Hundreds of new U.S. communities are cropping up with important physical centers—farms Reducing the sizes of private, single-family backyards. Offering instead anywhere from 5 to 300 acres of land for farming that benefits the entire community and neighboring ones. An outgrowth of the farm-to-table movement, this model for city planning is coming into a bumper […]
Survival prep isn’t only “bugging out” to the boonies A few months ago here on my ULTIMATE ERROR blog, I wrote about the burgeoning real estate submarket for disaster preppers. Perhaps not surprisingly, places like rural Montana and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado are leading the way. However, the capitalist cheer of “different strokes for […]
Government opportunists: “The world is dangerous! Do what we say, and we’ll help you.” The master-of-disaster governors of the U.S. states love nothing more than a photo op—except perhaps a sales-tax holiday. “Help people shop, and voters will beat a path to your door,” is their cynical motto. Of course, the pomp and circumstance requires […]
At the junction of fear and entrepreneurship, survival lessons for cash What isn’t a commodity in America today? Capitalism is a robustly effective economic system, yet, as forces of industry and government embark on ever-bolder experiments towards purer exercises of it, every solid, liquid, gas, and concept—corrupt or otherwise—is up for sale. Consider an article […]
The popular fantasy of “others” coming for you and your stuff The concept of a reanimated human corpse—a zombie—is said to have originated in Haitian folklore. Even today, especially in rural Haiti, grieving families sometimes believe that a mentally ill stranger wandering their village might be their deceased loved one come back to life. “The […]
On Saturday night, a 26-year-old man wearing body armor and armed with an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle and a .357 Magnum revolver drew the attention of a citizen at a Kentucky Walmart. Police were called, and they removed the occupants of the car (which also included a 19-year-old man, a 20-year-old woman, and a six-month-old infant) […]
Popular theme helps spread the message and the knowledge It was inevitable. The wildly contagious television show The Walking Dead has spawned educational, zombie-themed disaster preparedness programs. The multimedia guides, which include interactive elements come from the venerable Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquartered in Atlanta. What started as a tongue-in-cheek campaign to […]
Journalist’s reviews of prepper supplies prove comedy lives in strangest places Okay, first things first: disaster preparedness is most definitely serious business. That doesn’t mean we ought to take ourselves too seriously all the time, though, especially when “prep-sector” businesses give us good reasons to chuckle. Two weeks ago, a writer for the Washington Post […]
At some point, you’ve probably noticed Hollywood’s – and by extension moviegoers’ – fascination with apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic and disaster films. From Fire! (1901), to The Day of the Triffids (1962), to San Andreas (2015) and a thousand others in between, these films provide ready-made action (in the actual destruction) and the adrenaline rush of witnessing the scramble […]
A few days ago, right here on my ULTIMATE ERROR blog, I told you about several admirable disaster prep initiatives going on around the country. Well, the latest one to come to my attention really went big! The Tennessee National Guard held a disaster preparedness exercise recently which some participants called “one of the largest […]