The Arizona Star published a big piece on survivalists/preppers today. It featured Tim Ralston, mentioned previously on the blog as Tim Thumb, the man who shot a big chunk of his opposable digit off in a gun accident for the worst reality tv show, ever, Doomsday Preppers.
Why feature the heevahavas?
Well, they’re local color. And for some, including Tim Thumb, training preppers has become a business in a down economy. While the logic of taking survival advice from someone known for a spectacularly stupid and painful accident with a firearm on television escapes me it has apparently worked in just the opposite manner for Ralston.
There are firearms too, including handguns and a laser-sighted rifle. Because if there is one thing Ralston is sure about, people are going to get very angry very quickly when a solar storm knocks out the power grid. Or the economy collapses. Or zombies attack (though fictional, Ralston still has the perfect tool for reintroducing the undead to death).
The more people ready to face doomsday, he figures, the fewer who will come knocking at his bunker (and those of others) looking for food and water.
And that day could arrive next year, Ralston says, riding a coronal mass ejection (which is even sloppier than it sounds) that triggers an electromagnetic pulse …
Lisa Bedford considers herself a turtle in the disaster-prepping race. Slowly, steadily, the Peoria mom has amassed the food, water and equipment necessary to deal with a disaster — not the “asteroid strikes Earth” kind, necessarily, but the sort that might force the family to live on their own for weeks and months.
Bedford is a calmer survivalist, cringing when she hears of people talking about super volcanoes or nuclear attacks or melting polar ice caps and the global flooding that will result.
“It (doomsday prepping) seems to hinge on fear-mongering,” Bedford says. “At the core, I believe it’s about common sense and an awareness of what’s going on worldwide, not just in America.”
Certainly survival plays a part, and the author of “Survival Mom: How to Prepare Your Family for Everyday Disasters and Worst-Case Scenarios” has a gun and knows how to use it.
Her fears are more down-to-earth than those buried 3 feet under in a bunker. Should economic jitters give way to strife and panic, she will be ready. And if the doomsday scenarios pitched by extreme preppers make people more apt to stockpile necessities, so be it.
“Yes, the shows are fear-mongering,” Bedford says …
There is mention that preparation mania has roots from deep in the Cold War, specifically mentioning the Cuban missile crisis. There’s not much merit to the argument. A nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union was a real possibility although the number of warheads in the arsenals made fallout shelters pointless. And everyone was in the same boat together.
For the modern preppers/survivalists, everyone is definitely not in the same boat. If there is a shared community, it is one on the extreme nuts right and most of its theology is aimed at telling stories about how all the undesirables “in the city” will need to be warded off and/or killed after a disaster. And the end-of-civilization scenarios have little basis in the real world.
This bothers one of the preppers profiled in the Arizona Star piece. It’s been his business for decades and of the current craziness:
Cody Lundin of Prescott is someone who knows well the cyclic trends of prepping.
When Lundin began preaching the value of self-reliance almost 30 years ago … he was a voice in the wilderness …
But Lundin is having a difficult time bearing all the doomsday-prepper chatter. He shakes his head at the extremism espoused by those who want to store mountains of food and an arsenal of guns in a remote bunker.
The survival at all costs ethic makes him queasy.
Reporter Scott Craven mentions Tim Thumb’s Crovel entrenching tool for beating someone’s head in as a hit with the prepper crowd.
In the 1985 NYC world of the Watchmen, Rorschach only dealt with the city’s underbelly. His favorite activity was putting the squeeze on ex-felons at Happy Harry’s and beating to death those he ran across in the act of perpetrating violent crime. One scene from the comic shows him readying his cravat for use in strangling someone interrupted while raping a woman in an alley. When Rorschach finally comes to blows with a ‘better class’ of person, Veidt, he is easily defeated. Refusing to compromise on his black and white sense of right and wrong, he’s put to death in the snow at the bottom of the world by Dr. Manhattan.
