[mididoctors]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'I')n fact the premise of this forum is not “run for the hills and stock up on ammo”. If you have read the Assessments and Plans thread you will see there are quite a few different approaches to riding out the decline, with attempting to become less dependant on existing infrastructure being only one of many. The variety of thread topics also indicates differing attitudes; increase awareness, farming in town, conversion of suburbs, etc.

[cthulhu]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mididoctors', '
')you make on the surface a reasonable point..

however poverty in the Uk is not destabelising it is contained by social welfare etc...

the equivalency you need is not exactitude but min standards to avoid anarchy..

you need to have min standards in comparative terms. there is latitude globally and with-in any particular society.. success or containment is a threshold state not a universal condition

Boris
london

[cthulhu]

Much theorizing has announced the erosion of individuality's last
remnants; but if this were so, if society now consists of the thoroughly
homogenized and domesticated, how can there remain the enduring tension which must account for such levels of pain and loss? More and more people I have known have cracked up. It's going on to a staggering
degree, in a context of generalized, severe emotional disease-ease.

Marx predicted, erroneously, that a deepening material immiseration
would lead to revolt and to capital's downfall. Might it not be that an
increasing psychic suffering is itself leading to the reopening of
revolt-indeed, that this may even be the last hope of resistance?

And yet it is obvious that "mere" suffering is no guarantee of anything.
"Desire does not 'want' revolution, it is revolutionary in its own
right," as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, while further on in
Anti-Oedipus, remembering fascism, noting that people have desired
against their own interests, and that tolerance of humiliation and
enslavement remains widespread...

...Gail Sheehy's Passages (1977), for example, considers life developments without reference to any social or historical context, thereby vitiating her concern for the "free and autonomous self." Arlie Russell Hochschild's Managed Heart (1983) focuses on the "commercialization of human feelings" in an increasingly service-sector economy, and manages to avoid any questioning of the totality by remaining ignorant of the fact of class society and the unhappiness it produces. When Society Becomes an Addict (1987) is Anne Wilson Schaef's completely incoherent attempt to deny, despite the title, the existence of society, by dealing strictly with the interpersonal. And these books are among the least escapist of the avalanche of "how-to" therapy books inundating the bookstores and supermarkets.

It is clear that psychology is part of the absence of community or
solidarity, and of the accelerating social disintegration. The emphasis
is on changing one's personality, and avoiding at all costs the facts of
bureaucratic consumer capitalism and its meaning to our lives and
consciousness. Consider Samuel Klarreich's Stress Solution (1988): "...1
believe that we can largely determine what will be stressful. and how
much it will interfere with our lives, by the views we uphold
irrespective of what goes on in the workplace." Under the sign of
productivity, the citizen is now trained as a lifelong inmate of an
industrial world, a condition, as Ivan Illich noted, not unrelated to
the fact that everyone tends toward the condition of therapy's patient,
or at least tends to accept its world-view...

...If alienation is the essence of all psychiatric conditions, Psychology
is the study of the alienated, but lacks the awareness that this is so.
The effect of the total society, in which the individual can no longer
recognize himself or herself, by the canons of Freud and the
Psychological Society, is seen as irrelevant to diagnosis and treatment.
Thus psychiatry appropriates disabling pain and frustration, redefines
them as illnesses and, in some cases, is able to suppress the symptoms.
Meanwhile, a morbid world continues its estranging technological
rationality that excludes any continuously spontaneous, affective life:
the person is subjected to a discipline designed, at the expense of the
sensuous, to make him or her an instrument of production.

Mental illness is primarily an unconscious escape from this design, a
form of passive resistance. R.D. Laing spoke of schizophrenia as a
psychic numbing which feigns a kind of death to preserve something of
one's inner aliveness. The representative schizophrenic is around 20, at
the point of culmination of the long period of socialization which has
prepared him to take up his role in the workplace. He is not "adequate"
to this destiny. Historically, it is noteworthy that schizophrenia is
very closely related to industrialism, as Torrey shows convincingly in
his Schizophrenia and Civilization (1980).


--from http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/ze ... 001182.txt

[giengrene]

midi mate your a little off.

Most "survivors" know that they don't stand a powders chance in H#ll if they go it alone long term.

That is why most "survivalists" would be better termed "ruralists".

Most wish to live in a rural isolated community that still has a modicum of respect for one annother, and in a crisis would WORK TOGETHER.

Most of us realize that we cannot change the USA's economics. Period. Not overnight, and not in a year... It will take some kind of opposing force much greater than the minority of selfless people in the country.

[Licho]

Powerty is very hard to measure, there are many different criterias.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')I note "N/A" for poverty in Australia at the link http://www.worldfactsandfigures.com/cou ... tralia.php

[NevadaGhosts]

Oh brother. According to mididoctors, we shouldn't prepare for a survival situtation if the need calls. It is the unprepared who will die first. The prepared will have a much better chance of survival if things go bad. Mididoctors thinks so-called 'survivalists' are just a bunch of paraniod, delusional nuts that couldn't survive no matter what happens. This is bs. Not all of us live in huge population centers, you know. I suppose most Europeans don't have a chance anyways in a society breakdown situation. Where would they go and how could they defend themselves without guns? Too many people and not enough land in Europe.

Conservation and new energy technologies is NOT the answer. If the petroleum experts are correct, it's too late for that. There is no answer to peak oil. The only realistic solution is to prepare now. I would rather prepare and know how to survive in the wilderness than to just accept whatever comes and lay over and die when things get bad.

