When we see the same things happening over and over again in history, it becomes clear that the point is not to worry but to be aware. There may be mass death, but those who are prepared, like the Wise Virgins, survive and create the future.
It'll be frightening, possibly fun, and most certainly interesting. Fortune will play a large part in determining the outcomes from one person to the next, but the ones who are prepared are the ones who draw Fortune to their side. So, the question is: how do we prepare?
This week on SOTT Talk Radio, we're going to discuss some good ideas and how to put them in action. We'll also be taking a critical look at some of the wilder ideas that have given so-called 'preppers' and 'survivalists' a bad rep.
Running Time: 02:01:00
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Here's the transcript:
Hi and welcome to SOTT Talk Radio, this week we're talking about the possible very near future. What do we mean by that? Well, it's along the lines of impending economic collapse, global food shortages and famine, a planet frozen by sudden glacial rebound, white illness from comet-borne viruses, societal breakdown from bloody revolution, psychopaths in power waging wars to kill maim or terrorize us into a state of distraction.
Now all of that doesn't necessarily mean the end of the world but it certainly looks like we're in a time of great change one way or another. The point here is that when we see things happening over and over again throughout history, the same things happening over and over again throughout history.
And it becomes pretty clear that the point is not to try and stop it from happening but to be aware that IS happening. While mass death may be on the cards, those who are prepared like the wise virgins have the best chances of surviving and building a new and different future. So, are we all wise virgins here?
Pierre: Wise maybe.
Joe: Maybe okay, but Pierre is speaking for himself there. I just would like to introduce who we have in the studio, I'm Joe Quinn obviously, and with me is Niall Bradley.
Niall: Hello listeners.
Joe: Juliana Barembuem.
Juliana: Hello.
Joe: And as you just heard, Pierre Lescaudron.
Pierre: Bonjour.
Joe: So that is what we're talking about this week and...
Pierre: Yeah and you mentioned one important point is the perspectives because to be ready first you've to know where you are heading to. And the answer is not definitive. We do not have crystal balls. But Joe mentioned several possible perspectives that can set on quickly, that can set on progressively, they're not mutually exclusive.
One prospective that it's pretty certain is an economic collapse and Ice Ages are also possible. Epidemics because of airborne viruses and cometary events with all their subsequent effects like increase of earthquakes, volcanic activities and electromagnetic pulse.
Now, whatever the sequence of events is, our modern civilization is highly dependent on technologies and is highly fragile, it is not a resilient system of production and consumption because in the first world ninety eight percent of the people are not food producers, are not farmers. Most production sites are remote. You rely on big production factories for your supplies. You rely on mass transportation for the supplies to reach the consumption centers. And because of profit maximization and all the scam men and all the logistics management techniques, most producers have zero stock. So, one single sand pebble in the clock can make your whole machine stop.
Let me give you one example: the grid, the electric grid. Today, if the grid stops, there's no more electricity meaning there's no more pump, there is no more water, no more rainwater, no more communication system, no more internet, no more phones, no more economic activity everything gets frozen just because of one component: the electricity.
And the grid is very sensitive. If you have major snow falls, the lines fall down. If you have an electromagnetic pulse induced by a weapon or more likely induced by an incoming asteroid, the grid goes down. If you have floods, the grid goes down. And then, what we're going to talk today is how can we face, at best, those possibilities knowing that the objective, from what I understand, is not to survive like animals but is to have a decent life, a human life during those hard times.
Niall: Yeah and I think it's important to emphasize that whatever combination of events happen, in a way to what they all lead to is, economic collapse.
Now people would say "Well flooding, heavy snowfall all those things happen all the time and is localized and system gets back online, you might have to wait a couple of weeks or more" but if you've been noticing that this is happening more and more often, like we have, it becomes apparent that the system is fragile, as Pierre said, and it can only take so many shocks, before it cannot get back up again at least not in the way that we're used to and for the numbers that we currently need to feed, I mean the planet's population continues to grow and yet food production has dropped in the last three years at least, there've been major crop failures because of environmental impacts and you've got countries importing where previously they were net exporters and already we see the headlines of food prices rising and it's hitting the shelves and people are starting to notice it.
So it gets to a point, in fact people have done studies on this where there's a threshold where there's a mass social unrest that breaks out: revolution. And it's at that point that the economy is not functioning as usual and you are not able to rely on just being able to go into the store to feed yourself for the next day and so on.
So, at the very least, we're talking from where we can see now, you're looking at the medium term where you already are being forced by your environment to adapt. Whatever about the worst case scenario, already people must be thinking about "okay in the next six months what would I do? Do I have enough food right now?"
Pierre: Yeah whatever the sequence of events is, basically the key point is to increase your autonomy and autonomy around maybe five key factors:
1. There's Food
2. There's Water
3. Energy
4. Shelter
5. and Health
Do I forget any..?
6. and Safety
We'll discuss that, it's a tricky topic but I guess we would have to address it in the current show.
So you have to increase your autonomy in those fields particularly. Let's discard from the get-go some widespread ideas about survivalism. It's not so much about the money, buying fancy gizmos and storing up tons and tons of material; it's not about becoming a loner survivalist in the forest; it's not about using a mobile home with limited resource and shining like a beacon screaming "Loot me! Loot me!" to the ones who stare at the road and see that there's no more fuel. The two key points, from what we understand is:
1. Skills, developing skills
Because there's no point in having guns if you don't know how to hunt. There's no point having food if you don't know how to store it. There's no point in having medicine if you don't know how to administer it. So skill is the prime factor to increase, not only survival rate but quality of life, during those hard times. And the second point is:
2. Network
Network because, alone, psychologically is more difficult and one single person is not able to do all the tasks and to have all the skills that are required to live in almost full autonomy, because, actually today we are very disconnected from the real world! We do not know how to produce food, we don't know how to repair a car and we don't know how to produce clothes. We are like children assisted by the consumption society and we've lost our autonomy and skills so we have to regain these skills.
Joe: Well, hang on. The pair of you there are talking like a couple of preppers, like you are waiting for doomsday or something. As one of our listeners just wrote in on the chat said hang on a minute haven't our media and our government responded in the last few days that global warming caused by humans is the most pressing concern and if we can deal with that then the future looks rosey and bright?
Juliana: Oh boy.
Niall: That is a complete sideshow. If you look at what they're saying they're throwing off projections a hundred years into the future about coastal flooding that will gradually happen as the planet gradually rises. This scenario has no bearing on reality. The reality is that weather extremes are happening now and they flux from within an hour range. But there's a point where, that would seem in the geological record, those extremes snap. And there is a new threshold reached and that's for example how ice ages form. It's really annoying actually because on the one hand they do alarm people and that could be a service you know like "Hello, warning, get prepared"
Joe: Things are happening.
Niall: But it's also "Here's an alarm bell, now go back to sleep. It's a hundred years from now."
Joe: Well first of all, here is an alarm bell and the alarm is going off because of you, it's what you're doing when the truth is almost 180 degrees from that. It's more like the alarm is really sounding and things are happening on the planet because of what people are not doing. But they turned it around and said it's because of what you are doing i.e. your admitting you're a bunch of deadly gas emitters like Al Gore and you need to stop doing that and if you stop doing it, if we all stop doing it collectively like one big happy family, then we can stop all of these crazy weather patterns and floods and fires. And they don't mention it I think explicitly but supposedly in amongst that mix they just talk about climate change but as you're saying along with the climate change you're seeing Earth changes like volcanic eruptions on a much increased scale, you're seeing sinkholes, tornadoes...
Niall: And a lot of fireballs in the sky.
Joe: and the big one; fireballs in the sky, and they are all happening together but it's reduced down to mere climate, that it's just basically the weather, it's hot and cold, it's rain and sun, and snow.
Niall: And it's due to one factor; carbon dioxide produced by having too many people consuming too much and here's our to-do list of how to deal with it: buy a more fuel-efficient car.
Pierre: And pay taxes.
Niall: "If you pay us more taxes and we'll deal with it." It's a great little scam going on there.
Joe: Well I think that the whole global warming, the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is actually a vegetarian conspiracy.
Pierre: More CO2, more plants.
Joe: I think they are just a bunch of vegetarian terrorists around because the result of more CO2 over the past, you know 30 years in the atmosphere has been a vast increase in greenery and plants growing in places that they never grew before because CO2 in the atmosphere encourages plant growth. And who, I'm playing 'Cui bono?' here, who benefits from that but a bunch of vegetable leaders.
Niall: And plant eaters! Who is more flatulent; the plant eaters or the meat eaters?
Joe: Well there you go; I mean obviously a vegetarian produces more gas.
Niall: A vicious feedback loop right there.
Joe: Well yeah it is but they want it that way because by doing that they're producing more vegetables, they can eat more vegetables. So I think there is a bit of a scoop I've just stumbled on here, it's an exposé of the real conspiracy behind the global warming. Any takers?
Pierre: Yes, warming is a great thing actually but it's unusual when you look at the historic records the default weather settings for the planet is Ice Age and in between long-lasting Ice Ages you have four periods of relative warming, and those short periods of relative warming coincide with the short periods of empire developments and at the end of the global warming, the empires collapse, thus the main driver of civilization development. We are this dependent on the weather on the planet although we may think differently.
Joe: Okay let's be honest here that what we're saying here is only a theory, we have no hard evidence, there is no hard evidence in the historical record that just because the weather has gone kaflooey and there are all sorts of Earth changes as we mentioned, that doesn't necessarily mean that anything seriously bad is going to happen. It can flip back to normalcy right afterwards.
Pierre: Future is open, but what we can say is: indeed there is a series of, there are different kinds of events, we mentioned: noctilucent clouds, global dimming, cometary activities, sinkholes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, cooling, all those factors are on the increase, they all seem to be due to the same cause. Why the mainstream media describe them as unrelated, harmless and due to unexplained or due to human activity.
Juliana: Or events that happen once in a lifetime.
Niall: Yeah
Pierre: Yes, like a flood of the century. About the IPCC, the last report in 2007 was stating according to different models they predicted an increase in global temperature over the years after 2007 and the official records from the official weather stations shows a decrease in temperature. That's one of the reasons why the new IPCC reports mentions temperature projections of temperature increase occurring at the end of this century, eighty years. So this way they can be cornered and nobody can say but "look you predicted a temperature increase five years ago" and it's actually a temperature decrease, so it's a good way to get rid of...
Joe: Explain that again.
Pierre: In 2007 the IPCC, in its official report written by like two hundred scientists.
Joe: It was written by bureaucrats, go ahead.
Pierre: Yes, "scientists" and maybe corporate scientist. They projected temperature evolution and according to the...
Joe: Temperature evolution?
Pierre: Yes, evolution of global temperature.
Joe: You mean an increase?
Pierre: In the projection there was an increase, depending on the model, it was between 0.2 and 0.5 degrees increase.
Joe: They predicted from 2007 until?
Pierre: Until 2012 and the curves going up, okay? So you have this curve going up, depending on the models, they go up more or less. But during this 2007- 2012 period you had weather stations measuring temperature. So you've had real measured global temperature. And what does the data show? The data shows that the temperature has been decreasing between 2007 and 2012.
Joe: Well there are all sorts of different snapshots you can take. Different bodies take different snapshots over different lengths of time. But the most recent report from the IPCC, that was written essentially by western governments, admitted that in the last fifteen or sixteen years from 1997 and 1998 until today there has been very little change, very little warning maybe point one or two of a degree between 2002 for example in 2012 but not very much change at all when they had predicted a greater increase. So basically they're calling it a "pause" but it is missing this pause.
Pierre: But you notice what you said, since1997 but actually since 1997 until 2002 you have an increase and then it goes down. So by using 1997 starting point they can claim there was an increase, yes there was an increase in 1997 but since 2005, 2003 there is a constant decrease. It means for ten years global temperature from the official measured temperature coming from the weather stations used by the IPCC, those are the hard facts that they've been decreasing for ten years.
Juliana: Now what's funny is that now they're trying to make it look like it's an exception or a little sort of pause or break or something where temperatures go down before the heat starts really climbing up. So they're actually using the reverse logic of what it's known to have happened in history which is there's a peak, there's a period of years where temperature rises to then fall drastically and quite quickly. But if you read the newspapers nowadays they are like well we just had a long winter because it's a normal step towards global warming and by the way it's all your fault and all you have to do is stop using sprays and...
Niall: And pay us some more money.
Pierre: And those scientists and bureaucrats for years now have been hammering their hockey stick theory. You all remember this curve, temperatures increasing slowly then all of a sudden it picks up forever until ad infinitum. It's not the reality. For almost ten years temperature has been consistently going down according to official data.
Joe: Well only gradually, but in an overall increase in temperatures over the past sixty or seventy years. It may have gone down recently but that's within an overall increase in temperature.
Pierre: True.
Joe: And also in carbon and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. So, when people talk about the "global warming scam" it's not to say that there has been no warming, that there is not an increase in CO2 in our atmosphere, there is. And it has theoretically coincided with the industrial era, let's say over most of the 20th century, the problem with that is that simply because two things coincide does not mean that there's a cause-and-effect especially within that.
Pierre: Exactly.
Joe: If you want to claim that CO2 is human-made or human produced emissions are the result of increasing temperatures or increasing CO2 or both, then you have to stick with it and accept that and allow for everybody expecting that temperatures will continue to increase, as more and more people on the planet, as more and more cars are produced, as more and more emissions are produced by industry, then the CO2 and temperature should continue to increase and increase. But the whole problem here, is that in the last fifteen years the temperature has not been increasing in the way that it should if humans are responsible for it.
Niall: I have seen data that shows as temperatures declined at the end of the Medieval Warm Period, CO2 levels increased and they identified the source of it: the oceans.
Pierre: Yeah, actually there is a correlation, as you mentioned, between CO2 levels and global temperature. That's true if you look at historical records over tens of thousands of years when CO2 goes up, temperature goes up. However you see that there is a timing difference and seemingly it is not CO2 that causes temperature, it is temperature that causes CO2 because the main reasonable fuel to it is oceans. When temperature is high, oceans release CO2; when temperature goes down there's less release of CO2 it goes down. There's nothing man-made, nothing anthropogenic, I mean you see this global warming going on in planets that are not inhabited.
Joe: Well that's the thing, their flaw in the global warming theory is that this has happened where temperatures have risen and decreased throughout the tens of thousands of years in human history when there were very few human beings on the planet and certainly no cars are factories polluting the atmosphere. So to turn around and say that just because we live in an industrialized age then we have a lot of CO2, well actually the official level of emissions from human being has been set at four percent but even allowing for that actually has some kind of drastic effect that some scientists claim that "straw breaks the camel's back" type of thing, that extra four percent; even allowing for that you can't disassociate the fact that temperatures have risen and fallen throughout history when there was no industrialized civilization on the planet and simply said just because it's happening when there is an industrialized civilization, that must be due to humans when historical record shows that it goes up and down anyway. I mean, surely with that logic you would say, "Well hang on. We can't say that it's us because it has gone up and down when we weren't here."
Pierre: And as you said, man-made CO2 is four percent of total emitted CO2 but in addition, CO2 is only three percent of total greenhouse gases, the main one being water vapor. So it means that man-made CO2 is 0.12 percent, three percent of four percent of the total greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere. Peanuts compared to much more important drivers. The obvious one is the sun activity that is surprisingly, coincidently, amazingly low.
Joe: Yeah, I mean when you watch videos of Al Gore, who's probably the main proponent of global warming and has been for a couple of decades, and you watch him speaking about this, you really get the impression that he has an agenda, he's pushing it and he wants people to believe him and he's using all sorts of emotional manipulation and even recently subtlety calling for people who deny global warming to be in some way penalized or prosecuted, he didn't use those words but he said that "a price should be put on people denying the reality of global warming" when that guy is totally not being objective, not being reasonable, not being rational about the situation especially. You get the impression that he wants to distract people, he wants to shove people's noses into the dirt, he wants to stick people's noses, ostrich style, into the ground, put their heads in the ground with this and keep them looking at it and keep them believing in the idea that we are responsible for this, we have to do something, we have to take responsibility for it and act because if we do we can change it. And he's ignoring, as we mentioned earlier, all of the associated elements that go along with mere climate change: flooding and fire and lots of snow or lots of heat or lots of cold; all of the other things: sinkholes, volcanoes, earthquakes, typhoons, tornadoes, trumpet sounds in the sky and a startling increase in comet activity or fireball or meteorite activity in the sky, because, for people who are listening search Google the American Meteorite Society (AMS) and look at their list and this is just in America, this is an official for any reputable organization that tracks, reports and keeps reports of meteorites. And they have reports going back to 2005.
Niall: It's not official but it's well organized.
Joe: But it's fairly well organized and no reason these aren't official reports, they have documented reports of people who sent them in and said from 2005 to today there have been a stark increase, almost doubling year-on-year since 2005. But in the last year it has doubled from about 6,000 reports in the US alone to over 12,000 as of today.
Pierre: And the year is not over.
Juliana: You know, it's amazing that they get away with it because, as you were saying about Al Gore, how did he manage to do that and how do people really believe in it? I think it's just because people want to forget about history so nobody's looking at what happened in the past. Since there was an increase before there was a decrease in temperature; it happened before, so it's not human-made and stuff. There is that factor, that we forget history, then there's the fear factor and there's the fact that people are made to believe "well it's kind of risky and dangerous but you still have eighty years to live this, so don't worry too much and is actually your fault so you need the government to protect you, to charge you more taxes." So it's the whole battery of one manipulation after the other to actually take people away from the real events that are not controlled by human beings and can't be like fireballs and stuff. And he just keeps going and going and going. And the same thing with survivalist , there are people who will panic and really not be based on reality of what the situation is, and people who will not prepare at all because they're like "Well, who has to worry you know, our grandchildren will live to see it."
Pierre: And the way they prepare is the wrong way because of this global warming scam, they're buying air conditioners instead of buying wood-burning stoves.
Juliana: Yeah.
Niall: And solar panels, that never ceases to amaze me. Speaking of surviving, if you were to start with practicals, I mean you're getting a list, well let's start with that one: fuel.
Pierre: Energy.
