Are You Prepping for “Next Tuesday” or for Everything?

One of the few prepping resources on YouTube that I regularly watch and respect is Bear Independent. I find him well-informed, smart, and a good prepper. I like that he has government contacts and is willing to share information gained through these and other sources with his audience. Also, he’s down-to-earth and not an alarmist, unlike many YouTube preppers.

For some months, Bear has been warning us to prepare for what he calls “everything, everywhere, all at once.” That’s a far better thing to prep for than folks on Reddit who are prepping for “Next Tuesday.” Next Tuesday sounds like you could survive it by taking the day off and staying in your mom’s basement. “Everything, everywhere, all at once,” sounds serious, threatening, and lets you use your imagination.

In the video I posted below, Bear says he believes there is a one-third chance of this kind of event occurring in the next nine months. Then he says there are other analysts who put it at 58.5 percent, and in a later video qualifies that by saying they give a timeframe of before the midterm elections.

He also frequently states that there is a persistence zero-day exploit that has contaminated everything that touches the Internet and that everything from Microsoft software to Cisco routers is compromised. He also suggests a large-scale cyberattack that uses this exploit to shut key infrastructure systems down could be the start of the catastrophic failure he calls “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

What if Bear is Right?

Whether this catastrophic event happens or not doesn’t matter. Whether the chance is 33 percent, 58.5 percent or only 4 percent doesn’t matter, either. You should be prepping anyway. If you need a target, something to prep for, then I’d prefer you prep for a catastrophic event that includes everything you fear, and happens everywhere at once. That means it isn’t regional, but national or even global. It doesn’t just affect airlines or banks, but water, gas, internet, trucking, refrigeration, food production, communications, etc.; it affects them all.

Prepare for everything and you’ll be better off if you get only some of the disaster.

Some folks prep for specific things. If you are in Tornado Alley, you prep for a tornado. If you live on the Gulf Coast or East Coast, you prep for a hurricane. And that’s good. Prepping for a specific event is a good start on your prepping journey. At some point, you’ll find yourself prepping for three or four different events. As your journey progress, you might as well prep for everything: nuclear war, civil war, no power, no internet, banking or financial crises, currency collapse, enemy combatants, a pandemic, and anything else you fear, everywhere, and all at once.

Will you be Among the Ten Percent who Survive?

These are the two numbers I have reported before, but I think they are worth repeating: The government has estimated that after six months without power, 50 percent of the population will be dead. In one year, that number will grow to 90 percent. This data comes out of EMP reports, but it applies to any catastrophic failure of the utilities, regardless of the cause. That can be because sleeper cells attack critical substations, distribution lines, or generating capacity. It can be because a cyberattack crashes generation or distribution. It could be nuclear war, although I anticipate we’d reach the 50 percent number much faster in that case.

What are you doing to increase your odds of being the one in ten that live? And don’t cop out and tell me, “In that scenario, I’d rather die.” Easy to say now, not so easy when death is coming for you and you realize it’s too late to prep, learn to shoot a gun, have a place to hide, etc.

The Advantages of Being a Part-Time Homesteader

The longer I live out here in rural Appalachia, the more people I meet who are at least part-time homesteaders. I’ve seen the gardens along the road since we first got here, but livestock is becoming more popular. Pigs, goats, chickens, guinea fowl, turkeys, ducks, honey bees, etc.

We are part-time homesteaders, meaning we don’t raise enough to meet all of our food needs, nor do we work on homesteading to the exclusion of everything else. We have a garden, bees, and chickens not to feed us today—although it helps—but to boost our survival calories and food variety, and to complement our survival stores. I also do it to give me a trickle of income now and to be a source of barter after the SHTF.

If everything bad happens all at once, homesteading can scale. Fertilized chicken eggs can be hatched and the males eaten while the hens become layers, which is why we have a rooster and an incubator. Chicks can be sold or bartered so others can raise chickens and produce eggs. Pigs can be bred, producing 8 to 10 piglets, each of which can produce around 200 pounds of meat in about six months. Gardens can be expanded and seeds saved. My wife’s flower beds can grow sunflowers, and we can harvest the heads. My neighbor’s lawn can be dug up and planted with potatoes. We don’t have to have seven years’ worth of food in our storeroom if we can double our food production in year one and again in year two.

Prep While You Can

Like Bear, I continue to prepare in multiple ways. I recently posted about storing food in food buckets, and earlier this week I purchased four pounds of angel hair pasta to add to the pasta bucket that still had room in it. I haven’t made it to Sam’s Club yet, but oatmeal is on my list for another bucket. We now have a 10-by-20 foot storage unit to give us more space in our storeroom. This adds a bit of redundancy, and if someone bugging out here wants to pre-position supplies here, that can store them there.

Am I prepping because Bear says to? No, I’m prepping because I’ve been prepping since before Y2K. It’s my way of life. It doesn’t have to be yours, but it should be a small part of it.

Video of the Day

Here’s the video from Bear. I recommend watching the whole thing, becoming a subscriber, and reviewing some of his past work. If you want to jump to where he discusses “everything, everywhere, all at once,” that’s at about 19:19 in this video.

Be advised that Bear can take some getting used to, but when you do, you’ll get the inside jokes, understand what he means by “E-I-E-I-O,” and can be one of the cool kids.