What is it with many Europeans anyways? Why do they have the 'it would never happen, so why prepare anyways' attitude? I would rather be prepared and be wrong than be unprepared and be right.[/i]

[NevadaGhosts]

mididoctors,

One other thing. If you are not happy with this topic group, who the hell cares? I don't really care if you like it or not. If you don't want to prepare for a possible worst case scenario, who cares? That's your problem. You will be one of the first to take a dirt nap if and when things go bad. If you don't like what we talk about in this group, go elsewhere.

[mididoctors]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kochevnik', 'I') find the polyanna, big city, lets all hold hands and change the world mentality to the issue of peak oil slightly disturbing on two broad points ...

1. it is self-delusional and completely unrealistic.

2. it is a completely emotional response to what is, in essence, a highly inter-connected web of real, factual problems.

it is a consistent fantasy to believe one could escape a global catastrophe by relying on the same people and techniques that got us into this problem in the first place. it is a preemptive escape from responsibility as a member your immediate family IMO ..

there is an idyll of independence from facing the true consequences of reality by engaging in mental and emotional masturbatory ego fantasies about your own ability to shape world-wide events.

if the worse came to worst, the idea one could separate from personal responsibility by relying on the same forces that caused the problem(s) you are seeking solutions to, and have a degree of freedom, may be an illusion..

society will undoubtedly WILL survive one way or another, but whether or not YOU (or your gene pool) will personally survive becomes further and further in doubt the longer you refuse to take responsibility as an individual for your own contribution to the problem at hand and you refusal to anticipate anything other than arosy outcome.

Planning for future is taking basic, concrete, PRACTICAL steps to do my best to ensure that my family has the resources necessary to weather a wide variety of potential future scenarios ... that's why this forum group has the name it does, and it provides an INVALUABLE service to the individuals who gather here.

It isn't about futile posturing in a useless attempt to change the world ...

Much like one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter ... one man's wacko survivalism is another man's prudent preparations.

Good luck Mr. Grasshopper.



kochevnik

"The State is made for man, not man for the State."

Albert Einstein

[mididoctors]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cthulhu', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mididoctors', '
')you make on the surface a reasonable point..

however poverty in the Uk is not destabelising it is contained by social welfare etc...

the equivalency you need is not exactitude but min standards to avoid anarchy..

you need to have min standards in comparative terms. there is latitude globally and with-in any particular society.. success or containment is a threshold state not a universal condition

Boris
london

[simontay78]

A farmer had bought back a land taken by the government to build an nuclear underground bunker. Is it a safe haven?

Any comments or recommendation of existing bunkers?

[eXpat]

The doomer inside of me is green of envy!!

[strider3700]

Some of these things used to sell real real cheap. Not so much anymore. Most of them are now being handled by commercial resellers


http://www.missilebases.com/

[gg3]

Very energy-intensive housing there, with the need for hightech elevators and pumps and so on. And if you fall down that shaft, bye-bye birdie. Not my idea of a viable place to live.

If you're concerned about nuclear weapons or dirty bomb fallout, 6 to 8 feet of fairly dense earth over your head will keep you safe, and you can dig out a decent shelter on your own using a borrowed backhoe.

If you're concerned about nuclear power accidents, you're not up to date on the present state of reactor technology.

And if you're concerned about defense against conventional attackers, the last place you want to be is down a very easily located hole. Hint: a truckload of gravel on top of your hatch could make your day.

[Roccland]

Ok...so the bunker I chose is 25' long x 8' diameter with a 3' manhole entrance at one end and a 6" vent at the other. I have posted some pics below I took during installation. It has a small concrete pad on top now. It is entirely pest proof.

It holds quite a bit.

If you go this way PRELOAD THE CULVERT with 4x8 plywood before they seal it...to make shelves with by straddling the tube inside with 2x6s (turned lengthwise) and 1/2" ply wood on top.

The shelf will be in compression with the insides of the tube as you load weight onto it. This saves space at the bottom to sleep or store more goods.

It keeps a constant temp around 78 degrees year round. So food will stay for a while.

It was aboud $5000 to fabricate and deliver and $3000 to dig the hole and put a concrete pad above it.

I spent $200 to have someone make a lock apparatus - it is two anchors at either side of the manhole cover sunk into the concrete with a 4 foot steel strap that straddles the cover and locks to the anchors.

Someone would need a torch to get in. It took 30 days from order to ground to complete. Pacific Corrugated Pipe is who I used, but there are others I am sure. Pacific Corrugated Pipe

Picture 1

Picture 2

[dissimulo]

Cool.

[peasea]

presumably useful if the States gets involve in a Nuclear War?,

I would have spent the money on other things though, being it the UK , safe water and solar heating come to mind.....

I hope you have also stocked up on firearms ( presumably yes as you lucky americans can buy the things! ) as well ?

cheers

P.

[strider3700]

Nice. I've thought about something like that but I question the life expectancy of the pipe in my ultra wet climate. It looks like you're in desert territory so no worries there. Any pictures of the inside?

[UncoveringTruths]

There are other reasons than a nuke attack to have one of these especially in a desert climate you will keep cool in one of these if the power goes out.

[frankthetank]

Is that soil pure clay??? Soil around here is nothing like that. WOuld be a nice severe weather bunker too.