So it’s hard to know what Rorschach would think is right for Wall Street. Because he avidly reads The New Frontiersman, a raggedy-ass newspaper from the extreme right, he would not be sympathetic to over-compensated business executives.
Since Rorschach’s sense of morality defined him, compelling him into the streets to destroy the wicked without mercy or hesitation, it is inspiring to think of what he might do to the shadowy bonus recipients of Wall Street. Would he throw one down an elevator? Handcuff another to a stanchion in an apartment, leave a hacksaw within reach, and set the room ablaze with gasoline? Would he “put fourteen in the hospital needlessly” while squeezing the name and address of their boss from them? Would he crush one of their skulls out of sight in the men’s room?
In the United States, it has not yet come to that. However, if the men of Wall Street are seen to be beyond punishment …
On the other hand, Rorschach had no fondness for liberals or others thought to be soft and morally ambiguous, those he thought equally responsible for the collapse of the alternate history 1985 America in Watchmen. He could be just as likely to take a look at the toxic decay foaming up out of the gutters of Wall Street, threatening to drown everyone not at the top and upon hearing screams for help, just whisper, “No…”
In addition to business-killing taxes and regulations, California has the third-highest state income tax in the nation, the nation’s highest sales tax and the highest gas taxes in America.
Get this: Roughly half of California’s income taxes are paid by just 1 percent of California’s residents. It’s no wonder the most productive people are leaving the state each year as more bloodsuckers move in …
The way out of this mess would be painful. Massive cuts would be required, services slashed, and agencies gutted and eliminated …
Liberalism has failed around the world, and it has failed here, too.
Yes, its a state of bloodsuckers of the classic type described by Ayn Rand, pulling down the powerful job creators and intellects. And I am one of them. As you can plainly see I leech on the work of the producers, like Ted Nugent in the above video, to get views and laughs on YouTube.
Ted knows the Republican Party is dogfood in California. The demographics of the state, where the majority of the people live — on the coasts and in the cities, do not support it. Much of this can be laid at the feet of the party’s antipathy to the Hispanic population.
It’s time to stop thinking of the Republican Party as an exclusive club where your ideological card is checked at the door …
Most of Schwarzenegger’s editorial was devoted to lamenting how the GOP has turned into a party of extremists, opposed to getting anything done while rooting out everyone who doesn’t possess a Tea Party far right purity.
It’s marginalized the party in California. However, through state law which requires a two-thirds majority to pass any budget legislation, its members have effectively stymied all attempts to rectify California’s monetary crisis, much as the filibuster has been used in the Senate to halt national government.
Schwarzenegger faced this all through his tenure as governor. His own party ruined any attempt at government, in effect ruining his run and reputation as a politician and public servant of any merit.
Schwarzenegger, again writing only non-specifically about his problems with the party:
I bumped up against that rigidity many times as governor. Not surprisingly, the party wasn’t always too happy with me. But I had taken an oath to serve the people, not my party. Some advisors whose opinions I respect urged me to consider leaving the party and instead identify myself as a “decline to state” voter …
An inclusive party would welcome the party’s most conservative activists right alongside its most liberal activists. There is room for those whose views, I think, make them sound like cavemen. And there is also room for us in the center, with views the traditionalists probably think make us sound like progressive softies.
Note the waffle through insertion of the “I think” bit. It’s only my opinion guys. Please don’t kill me, Ted-like folks.
The crazies are already crazy enough, buddy. Don’t make it worse. A new series created by JJ Abrams — Revolution — illustrates how marinated US popular culture is in electromagnetic pulse doom stories. In the real world it’s solely the property of the extreme right wing. But you can’t have a television show with just those characters. That would be called Doomsday Preppers, an existing niche product designed to monetize the peculiar rather than vend something for network primetime family viewing.
