Gardening as education and prep

As much as we complain and panic, the S has not HTF yet. It is the same old world that we have been living in but with higher costs. I recognize that this is going to change, but God only knows when.

With that in mind, I think that it is extremely important to have a small vegetable garden right now, not too big, not too small. Don't worry excessively about the size, or yield or canning the stuff. Just learn how to work the soil and what plants like your plot. Get an idea of the rhythm of the year. Figure out with this garden what pests you have, what weeds you are going to have trouble with, heck, what tools you need to make the garden work without breaking your back.

This is your "going to college" garden. Because, lets face facts, your garden isn't going to save your life this year if chaos descends and the world goes to hell tomorrow. This is your chance to learn how to garden the year after the SHTF.

There are skills that you can acquire, gardening is one of them. The fresh veggies will do you good and the mental cleansing of pottering about in a garden is good for these high stress times. But more important as a prepper, you have to start developing skills that will make your life better in a rougher and less resource rich America. In a chaotic environment, yield in a garden can be phenomenal (I would wager you could easily get a couple of hundred pounds of potatoes out of a back yard).

In my opinion, the skills that you can take time to develop now are going to serve you as well if not better than the stores of food or number of guns or ounces of gold. All of these things will all be useful, but skills are not as easy to count in your basement, so please, please make sure that you don't neglect your skills.

Nothing better for your humility

Searching for jobs sucks.

I had a good run at unemployment, and the benefits fully fund my low-cost lifestyle, but I am beginning to get a little nervous now because the job market is in a serious hurt. When I started the benefits 24 weeks ago, I figured that I was in great shape to get a job. After all, I had been employed continuously for the last 18 years, how hard could it be?

Actually, I was cocky enough to think that I didn't want to push too hard at first. Since the benefits exceeded my costs, in my mind I was looking at 30 weeks of vacation. To be honest, it has been a relaxing balm to my spirit not slaving for the man for a wee bit.

But now the economy is getting flushed, and the job market is tighter than a crooked cop's asshole when he is placed in jail. I think that any job will be good right now, so my standards have dropped to effectively zero in the past weeks. Getting into one of the few productive jobs left in the country would be great. If push comes to shove, even a government job will do just fine thank you.

But I don't for a minute think that the job that I will be getting will last until my retirement (such as it is). I think that ongoing scrambling is going to the norm for the future. The rate of change in our society and our economy is going to be staggering. To expect that you will quietly reside in a grey-flannel suit job is wishful thinking of the highest order.

Keep flexible folks, pay attention and keep your wits about you. be prepared to make jumps. Do not always plan for a huge change and a huge jump, but be equally prepared for a series of small, tactical jumps to keep you safe and thriving.

The trouble with change is no one knows how it is going to come at you.

Be careful out there

Turning off the cell phone

More and more, I have been viewing my cellphone with distaste. The damn thing is little more than a leash. People can get hold of me anywhere, and frequently do. I admit, I thought that it was cool when I first got it. I even remember being so goofy as calling my mother to announce that I was sitting on the great wall of China.

But now, watching what they have become, I am more and more repulsed by the invention. All races, creeds, and colors are affected by it. Use is endemic and rude. Moronic husbands wander down the aisle at the grocery store asking their wives what they should buy. Women appear to have the things grafted into their ear when they are in cars.

I think that it adds to the accelerating atomization of American life. When you can stay in constant contact with you little clique, there is no need to interact with anyone. You can have a life that is:

1. your house
2. your car
3. your work

The rest of society can just go hang.

But (and this is my tin foil hat side speaking), I really don't like they way that the phone company necessarily knows where I am at any point in the day if I carry it around with me while it is turned on. I think that they have the ability to locate you within 500 meters with a standard cell phone, they know exactly where you are with a GPS equipped phone.

So I recorded a new message yesterday, told the folks calling me that it is off and to call me at home if they need me. I'll carry the cell phone turned off and turn it on if I need to speak with someone or there is an emergency.

I'll let you know how it works out.

Having a bit put aside

I am amused with the commercial where you see people walking around with a paper mache number that describes the amount of money they need to retire the way that they want. I am amused because they are big numbers. Folks want to retire with 2-3 million in the bank according to these commercials. Wow.

This is a sign that the greed and desires of the bourgeois is way out of line. 20 years of retirement is pretty standard before you get to talk to St Peter. Two million means around 150,000 a year for your "golden years". Man, if you got that much saved you are a champ.

