepper. Using conventional methods, you could very easily use all of your time simply growing food to feed your family. This makes sense for some people, but for most people—especially city dwellers—it makes more sense to do something else for income and pay someone else to grow your food.

The other route that some people go is to build up commercial growing operations and sell their excess at farmers’ markets and to stores and restaurants…and this is a great thing, assuming that your equipment and land doesn’t get confiscated in a disaster situation.

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but until you can feed yourself, or know the source of your food and have something of value to trade for food, you’re going to be subject to whoever controls the food supply.

So, what I want to suggest today is some alternatives to traditional plant-in-the-ground gardening that could allow you to plant ANY time of the year, increase the amount of food that you’re able to generate per square foot, and decrease the amount of daily effort that you need to put into food production.

Square Foot Gardening in Raised Beds in a Greenhouse

Many people are familiar with or own the book, TV series, or DVD by Mel Bartholomew or are at least familiar with the concept. If you’re not, square foot gardening is a strategy that uses a 4′x4′ or 2′x8′ or similar planting box with 1′ square sections inside that each contain a different plant. Having every plant within 2′ of the edge means that the ground doesn’t get compacted. Having different plants helps resist the spread of disease. Set up correctly, this type of arrangement will use less water than a traditional garden and, since the ground is not compacted, weeds are easy to pull.

A common improvement over on-the-ground square foot gardens is to put them in raised beds so that you don’t have to bend over to do any planting, weeding, or harvesting.

A further refinement is to put your raised beds in a greenhouse. Three of the big advantages to using a greenhouse are that:

You have increased control over what insects and weeds are introduced into your garden.
In the winter, you can keep your garden warmer and extend your growing season by using dark materials and partially buried water tanks. In some cases, you can use this same partially buried water to keep your greenhouse cooler in the summer.
You have increased protection from GMO pollen, polluted rain, hail, late frosts in the spring, and early frosts in the fall.

Hydroponics & Aeroponics

Hydroponics and aeroponics are two disciplines of growing plants without soil. Basically, you suspend roots and bathe them occasionally in a water/mist that contains all of the needed nutrients for the plants. The big advantage of hydroponics is that you can grow significantly more produce per square foot of floor space by going UP. Simply put, instead of having 10 spinach plants spread out across 10 feet of ground, you could drill 10 holes in a section of PVC pipe, hang it from the ceiling, and have a spinach plant coming out of each hole.

The other major advantages of hydroponics and aeroponics are that you can compress growing cycles, grow bigger produce, use less water, and reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides and herbicides.

I can tell you from personal experience that these technologies are FUN and they work, but they’re not all sunshine and rainbows…I’ve lost multiple crops because of the pH of the water getting bad because I wasn’t monitoring them like I should have been.

Aquaponics

Aquaponics takes hydroponics and aeroponics one step further. With hydroponics and aeroponics, you still have to add fertilizer. Aquaponics takes care of this by adding fish (mainly tilapia) and beneficial bacteria to the mix. Fish secrete ammonia, which bacteria converts to nitrates in a 2 step process, and the plants eat up the nitrates. The other upside of this system is that you can harvest the tilapia and add fish protein to your diet.

There are a couple of “gotcha’s” with aquaponics too…you’ve got to monitor and control temperature and water quality. If you eat the fish, you need a plan to get new ones, and if you’re not growing food for your fish in the garden, you need to buy fish food.

That being said our family plans to use multiple independent/redundant aquaponic systems to be able to generate more food than we consume by the end of this year.

Share Cropping

Do you have the space and money to set up a raised bed, hydroponic, aeroponic, or aquaponic garden but no time, physical ability, or skill? One strategy that I’m hearing about from more and more people is share cropping. As an example, family A has space and buys the equipment for a setup that will generate 8 times what their family can consume. Someone from family B has the knowledge, time, and inspiration to do the work to plant, grow, and harvest the crop. Family A gets to eat to their heart’s content. Family B gets to eat to THEIR heart’s content. Family B agrees to find channels like farmers’ markets, co-ops, and barter networks to sell the remaining produce and split the proceeds with family A at an agreed upon ratio.

I’ve become a big fan of the share cropping approach over the last couple of years. It not only gets high quality food onto people’s plates, but it also fosters resilient communities and beneficial inter-dependence. What are your thoughts…not only on growing your own food, but also on ways to compress the time, money, and space necessary to generate enough food to feed your family?

Please share your thoughts by commenting below:

If you decide that you’re going to garden, you still have the issue of how to eat if you have an off season, if you face a food crisis between now and the time you are able to produce all of your own food (which, honestly, will never happen for most people), or if a disaster takes all of your time and you find yourself unable to manage/maintain your garden, you STILL need to have food storage. In my www.FastestWayToPrepare.com course, I go over some of the fastest ways possible to get your family prepared for short to medium term disasters…including how to have your own high quality, delicious food supply for about $2 per person per day in a single 30 minute trip to your local Costco or Sam’s Club! To learn more, head on over to www.FastestWayToPrepare.com.

Until next week, God bless & stay safe!

David Morris
www.SurviveInPlace.com
www.FastestWayToPrepare.com
www.UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com

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Tactical Firearms Training Secret #1-Airsoft

April 26, 2012

Welcome to this week’s Urban Survival Newsletter, brought to you by my recently released book, “Tactical Firearms Training Secrets.” As any shooter can attest, ammo prices have shot through the roof over the last few years. I went to an indoor range near my house a couple of weeks ago with 1 gun to test/confirm [...]

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