It’s gotten so you can’t turn around without being hit by another JJ Abrams creation. There are so many of them you know he’s now like everyone else in such a production position, an exalted deity who assigns his name to lackeys, allowing them to phone in whatever it is that needs phoning in under his blessings.
And it sure looks it from the trailer. How unique. Another tv series with civilization destroyed, electricity gone, people playing survivalist, down to the various tribes, this time using bows, arrows and muskets.
Is there anyone who doesn’t see “electromagnetic pulse” crap on tv or in movies as plot devices/scenarios/predictions a couple times a month in 2012 USA? Not likely.
What sets Revolution slightly apart, and any other thing like it in the last three or four years, from the kook survivalist craze is that the cast can never be like anyone you see in prepper videos.
Everyone is caught flat-flooted when disaster arrives. Nobody has a years worth of dried corn and pemmican, no basement armories with a quarter ton of ammunition, no gun room with a couple belt-fed weapons. The houses are never built from cast-off shipping containers. And they’re not all camo-dressed right wingers. About half the cast will be visibly worried about falling into a world where only the gun, mercilessness and physical strength rule. The fascists are almost always the bad guys.
While you’ll see the bits about having to fight off others coming for your stuff, those coming for it are never the same types the prepper/survivalists mean when they advise on learning how to shoot moving targets. The progressive, liberals, educated and registered Democrats/Commies aren’t the unprepared targets everyone is hoping they won’t have to shoot up because they’ve come stumbling up the road to the safe house.
With a peak in the cycle of solar flares approaching, U.S. electricity regulators are weighing their options for protecting the nation’s grid from the sun’s eruptions—including new equipment standards and retrofits—while keeping a lid on the cost …
They are studying the impact of historic sunstorms …
“This is arguably the largest natural-disaster scenario that the nation could face,” said Mr. Kappenman.
Mr. Kappenman has consulted for companies that make equipment to harden the grid.
Others are more cautious in their predictions …
The private sector and scientists with the US government have now turned wise to what happens when the lobbyists from the Cult of EMP Crazy (or EMPAct America) run wild. And they have successfully shoved off to the fringes the constant assertions that the nation faces an imminent return to the days of the horse and buggy.
That hasn’t stopped the EMP lobby, which is the same as the Bomb Iran lobby. They simply change their name to something that sounds important knowing that reporters won’t check the rosters from the old kook brigades for matches.
And so, one of the chief lobbyists for EMPAct America, Peter Pry, appears in the Journal story as “executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a group that members of Congress designated to track electrical-grid risks and that supports Mr. Kappenman’s conclusions.”
The Task Force on National and Homeland Security is EMPAct America with a second name, the same group of right-wingers that has always been lobbying for ballistic missile defense and bombing Iran before the mullahs send American civilization into the abyss using a missile launched from an offshore barge.
Chainsaw Rally — remixed and put to YouTube found, some of it famous, some infamous. Everything you need to know about Ted Nugent in a bit over two and a half minutes.
Not a week goes by that my news tab doesn’t have a few stories on the American survivalist movement, courtesy of the presence of doomsday electromagnetic pulse references in all such pieces. The homespun country paranoids are now firmly in the US entertainment mainstream, notably in newspapers, almost purely because of the semi-success of one of the crummiest television reality series ever, National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers.
The prepper movement shows all the collateral damage [the rubbish from the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, a GOP construction] has wrought on the suggestible and unbalanced.
Conspicuously, this increasingly nuts demographic is almost entirely white, far right, heartland, fundie Christian religious and breast-beatingly patriotic.
It is not a surprise that cable television feels this niche large enough to monetize. Death cults/apocalypse believers have always been part of the American experience. However, until social media, micro-casting and the Internet there wasn’t an easy way to cynically gather all of them up into a nice exploitative package for advertising.
[Tom Martin, 34, a long-haul truck driver based out of Port Angeles] and other preppers are adamant about not being mistaken for survivalists, especially after the recent news stories about the North Bend man who police say shot himself in a hillside bunker after killing his wife and teen daughter.
