Doomsday Preppers Week 10: Survivors and Ghosts
Lindsey and Ray are part of the urban agriculture movement, a movement that I personally support and encourage. Instead of getting all their food from the grocery stores (or worse, fast food restaurants) as too many Americans do today, they’ve taken to growing what they can, and seem to have embraced the relatively new concept of edible landscaping. They’re concerned about a collapse of the world agricultural system.
If you’re one of those people who wholeheartedly believes in global warming, stop sneering at Doomsday Preppers now; if global climate change really is upon us as some claim, then shifts in climate will lead to poor yields and even crops failures. Such shifts and the famines they caused are the most likely causes of the end of the Mayan and Egyptian empires, and affected us here in the United States to a lesser extent in the 1930s. Considering the massive shift from rural to urban lifestyles that has happened in the past 80 years, the overwhelming majority of us are reliant on a relative handful of American farmers.
Scared sober yet? Good.
In response to this threat, Lindsey has become an advocate for sustainable living, promoting her message through a call-in radio show to encourage her Idaho community to follow her lead.
While Lindsey focuses on promoting a sustainable lifestyle, her husband Ray is a former Marine intent on protecting Lindsey and their family from the rampaging hordes of starving people he expects to see if food supply collapses. He’s secured for the family a bug-out location with simple cabins and a deep well, far away from other people and stockpiled with four years of supplies, communications gear, their own agricultural supplies to continue growing their own food, and, of course, weapons. Why?
Due in part to Lindsey’s radio show, she and Ray are well-known as being the most-prepared among their friends and family. Some — who of course don’t believe in prepping themselves — have told Ray, “If the sh*t hits the fan, we’re coming over to your place.” Ray, AK-pattern rifle in hand with a 30-round clip in place, says rather convincingly that no, they will not. Therein, chillingly stated by Ray with his takes-no-nonsense eyes, lies the harsh reality of prepping told through the fable of the grasshopper and the ant.
If you prep, you might live. If you live improvidently, and do not prepare for bad times, do not expect others to save you.
While Ray and Lindsey won’t suffer the fools lacking the wisdom to amass skills, they do understand “safety in numbers,” and they’ve made the wise decision to ally with like-minded individuals in their area who are both physically fit and equipped with the necessary skills.
In this episode, they highlighted two new recruits to the team, both of whom are active duty military with good gun handling and small unit tactics. As the producers love to do, they carried out a practice bug-out and had the two recruits clear the bug-out location, encountering an unexpected surprise when they find the cabins occupied.
As always, the shows experts graded Ray and Lindsey’s preparations, and as usual, I disagree with their scores to a certain extent. Practical Preppers places Ray and Lindsey second of all preppers this season, behind prepper-inventor John Adrain from episode five, and while the score was was close, I don’t for a second believe that a single individual in late middle age relying heavily on electronic technology has a better chance of long-term survival over a highly skilled group with a deep reservoir of supplies, a relatively secure and remote location, deep agricultural skills, and military skills and discipline.
If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on Lindsey and Ray being the most well-rounded preppers featured in either season of the show.
Neither Jim D. nor his truck, nicknamed the “Behemoth,” are subtle when it comes to prepping, but then again, neither is the disaster he is preparing against.
Jim is preparing for the collapse of the power grid, and the social unrest that will follow. He’s one of many preppers featured on the show focused on this possible calamity, which ranks, if my memory serves, as the most prepped-for disaster this season behind a worldwide financial collapse, and with good reason. As fragile as financial markets are, the electrical grid and the computers on them are our world here in the information age. Everything we buy, sell, consume and replenish is dependent upon electricity, and the electrical grid that powers our world was thrown together in a haphazard way. It is poorly shielded against any sort of attack, from physical attacks on key physical equipment to electromagnetic discharges (natural or man-made) — or Jim’s primary concern, cyber-attacks.
Jim’s massive, 13-ton “Behemoth” is an MRAP-inspired rolling safehouse, with 1/2″ thick armored walls, and a multi-fuel engine with massive fuel tanks capable, he claims, of driving from Los Angeles to Nova Scotia on one tank of fuel. He’s spent $300,000 modifying this monster into what it has become, and frankly, I’m not sold on the concept.
While the family’s living compartment is armored, the rest of the vehicle doesn’t appear to be, and as it is most likely to be struck on the move if things really do go sideways, I think that constitutes a fatal design flaw.
Defensively, Jim is apparently resorting to tactics better suited to Hannibal’s elephants, riding on top of the vehicle, completely exposed, to fire at his presumed enemies. He claims to be a “security consultant,” but I have serious questions about what kind of security consultant he must be. I’m convinced he can’t be a physical security consultant, as anyone remotely aware of how frequently our soldiers in Iraq were sniped in vehicle turrets would be aware. A stationary shooter engaging an exposed moving target isn’t an ideal situation, but the opposite situation outside of extremely close range using stabilized firearms capable of laying down suppressive firepower (i.e., belt-fed machine guns capable of sustained fire) is darn close to suicidal.
Of course, the producers of Doomsday Preppers want to make the flaws in Jim’s defensive theory nakedly obvious, and so they set up a “demonstration” where he rides around on top of the “Behemoth” and shoots at targets for the camera. How does Jim fair?
Not too good.
Moving at most at 10 mph, Jim cleanly misses targets as close as 20-25 yards, posing no threat to to any opponent, while making himself little more than a carnival shooting target.
The experts from Practical Preppers give Jim 10 months, and I think they’re being generous. At 13 tons and poorly laid out as a fighting vehicle, I don’t expect Jim to outlast his first encounter with serious opposition if society falls apart.
There is more than one critic of Doomsday Preppers convinced that the subtext of the entire show is subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) mockery of the prepping lifestyle, and that the producers either seek out people who are certifiable loons to appear on the program or splice together dozens of hours of footage in such a way as to make the participants appear as dumb as possible when their 20 minutes of infamy air. If you subscribe to this theory and find it infuriating, simple turn off your computer and walk away now. I would, but I have to write this review.
Recognize the sacrifice, people.
Okay… I warned you.
Amanda Bobbin hears voices. This is normal for her, because Amanda claims to be psychic. Her husband Scott seems to have no problem with this at all.
Amanda never intended to be a prepper, but channeling the spirit of the former owner of her 51-room, 8,500 square foot mansion through automatic writing and her communications with the deceased “Greta” convinced Amanda and her husband Scott to become preppers.
“Greta” has also told Amanda that a comet is coming to hit the Earth. What mysterious force turns the “dear departed” into astronomers? No one will tell us.
It must be nice to be rich and insane.
At the very least, at least “Greta” is currently a benign insanity, and has merely “told” Amanda to open their home for survivors in the event her paranormal visions become reality.
Stunningly, Amanda Bobbin doesn’t have custody of her two teenage sons — I can’t imagine why — and the fun really starts when they come for a visit from Ireland, completely without a clue as to what awaits them.
The boys are awestruck as the Bobbins’ neighbors present them with sort of a housewarming present to start their preps, a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. The two Irish boys, being European beta-males, looked like they were about to wet themselves upon seeing the shotgun.
What does Scott do with his gift? He immediately points it cluelessly at his neighbor’s wife’s head. The young man presenting the gift says calmly, “Don’t point it at my mom.” I think he’s figuring out quickly he’s dealing with idiots.
The shock of her bed-wetting Irish spawn convinces Amanda that she needs to “come clean” about her new prepping lifestyle, “Greta,” the comet… 
It verges on sadism to film young men at the moment they realize (if they didn’t know already) that their mother is quite insane. The older son, Christopher, rather calmly points out that he thinks “scientists would be able to predict something like that. It’s not just going to come out of the blue.” The younger son, Jonathan, says he’s on board with prepping, but his body language suggests he’d rather be anywhere else.
Christopher walks out, causing Amanda to note, “He doesn’t think we’re rational.”
Really?
The experts give Amanda and Scott ten months of survival time. Since Amanda already communes with the dead, I’m not sure what the big deal is.
****
Check out the previous installments in Bob Owens’ ongoing critique of Doomsday Preppers:
I laughed at Mrs. Bobbin’s 16 year old son when he saw the shotgun for the first time. His mouth was wide open; he’s never been near a civilian with a gun. Oh the horror!! Those are daaangerous.
Mr. Bobbin, for his lack of experience, turned out to have a good aim.
The Global Warming Wife strikes me as bit goofy, which makes her seem unreliable. But she is prepared for an emergency and her husband seems solid enough to steer the group away from foolishness. I agree 100% with Bob about Truck Man. A few rounds through the engine and he’s no longer a moving target. And the Ghost Hippies? Wow. It wasn’t even a muzzle sweep. He stuck that shotgun right up her nose. And then when they loaded the thing for him to shoot he didn’t know if the safety was on. He’ll be a casualty of his own making pretty soon. But the wife. Wow. Imagine shaping your whole life around what a ghost tells you to do? Even worse, imagine your wife telling you it’s time for a radical life change cause the voices in her head command it. The leftover food from the last occupants looked ancient and mouse-infested. They have no skills or plans. And as Bob said, the Euro-commies turned their boys into eunuchs. And like Martha’s Vineyards hippies from a previous season they look forward to inviting strangers into their home once SHTF. Which is just inviting tragedy. Everyone watching in North Carolina is already planning to take their mansion by force. This couple does make it clear that the show’s aim is to ridicule serious and level-headed people responsible enough to prepare for emergencies.
When I heard them say they were going to let in everyone who came to their house, I thought for sure that would count against them when they were graded. It wasn’t even mentioned!
I don’t know much about the people grading but they seem focused on a very specific type of survival plan. Anyone who deviates from it is marked down. And anything that doesn’t directly hinder how much food or water you have stockpiled, like letting armed strangers into your house post-apocalypse, isn’t part of the calculation. So you’ll get a high score if you have to drive cross country in the middle of nuclear fallout as long as you’ve got plenty of supplies at your remote bunker. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The thing that gets me about this show (other then the “let’s find the biggest goofballs we can for each episode” issue) is why would any knowledgeable prepper prepare to keep himself and family alive during troubled times and them go on TV and advertise it? As a bit of a prepper myself (grew up planning to survive natural and man made disasters) the last thing I want to do is let everyone know where the food and ammo is located in the event of trouble.
Part of prepping is maintaining a low profile.
My concern would be not only alerting the t.v. audience but Homeland Security coming after my food and weapons. Surely they already know but I sure wouldn’t help them out.
As a one off (delete if you like) but the one guy, with the disguised face, has a distinctive tattoo on his right elbow. Long sleeves please, if you have arm tattoos.
As for the rest, the first segment is good, being able to farm is incredibly valuable. Loved that he’s not going to take in those unprepared. I put them at the top, along with the farmer from last week. Then I’d go with Snake.
As for truckman. Yeesh. I was screaming, “you’re a sitting target.” The glass in the cab looked like ordinary auto glass, though I can’t be sure. And what happens when you run out of fuel? Though the caches were a nice feature.
As for the last couple. You too noticed she didn’t have custody of her kids. From Ireland, where there is a lot of respect for the traditional family. If she lost custody, well that says a lot about her. And a comet that’s big enough to cause a 3000 foot tidal wave? Honey, that’s going to be another dinosaur extinction. With us as the dinosaurs. Not. knowing. the. first. thing. about. gun. safety. I woke my dogs up there I was so ticked off. My dad went over the safety rules before teaching me to shoot.
But any tv show needs to be entertaining. I don’t know if they are trying to portray preppers in a negative light so much as they need to get people to watch. A normal. 72 hour bag might make a nice 20 minute FEMA video, but how do you make a series out of it? I bet psychic lady does well in reruns ratings, which is what the producers want.
Get a 12 ga like the Vice Prez says: then you can assault and pepper the hoards of hungry dumbocrats.
The thing striking me as being omitted here is that no matter how well supplied and armed these individual planners may be, they are overlooking the sheer numbers of feral, hungry alpha-males who will be on the hunt….running in packs like dogs, literally the survival of the fittest.
They can be holed up in their isolated cabins with provisions, or inside their 300k dollar vehicles, but once a single hunter finds them, it’s only a matter of time, they’ll be overrun, slowly, then as the word is spread….more efficiently, like the Chinese human waves coming into South Korea…..does anyone remember that?
I thought not.
That’ll be the end of all of those Mason jars of preserved beans in the root cellar, or eventually sniffed out by the ravenous dogs running with their handlers.
These serial articles here are a balancing act juggling parody with tragedy.
The human waves occurred in Korea because there were a lot of them and their officers would shoot them if they didn’t. You won’t be facing huge brainwashed hordes in a STHF. Because, as you say, they will act more like a pack of predatory animals. Animals hunt easy prey. Shoot a wolf or two and the rest usually run off. Bandits are going to skip the fortified house surrounded with concertina wire and raid easier targets. You also won;t be facing those numbers. The Koreans could allow hundreds of men to die rushing a position because they had thousands more in reserve. Not so after SHTF. Those bands of ferals you mention have to get out of the cities first. And to do that they have to survive the other bands of ferals. They’ll feed on each other and turn the cities into killing fields. Few will make it to more remote areas of the country. I’m not sure what alternate solution to well fed, well supplied, well defended groups would be preferable to you.
Is there a psychological term for people who think about all the things that can go wrong instead of all the things that can go right?
My own layman’s term is that they’re nuts, playing at some stupid game instead of facing life. And any psychic is either a liar or nuts.
I could glean more wisdom and a more modern take on life from watching Boris Karloff intros on the old “Thriller.”
Yeah, a comet’s going to hit the Earth. Did she say what color it is?
What’s the psychological term for people who watch shows where they gain satisfaction from knowing they’re not as goofy as the people on the TV show?
To be fair an large asteroid will strike the earth. Just a matter of time. As for worrying about problems? Maybe they just want to be prepared for emergencies to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. You lock your door so no one invades and causes you harm. Why accept your preparation and not theirs? Because it’s of a greater magnitude? I was a scout growing up so I can’t laugh at people for wanting to be prepared. But they do make mistakes. Poor planning. Lack of training. Spending more than their budget allows. Straining personal relationships too far. But we don’t watch to laugh at them. At least I don’t. I watch to see what they are doing. Is it different? Is it wrong? What can I learn from it. And if they are crazy… a chuckle can’t hurt.
There’s a slight difference between me turning a lock on a door and spending days on end and thousands of dollars doing so. How many people would lock their doors if they were mandated to create a boot camp/militia they finance themselves?
Of course an asteroid or comet will hit the Earth. The idea someone knows when simply by thinking about it is lunacy. This show is a car crash, which has an endless fascination for people.
Not me. In fact there is little on TV that interests me. Half the programs seem to have NCIS in the title.
I think that this type of “reality TV” is really a kind of infomercial, designed to promote the sales of the sponsors’ products. In this peculiar case, the cultivation of an apocalyptic mindset seems to be good for the bottom line. However, this is not to say that sensible preparation for natural disasters is not worthwhile.
Those interested in apocalyptic events should become serious students of history. For example, a careful examination of the aftermath of the Roman Empire’s collapse, using reliable historical sources (of which today there a many), would undoubtedly be more informative than watching “preppers”.
I think such a study would highlight the crucial importance of concepts such as “the village”, “monastic community”, religion, morality, preservation of learning, bonds of charity (as opposed to the lone and selfish approach to survival), none of which seem to currently be on this infomercial’s agenda.
Groooooaaaannnn! — Mark VA
Dammmmmm! You beat me to it!
Here’s a good starter pasted-site showing siege tactics. It seems to me that these fortified retreats of these Doomsday Preppers are actually small scale castles with the usual vulnerability of a poisoned water supply and eventually running out of food, even if they grew their own season after season.
When The Arnold and Tom Cruise and Matt Damon have mustered their post apocalyptic feral buddies into squads, all they have to do is sit around their campfires while lining off the surrounding land after planting those handfulls of corn they’ve had in their rucksack……patiently surrounding these fortified and heavily armed redoubts smoking some sort of good stuff while the Prepper-inhabitants inside their bastions slowly starve or shrivel up from lack of water. It seems to me that Keanu will somehow show up having been on the solo prowl with his faithful lion[-ess ] companion.
The key words here is “surrounded or surrounding”, and “waiting”. Over t i m e, the Preppers are doomed inside their isolated fortification.
My friend Captain Google has this to offer here:
“Medieval Siege Tactics:
A castle was a well fortified building and when the gates were shut and the drawbridge was raised it was a very difficult place for attackers to get into. Medieval soldiers employed many tactics in their attempts to breach a castle’s defences. The term siege is defined as the action employed by an army of surrounding a fortified location cutting its inhabitants off from escape or resupply while being attacked.
The attackers, or besiegers, had several types of siege engines that they used in their attempts to break into a castle, but even with the strongest engine a siege could last months. The attackers sometimes had to wait until the defenders in the castle had run out of supplies and surrendered the castle.”
…asking forgiveness in advance for this terrible Post Script, suggest all readers here check out Capt. Google’s entry for “…Hoist on their own petard…” with illustrations.
To wit:
“Petard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Petard (disambiguation).
A petard, from a seventeenth century manuscript of military designs.
A 19th-century British army petard
A petard was a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications.”
Be careful….very very careful…..
….OK….permit my last…I promise….paste :
“The word petard comes from the Middle French peter, to break wind, from pet expulsion of intestinal gas, from Latin peditum, from neuter of peditus, past participle of pedere, to break wind; akin to Greek bdein to break wind. (Merriam-Webster) Petard remains a French word meaning a firecracker today (in French slang, it means a handgun, or a marijuana cigarette, and it is also the basis for the word for firecracker in several other European languages).”
OK…I’m gone.
The show may demonstrate extreme situations. The reality is we all need some type of preparation. No one should rely on the government to help them out. Take some responsibility for yourself.