But the cold reality is, most of us Lumpen types won't have that kind of money. The dot com boom wiped out quite a bit and the upcoming slump/crash/slide/boom will take care of a lot more. And the folks who get social security will be the early ones in, that trough is already pretty empty and not going to be filled. Couple that with the way inflation is setting us up to put less aside to to take care of trivial things like gasoline and food and you have a scenario when we will be working a lot longer into our lives than we originally thought.

Its OK, this dream of a happy motoring retirement has only been a recent delusion. We are all reasonably healthy and we will be working until 65-70. Plan on it. It won't be bad though, you will not drive your wife crazy this way, you will have something useful to do instead of sucking your gum's and reminiscing about the good old days. You will be a useful and contributing member of society instead of demanding overfed parasite.

Looking in a mirror every morning won't be nearly so difficult.

Nuttin' too heavy

One of my favorite pastimes is looking at the differences between reality and government statistics. Perhaps I should say the difference between statistics and reality in general.

Being one of the statistical sampling in unemployment (yes, I am taking an unemployment check, and yes it is running out), I see the guvmint sez that we are sitting at a 4% unemployment rate. Well, from the best that I can tell, we are actually sitting between 9% and 13%. It seems that if you run out of unemployment benefits, magically you are no longer unemployed.

So, if I don't get a job in the next seven weeks, then my unemployment benefits run out, and voilà I am no longer unemployed according to the government.

I feel better

How can you not love this scene

The movie isn't really all that good.  Faye Dunaway never did anything for me and Robert Redford is a Liberal Wienie who claims environmental credentials and then builds ski resorts in pristine canyons.

But this scene is a great one for those of us in the tin foil hat crowd.   It was prescient in a manner few films show.  The population growth and the frenetic rates of natural resource extraction during the last thirty years have set the stage to where the "Higginses" of the world will have greater and greater impact.  The lumpen here in the US is going to start to see some shortages and pain in the next while.  Some folks see the crisises beginning now, I see the game beginning in four to six years.

The sad part about it is that it is inevitable.  This bald statement makes me unamerican in the most fundamental way.   We have built the mythos of the American as a "can-do" positive mental attitude society who change the world to what they wish.  According to this mythos, Americans are not subject to the dead hand of the past, our special relationship with God allows us to operate outside of the past.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
                                            -- Mark Twain

The words I think that we will be rhyming with are from three different stanzas:

• The Roman Empire under Diocletian and the crisis of the third century
• The Thirty Year's War
• The late Ming dynasty and the effects of the thoughts of Yangming Xiansheng

Since this is Memorial Day weekend, I am going to put off discussions of these until the next time.  I have to wash clothes and get a barbeque ready.  I trust that everyone will spend this weekend in a happy and productive manner, summer is almost here.

See, we are doing stuff that is good for us too!

Since it is always good to have solid evidence to support ones vices, I am putting this out there as a public service.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-healthy-type

Handy for preppers

Hey: Just a thing I ran across (google is watching me)

Click the image and It'll take you to the site.

Handy

An old story

I regularly read some "prepper" blogs and enjoy them greatly. Sometimes they go a little farther than I would go, but who is to say that they are wrong?

The way you look at TEOTWAWKI is critical to your survival I think. Things are going to get hairy, but that has been true of any interregnum. I personally enjoy Dmitry Orlov's take on the whole thing. The Soviet Union took a hit a Russia is a smaller, more dangerous place than it once was, but it is getting better and it is far more democratic that the Soviet Union it replaced. What most folks forget is that we have seen this movie before and most of the players get through. Most of us will get by in the next twenty years, but the world and the USA will be greatly changed.

So, continue to prep, but remember that the purpose of the prepping is to rebuild. The preparations that you make are not just so that you spend the remaining days of your life peering down a gunsight at the looters, but rather, they are to rebuild a system that is capable of thriving in a changed world.

Prepare for the coming fall. Be a good neighbor. Learn a useful craft. Grow a garden. Give to charity. Buy a bum a drink.

Prep for what you want the world to become and start working for it now.

A rainy, non paranoid post

The trouble with living in the Pacific Northwest is that you really do get sick of rain sometimes. Now I realize that Memorial day weekend has always been a bit of a bummer, probably more barbeque's and picnics have been rained out than have gone off in my lifetime, but the expectation is still there. I want the sun.