Niall: Energy, that's something that gets knocked out.
Joe: Well hang one, why don't we break it down to scenarios and what survival or what will be necessary? What do we think are the most likely scenarios or possible scenarios, the most plausible scenarios in the near future? We're not saying that, all at once the entire planet is going to be destroyed because then there's no need for any survival, right. We're presenting the idea of various scenarios that are merely progressive or cumulative or happen on a progressive bases. There's been a lot of talk about next month they're going to have a test blackout drill.
Niall: It's going to be held simultaneously in Canada.
Joe: The US and Mexico, right. [Link to Sott article of it: http://www.sott.net/article/266549-US-Canada-and-Mexico-to-hold-major-drill-in-November-to-simulate-knockout-blow-from-EMP-pulse] So that scenario and there's obviously an Iranian nuke, right?
Pierre: High-altitude.
Niall: Iranian nuke and/or...
Joe and Niall: Solar flare
Joe: All right in that situation, we talked about it a little bit earlier, in that situation there's no more electricity, what do you need? Okay so you need some electricity, so what do you do for electricity?
Pierre: Well, that's what I was mentioning before, in order to point out the need, whatever the perspective is, because one of the weakest points is electricity, the grid. If there is no more electricity there is no more communication, no more transportation, no more water, no more pumps and no more food so you have to be autonomous in those fields. There are four main ways to produce energy and if the grid is off and you want energy, you have to produce it by yourself. So you can produce it from:
1. Fuel
2. Air, wind turbines
3. Water, Hydro's
4. Solar panels
And from our research, everything depends on your context. It depends on how much energy you want to consume, it depends on the setting around your place and it depends on the natural resource available. Of course if you know you are in a very windy place, maybe turbine will be interesting. If you are in a place that's quite ideal, in a place with slope and with a stream consistent enough, a hydro is a very good solution, very efficient and can produce a lot. But for most cases, if you don't have those obvious energetic resources at hand, the best solution is a generator. So now, what is a generator? It's a machine that transforms fuel to condition into electricity. Now there are several kinds of generators, depending on your needs, there's size, accordingly you use a generator which strongly suggest that your generator should be diesel-powered, because diesel stores longer than gasoline and it's not flammable and you can use it for other purposes. Your generator should be indoors because otherwise the noise of your generator, it is very noisy by 90 decibels (dB), would attract looters and also because diesel can freeze. Those are two good reasons to put your generators locked indoors.
Joe: Okay but on a practical level, most people listening to this probably lives in some kind of an urban built-up area and a diesel-powered generator is probably out of the question for them. So probably the next best most plausible thing would be some kind of solar panels that would at least provide a little bit of energy for them to run basic natural equipment.
Pierre: Well, it really depends on the magnitude of the events that might happen. If the magnitude is relativity high, the urban environment is really not the best place to be. I'll give you just one example amongst many others. First, globally in a city you have a lot of consumers, human beings and you have almost no resources, there's no field, there's no cattle, there's no wildlife. So there will be an intense competition for food. One simple example is the sewer system in the cities; say you live in an apartment, second floor, and the sewer system because there's no more maintenance, no more electricity for pumping, gets clogged. It means the neighbors upstairs when they drop stuff in the toilet will end up flushing back inside your apartment. It means also that all the waste, if there's a kind of economy collapse, you will have waste accumulations in the city, you will have pest proliferation, you will have more epidemics and you will have a lot of flooding. Here, I'm not talking about an apocalyptic scenario necessarily, but you have a clear correlation between level of poverties, scarcity of resources and criminality. So in the city these phenomenons will be amplified. So if you can try to find a setting away from the cities, and if you have to work in the city, maybe you can develop a...
Joe: At least think about, maybe have as a backup someone you know, a family member that lives outside the city, that lives somewhere where it's easier to provide for yourself in the basic ways. Just think about these things, the whole point, as we mentioned at the beginning of the show was, to be aware of these things. At the very least think about them, think about a kind of plan B's and on worst-case scenarios and have a plan in mind of what you might do. Don't wait until you're forced to think in a bad situation already.
Juliana: Yeah because on the worst-case scenario, a lot of things could happen. On the best-case scenario nothing happens and you still are prepared.
Joe: Yeah, there's nothing to lose.
Juliana: Yeah, there's absolutely nothing to lose by having extra things stored away or having a secondary system for electricity or things like that. Like you just said, having somebody, a close-network and learning things is just fun! You don't have to do it with the fear of an apocalypse.
Joe: Pierre mentioned food, one idea is in the old days your grandma probably used to can things, canned fruit probably primarily to make preserves or she might have canned other types of food. Canning is quite easy to do and that's something where you have absolutely nothing to lose, and you'll also learn a little something about how to can food.
Juliana: Having extra candles, oil lamps.
Joe: Yeah, it's not strange. So, and if nothing happens, the world progresses into a wonderful utopia where we're all skipping through daisies and playing with bunny rabbits. But then, you'd still be happy you have that food. You bought it maybe at a price when is cheaper, so there's really nothing to lose and everything to gain from doing that simple thing. And also, like we mentioned, if it's within your financial capabilities and you live in the city, look into some kind of a solar-powered set-up, even if it's just minimal, there's nothing to lose from having that either really if you can afford it. Also the idea of thinking about who you would you go to if you find yourself in a situation where services suddenly are all stopped in a city in an urban environment and things are not very pleasant. You can look at even recent hurricane examples of people who lived in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy last year and Hurricane Katrina, etc. That wasn't a pleasant experience for any of those people involved in the fact that it turned out deadly, not from the hurricane but even afterwards, deadly for some people.
These are not things that are doomsday, prepper, oh my god Armageddon to get you going. These are things that are happening right now that involve the observable Earth changes and climate change that has been happening and that are causing hardship or have caused hardship for a lot of people and it could come to your doorstep. So even on that basis, think about what you do in that situation, it transfers itself very easily to an even worse situation.
Pierre: And you mentioned that if you buy now, if you do some storing and canning, you will buy food cheaper. For several years now we've not eased the steady increase in raw material price and in particular food. So you would buy cheap now and so you spend less than buying during the middle of the crisis. And also an important point, you were mentioning hurricanes, during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 authorities started seizing guns. During World War II and for centuries during wars, armies were seizing food from local populations. So be discreet about your preparation. Don't advertise that you are storing food, that you are getting a generator, things like that. Because if things turn bad, and we're not sure about that, but if it turns bad, you would be a prime candidate for "friends" knocking on your door and asking for some help.
Niall: How can we square that up with something I think will be important for a lot of listeners, okay they're watching what's going on, they're aware but they don't have the financial resources to meet even their own basic needs and so it's necessary for them to reach out and communicate and discuss with other people? So on the one hand you say let's be discreet about it but how then do you go about networking because that seems to be crucial to not just surviving but having an enjoyable life no matter what happens?
Pierre: Even if the person has no resource, the person cannot disclose the fact that he or she is storing up stuff because the person has no resources. But if you have no resources, it's even more important to focus on skills and network. You need a reliable network in order to...
Joe: Yeah, but Pierre, Niall's asking about how you go about setting up a network, how do you, in terms of being discreet about it, not wanting to advertise the fact that you're thinking in any way about preparing for some kind of a scenario, how do you go about finding a network? Well I would say you just put some feelers and start looking in your local community or a little bit further afield. A good place would be like maybe local food banks that are already setup to feed homeless people, the kind of benevolent, altruistic organizations that are already set-up doing this that have some kind of a background and training and understanding of having to deal with the people in need already.
Juliana: And there are plenty of places where you can also volunteer if you have the skill, where you'll meet people who are interested in and not just interested in achieving money for what they do, but they just want to share their skills or learn together. There are lots of workshops.
Pierre: Yeah exactly, you don't have to disclose all your plans, you just have to join community of like-minded people where you will learn and share skills. It is a community where you share some interest for the work of welding or mechanics or whatever.
Niall: There are a number of, I was checking online and there's a prepper's network already going. In the US it's actually been for decades, survivalism has always been present but it seems to be a very well-established network from city to city, state to state, of people who get together and they have meet-ups, they have online discussions. There are a lot of people talking about it, a lot of people are thinking about it and you're not alone, by any stretch of the imagination. Even if they have "doomsday prepper" TV shows that they are the wackiest of the wackiest and they try to make it all silly and indeed they do find a few weirdoes but of course there will always be people who have some stupid ideas trying to implement them, but there are a lot of regular people. It's not that they are thinking about "oh the disastrous future might happen" they're responding to the situation on the ground now. When hurricane Sandy happened, the government was nowhere to be seen in terms of helping people materially in the aftermath. But the one group that stands out that helped people on the ground was a local Occupy movement that was set up, a local branch for New Jersey I think. People got together.
