Doomsday Preppers Week 7: Let’s Drown the Family
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “I’m preparing for an economic collapse that will lead to violent social unrest.”
Airing as the federal government technically went bankrupt and over the “fiscal cliff” it cannot possibly avoid or recover from, this episode, which featured preppers who are gearing up for an economic collapse of the U.S. government and the violent social unrest that will follow, now seems prescient. Our fiscal insolvency is finally starting to hit home with many Americans.
Dangerously, this comes at a time just weeks after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, CT, which Democratic politicians are using as a cudgel to push for extremely wide-ranging gun control and confiscation. The single most powerful newspaper in the United States—which is deeply in bed with the Obama regime—has published an editorial calling for the destruction of the Constitution. Another newspaper published an editorial calling for the brutal murders of Republican leaders by dragging them to death behind vehicles.
Americans have responded to this threat from the federal government by purchasing firearms at unprecedented levels. Local gun stores have sold out of even World War-era rifles, and the nation teeters on the edge of rebellion.
Prepping for “violent social unrest” is now incredibly real to many Americans for the first time.
All the preppers this season who have prepared for this eventuality — which are roughly half of the show’s participants this season — are no doubt on high alert. And who can blame them?
Reality television is on the cusp of becoming a horrible reality.
Bryan Smith, the son of a sharecropper who once shot a man in self-defense, saw the worst coming and came up with a plan to not just survive it, but to help rebuild from the ashes afterward. He saved money from his successful lamination business and invested it in 47 acres of land in central Florida.
One of the crops he intends to grow on his compound is sugar cane, which he’ll use not so much for sugar as for the alcohol that can be distilled from it. Lower levels of distilled alcohol can make a crude rum for barter, while more highly refined and concentrated alcohol can be used as fuel for a generator Bryan has refined to run on his home-brewed eco-fuel. He intends to use the generator to run a well that will pump 2,400 gallons an hour from the Florida aquifer.
Interestingly, Bryan can’t grow fuel for his diesel tractor, but thinks he’s found a way to steal fuel in a novel way. Electrical transformers hold gallons of mineral oil as a coolant, and Bryan intends to raid these to collect fuel for his tractor. I’m sure he’s not the first to have come up with this idea, which means a crashed electrical grid that will be that much harder to resurrect as critical infrastructure is cannibalized for short-term gains.
Bryan has also spent $100,000 on the equipment and components to reload ammunition. He has the gear to turn out hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition. The question is, how does he keep it from being turned against him?
As you would expect, Bryan is also loaded for bear when it comes to guns, and sadly, he’s wasted money on crappy “AOW” or “any other weapon” devices like pen guns and cane guns. If I ever become rich, someone remind me to simply practice with the guns I have to become more proficient, not fritter it away on gimmicky solutions.
In addition to all his above-ground prepping, Bryan has dropped a cool $150,000 on a 500 square-foot underground bunker from his friend Ron Hubbard at Los Angeles-based Atlas Survival Shelters.
It’s nice when you have the money for such elaborate prepping, spending hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on acres of land, elaborate systems, and purpose-built and high-end custom solutions, and this season of Doomsday Preppers has featured quite a few multimillionaire preppers like Bryan. Sometimes, though, I have to question their motives.
Are the producers of the show attempting to turn it into Prepping Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous as a way of showing what someone can do if he has tons of cash and plenty of fear? Or are they attempting to assert that it isn’t worth even trying to prep if you don’t have cash to burn? Intended or accidental, a show that focuses so squarely on the filthy rich segment of the prepping market may have the effect of convincing less-wealthy individuals that trying to put things aside for bad times is beyond their reach. Unintended consequences? I’ll leave you to decide. 
Christine H. is a suburban housewife in Virginia Beach terrified of the possibility of a mega tsunami — specifically, the collapse of an active volcano in the Canary Islands 3,500 miles away. She fears a wall of water hundreds of feet high moving 500 MPH will scour the Eastern Seaboard down to bedrock.This is utterly insane and based upon junk science for a bad BBC TV show, but whatever: it’s television, not real life.