But pretty soon we will be in the great time of the year, June through October is why you live here. It is cool and green, the skies are blue, and life is good. So I have to keep my eyes on the prize and remember that the summer is here soon.

Life is good.

A Delicious Irony

Have you ever noticed that we say "In God We Trust" on mammon?

And you wonder why I like Dmitry

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/03/two-step-to-empire.html

Living Arrangements

The recent spike in oil past $135/barrel and the subsequent rise in gas price past $4.00 has brought a veritable storm of folks out there screaming the world is coming to an end.

In 1991 I moved to a small town in Eastern Washington up by the Canadian border. Since the closest movie theatre was across the border, we had regular visits across to watch films and indulge in poutain (take a mess of real french fries--cover with cheddar cheese, either melted or grated and then melt it. And now the crowning glory-thick home made Brown gravy--and some folks even use a dollop of ketchup as topping).


So, getting back to the idea at hand. We would pass the gas stations in Canada and see that they we selling gas for about a sixty cents a liter and wonder how they managed with that cost.
We never did find out, but the point here is that they did. Canada has alway has gas prices about 70-100% higher than ours and they get along just dandy. Four dollars a gallon isn't going to kill us. Hell, eight dollar a gallon gas ain't gonna kill us. It will just make us do all the things that we probably ought to have done a long time ago.

I am not supporting Barak. I think that he is a slick Chicago machine politician with the morals of Bill Clinton and the mindless ambition of John Kennedy. But he told the truth of it when he said this;

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,"

Now what other counties think about us is worth about as much as a bucket of warm spit. That part of the statement is absurd on its face and should elicit all of the ridicule and contempt that it so richly deserves. The first three points are salient.

Look it up folks, the US produces 3% of the world oil supply. Even if we drilled like madmen, sticking a "rockin' donkey" in every back yard, we might be able to double our output, bringing us to 6% of the world's oil supply. The trouble is, we use around 24% of the oil.

We can't afford to live like this folks. The end of the world isn't coming, but the bill collector is.

All this wasted time

Guys...I am so depressed :{

http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

Usury

In the dark past, usury has been considered a social anathema. Christianity forbade the practice of lending for interest until 1545 (Henry VIII was a mess) and even Martin Luther and John Calvin found the practice repellent. Plato, Aristotle, Cato, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Thomas Aquinas, Muhammed, Moses, Philo, and the Buddha all were opposed to the practice.

I have a tendency to believe that this is really the root of most of the problems that we are going through now in the United States. All states have usury laws, but in 1980, the Congress, in it's never ending quest to line their own pockets and help the pig-fucking bastards in the banking industry gave the big banks the right to ignore the law. That is why you see N.A. after banks names. It is a federally approved tattoo that says, "we can fuck you as hard as we please".

There is a website that lists each states usury rates, when you read them you will laugh hysterically.

My point is this: At the end of the day, the problems we are facing are the consequences of greed at all levels. Greed of the lumpen to have more than they can afford, greed of the middle class to retire like nobility, greed of the banks, greed of the corporations, greed of the rich.


Gordon Gecko was wrong. Please, lets everyone remember that he was the bad guy.

Pickup trucks and IQ

One of the real changes that I have seen recently (lets say after Y2K) is that the nature of home building sites has changed.

Back in the old days, I seem to remember that the home construction sites were populated with older trucks that folks considered their "work trucks". These beasts were held together with baling wire and bubble gum and served as a tool that helped them make money. I can't imagine that they had a monthly debt attached to them.

Now when you go by a construction site, the place looks like an annex of a car dealership that specializes in men who are compensating for something. Everything is extended cab, leather interiors are common, four years old is ancient.

Now, if my memory serves me correctly, one of the big reasons that the oldsters kept these beat up, paid off trucks was because they knew that work would be thin in the future. They didn't want the banks breathing down their necks at a later date. Now, I wonder how many of these truck that's are out on the few remaining job site are going to vanished from their owners driveway some Sunday morning, with the neighbors explaining it was a couple of men in coveralls

Versailles and Higher State Taxes

When one strolls through the gardens at Versailles, one of the last ideas that goes through your mind is "Wow, what a nice prison". But when you spend some time thinking about it, you begin to realize that maybe there is some merit in that thought.