Joe: And it's interesting that it came out of, like you said the Occupy movement which was a political movement against the corruption within the political elite and the global elite, and they were very quickly able to turn themselves around because they formed as a group of ordinary people together against corruption. It was just a seamless change for them, to just turn around and start helping people to meet up after hurricane Sandy. And it's interesting to me to realize that, to think about things in this way, think about economic collapse or the grid going down or anything like that, you don't have to be doing it out of a sense of fear because when you think about what you're actually doing and the change in your attitude, your attitude is changing more towards, like we just discussed, community relationships. Like Pierre mentioned in the beginning that people today don't know how to look after themselves anymore. They live in their little isolated communities, mainly in cities and they don't really know how to provide for themselves. So using the idea of a kind of semi-doomsday or some not too distant future situation where the grid goes down or you have to provide for yourself, using that as a reason to simply establish or re-establish community relations wherever you can, find like-minded people and learning about canning, for example, and learning how to grow your own food or whatever.
Those things that you are doing on a practical level and a change in mentality is simply going back to the way people used to live fifty, sixty, a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago there was much more community life and community spirit. People did can their own foods to put them away for winter and stuff and they helped each other out.
Juliana: They built their own houses.
Joe: They made their own clothes and built their own houses. So the point is that this is a good thing because people always say that the old times were best and people who grew up fifty years ago said that life then was, compared to today, far better. So even if nothing happens, another kind of situation where you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, you're actually rebuilding a kind of life or starting to build a life based on an older way of life that was much, much better than today.
Pierre: You're reclaiming two important things: you're reclaiming individual freedom in a sense of autonomy. Its self-empowerment, you can do things by yourself, you're not dependent anymore. And you're reclaiming another very important thing: a true social life, you have friends, you interact and you are not into this materialistic-individualistic life anymore. So these are two very important progresses even if no crisis happens and we hope no crisis happens. And why do we focus on and why do we insist so much in skills? Because let's just take a hyper-inflation scenario like in Germany in the end of the twenties where basically everybody is broken, spoiled and everything is super expensive. You cannot buy goods anymore. You cannot buy services anymore. Imagine all the services that you depend on, all the skills you depend on: the plumbing, the electricity, the masonry, the gardening, the butchering and the auto-repairs, all that is not affordable anymore during hyper-inflation times. So there are two solutions: either you're going to do it or your network is supposed to do it or it's not done. No more cars, no more electricity, no more plumbing, no more masonry, no more gardening, it becomes bare survival like animals if you can survive.
Niall: Let's look at something happening now in microcosm, in Greece the economy tanked, well the plug was pulled from them a few years ago, fifty percent unemployment, basically there is no money going around, people are coping with it or at least there are some examples of people coping locally. Networks have sprung up where their center where people go and contribute their skills. Just on paper initially they say "I'm X and this is what I can do and what I can do" and they are put in contact with someone else who needs that and vice versa, and there's a whole little market of things.
Joe: It's like bartering.
Niall: Essentially, yeah. And it's not just in Greece where it's markedly worse, at least within Europe; I've encountered this in Ireland where people were relatively better off. Ireland has been hit badly in recent years but people are already responding to the worsened economic condition as it is. So with these hypotheticals we'll see how they play out.
Joe: It's kind of interesting that the people who have been hit worst are at the beginning are the poorest people, and that seems unfair but they may have the last laugh in a certain sense in that they'll have a longer time to engage in this kind of community spirit and community sharing and helping each other out than the people who suddenly find it just all collapses all at once on their heads, maybe the middle class, the upper middle class or whatever who have been spared the worst of the bankers transgressions.
Niall: Well yeah, the elites screwed.
Joe: Well they've got their bunkers.
Niall: Yeah but who's going to clean it for them, who's going to run it for them?
Joe: They've got slaves.
Niall: They've got slaves, right, well we'll see about that. They're going to find that they're alone, as they've always been, and if there's one thing that gets people through these kinds of crisis...
Joe: Are we banding together and hating the elite? I'm blaming the elite for their troubles and not only are they screwed in the sense of no one will care about them but if things happen on a wide scale that people then blame the ruling elites.
Niall: No, I mean simply that for people to survive; if anyone person has ex-number of skills and ex-number of resources, that's not going to do much, for the value of it is in his contributing that to the whole. Because no one person is going to be able to have enough of everything and know enough how to do everything, so the very nature is that you need to work together with other people and the elite are constitutionally incapable of doing that.
Pierre: About the elite there might be two kinds that initiates, who are prepared, who are preppers and that the elites won't answer. When I would not like be the owner of one of those fancy villas in Beverly Hills, when things get bad because cities can be places of high criminality and those places are full of resources, raw material and equipment and so it might turn bad and things may get reversed.
Niall: To help us along with practicals more or less, let's go back to what you suggest Joe that we talk about what scenario we most likely...
Joe: That would give raise to a need for a particular practical.
Niall: Exactly, so it has gotten colder. Winters are longer and they are colder. So you want to respond to that. Warmer clothes, of course, and people who live in certain areas do they want to get further south? I mean an Ice Age which we've been told can form within six months. We're talking about like a mile of ice. There's no such, well would I adapt to the new environment, you need to get beyond a certain, do people need to move first before they start thinking of this?
Joe: I don't think people should, again it comes back to the premise at the beginning of the show that people need to be aware and watching what's going on, if you are aware and you get past your reluctance to think that anything bad could ever happen and just assume for a minute that it might with the idea of allowing that awareness and you know even giving fifty percent chance that's enough to make you think "okay well I should think about it, as an eventuality" and that will then lead you to maybe have more interest in watching the weather, watching the way things are going, watching news report, etc. And just being aware and watching those kind of things will give everybody who does that a head start. It's not about right now even if recent cold winters weren't bad enough to make anybody else up stakes and flee out type of thing.
But it's unlikely that something like that will happen all of the sudden. There won't be a mile of ice covering Holland for example all at once. It'll be progressive. But if you see the signs of this worst-case scenario happening, it's up to you when you decide that it's going to go, or it's very likely to go to the worst case scenario but decide before it arrives. Also have in the back of your mind an idea or a plan or something, maybe about somewhere to go that's further south, how you would do it. I'm not even talking about having to buy a house in South Spain or North Africa or something like that you know. I'm talking about just thinking about it is enough. The people who have not thought about it whatsoever have blotted out any idea, any conception of the possibility that anything bad happening who will right up until the last moment will deny it and deny it and deny it. You don't want to be one of those. You want to watch what's going on and if you start to watch what's going on, at some point you're going to say "okay maybe I need to get a more concrete plan in place here" you need to think a bit more seriously about "where I could go?"
Juliana: But you also can't do it based on fear. The other extreme of those would be people who just run away or they're just acting on fear on wanting to save their own little life. When you're talking about developing a skill, learn something, you're also thinking in terms of what you can do, even if you're not able to move one day for example. You know, what would you do, what would you give your children, what would you want to know things, do you want to teach your children something that they can use in the future. I mean do you even know how a light bulb works?
Pierre: And it should not be on a theoretical exercise because to acquire properly a skill you have to train, you have to apply it. So I think it's a good idea, in addition to developing your own awareness on what is going on. To start developing concretely some skills, not only reading on the internet about soap making, we're trying to make some soap. Getting some lye, getting some fat, getting some essential oils and doing it. The first or second time it may fail but we improve. Acquire tangible skills that you can apply and that you can use even during a time of non-crisis.
Joe: And the point is when you take a step in that direction, again you have nothing to lose and you are setting your intent, you're doing something real about it based on this idea, you know in the back of your mind the reason you're going to learn this new skill or the reason you're exploring possibilities in this area or putting feelers out in a certain direction or because you're taking the possibility of a bad future scenario seriously. By simply doing that and making it real for yourself, things can change, it's the first step in the right direction and you got nothing to lose, you're learning new skills.
Juliana: If nothing else it's just a fun hobby.
Joe: Yeah exactly.
Niall: It turns out that x-few you did or x-things you made you didn't need, well somebody else might and better still, you in the process of learning enjoyed it and it may open new horizons to other things.
Joe: Met new people, etcetera.
Niall: That skill actually was required in order for you to get to the next thing.
Joe: Yeah, so step-by-step and you need to make an effort to do it. You can't hang on about waiting on a "free lunch" type of thing that you're not going to sacrifice anything until you have a 100 percent proof that you really need to do it. Then you are only going to do it but grudgingly, that's not the post to take. I mean it's about making an effort. There is a certain amount of faith involved here but its objective faith or its faith based on an objective observation of the environment around you. So it's like the environment is giving you signs and hints. It's not a hundred percent proof that something might be happening and there's where the faith comes in. If these things are happening and it's possible that it could get worse, rather than the opposite which is totally dismissing it and saying well based on a subjective need not to want to be put out of your comfort zone.
Pierre: One of the first steps to develop this awareness beyond theoretical level is to test your level of dependency. Try for several hours to switch off the electricity and see how life is without electricity. Try to switch off the heater during the winter and see how life is without a heater. And when realizing our level of dependency, it might be one of the strongest motivators to learn those skills.
Juliana: Yeah and you don't even need to be politically oriented or anything. I think most people have it in the back of their mind that their leaders are not to be trusted in some way or another, that they won't be there to protect them all the time. But just from that base, why not learn to be independent, autonomous. Without going into conspiracies with doubt, without going to end of the world scenarios, why wouldn't you want to be independent?
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: A big thing of course will be the stress that gets people because at the best of times people worry, people when they get hungry they are already worried, "I'm not going to starve" even when they know full well they are secure and there is food in the fridge and so on. So you can imagine about stress building when it becomes more apparent that the regular needs are less available. I think Joe you pointed out that people just get into the mindset is a great way to deal with the stress, to surf it.