Oh, wait…
She’s dedicated considerable amount of time organizing, cataloging, and sub-categorizing everything in her garage she’s put together in her prepping, and appears more than a little OCD.Protip™: Load the trailer, not your shelves, and leave it in the garage. If the kaka hit the air circulation device, you back up the van, hook it up, and you’re gone in minutes. That, of course, makes way too much sense, and will not work for the OCD types that like to re-catalog and re-organize everything constantly.
Christine’s backup plan for if the roads are too congested?
Inflatable rafts.
Two hours after beginning their bug-out plan, Christine dumps her family into a tributary off the Intracoastal Waterway paddling at just 1.5 miles per hour. There will be no deliverance for these rafters. After all the time, effort, and money she’s spent preparing, she’s only managed to find a more scenic place to drown her entire family.
Luckily, Christine’s disaster has very little chance of occurring, and most of her prepping translates well for more sane concerns.
****
Related at PJ Lifestyle:
Amish Mafia: When Reality TV Finally Jumped the Shark
Check out Bob Owens previous critiques of Doomsday Preppers:
Next week’s show promises to be a real kicker, as they are supposed to show people building castles.
The first guy’s hunting and fishing skills are helpful, but yeah, shooting transformers is just going to further degrade society.
What I find really troubling is not poor skills/reasoning/lack of real preparedness; but rather that preparing for societal collapse seems to be becoming mainstream. Have we really lost faith in this country?
Not the country, the corrupt and malevolent leadership. The TV guys are prepping for Mad Max. Red Dawm and Wiemar Republic is more lilely. The main chance is to restore the Constitution and sound money. Iceland went bankrupt and is coming back.
With the luck of Murphy, that mope will shoot up a transformer and fill his tractor with Askarel.
I am highly amused by people who have a bugout plan for something that will give them hours of warning at best, and a hidey hole 200 miles away.
Escape for a while?…..to where?, specifically? …..what will you do when your carried supplies run out?…..you can only carry so much.
You can run only so far. Then you have to scavenge, then you become feral…an animal. Time WILL run out.
I’d rather keep on hand some fast-working lethal pills.
See if you can find that excellent old movie, “On The Beach”. Takes place in Australia, if I remember correctly. Chilling.
….pasted here from Captain Google:
“On the Beach (1959) is a post-apocalyptic drama film directed by Stanley Kramer and written by John Paxton, based on Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel of the same name and starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins.
Stanley Kramer won the 1960 BAFTA for best director and Ernest Gold won the 1960 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Score. The film was remade as an Australian television film by Southern Star Productions in 2000.”
There’s always the northern Yukon. It is possible to live there. Of course that’s assuming the disaster doesn’t bring a nuclear winter and a new ice age with it. It might be fun spending every day for the rest of your life trying not to freeze and trying to find enough food to live a little longer.
Many choose to “bug-in”, staying in place. This show only shows the lunatic fringe of the movement. I got into because FEMA suggested that we store food and water for several days (this was right after 9-11). One doesn’t accurately prep for a particularly disaster, just likely ones. I think this country is in dire danger from this government and will continue to prep.
they will be better off in a raft than last episode’s lost in manhattan folks
Tsunami? Better escape by raft.
On next week’s episode – man attempts to escape a hurricane by hanglider
During the cold war people built underground bomb shelters in Central Florida. I never heard of any that didn’t flood.
I’ve never watched the show. Other than buying a bit of camping gear that I’ll use if society never collapses, I haven’t prepped for anything. I live in a major city. In any direction there are a million or so people between me and open countryside. If there is a plague, I’ll succumb. If there’s a nuclear holocaust, I’ll be part of the mushroom cloud. If it’s zombies, I’ll be a zombie too. If we’re all fighting for food, I’ll run out of ammo then starve and die…
In the movies there are always those few dozen that survive whatever disaster—a few dozen out of hundred-millions. Pretty bad odds.