Says Martin, “That guy sounded like a nut case, somebody who thinks everybody is out to get them.”
On its website, Puget Sound Preppers says, “This group is NOT involved in: revolution, war, militia, political parties, religious activities, racism, or lobbying. This group is about skills and knowledge.”
An upcoming meeting, for example, is on raising chickens.
He doth protest too loudly, offering only a standard and easily shot up likely story in defense.
At once paranoid and practical, preppers are essentially pessimistic boy scouts. Some prepare for war, others for economic collapse, and in parts of Western North Carolina many worry about an Electromagnetic Pulse weapon (EMP) that would disable electronics and turn back the clock by a full century. In every scenario there is reference to a fallen society that’s “WROL” (without rule of law) in which only the well-prepared can prosper.
EMP is the primary concern of Jan Sterritt who, along with husband Bill, runs Carolina Readiness Supply in Waynesville N.C..
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when (an EMP will hit)”, she says.
Jan scurries around her store with a cordless phone clipped to her belt. It rings at 5 minute intervals with new questions from the Sterritt’s now growing customer base.
“It was just like we’ve gotta do something. We’ve gotta tell people about it and get them prepared,” she says when pulled aside for a quick interview.
OPSEC makes interviews tricky. Jan and Bill only allowed us in the store, with some reservations, after we promised not to blow their customers cover. Both Sterritts say that for most of their first year in business shoppers would wait until the store was empty before revealing their prepper needs in whispered voices.
Now, Bill says, people are beginning to “wake up”.
“There’s fewer and fewer people that think we’re nuts,” he says …
Of particular concern to Bill, is the “occupy” movement. Bill points his finger toward Asheville, about 20 miles East, where protesters gathered over the summer.
“There are those who want to disrupt our constitutional system. I mean there are anarchists in the street. They’ve been in the street since last fall. I fear they’ll be out in the streets this spring and summer. They’re being subverted by anarchist elements, communists, there’s a lot of subversion going on within these groups. It’s scary.”
Bill is now more animated as he talks about his real motivations. His political interest in prepping dovetails with trends in the national news. When the economy cratered in 2008, when Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when concern grew about Federal debt, preppers multiplied nationwide. In the western Carolinas they’re around every corner.
There is no progressive viewpoint within the prepper movement. And they have an allergy to the descriptor “survivalist” because of its association with neo-Nazis, militias and the far right. They are inescapably a part of this social fringe, on television, always visibly infatuated with fortified home ammo dumps, machine guns, and paramilitary training.
They all share an uneducated, simplistic and diseased world view, half of their daytime life spent obsessing over how they’ll defend themselves from the others who will come for their stuff in the inevitable fall. And you know who all the others are.
Poke them hard enough with hard questions, or supercilious articles, and they’ll snap. Since they are always carrying and displaying weapons, general news reporters may feel reluctant to press them on such matters.
However, one does not have to go very far on YouTube to find men in camouflage, advertising themselves as preppers, recommending shotguns or other firearms for use in shooting government men or strangers in one situation or another.
“We want someone in our group who is very familiar with weaponry and the art of fighting … I am thrilled to have somebody who actually knows how to use a gun and that means more than plinking away at a range where the target does not move …” sez my favorite prepper, the Patriot Nurse, in her latest video.
It’s arguable that National Geographic has done anyone a service by thrusting these people into the limelight as sometimes reasonable, for the sake of some money on cable television.
Ted Nugent’s fans are what Paul Fussell called ‘bottom-out-of-sighters,’ people so light in the wallet absolutely no one was interested in advertising products to them.
Fussell used it in reference to roller-derby on Saturday morning television back in the late-Sixites and Seventies in his book, Class.
Denver Westworld ran a photo essay on Ted’s fans at RedRocks amphitheatre. It’s here and worth the momentary laugh.