Joe: Yes, but it's also a step in the right direction, the first step in the right direction to get over your psychological or emotional block.
Juliana: By empowering yourself by learning things.
Joe: Yeah, your psychological block or your emotional block or your emotional need not to think about being put out of your comfort zone in a serious way. I don't know it's almost like a kind of spiritual thing in a way because by taking action and it's going to take effort that may take a bit of sacrifice in some area or other, but it's nothing too serious by engaging in this kind of thinking and in this kind of practice in taking up a new skill or networking with a new community or putting feelers out in that direction. You are responding with your own energy and your awareness to signs that are all around us. If there's any kind of a conscious awareness in the universe or whatever that directs these kinds of climate or planetary changes on a cyclical basis, well then you know you're interacting with that, you know you're responding favorably, you're responding to the signs that are out there around you.
That our objective, that our truth is based in truth in a sea of lies; in a sea of global warming lies. But its forcing people to buy an electric car because cars contribute to emissions and stop eating so much meat and go vegetarian, or do all these ridiculous things that have nothing to do with what's actually happening. If you respond to the global warming thing and try to be green then you're responding to a lie propagated by the psychopaths in power. If you do what we are suggesting you should do, you are responding to an objective truth that is being offered to you by the universe.
Pierre: Yeah seeing the world as it is a key point, as far as the human cosmic connection is concerned, if it exists. But also in the more practical level, seeing things as it is and being prepared can be a lifesaver. In accidentologies a lot of sailing cases are being studied (accidentology study accidents). Sailing is an interesting topic because is very close to the crisis that we might expect.
Joe: Sailing?
Pierre: Sailing, yeah because you are in an environment [where] there is no grid, there is no resources, no fresh water and you cut away from society, you are alone or alone with your group. When accidentologies studies sailing accidents, usually there's one small program occurring, technical program maybe because a big wave brings the mast down, breaks the mast down okay, that's not a big deal objectively, but actually what really matters and what would define the outcome: death of crew members versus fixing quickly and efficiently the problem, is the psychological state of the crew in the way they would react. And often dramatic accidents occur when the stress, the fear overcomes the thinking of the crew and they start to make the wrong decisions that lead to a bigger accident, even more stress and even bigger accident and sometimes it's crazy actually, it's self-made.
Joe: It's a negative feedback loop that spirals downward, can spiral downward to destruction. But for the crew of a sailing boat to respond in that way they would have to have been prepared or trained themselves in some way to expect that and to be able to remain calm and have some contingencies in place and know how to act for that, in response to that eventuality. And that's kind of what we're talking about here as a first step but so many people don't do that. The real problem here is that so many people haven't even got to the point of allowing into their awareness the possibility of something bad happening in the very near future. They are in la-la-land, they've got their rose colored glasses on and they are not seeing anything, they're ignoring it all. The stuff that's actually filtering in, they're rejecting it, they're dismissing it, and they're explaining it away. If something bad happens, those people are going to be caught completely unawares and not know and they are going to probably end up in a situation as Pierre was describing which is they will panic, not be prepared so they'll panic, it'll be a traumatic situation and they will probably make a worse mistake that compounds the problem and that's it. Now if you want to be in that position, go ahead, continue to believe the lies and keep the glasses on, but it's not like there aren't signs pointing to something very different happening.
Juliana: And it's not like there's not any price you pay by doing that, because even nowadays people are getting sick, people are more and more stressed. You can keep it aside and claim that everything is all right and then if you have positive thoughts then nothing bad will happen but in reality people's bodies are even reacting, people are going crazy, more and more people need antidepressants, is that a way of coping?
Pierre: Yeah, and about these possible problems looming in the future. Ice ages for example; Eskimos have been coping with a very cold temperature for decades or centuries. In Russia during the nineties people have been coping with a terrible economic crises, some with success, some even become richer if not materially, spiritually. So for most of the possible coming situations, there's nothing insurmountable, there's no unsolvable problems. You just have to be ready to have the appropriate knowledge and network and posture.
Joe: I think all of the scenarios that we could possibly encounter for example this winter.
Niall: This winter's not ending.
Joe: First of all many feet of snow in unusual places in the northern hemisphere and even next year maybe in the southern hemisphere. Solar flares or an EMP or whatever you want to call it but the grid is going down. All of those scenarios even a volcano erupting and blotting out the Sun, all of those scenarios involve really one or both of two things: no electricity and no food. That's kind of what it comes down to right? No electricity, no food.
Juliana: And no water.
Joe: No water, no access to the stores, no access to any products. So just imagine, sit down for a while and imagine yourself in that situation and think now what would you need, what do you use on a daily basis that are the essentials that you might think about stocking up on. Having a small extra or whatever size extra supply of, to see you through, so in the immediate aftermath of one of those situations happening, you're not one of the people getting trampled at the department store trying to get the supplies then, if you already have them.
The first step, the first avoidance of the first outcome of one of those situations is being part of a mad violent throng running around the streets into every store trying to grab as much of whatever is available as possible. Do you want to be one of those people? It's happened even in the absence of any kind of crisis at Wal-Mart stores on Black Friday, you know people have been trampled to death when people are rushing to get stuff that they don't even need because there is no crisis; it's just stuff on sale. Imagine what it's like when it comes down to basic necessities for survival.
Pierre: There's a good example where a psychological state, the stress, the fear is due to wrong decisions that are more harmful than they are beneficial because for a few bottles of water you might end up injured or in jail. And being injured in normal times is okay but being injured in crisis times is much more difficult. Access to hospitals and this is not the same anymore.
Joe: Those are the things to think about and that's really a really practical way. Nobody can say that they would want to be in that situation. So take steps, it's very easy steps to avoid at least that situation and once you've done that, it makes it real for you, you've gone out and bought a few extra supplies of the bare essentials and the scene is real for you, you responded and put your intent into it in a real way and you kind of open the door. So take that first step. We are not talking about having a new house in the country or having a whole herd of cattle or stockpiling in some warehouse somewhere or having your own armory of guns and having a network of preppers behind you to go raiding and stuff. It's just the first step.
Niall: Yeah.
Juliana: Psychologically it's very important to take because one of the problems is that during a crisis, people will freeze from fear, they won't deal with it and they won't know what to do. Well if you already take the steps that Joe is describing then you have removed a big part of the fear. You've given yourself a little bit of time to figure out what to do next and that's huge burden taken off of you.
Niall: Yeah, vigilance is crucial and your vigilance is eaten by stress. So being as in a good as mindset as you can be will enable you physically to respond better.
Pierre: On a material level this awareness should lead, I think, to a capacity to react faster than others especially if you live in an urban area you don't want to react at the same speed as others because if the magnitude of the event is high enough you'll have shortage of food, shortage of water and then you will have the roads that may be blocked, you might have refugees drift, you might have people leaving urban areas because there's no more resources. I don't know that's a possibility. In this particular case you want to be ready and able to leave before the communication access are blocked.
Joe: Yeah, anyway food...
Niall: Think about what medical supplies you need as it is and then what others things you might need.
Pierre: Yeah, about this point quickly, not exactly medical supplies but prevention. Prevention is probably the most important thing because you don't really want to go through major surgery during a serious crisis time. So I think it's important right now to get as healthy as possible, as fit as possible, do all the preparatory, all the dental work that you have to do if you can afford it or at least do it incrementally so all the health issues you might have try to solve them because right now it's much easier than when the resources are limited.
Joe: Absolutely and that brings us to the worst case scenario but unfortunately it's very present that's in our skies, as we've mentioned already, there are ridiculous increase in fireballs sightings and like we said, 13,000 or some this year and that's just in the US so let's multiply that by 3 maybe 3, 4 times for the rest the world we're talking about 50,000 fireballs, divide that by 365, I don't know what's that, quite a few per day flying across the skies of the planet and there is pretty hard scientific evidence for at least life having partly being produced on this planet by comets, the idea of panspermia: bringing organisms to the Earth that seeded life. I don't know if that is true or not but certainly there is evidence that, very recently they found the evidence of microorganisms in the upper atmosphere that were not from the planet. Actually this is quite covered up, but back in 2002 there was for a month or two, there was this red rain falling in Kerala in India. Initially they thought it was dust from an African desert.
Niall: Yeah, it was picked up and then deposited red rain.
Joe: But then there was a scientist, and you can check this out on a report done on it and I think there's a video on YouTube about a scientist who studied this and said that the organisms he put them under a microscope, not the organisms, but this red rain put a couple drops of it under a microscope and he stated pretty clearly that this is not dust and bore no resemblance to dust particles or sand particles and that in fact it seems to have a pretty striking resemblance to some kind of a microbe or some kind of a living organism. So the point here is that not only comets seed life on Earth, they also can destroy it by bringing viruses or bacteria in and this is a theory that's proposed for things like the 'Black Death' and that in fact it was caused not by rats carrying a virus but by...