Awwww, that’s not a very positive outlook at all, lol! Are you saying survival will be like playing the lottery? Well, you do have to play to have a chance at winning. I say move to a southern state, and a rural part of it, and you’ll definitely increase your chances of survival. Buy some property surrounded by self-sufficient neighbors that have arsenals (you’ll know this as everyone’s favorite weekend pasttime involves making the “neighborhood” sound like World War III).
I see a tenporary disruption in food transport stemming from a disruption of fuel due to worthlrss currency. Many people in Spain have not been paid in months but they still go to work cause they are needed. Farms are being looted but food is still moving to cities. Our biggest threat is a totalitarian takeover by Lord Obama and his goons. I suggest we all need, at minimum, a month’s supply of food, a gun, ammo, and enough silver to get past the currency / credit collapse. Good neighbors are better security than a bunker. Remember the Korean store owners of LA.
Also make plans to have on hand a long-term currency should gold and silver not be as available. You can’t eat gold and silver. But people will definitely want alcohol, tobaccao, food, meds, necessary items like socks, warm clothing, staples/luxury items sugar, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, etc. Think 1800′s general store.
You can eat gold but it’s a stinky job retrieving it. Chocolate would make a better edible currency.
The real danger will be the collapse of the value of the dollar by the continuing Trillion dollar deficits and The rising amount of unfunded entitlement programs.
The temporary solution by the do nothing Congress and our Community organizer President is to print Trillions upon trillions of dollars with no value to compete for the necessities of life.
This path to hyper inflation will lead to anarchy and civil unrest when the Government no longer subsidize the takers This will lead to the down fall of this once great country
i think you overestimate the effects of hyper-inflation.
i have live in brazil for the past 30 years and experienced more than a decade of hyper-inflation (>1000% per annum) late 80′s and early 90′s.
it was bad, most people were really poor (still are, though stlightly less).
crime rates are ridiculously high.
still there never occured a general collapse of civilization (true, the slums are off-limit to most authorities, but hey, its less than a third of the population, and they weren’t much better before the hyper-inflation anyway)
most people went normally to work every day. there was no generalized famine.
the only time when we really feared not being able to buy food was when the government tried price control for a change. fortunately it didn’t last long and was aleviated by the existence of black markets.
if the dollar suddenly loses 99,9% of its value, i doubt a bunker or a buch of guns would help much…
you’ll probably just become what the rest of the american continent already is.
hope you like caipirinhas.
The Continental dollar and the Confederate dollar went bust and we came back. We will have to defeat a communist take over this time.
Food, water and water purification gear, ammo, meds/bandages, weapons, simple construction level hand tools and lots of whiskey as barter find a quiet place on your property and dig a bunker that’s made of cement bag walls cover it with plastic sheet and a metal roof covered in sod.
Bring a hand pump and a chemical toilet.
Go to ground and don’t come up to look around for two or three weeks.
Tsunami’s are not usually made entirely of water and floating on waves of debris is at best impossible.
“I never heard of any that didn’t flood.” In the sandy hills of Florida many did not flood. With the warm temps and high humidity, however, many of them became gopher tortoise like homes to all sorts of friendly critters. Rattlesnakes, rodents, roaches, Coral Snakes, mold, fungus, etc.
After they filled in the swamps, the poor critters had to live somewhere.
Bush-Era Wiretapping Case Killed Before Reaching Supreme Court BY DAVID KRAVETS 01.03.13
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/bush-wiretapping-case-killed/
There are so many reasons we need to all get prepared. I recommend having a basic 72 hour survival kit for each member of your family. Make sure you can easily take it with you if you need to leave in a hurry. When you have accomplished making your first survival kit then work on some more long term goals. Start with a 2 week supply of food and water. Make an emergency plan for your family and have designated places to meet in case you can’t return home. Also if you have a pet make an emergency kit for them. Preparation begins with you and not the government.
The castle was a joke. Completely indefensible and walls that wouldn’t take anything. All that guys has is a building that looks castle-like.
If you want to build a castle, spend a little time studying how they’re built, and the reasons they’re built that way.