Reads the news weekly: “When this male Ted Nugent fan was asked about the recent investigation by the Secret Service into the Nuge regarding some controversial comments Nugent made about President Obama, his response was, ‘It’s bullshit! He [Ted Nugent] lets the FBI train on his property.'”
Yeah, the Green Berets, too. Would you believe … the local chapter of Boy Scouts of America? Well, would you believe … two guys using a metal detector to find buried old coins?
It’s also worth noting Ted’s notoriously teetotal and prone to bagging on users of spirits. So it’s fitting the only venues he plays are those where the fans are encouraged to smell strongly of drink.
Like old roller-derby, Ted’s fans also don’t buy anything except the occasional concert ticket. They don’t buy records. They may go for an occasional T-shirt.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports two of the members of the gang will likely go to trial. Two have already accepted pleas on conspiring to acquire weapons and silencers.
Lawyers representing Ray Adams, 55, and Samuel Crump, 68, gave no indication at Tuesday’s federal court hearing whether they would seek a plea deal weeks after the two other men charged in the plot pleaded guilty to weapons charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Adams and Crump are charged with conspiring and attempting to make a biological toxin called ricin.
Adams’ attorney Barry Lombardo said “no, no, no” when asked if his client is pursuing a plea deal. Crump’s lawyer Dan Summer declined to comment …
A ricin conviction sends them to jail for a long time.
The Georgia Ricin Beans Gang was too incompetent to make ricin. And any notional plan to push castor powder out of a car speeding along the highway was laughable. In no way would it have worked.
However, the paradox is a tough one. No one ever walks in the US on a ricin charge, no matter how incapable or foolish they are.
No American defense lawyers have ever been able to argue such a case and win before a jury. While it has been done one time in England, it would be an eye-opening first here.
Crump had memorized the recipe for the poison, prosecutors said, and Adams had the know-how to make it as a former government lab technician. The men were arrested just days after authorities say they discovered evidence they were trying to extract ricin from castor beans at Adams’ north Georgia home.
The attorneys for the two men, though, have said the government’s charges are overblown.
“The government doesn’t have a strong case. Surely there was talk about ricin, but it was ridiculous,” Summer said at an earlier court hearing. “It was like an old man in the stages of senility talking out of the side of his mouth.”
Yes, it certainly was ridiculous. However, thanks to the war on terror, such a fact will likely be disregarded.
And Jesus told the masses in North Carolina: “Tolerate not the Sodomites for they are like vermin, infectious, and will make you into a homo, too.”
And the masses listened.
Background: Last week I asked Mark Smollin to make me a cover for a fake book — The Compleat Sayings of American Jesus.
With my suggestions he came up with the above and a word balloon that needed filling.
I told him to use one of the first “sayings” published last week here. It had to grab with that special kind of nastiness one has come to expect in the white vote in the south and much of the heartland. It also had to have a quality that would immediately buzz off the same pismires because they never see themselves in such a bad light, viewing what they’re doing as defending something special instead of what it actually is — using law, truth determined by majorities and rampant ignorance to pick on people they hate.
What was the citation from yesterday? Yes, here it is, with regards to a country in a state of fail: “Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.”
Today’s double dose:
Just how unpopular is President Barack Obama in some parts of the country? Enough that a man in prison in Texas got 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary.
The inmate, Keith Judd, is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas …
Brown, [a West Virginia electrician who voted for the jailbird], went to the polls Tuesday with his 22-year-old daughter, Emily. She planned to vote for Judd too until she found out where Judd has been living.
“I’m not voting for somebody who’s in prison,” she said.
She was certain about one thing: “I just want to vote against Barack Obama.”
American Jesus told the masses in West Virginia: “Even the lifetime criminal has more virtue than a socialist Muslim from Kenya.”
Just breaking:
And American Jesus said, in a press conference from Charlotte, NC: “Malum est dux qui est infecta homosexualitas” or “Evil is a leader who is infected with homosexuality.”