Niall: If people really sat and thought about this, this is relatively recent history, six hundred years ago, 666 to be precise years ago, the Black Death struck. At the very least it wiped out half of Europe's population. That's the lower end of the estimation. Up to eighty percent of the population of Europe which was about 200 million people at the time. That is a civilization ending event. It spread out over a few years and it did return in waves, I'm thinking in particular of the so-called Great Plague that hit London in 1666, that number again.
Pierre: It lasted actually, the 'Black Death' started in 1240 it lasted, the waves, until 1720.
Joe: Yeah about five hundred years. The 'Great Plague' of London that you're talking about was in about 1666 right?
Pierre: Yes and in 1665 an asteroid-fireball was observed and not only that, actually 1240 was preceded by several years of intense cometary activity and at 540 AD the beginning of the Justinian Plague was preceded by an intense cometary activity as well, so it's not a smoking gun but a strong correlation between cometary activity and the start of plagues. And a smoking gun actually was published in 2012 by Chandra Wickramasinghe an Indian scientist who found in meteor-rich material fused fossilized microorganism in a recently fallen meteorite proving that meteorites can carry microorganisms from outer space.
Joe: So there have been quite a few meteorites flying throughout the atmosphere and also some comets that have passed by of late. So that's another possibility, another scenario of some kind of viral epidemic and pandemic.
Niall: And part of the reason is so devastating is because it brings in a whole new strain of virus for which we have no defense against.
Joe: Except, and this is why I brought this up was, Pierre mentioned staying as healthy as possible and one way to stay as healthy as possible is to eat more animal fat and reduce your sugars and carbs to as low as possible. Because ingesting animal fat and having it in your system is very good way of protecting your cells, increasing the fat myelin sheath around your cells, which is essentially a protective coating of fat to protect against intrusion of viruses and also a lot of viruses feed on sugars i.e. any type of carb as it's broken down into sugar or sugars itself. So by reducing your sugars and increasing your fat you are providing essentially a double defense against viruses. And we're not talking just here about any possibly cometary viruses, were talking about any other virus: pork flu, swine flu, you know horse flu, donkey flu, cat flu, rashes.
Juliana: And it's been shown actually that viruae look like DNA or very similar and can alter your DNA in the same way junk food today or GMO's or whatever they've been shown to actually destroy your DNA, create mutations that you've never imagined possible. So if you don't have healthy DNA, plus a good fatty coat on your cells, then you're much more prone to catching anything, whether it's human-borne or airborne or whatever.
Pierre: And fireballs through electrophonics can modify DNA as well they are mutagenic. There is secondary evidence, historical evidence showing a correlation between high-fat diet and plague visits. A study of the Justinian Plague most of Western Europe was wiped out and a few centuries later the tribe that emerged was the Franks, a Germanic tribe, and in these War of Guals, Caesar describes the diet of the Germanic tribes. He said that "unlike us Romans who eat a lot of wheat, Germanic tribes mostly eat meat and meat all the time" i.e. not only meat, fat meat. And the other point he emphasizes about Germanic tribes is he said that "since childhood, they bathe in ice-cold water." So this might be two factors that increase plague immunity.
Niall: There's a third one, it's just anecdotal but I find it's fascinating, during the Great Plague 1666 in London school children were forced apparently, they had no choice in the matter, to smoke tobacco.
Joe: That's no anecdote. Well it's fairly well documented that during the Great Plague in London it's well known that authorities at the time kept fires burning night and day in the hopes that the air would be cleansed of whatever it was causing this plague; suggests that they had an understanding that it was some kind of viral infection that was carried in the air, was transmitted through the air, rather than by rats. This may have been linked, this attempt to forestall the infection, may have been linked to a very common belief among ordinary people at the time as well, about smoking tobacco. According to an amateur historian, some years later his name was A. J. Bell who's writing at 1700, he said during the plague "for personal disinfections, nothing enjoyed such favor as tobacco. The belief in it was widespread and even children were made to light up a reaf in pipes. Thomas Hearns remembers one Tom Rogers telling him that when he was a scholar at Eton in the year that the Great Plague raged, all the boys smoked in school by order and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking. It was long afterwards a tradition that none who kept the tobacconist shop in London had the plague."
I mean, there's a lot of evidence that tobacco leaves have an anti-viral effect. I think in the year 1500, there was a Portuguese explorer in Brazil, Cabral who reported that the use of the herb betum, as it was called tobacco, for treating ulcerated abscesses, fistulas, sores, inveterate polyps and many other ailments. And in 1529 a Spanish missionary priest collected information from four Mexican traditions about the use of tobacco for medicinal purposes. He recorded that breathing the odor of fresh green leaves of the plant relieve persistent headaches. For cold and catarrh, green or powdered leaves should be rubbed around inside the mouth. Diseases of the glands and the neck could be cured by cutting out the root of the lesion and placing on it a crushed tobacco plant hot and mixed with salt. So there are plenty of other historical references to tobacco being used for various ailments including, and of course many indigenous tribes and communities throughout history have smoked tobacco leaves.
Juliana: So basically to survive you're telling us that we have to do exactly what the mainstream doctors say that will kill us?
Joe: Isn't it just strange? It's just a coincidence I suppose but it's amazing to me that almost everything that is officially propagated as the thing to do for health, well-being, etcetera, prosperity, it's pretty much exactly the opposite of what really should be done. It's amazing. And I don't know if that's the only thing that makes me think it's by design because I don't believe that they could of got it so completely inverted by coincidence. I think there's maybe some distortion in the truth to a certain extent but when it's exactly the opposite I'm like somewhere they had to plan this but then I'm just like a conspiracy theorist.
Pierre: Well just one point about the airborne plague versus rat-borne plague, two pieces of evidence tends to confirm that it was an airborne virus:
A) The speed of propagation.
It propagated so fast that rat migration couldn't explain these speed of propagation. And
B) Plague has been witnessed in Iceland, where there's no rats.
So it's probably an airborne virus. And smoking would be interesting to prevent airborne virus, including plague, because one of the effects of smoking is that it stimulates the secretion of mucus in the lungs that acts as a protective barrier and prohibits viruae to enter the body organism through the lungs.
Joe: And here we're talking about as natural tobacco as you can get rather than pre-rolled cigarettes that contain all sorts of additives and toxic chemicals; smoking a pipe for example, or rolling your own.
Niall: Of course, independent from this are more anecdotal references to tobacco from history, the research done today, research that's funded too of course, casts tobacco as the evil that we're told it is; time and time again it accidentally discovers properties that are beneficial.
Juliana: The same happens with fat, animal fat.
Niall: Indeed, and in particular they seem to center around the benefits tobacco smoking brings to your psychological health, lowering stress or at least being able to deal with stress. Again this comes back to the core of being in good shape for whatever kind of crisis is in front of you. You cannot be vigilant and reading your environment and being responsible enough to act on what it's telling you if you're not psychologically witted or physically.
Pierre: Yeah we didn't address the point concerning water, so maybe we can say a few words about it. Water is one of the resources that can become scarce during a time of crisis. Where there are several sources of water, if the water pumps are down, there is underground water; so if you have some land and a well or a stream, that's ideal. If you're aware think about the manual pump if you don't have a generator to operate an electric pump. A stream can be used directly. Don't forget to treat the water and analyze it. If you live in the city there's rainwater, if you can collect it. Down spouts, if you have a house it is easier. Down spouts can generate a lot of water, but it has to be treated as well. And treatments can be made with chlorine but chlorine is a powerful oxidant, so half-wise it's not the best solution. UV treatment is a good treatment. There are some cheap UV lights to destroy bacteria and viruae. And/or colloidal silver is also an efficient and potent anti-septic agent.
Joe: All right, now for the big one.
Niall: You mean wiping out most of the world with the big one?
Joe: No. The hot potato and I'm going to throw it in your direction. "Where's my gun?"
Niall: Guns. Well it's interesting. In the US it's fairly openly discussed tongue-in-cheek most of the time but there it is. It's in the culture. People are talking about zombie apocalypse and the gun culture is being re marketed in a way.
Joe: What do you mean people aren't done with the zombie apocalypse? People are actually taking seriously the idea that...
Niall: Well, people are taking seriously the scenario, which we didn't list as one of ours, that there will be zombies roaming the street.
Joe: Now, but you know what that's going to translate to for people? That's going to translate to what we already discussed; this idea of a zombie apocalypse is very, very similar to hordes of people running through the streets trying to get to any store and any department store they can and beating everybody in their way and acting crazy. That's pretty close to a zombie kind of scenario, right? People are preparing for the zombie apocalypse to respond to that, if they are planning to respond with weapons.
Niall: Yes and a core plank in the way preppers are being prepped for any eventuality is: "okay water, food and guns" so if things were in that kind of scenario and that kind of state where without a weapon you would not survive, nobody would survive long enough, you know what I mean? Things are so bad that you're relying on the weapon to survive.
Joe: So is there any reason to have a weapon?
Pierre: Well, a reason might be getting fresh food, hunting and fishing and also having a greenhouse is a good way to insulate from...
Joe: Hunting fish with a gun?
