On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:31:22 -0700, Winston_Smith
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:22:23 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 12:51:55 -0700, Winston_Smith wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 15:39:29 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:

The Survivalist website tells you why to select nickel-plated ammo
with flash-suppressing powder and controlled-expansion bullets. You
"preppers" are telling us to get out of debt and keep a cash reserve.

Enough said.

Yup. Hundreds, no probably thousands, no probably multiple thousands,
of prep sites allows for a lot of cherry picking.

I didn't pck any cherries. I just went right for Survivalist.com, the
motherload.

Survivalists are worse than cats when it comes to being impossible to
herd. There is no official home page. There is no official Hillary
spokesman. Any single one you pick is cherry picking even if you do it
at random.

So I picked one cherry? d8-)

Winston, you know as well as I do that people call themselves
"preppers" for the same reason some call themselves "progressives."
Survivalists and liberals have very bad reps.

The suggestion is that preppers are "sensible" and not paranoid
freaks. I can go along with that. You identified your initial concerns
as getting out of debt and building up a cash reserve. Again, that's
home-ec.

Survivalists tend to be weird, tribal, and paranoid. They have a
creepy obsession with imaginative ways to kill people. They tend to
think in subterranian terms.

And that's why many call themselves "preppers."

--
Ed Huntress

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 20:52:03 -0400, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:31:22 -0700, Winston_Smith
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:22:23 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 12:51:55 -0700, Winston_Smith wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 15:39:29 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:

The Survivalist website tells you why to select nickel-plated ammo
with flash-suppressing powder and controlled-expansion bullets. You
"preppers" are telling us to get out of debt and keep a cash reserve.

Enough said.

Yup. Hundreds, no probably thousands, no probably multiple thousands,
of prep sites allows for a lot of cherry picking.

I didn't pck any cherries. I just went right for Survivalist.com, the
motherload.

Survivalists are worse than cats when it comes to being impossible to
herd. There is no official home page. There is no official Hillary
spokesman. Any single one you pick is cherry picking even if you do it
at random.

So I picked one cherry? d8-)

Winston, you know as well as I do that people call themselves
"preppers" for the same reason some call themselves "progressives."
Survivalists and liberals have very bad reps.

The suggestion is that preppers are "sensible" and not paranoid
freaks. I can go along with that. You identified your initial concerns
as getting out of debt and building up a cash reserve. Again, that's
home-ec.

Survivalists tend to be weird, tribal, and paranoid. They have a
creepy obsession with imaginative ways to kill people. They tend to
think in subterranian terms.

And that's why many call themselves "preppers."

I've always wondered whether the Survivalists" actually have any
experience in what they all seem to imagine as Armageddon, a total
breakdown in civilization. True they may have 100 cans of baked beans
in the pantry, but will the piped in city gas still be flowing. True
they have 100 gallons of gas for the generator but when happens when
the gas runs out?
--
cheers,

John B.

On Tue, 13 Sep 2016 10:19:36 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 20:52:03 -0400, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:31:22 -0700, Winston_Smith
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:22:23 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 12:51:55 -0700, Winston_Smith wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 15:39:29 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:

The Survivalist website tells you why to select nickel-plated ammo
with flash-suppressing powder and controlled-expansion bullets. You
"preppers" are telling us to get out of debt and keep a cash reserve.

Enough said.

Yup. Hundreds, no probably thousands, no probably multiple thousands,
of prep sites allows for a lot of cherry picking.

I didn't pck any cherries. I just went right for Survivalist.com, the
motherload.

Survivalists are worse than cats when it comes to being impossible to
herd. There is no official home page. There is no official Hillary
spokesman. Any single one you pick is cherry picking even if you do it
at random.

So I picked one cherry? d8-)

Winston, you know as well as I do that people call themselves
"preppers" for the same reason some call themselves "progressives."
Survivalists and liberals have very bad reps.

The suggestion is that preppers are "sensible" and not paranoid
freaks. I can go along with that. You identified your initial concerns
as getting out of debt and building up a cash reserve. Again, that's
home-ec.

Survivalists tend to be weird, tribal, and paranoid. They have a
creepy obsession with imaginative ways to kill people. They tend to
think in subterranian terms.

And that's why many call themselves "preppers."

I've always wondered whether the Survivalists" actually have any
experience in what they all seem to imagine as Armageddon, a total
breakdown in civilization. True they may have 100 cans of baked beans
in the pantry, but will the piped in city gas still be flowing. True
they have 100 gallons of gas for the generator but when happens when
the gas runs out?

To be fair, there's a long continuum that runs from Winston's rational
home-economics ideas, at one end, to psychopaths who dig underground
shelters to protect themselves from a collision between Earth and the
Hale-Bopp Comet, at the other.

But when it goes beyond preparing for a few days of being stranded in
the wake of a hurricane (something I do, and we've been hit twice, by
Irene and Sandy), it gets very creepy, very fast. At some point, they
appear to be *wishing* for some disaster, probably to redeem their
loony habits and their sociopathic beliefs. It's like a dystopian
hobby gone mad.

When they get to the Third Bardo of paranoid lunacy, the movie scripts
that run in their heads tend to be based on complex narrative
assumptions that are statistically ever-less likely. And the
preparations they engage in become less likely to address a
catastrophe at the level they anticipate: They prepare for an invasion
by a marauding tribe of starving Latinos, and it turns out to be no
more likely than being swept away by a flash flood from a broken dam.

You can't prepare for everything, and the farther you go with it, the
more likely you are to miss the mark. And the less likely it is for
*any* catastrophe to occur at that level.

As I've said, the one redeeming quality of the whole enterprise is
that they consume products and thus contribute to our economy. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress