How to START ‘Gathering In the Summer’

Here’s How to Become a Prepper

By 

The Organic Prepper

May 11, 2020

If the coronavirus has inspired you to become a prepper, you’re not alone. At long last, prepping has become mainstream due to runs on supplies, shortages, and stay-at-home orders throughout the country. More folks than ever before are seeing the wisdom of having extra food and household goods on hand. It can help you through not only disasters and pandemics, but also through personal financial problems.

But delve into most preparedness websites (including this one) and it can start to get overwhelming when you read articles about civil unrest, EMPs, and existential catastrophes. You’ll see articles about guns and outdoor survival and all sorts of things in which you have absolutely no interest.

And more than that, it’s kind of overwhelming. It can make you feel like, “Wow, I will never be able to have a bunker in Montana with 150,000 rounds of ammo. I don’t even know how to build a fire. Why even bother?”

Before we get started with the “how to’s” here are a few things you should know.

All of us started at the beginning.

It’s important to know that all of us started somewhere. We all had some event that awakened us to the need to be better prepared. (To learn how some readers were inspired to get started, go here.) We all had to learn the ins and outs, read the books, and acquire the stuff.

Most of us don’t have thousands of dollars to drop on buckets of food and secondary locations. We began by just getting a few extra things when we could.

It takes some time.

Getting well-prepared doesn’t happen overnight. Even if you have a budget that is relatively unlimited, you will find that it still takes time to figure out what you need, where to get it, and where to store it.

So if you can only afford a few extra things each week, that’s a fantastic place to start. Within a month, you may have an extra week’s food supply doing things that way. Within a year, you’ve got a 3-month supply.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was a prepper’s stockpile.

You don’t have to be of a particular political or religious belief to be a prepper.

A lot of folks think that most preppers are well-to-do white, right-wing Christians. While a lot of preppers do have that in common, there are a lot who do not. We don’t all live on an acreage in the boondocks and raise everything we eat.

If you feel like you don’t fit into the mold, don’t worry because let me tell you a secret: there really is no mold. We have readers of this website from all different kinds of political and religious backgrounds. We have city dwellers and suburbanites. We have folks who live off the land and folks who buy most of their food from the grocery store. We have rich readers and poor readers. We have people coming here from many different countries with many different belief systems. The thing that unites us is that we want to be prepared.

We have people who are involved in prepping for a huge variety of reasons and we, the writers and editors of this site, sincerely welcome anyone who wants to become better prepared for emergencies.

You don’t have to be a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to be a prepper.

A lot of folks have this mental image of some wild-eyed guy peering out of the bunker wearing a tinfoil helmet. I’ll grant you that a lot of preppers are mistrustful of the things we hear in the mainstream media. We don’t take things at face value.

But for every prepper who is certain that the New World Order is trying to take over and every event is a false flag, there are preppers who are extremely logical and scientific. There are preppers who are pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination and everything in between.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that we run the gamut. Don’t let the stereotypes scare you away.

Don’t stay someplace you’re treated badly.

In most of the preparedness world, you’ll be welcomed with open arms. But there are a few websites and forums where you find long-time preppers who are incredibly discouraging. If you run into this issue repeatedly, don’t continue hanging out there. Getting started on a big endeavor is overwhelming enough without people like that making you feel like crap.

Around here we like to help each other with advice and suggestions. Feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments section and you’ll probably get more than one answer from those who wish to share their knowledge.

We welcome you and we’re glad you’re here. Go here to sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss a thing.

Now, how do you get started prepping?

Pretty much all of us have recently had a crash course in preparedness with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people have been sheltering in place in their homes for over a month now and have seen holes in their purchases. Some folks had the unfortunate experience of going out to stock up a little too late, only to find that the shelves were bare of essentials.

An enormous factor that makes just about every disaster worse is panic. When you wait until the last minute, you’re out there with all the other folks who waited until the last minute. Tensions are high and supplies are low. This can create an unsafe situation and can leave people without the things they need to face the event that has them rushing to the store in the first place.

The goal of prepping is to avoid all that.

When you’re prepped, sure, you really want to make one last run to the grocery store or Target, but if it came right down to it and you couldn’t, you’d still be okay. You still have the things on hand that your family needs to survive an event that lasts for a few hours all the way to a few months or even a few years. (And remember what I said above? It takes a while to get to that point.) The information below contains lots of links to articles, PDF guides, and books for topics you may wish to learn more about.

What are you prepping for?

There are all sorts of events people prep for, one of which, obviously, is a massive pandemic and quarantine. Outside of your general supplies, consider prepping for power outages next. Here’s a PDF guide that will help you get ready for blackouts. and here’s an article with some guidelines.

But there are many more things and some will be unique to your area. The Prepper’s Workbook may be helpful in figuring out exactly what’s the most likely for you. Here are some more regional things to prepare for these events are common in your area:

Focus on the things most pertinent to your area. Think about those most likely events and what generally occurs with them: power outages, property damage, a requirement for special shelter, a secondary disaster (like a flood that follows a hurricane, for example).

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

תיקוני עירובין גליון 248#

גליון שאלות הלכתיות המתחדשות מדי שבוע בבדיקת העירובים השכונתיים

Download (PDF, 525KB)

Reprinted with permission.

להרשמה ללימודי התחומין של מכון הלכה למעשה, עם מצגת מיוחדת להבנת השיעורים, לחץ בקישור זה.

למצגת העירובין, המקיפה את היסודות עם ההלכות המצויות בזמנינו בעשיית עירובים לחץ בקישור זה.

דורינו שעשית לו כל הנסים הללו ולא אמר שירה לפניך – תעשה לו משיח?! – שיר חדש

שיר לישועת ה’

ביאור לשיר ● הכרה בישועות ה’ ● חשיבות השירה ● שיר הכרה בישועת השם [נכתב ע”י הרב החפץ בעילום שמו שליט”א]

22:14 (10/05/20) מכון בריתי יצחק ● הרב יצחק ברנד

המשך לקרוא…

מאתר בריתי יצחק – הרב ברנד שליט”א, כאן.

יש סתירה גלויה שבין ‘דעת תורה’ בחו”ל ל’דעת תורה’ בארץ ישראל

ז”ל ספר אמת ליעקב (מתורת הרב יעקב קמנצקי זצ”ל) על פרקי אבות סוף פרק ג’:

אם אין קמח אין תורה אם אין תורה אין קמח.

עניני הממון והכלכלה של ישיבות ומוסדות התורה הם עניני “רוחניות”, וכל התערבות מבחוץ בעניני הממונות של הישיבה הרי היא כהתערבות בלימודי הישיבה.

מצינו בירושלמי [סנהדרין פ”י הל”ב]: למה נקרא שמו אחז, שאחז בבתי כנסיות ובבתי מדרשות. ולכאורה נראה כאילו חז”ל משבחים את אחז, אבל תימה הלא אחז רשע היה? אבל פירושם דבריהם הוא שאחז ביקש שיניחו את בתי הכנסיות ובתי המדרשות תחת אחריותו והוא יכלכל ויחזיק אותם, הוא “יאחוז” בהם, והסוף היה שמתוך כך קיבל אחז הרשע שליטה גמורה על מקומות התורה האלו עד שסגרם לגמרי [וכדאיתא בירושלמי שם]. וזה חשוב לדעת בזמננו שישנן מוסדות וגבאים שאינן שומרי תורה והם הם השולטים במעות צדקה ומחלקים אותם לישיבות ומקומות התורה.

ויש סתירה גם בחו”ל גופא…

9\11: Academics Refuse to Consider Evidence Against Their Main Benefactor – Government

Peer-Reviewed Journal Publishes Article on Academic Resistance to 9/11 Truth

Outright Hostility Ensues to the author and scholarly journal thus proving the author’s point 9/11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline (IR stands for International Relations)

By David A. Hughes

March 12, 2020

The consequences of the terrorist attacks of 11th September, 2001 have been catastrophic. In addition to the estimated 3,000 people who lost their lives during the attacks themselves, millions more have been killed in the “War on Terror”; there has been an aggressive worldwide expansion of US military power, including the introduction of drone warfare; the MENA region has been destabilized, leading to massive flows of migrants; international law has been violated (most egregiously with the Iraq War); and domestically there has been a draconian scaling back on civil liberties, including historically unprecedented levels of surveillance, arbitrary detention, and torture. All of this has worked to undermine the post-1945 liberal internationalist order and has contributed to mounting concerns about liberal democracies being transformed into police states. It would not be difficult to defend the claim that “9/11” represents the most significant political event of the post-Cold War era. 

These consequences rest on the fundamental premise that the United States was attacked by Al Qaeda on 9/11. Upon that premise are erected the moral and legal bases of the “War on Terror,” i.e. that “civilized” states have the right to defend themselves preemptively against terrorist barbarism in an age where terrorism is networked, transnational, and more threatening than ever before owing to new technologies of destruction. Yet, what if the fundamental premise were false? As Benjamin observes, 

Were this claim ever to be proved false – were it ever to be shown that the United States was not in fact attacked by “others” on 9/11 but rather attacked itself (or let itself be attacked) for the purpose of blaming others and justifying international war – then its war would not be one of self-defence but of pre-meditated and carefully camouflaged aggression (2017: 373).

Legal responsibility for verifying the US claim to self-defence, even if only retrospectively, rests with NATO and the UN. However, both organizations “accepted without hesitation the American claim to have been attacked by elements of international terrorism” and continue to do so  (Benjamin, 2017: 373).

Academia has followed suit. Despite the gigantic volume of academic literature on 9/11, “almost all such studies assume the correctness of the core US claim of self-defence and then proceed to nibble on issues lying around its perimeter” (Benjamin, 2017: 374-5). Thus, debates revolve around the appropriate relationship between civil liberties and security, whether or not to treat 9/11 as an act of war or a crime, the ethics of torture and drone warfare (implicitly assuming the “War on Terror” itself to be just), and so on. Particularly in the International Relations literature, including the Security Studies and terrorism literature, there is little to no suggestion that 9/11 may have been a false flag operation used to provide the pretext for illegal wars of aggression and domestic repression.

Prima facie, this seems odd given the long and well documented history of false flag terrorism. In 1931, for example, Japan sabotaged a railway line that it operated in the Chinese province of Manchuria, blamed the incident on Chinese nationalists, and launched a full-scale invasion, occupying Manchuria and installing a puppet regime there (Felton, 2009: 22-3). In 1933, the Reichstag fire, caused by the Nazis, was blamed on communists and used as the pretext for a witch hunt of political opponents (Hett, 2014). Operation Himmler in 1939 involved a series of false flag events, the most famous being the Gleiwitz incident, the day after which Germany invaded Poland (Maddox, 2015: 86-7). In 1967, Israel bombed and strafed the USS Liberty and sought to blame the incident on Egypt in order to bring the United States into the Six Day War (Mellen, 2018). The Apartheid regime in South Africa carried out stealth attacks against government officials and installations and blamed them on the African National Congress in an attempt to discredit the anti-Apartheid movement (Baker, 2017: 377). The Algerian government is thought to have covertly murdered civilians and blamed the murders on Islamic parties during the civil war of the 1990s (Baker, 2017: 378). 

Is the United States above such behaviour? Hardly. The sinking of the USS Maine, widely suspected of being a false flag, provided the pretext for the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of various Pacific islands (Anderson, 2016: v-vi). Operation Northwoods, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, contained proposals for all manner of false flag attacks to be blamed on Fidel Castro and used as the pretext for invading Cuba (Scott, 2015: 94, 98). These included sinking a US Navy ship in Guantánamo Bay, sinking boats carrying Cuban refugees, staging terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, D.C., and making it appear as though Cuba had blown up a US passenger plane by replacing the plane with a drone in mid-flight and secretly disembarking the passengers. The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 was cynically invoked by President Johnson as the reason to launch air strikes and escalate the war against North Vietnam: it is known never to have occurred (Moise, 1996). In 1967, when Israel tried to sink the USS Liberty, President Johnson called back rescue ships and planes, indicating complicity in the attack (Mellen, 2018). Operation Gladio, orchestrated by the US government via NATO, involved using far right and neo-Nazi groups to stage political assassinations and terrorist attacks against civilians in Western Europe and blame them on left-wing organizations (Ganser, 2005). 

“Putting all these pieces together,” Benjamin (2017: 385) notes, “what emerges is a disquieting mosaic showing the very real possibility of a mass-casualty false-flag attack being executed to justify international war.” Prima facie, it is not inconceivable that certain elements of the United States government, possibly with links to other transnational actors, could have staged 9/11 in order to provide the pretext for the “War on Terror.” At the very least, this possibility should not be dismissed out of hand.

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.