Pierre: No, hunting again, but more globally to get a fresh food in order to bring some variety and change from canned food, yeah is fishing, hunting and growing some plants as well and a greenhouse is a way to grow plants, even in Ice Age and to insulate in the center of your building. But again, getting a gun for hunting is useless if you don't acquire the skill for hunting. If you don't know the territory, the animals, how the gun operates is even dangerous to operate a gun without proper knowledge. So again we go back to the preponderance of skills over material possessions.
Joe: Yes, here we're talking about people who don't have a gun and whether or not they should have a gun. Because a lot of people in the US, they are listening from the US, be aware that a lot of people, if they themselves don't have a gun, a lot of people around them, depending on where you live, but a lot of people there's a good chance that someone around you, in your community has a gun or many people have guns. So in that sense it's a kind of a moot point because those people have guns already for different reasons but they will obviously turn and use them as they see fit. Obviously, these people aren't going to go animal hunting in an urban area with, you know 10 million of all the people around.
Niall: Well the big reason that a lot of militia or just regular survivalists, people who are doing this solo, the big reason they give for stocking up on ammo is for the showdown for this other scenario we haven't brought it in yet. The showdown with the feds when the government clamps down and comes to take stuff from you, that you can defend your family, your resources. Now I mean, again the scenario here where it's you against an army.
Joe: You don't want to be in that scenario so it means that it comes to watching the environment, watching what's happened-happening around you and when you see it getting past a kind of point of no return or certainly a point where there's a greater than 50 percent chance that it will go to that situation that you don't want to be in. Well then that's when you have your backup plan of going somewhere else or having somewhere else to go, having someone else to go to in a different setting.
Pierre: And here, it shows that what is proposed by most preppers, i.e. going solo in the forest with tons of guns and ammunition, is not a good idea because you will have dozens of people following this strategy. So we'll have a forest full of weirdos equipped with machine guns and ammunitions so you don't want to be solo in the forest with guns. In the book "How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It" by James Wesley Rawles, I recommend his book because this guy has been studying this topic and applying it for a few decades actually. [Link for the book in Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/How-Survive-End-World-Know/dp/0452295831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380483346&sr=8-1] He's an ex intelligence agent, nobody's perfect, so he kind of overemphasized the security topic, a lot of chapters dedicated to that. However he has some interesting points, one of the interesting points is that he said there are two basic defense strategies: castle versus concealment, defense ability versus concealment. Defense ability typically is a middle age castle on top of mountain, everybody sees it, there are a lot of resources that everybody knows it and there are so many weapons and so many defenses that nobody can get it, theoretically. The opposite strategy is concealment. Concealment is being discreet, do not attract looters. And there are few tips he gives that are interesting: if you have a generator and you produce light, you need some black tape, black plastic on your windows. You don't want people to see the light through your windows otherwise they will deduce that you have energy while they have not. You have a resource that is precious. If you have a generator, conceal the sounds. Put it in a soundproof room. He has a lot of advices like that about being discreet and not advertising the fact that you have resources that you can be a prey to looters.
Joe: Just on that scenario whether there might be looters say, and you have some level of independent electricity generation. That scenario about the power grid going down is interesting because, while it seems very unlikely when we've all come to depend so much on electricity always being there and there's no sign that that could happen on such a wide scale, the thing is that if it did happen for any of the various reasons that could cause it to happen, it would happen immediately. For example it could happen tomorrow. That's the kind of thing that you wouldn't necessarily get much warning about.
Niall: No, it happens early on in a crisis.
Joe: Except in the sense that it's one of the possible results of the stuff that's been going on for several years. But I think in that scenario if a lot of people in a major city or in a major part of the world, a highly populated part of the world found themselves in that situation, the immediate reaction would be "what's going on" and "when it's going to come back on" and then people use up their stocks, they'll maybe go to the supermarkets get as much as they can, that would last a few days. If it went on for a week, you have a process of people complaining, the government agencies trying to placate the people or trying to do something about it. But if it wasn't going to come back in the foreseeable future, I think it would progress to the point where people would, quite quickly if there was no food being delivered to the stores and there is only meager supplies being delivered by some relief agency, people would relatively quickly, within let's say a month, start getting a bit antsy and you may find yourself in a position where there are people going around with guns looking for supplies from other people.
Juliana: What about zombies with guns?
Joe: Zombies with guns? No, zombies don't eat guns; they just eat your brains. In that situation we have some electricity, that's a good point. If you find yourself half of that period of a month or however long it takes, for it to be a dangerous situation and you want to hide the fact that you have electricity, you know don't use your electricity at night, use candles like everybody else is using.
Pierre: And if you use candles, have some fire detectors because one of the big problems before electricity was the fires because of lanterns and candles. Battery-powered smoke detectors and fire detectors are cheap, easy to install. So it's a good investment if you want to be prepared for this kind of eventuality.
Now, it's a crucial point this gun topic, I've been thinking about it for a while. It's like a social regression to think about having guns to defend yourself. Shooting on someone to defend yourself nonetheless but it's the possibility of shooting someone. But at the same time when you think about it, before the emergence of states that are supposed to give security to citizens and to prevent violence between citizens, for centuries if not millennia in societies the use of weapons was widespread and people were walking around with swords or with guns and pistols depending on the period of history. So is it a possibility to acquire a gun and to learn how to use it, at least for self-defense, and to encourage looters to loot the neighbors of your house? Is it promoting an escalation of violence? Is it useless because there would always be more looters coming?
Niall: I think in the US, having a gun in the home has been a feature, has been a fixture for generations. I think the nightmare scenario where you've got crazy people, so to speak, loaded with guns going around and taking other stuff from people is the kind of thing we're thinking about here; but it's still far off I think, it's not something that, I think for most people they are in touch with their own recent history at least people in rural areas. They're aware of why they had a gun in the home, it was there as a deterrent. Is it necessary to shoot every intruder or anything? Of course not. And I think it is part of getting back in touch with a relatively independent lifestyle that people knew just two generations ago: canning your own food, saving for a rainy day. That is not a bad idea.
Joe: Speaking of canning your own food, I know Juliana you have in a previous incarnation or rather in a previous life you canned some food. I've never done it myself but is it easy to do?
Juliana: Oh yeah it's very, very easy.
Joe: Just walk us through the process then.
Juliana: Well it depends on what you want to can.
Joe: Well let's say on a small scale for most people.
Juliana: Yeah, I'd say the most basic things to keep you alive would be fat and meat. Now you can get the cheapest cuts at the butcher and chop it up in pieces. Can it raw so you raw pack it, you just put the meat in the jar and put a little bit of salt because that helps to preserve it as well. And depending on the cans you buy you just seal it, don't add any water or anything and you seal it.
Joe: It's a glass jar right?
Juliana: Yeah, a glass jar with a seal and a lid that when you open the seal, you can just open and close the jar as you want. Then you put it in a special pressure cooker. You need a special pressure cooker, one of the big ones. And you usually leave it for 60 to 90 minutes. It's better if you leave it in for 90 minutes so that it sterilizes properly. If you have just a little pressure cooker in your house then it's better if you leave it for 3 hours. And that's it. After it's done you wait until the pressure goes down and you remove it. Once it's cooled down you make sure the seals are properly sealed and there you go. It can keep for four or five years no problem.
Joe: Well, there's a question here: "Which fruit is better to can?"
Juliana: Which fruit?
Joe: Any?
Juliana: Well, I would not can fruit for survival.
Joe: No but if you are vegetarian.
Juliana: If you are vegetarian then you might want to can anything, any fruit. The only thing with fruit is that you don't want to put it in the pressure cooker; just put it into a boil for 20 minutes is enough. And also if you have available, adding sugar or a little bit of ascorbic acid - vitamin C, or apple pectin, that helps preserve it as well. But any kind of fruit you like really works.
Joe: We also have a message there about a food dehydrator to make pemmican.
Juliana: Yeah, as long as you can preserve it afterwards, I don't know how long it lasts. If you have a vacuum sealer it's probably better because I don't know with humidity and animals around and whatever.
Pierre: All you need is a dry place and a dry room otherwise you will get mold development. You can also store all kinds of food with canning like legumes for example and other kind of food in those blue barrels with slit lids. You put your food in there...
Joe: By legumes you mean dried beans?
Pierre: Yeah, even grains, we don't say you should buy grains but if barter becomes the predominant mode of economic exchange then having wheat and other grains is very interesting. For that if you want to store this kind of food before putting it in a blue barrel, put it in a plastic sheeting of Mylar because it prevents exchange. Those blue barrels and any plastic leaver some exchange and anti-oxygen tablet inside the blue barrel and then you seal all that and you try to store it in a room as cold as possible.
Juliana: And earlier on, you were talking about the plague, one of the things that is said to have saved people from the plague is bone broth. Now that's super, super cheap and you just get marrow bones if possible from the butchers, we get it for free and you can get it for free in most places. And you just boil it in a pressure cooker for about a day and then you can it. You follow the same procedure as if you were canning vegetables. And that is said to have saved the lives of people with the plague. You can feed an entire family with that if you add water to it later. So those are things that are packed in minerals, vitamins and fat.
Pierre: You make it concentrated because you said you add water later?
Juliana: Yeah, if you leave it longer, say for example for an entire day, then it will be so packed with minerals and everything. It will have extracted everything from the bone so that you can dilute it with more water, add a little bit of meat if that's all you have or grains or whatever you have and feed an entire household.