The Sun King built Versailles as much as a palace as to provide a place for the nobility of France to congregate under his control. Over time, the perks and decadence of Versailles crippled the nobility and allowed Louis Quatorze to keep the nobles at heel in a guilded cage.

The nobles passed the running of their once independent estates to caretakers and ran toward Versailles much in the same way that a moth runs toward a flame (and with about the same results). With Versailles, Louis managed to concentrate the power of France into a singular state. The nobles power was reduced to to little more than a dab hand at fashion and lechery.

The lessons here in America are similar, but there is no architectural marvel to behold, Our Versaille is built into the money that streams from Washington to fund everything from education to sewer treatment plants to police forces.

This funding has emasculated state governments, making them little more than deputy accountants and ten percent skimmers. States are not really allowed to have an opinion anymore, when they try to express one, the money starts to dry up and the screaming starts.

But, we may be starting down the path to things righting themselves. The Bush Presidency, through it's relentless and pathological fixation on accruing power may well have set the nation on a course where the States can take back their power. Like Louis, they have bankrupted the nation, and with the loss of this money, comes the loss of power. States will be left to their own devices in order for the federal government to pay for its excesses.

So now it is time for States to begin to rebuild their independence. They need to establish what their needs are and start self funding their needs. They need to begin refusing the unfunded mandates from Washington. They need to set their tax structures and duties in a manner that they can keep going when Washington collapses.

Because remember my friends, while Louis XIV built Versailles, it was his successor, Louis XV who said:

“Après moi le déluge”

Have fun Barak

Gotta figure out planting tomatoes

Well, all the tomatoes are dead...They were spindly to begin with and now they are all desiccated little memories. Sigh, now I have to go and try to find some plants instead. I'd wander down to the farmers market, but the city has arranged for it to be a magnet for dumbass yuppies with too much money to burn, so the prices are ridiculous.

The rest of the garden is doing reasonably well, the carrots are being slow, but that is just the way it is. The potatoes are coming in well and I will be adding a second tire to the stacks soon. I think that I will try to grow the potatoes in straw as I mound them up.

Today will be the day that the boys will be learning to weed the garden. I hope that the death toll is not too high. I shy away from the temptation to to spout the dreaded "when I was your age line", but it comes close sometimes. If I talk honestly with my mom, she reminds me that I was much the same way and from her experience, boys are genetically predisposed to running around like maniacs and avoiding all possible instances of work.

Who's going to get through easier?

Who I am starting to pity is the "strong-independent women" who populate the corporate landscape. They have excellent role models and a sense of entitlement to the fruits that the society can provide. In a just world, women would be moving up into a society where 50.4% of all jobs and income would accrue to women.

But shit man, we don't live in a just world. We live in a world that is getting stickier and stickier and everyone is going to have to do with quite a bit less.

For the most part, women have steered themselves into the finance, service, and marketing sectors. They aren't for the most part welders or engineers or carpenters. These areas are gonna suck big time in the near future. A person had better be able to put in a day of work, not a day on the telephone networking.

This isn't to say that there aren't drone males out there. Actually, there are far too many of them, but the drones are going to lose the biggest chunk out of their incomes and egos. How you dress and your phone skills are going to count a lot less than delivering the goods. And a whole lot of women and men have built lifestyles and self images around their looks and smooth talk.

I just don't know how much longer this will last.

A Whimper

Getting back to the theme of TEOTWAWKI. What I see coming up is a drop off in several stages. There will be three stages and we are around halfway through phase one.

Phase One

This is when we shift over from abundance and having an excess of everything to a system where there is enough but it will have to be controlled and well-distributed to make sure that everyone gets their share. The big box stores will try to control this distribution network and centralize the profits, but the truth of the matter seems to be that with fuel costs at a high and likely to stay high, the "warehouse on wheels" is due for a fall. We will struggle mightily to re-develop a system of local distribution and merchandising, but there will be some pretty wide holes and there will be serious inflation and occasional shortages. Figure this phase to last for two or three more years.

Phase Two

This is where the fun will really start. I am assuming here that Peak Oil is a reality. It is about here that we will start back the other side of the oil supply curve. Couple this with the rest of the world demanding their share of the pie and the cost and availability of fuel and heat will start becoming seriously constrained. America will begin having shortages in a fairly serious manner and the Lumpen will start getting frisky. I see the beginning of societal unrest here as the Haves of the baby boom start retiring and sucking money out of the system and the rest of the country begrudge them the right to take more than their fair share.