Pierre: And a great food to store is salt. Salt is very useful, you need it because it takes exhauster, it's a preservative and for you and for barter. Because salt doesn't need special requirements for storage, you can store it for literally for centuries.
Juliana: You can use it to smoke food as well. Smoking is a very good skill to acquire.
Niall: Indeed, I'm not sure about how long it can preserve because smoking alone won't do but you can smoke meats to, at least to keep things temporarily preserved, in case you don't have refrigeration. To keep them for a longer time then you need it to dry properly.
Juliana: And you need the salt for it, yeah.
Joe: Salting, smoking and then drying. But people can experiment with that if they want to smoke something and salt and then hang it up somewhere in a dry area, see if it keeps, you know. With the salt on it, I mean you'll end up with some pretty salty meat but it's better than nothing. Imagine this next scenario where you have to barter things or something that would be valuable to people who aren't thinking about for example the ketogenic diet or the paleo-diet who aren't on that; what kinds of things would those people be interested in?, If they came and said "listen I've got some pork, I'm a vegetarian and I've got this pig and I just can't stand to the look at him. What would you have to exchange for this pig?"
Niall: Two things come to mind: sugar and milk.
Pierre: Alcohol would be a big factor, toilet paper and feminine hygiene pads. It's on top of the list, and actually pads...
Joe: What list?
Pierre: The special list of a hundred of things that disappear.
Joe: Now where did you get that from?
Pierre: Well it's an article in French...
Joe: Well tell us what it's about. What is the title of the article?
Pierre: "The Hundred First Things That Disappear During Time of Crisis" it was written by a survivor of the Sarajevo War. And from this survivor testimony and from other testimonies I've read, something that is very valuable in those times of crises are those little items that preserve what is left of humanity: lipstick, for women, perfume, soap and hygiene products. What is very good for barter as well in those times is: batteries, to power on all those electronic gizmos, wood, if you have access to wood, tools, chainsaw is a great thing, ammunitions of course and oil.
Joe: These things that were valued as barter items.
Pierre: Oh yeah, number one is:
1) A generator
2) Filters and water purifications
3) Portable potties
4) Dry Wood
5) Oil for Lanterns
6) Coleman fuel
7) Weapons and Ammunition
8) Can Opener
9) Honey, Syrup, Sugar
10) Rice, Beans and Wheat
11) Oil, vegetable oil
12) Charcoal and starter liquid
13) Interestingly, and is mentioned in this book from this Rawles guy as well, during these times of crisis you can never have enough containers. All those plastic containers to store, to tie these things away
14) Portable gas heater
15) Cereal meal manual
16) Propane tank
17) Survival manual
And the list goes on for hundreds of items so I will spare you but...
Joe: It gives you an idea of what's in demand in times of crisis.
Pierre: Trash bags, toilet paper, milk, seeds; yes seeds are great, I mean we're kind of a strong advocator of ketogenic diets but seeds: for bartering, for sprouting and for growing food, it's a great thing.
Joe: Are you saying that iPhones won't be high in that list?
Pierre: Number 27, iPhone 5S.
Joe: That's good to know because I mean I was starting to get worried there.
Juliana: I've read some crazy stuff today looking for information for the show. I was reading about one of these preppers, the item number one was dental floss because you can use it as a fish line or whatever or to grab food from whatever they were. Number two were condoms because you can store up to a gallon of water in them. I mean why don't they just use containers or things like that?
Pierre: An interesting one, also in this list is number 33; clothes pegs. Because the dryer is not working anymore, it consumes too much electricity.
Joe: That's for your nose for the smell when people are throwing their toilets outside the window.
Pierre:
36) Fire extinguisher
40) Big dog, for safety, security
42) Matches
43) Paper and pencil
Niall: And where does chocolate come out on that list?
Pierre: Hmm I'm not so sure if it's specifically mentioned. It can be included in one of the top items with all the sweet stuff.
Niall: You can imagine that, some luxury goods will be very handy.
Juliana: Yeah I think there's some kind of consensus about it because people seem to need the feeling of that life goes on or that something is worth living for or I don't know what the...
Joe: To keep up appearances essentially so they can feel civilized.
Juliana: Yeah, so perfume and make-up and things like that.
Niall: Yeah to maintain some dignity as well.
Pierre: During Second World War, a valuable item was a black pencil because women wore at the time stockings that had a seam at the back that was showing a black line and they couldn't buy stockings anymore because of scarcity so with those black pencils they were drawing a black line at the back of their legs.
Joe: To make it look like they had stockings on.
Pierre: Exactly.
Joe: Wow.
Pierre: To make it look that they were still woman, human you know, civilized.
Joe: Yeah, there's always going to be some weird stuff going on in the event of a crisis on this planet.
Juliana: Well maybe you just need a plastic box to pretend that you have an iPhone still.
Joe: Yeah.
Pierre: A black one.
Niall: I'm worried about all Mac users are going to be...
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: Oh god, hysterical.
Pierre: Well the Rawles guy mentioned that if you have an iPhone actually, it might be very detrimental because if you leave the Bluetooth on or Wi-Fi on, someone smart in a car can drive around with his laptop with Wi-Fi detection on and it can detect where the people with energy and goods are.
Joe: Where does she get the power for the laptop?
Pierre: Oh, one of the recommended items as well, it's not in this is list but in another source is a car charger to charge electronic devices, torchlights, etc.
Joe: Yeah I think you need to modify it for; that's from Bosnia, bombing of Bosnia by Bill Clinton and his friends. Things have moved on since then and if we're talking about life going on and maintaining a semblance of civilizations and stuff, everybody has, like I was saying, a phone these days and they may still think that there's some reason to use them so maybe those kinds of portable chargers, you can get the wind up charger for your phone so you can show people that you have an iPhone.
Pierre: Although there's no network anymore.
Joe: Which is a definition of civilization these days apparently.
Niall: There are a lot of online resources.
Pierre: Two other items maybe before I stop, three other items:
63) Knives and sharpening tools
64) Bicycle and related equipment
65) Sleeping bag because if you have no heater, a sleeping bag is a good solution to be hot during the night.
Joe: Yeah people need to get thinking about all the things that they might need that may be useful, that you don't use right now. But just let your imagination go and imagine a electricity-free environment, if you want to put it that way, and imagine what would be useful and take it out of the closet or go and get one cheap and just have it on hand. Little things like that can make all the difference and like I said they could be the first step towards a new way of thinking and in making it real for yourself and you have nothing to lose. Don't be afraid that you're going to turn into a prepper, not just because you went in bought a few extra supplies and a sleeping bag.
Juliana: And just as we're talking and sitting here and thinking, look at all of the propaganda about terrorism. How likely is it for you to suffer from the so-called terrorism in the way it's promoted?
Joe: Well there's lots of statistics on that.
Juliana: Exactly, and look at all the rights they are removing from you. Now here we're talking about something that is way more likely, whether it is just an economic crisis or whatever happens in the sky and stuff, and people aren't preparing for that. They are giving away their rights, their freedom for a false cause. Well I hope that people who are listening are really thinking about it and realizing the amount of propaganda that goes together with terrorism and whatever they make up for the threat of the day, instead of actually seeing the reality.
Pierre: There are two topics we didn't mention, I will quickly address them.
A) Transportation
If you have a fancy hybrid car or V8 car that consumes gallons and gallons of fuel, maybe it's time to change your car and get, maybe a four-wheel-drive diesel-powered pick-up where they have value. We have a forum member who lived in Russia during the crisis and he said those utility cars were so valuable because there's no more mass transportation, no more auto transportation companies so people who are able to carry stuff from point A to point B have a strong advantage. And the b), the second point we didn't address is:
B) Communication
When there's is no more internet, no more phone and no more cellphone, having a walkie-talkie or CB radio, maybe an FM/AM radio with a broad band range may be the only contact you have with the external world and is very important to keep on top of things and know what's going on in other places on the planet.
Joe: Just on the terrorism threat and the likelihood of that actually being a threat to anyone, there are many statistics on how unlikely that you'll be killed by terrorism but one of them is that anybody would, in this case an American, is more likely to be killed by a toddler than they are by a terrorist.
Juliana: Or by lightning.
Joe: Or by lightning, yeah everybody says that, or by airplanes crashes. But in America, if you're in America it's more likely that a child, like a three year old child will come up shoot you with a gun than a terrorist. There are more people killed in America by children, like three or four year old children than they are by terrorists.
Pierre: What about terrorists-toddler, with a bear?
Joe: Terrorist-toddlers they haven't invented those yet.
Juliana: What about a zombie-terrorist-toddler?
Joe: No, they haven't created it or seen it. What at this pace they may be just around the corner if the CIA has anything to do with it. Anyway on that happy note, we will leave it there for this week. Thanks to our listeners and for our chatters who, as usual, have been chatting away furiously and also having all sorts of fun. We will be back next week with a show which involves the interview of...
Niall: Lierre Keith, author of "The Vegetarian Myth."
Joe: Indeed, so that promises to be a good and interesting show and a kind of follow on from this one really. So until then, have a good one.
features excellent discussions and interviews, and this show was another example; thank you for the "transcript"!