The local governments will start stepping up here. They will start demanding that Washington do something, but by this time Washington is broke so the local governments will start implementing local solutions. Some of these solutions will not be thought well of by the Kumbaya crowd.

Taxes will start going through the roof as you gotta start paying off the bills. Folks are going to be pissed and they will start pushing back against taxes in a big way. I figure Washington will cave and then start running the printing presses. It ain't gonna be Weimar, but it ain't gonna be pretty.

I figure this phase will be from around 2010 to around 2016. You gotta give me a little slack on either side, this ain't an exact science you know.

Phase Three

This is the stage where there isn't enough to go around. Folks will have their saving evaporate and the investments collapse. Getting around is going to become and issue and getting manufactured stuff and food is going to become problematic. Some hunger and some serious social unrest here my friends. This is when bullets start flying. Keep you head down and stay safe. Have some getaway money put aside, and have a way to put some miles between you and the crazies.

Required Viewing

Local Government

I think that when things start getting shaky, it will be interesting to watch the actions of local governments in the US. For the most part, these are pretty good folks, they are worried about the things that really matter like police and fire, water and sewer, and sweeping the streets.

The fall will be hard on them, but I think that this is where you will see both the best and the worst of America. Some of these folks have no tools to do the job and will be miserable failures. These will be the folks that ensconced themselves in order to help their development companies grow the useless subdivisions and strip mall that ate their farmlands.

Some will grow into the job, and "get 'er done". They will have a rough row to hoe and will probably have a pretty good reason to be proud of themselves.

Some will shine.

But at the change, these are the folks who will husband us through the change. The state capitals will be worse than useless. I predict that most of their time will be spent trying to reclaim their perquisites and serving the corporations who have no intention letting off the butt-fucking of the American people.

Grey Men

The group of folks that will have the most problem in the world to be will be the grey men that inhabit corporate America. Good little boy who have spent the last 25 years of their lives toiling for their corporate master and waiting expectantly for their "Golden Years" reward of golf and loafing.

Bummer for them dude. They will be finding out soon just how much store the big corporations put into the promises of a happy retirement that they handed out so freely. What we will have is a group of sad, pathetic losers who donated the best years of their lives on an IOU that no one has any intention of honoring. They will be sixty year old men with few prospects, a social security card, a bunch of shattered illusions, and not really that much they can do about it.

You gotta remember that revolution is a young mans game. The youngsters will be sharpening their knives when they found out how bad they have been screwed, they are going to have a completely different set of goals than protecting the grey men's constitutional right to 18 holes a day.

Good luck man, you and all of your excess baggage are going to have a hell of a time of it.

The Old Blog

I can't for the life of me remember why is is I have two blogs (actually three, but that is beside the point).

Here is the address for the old one.

http://timurlane.blogspot.com/

What to do with the Boomers

The six-hundred pound gorilla in the room is the 7o million or so boomers that are infesting the culture. Probably more than any cohort in the history of the country, this self-absorbed and demanding group will do everything that they can to suck the remaining marrow out of the American economy in order to provide for the overstuffed retirements that they feel are their right.

It will never occur to them that theirs is the generation that engineered Enron, the dot-com crash, and the housing boom. They are the generation that presided over the gutting and outsourcing of America and the systematic underfunding of everything you can think of for the rights to lower taxes and marble countertops.

A great first step to the healing of America would be to let this mass of narcissistic vomit sway in the breeze. They have done nothing exceptionally telling in their lives, let them continue to work until they get it right. Let them work until the social security fund is paid off and fixed. Raise their taxes until the national debt is paid down. They ran the society in a manner that they took the good shit and stiffed the kids with the bill and now they are bankrupt. They need to keep working to help us get out of this mess.

Excellent

Raising sons is a treat. Yes, they are ungodly noisy, have the attention span of a gnat, and leave a mess everywhere, but the truth of the matter is, the joy of raising them far exceeds the irritation that they cause. I wouldn't have it any other way.

They Hate Our Way of Life

The politicians are forever beating on the Muslim world for hating our way of life. We my friends, I will take a wild guess here but I think that us folks here in the US are starting to take a serious look at our "Way of Life" and are getting more and more disillusioned about it.

To be honest, it appears to me that the US is not so much a country as a peculiar economic agreement where everyone tries to take as much as they can and give back as little as possible.

Who do we think we are

We have a problem defining who we are here in America.  We tend to idealize our past and ourselves. We think we descended from the folks coming over on the Mayflower, when there is a better chance we descended from an indentured servant transported for theft.   We claimed manifest destiny to civilize the continent but slaughted anything between us and what we wanted.  We won WWII through the valiant efforts of Patton, McArthur, and Eisenhower, but the main thing we did is made sure the Russians had plenty of bullets to kill Germans.

Look at us now. We are shocked and aghast when Belichik cheats at a stupid game, but Mozillo and his ilk steal 100 million or so and they are captains of industry.

We gotta get our shit together. 

Gotterdammerung?

Ragnarok, Armageddon, Kalki, Tonatium

Why is it we are so intent on a the end of days. TEOTWAWKI is a great step down from these. I think that mankind will do out with a whimper, not a bang.

As your half-insane local survivalist guru, I am here to tell you that you don't really need to be out hell and gone away from the cities, or have a bunker to hunker down into. What you need is a healthy dose of common sense, a couple months of food, a way to purify water, and a multi-purpose gun or two.

If it is the end of days, fuck it, lets party. No amount of planning will make the post holocaust world worth living in. Survival for survival sakes is the mark of an animal willing to gnaw his own leg off in a trap.

What I propose that we survive is a transition from the high-test, uber-concentrated world of today. Peak oil is a very likely subject and the ability to forge a life using much less energy than now will be a major portion of the test for survival.

Up here in the NW we have the Columbia River for water and power, we probably aren't going to be in too bad of shape for daily bread. So we will have to figure out how to do without Chevy's (Both types), learn to garden and preserve food, cook at home, and walk to work.

I sincerely doubt that the general populace of the United States will turn into the reavers of the "Firefly" series. Oh, cops will be overworked, rich fucks are gonna be taxed heavily, and everyone will eat lower on the food chain, there might even be nights when children will go to bed hungry, but no huge problems, just living like the rest of the world.

Whither Survivalists?

“Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.”

—George Carlin

In a way, the title survivalist is kinda silly.  It is as though the folks who pour the name on themselves are the only people who want to live, the rest of society is unwilling to do so and only want to be around if there is someone to support them.

But the actions taken by the survival types show that the  folks that they consider untermenschen non-survival types are a source of real concern.  Loading up in the bunkers with as many automatic weaponsas they can lay hold of, they await the ravaging hordes with a fatalism worthy of a biblical prophet.  

But when you think about it, the ravaging hordes are what will keep everyone alive.  yes, right now they are busily esconsced in their McMansions, overweight and in debt, but all of those problems have easy solutions.  How we will survive as a society is leading the society into a new system with less material input and greater personal responsibility input.  

What we need to be discussing is not which automatic weapon will put a bigger hole in a looter, but how do we shift a society from one built of consumers to one built of citizens.

But, to be honest, there are gonna be some scary times getting from here to there, and a couple months of food and the ability to raise a garden might come in handy.......maybe some weapons too.  :)

Der Alte

Lets see what this looks like...this is only a test....had this been an actual emergency, well you know the rest

An Urban Survivalist

This will probaby be shouted down by the "way-out" survivalists, but I think that one has to take a chance in a small city.  My reasons are quite simple, I cannot say that life would be worth living out on a piece of very marginal land, living in fear of every passerby that shows up on the horizon.

I tend to think of humankind as sociology, not psychology.  Anything that exists today that is worth keeping (and for that matter worth throwing away) is a product of a group effort.  The myth of the lone individual working in isolation creating something of value is so rare as to be considered either extinct or an observation that was just based on wishful thinking in the first place.

That being said, I truly think that living through the storm times that are facing us will be a chancy thing.  I feel however, that the probability of success is greater with a group in an urban setting than as a solo in a rural setting.  If it is a full blown storm, the casualties in either setting will be staggering.  

The requirements are the same in either setting; savings, storage, security, and availability of energy sources.

I think that cities will allow for improved access to all of these requirements.  There will be serious issues with maintaining them, but the same can be said of the rural setting as defined by the wayouts.

One of the key things to remember is, that if the world goes mad max on us, a lot will lose even if they did everything right.  You just have to figure out how to do it with a little style.