Warnings Signs & Concerning Indicators
217: Risk Event Overview - How To Intelligently Prepare
It’s time for a good ole rant folks.
Hope everyone had a great weekend and Monday. Today’s post is going to touch on some serious concepts everyone, regardless of where they live, where they work, or what they do day to day should be monitoring.
This weekend I was pulling solo dad duty watching my 10 month old son. I put him to bed Friday night, watched this new show called Outer Range (weird af only made it to episode 6) fell asleep on the couch, woke up at 11pm and decided to hit the hay to recoup from a week of travel.
While I was getting ready to go to bed a pretty bad storm rolled through our town with some high winds, but I love sleeping during storms so I didn’t think anything of it. I slept pretty deeply but faintly remember hearing a very loud bang outside at around 2am/3am. I only registered it for a second before dozing back off and waking up from deep REM at around 7am.
When woke up the house was hot as hell. Sure enough i heard the little guy crying so it was time to hop up and start the day. As I walked to the hall to go to his room I noticed the lights were all off, and I noticed the sound machine was off in his room. The light switch wasn’t working.
When I got downstairs it was obvious all of the power was out. I wouldn’t say I panicked but this posed several immediate problems — the fridge was full of new food. I couldn’t run any fans, the AC was out and the house was heating up quickly, I couldn’t charge my phone, couldn’t run the wash, couldn’t use the TV or my computers, and couldn’t boil water for my sons regimen of bottles that day.
I walked outside to see if there were any downed trees or noticable power lines down but didn’t see anything. I ran into a neighbor who told me power was out for the entire town and the police station. Thinking quick and fiending for my daily dose of cold brew I got the little guy in the car, grabbed all my chargers, laptop, and phone and drove to the nearest Starbucks who thankfully had power. I hung out there for awhile and was able to confirm power was out in the town.
Turns out a squirrel was running along a powerline in the middle of the night and collided or chewed on a transformer that exploded and turned him into vapor — nuking power for the whole town.
It took about 8 hours before the repairman was able to come out and get everything fixed and in the meantime I was stranded at Starbucks.
This wasn’t some end of the world, Red Dawn scenario where Russian paratroopers were falling from the sky, nor was it another outbreak of a deadly and contagious virus that disrupted society. It wasn’t even a gang of extremists targeting a power grid.
It was a single squirrel that ended up shutting off the power in a town of thousands of people. This is a trivial example but there are several takeaways and lessons to be had. The first is, it didn’t take days for me to start scrambling and wondering how I was going to go about my day — it took an hour. Firefighters and police officers were without power.
My capability to prepare and keep food and water was impacted. My phone was on 16% and my laptops nearly dead from work the night before — without power I would’ve had no way to contact help, loved ones, or professional services if need be.
That was a few hours — what would I have done if it was for a week? For longer?
This innocent enough event reminded me of how quickly things go downhill without something like the power. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying summer and trying to write about things that aren’t super dark, upsetting, or unpleasant to talk about
The fact of the matter is — the probability of certain serious risk scenarios occurring or playing out in the United States and around the world is escalating by the day — even if nothing super major has clearly “broken” in plain sight — though many smaller things have.
The endless train derailments, food processing fires, supply chains issues, sky high prices of consumer goods, War in Ukraine, failing infrastructure in the US, our enemies abroad, violent riots in France and South Africa, and even disruptive political division in the US all pose true threats to stability and society in the short to medium term and we should be fully aware of these scenarios and factor them into our preparedness and decision making when it comes to investments, lifestyle choices, and plans for the long term.
The world is de-globalizing — lines are being drawn, violence is breaking out, systems are breaking. The virtues of idealism are being cast aside in favor of kinetic and real action. Consequences of loose and corrupt policy are beginning to show. Economies are being synthetically propped up by wars and centralized schemes. Most normies will just continue about their day without blinking — until things get so bad they can no longer ignore it. But at that point it will just be panic.
Today I’ll be covering various risk scenarios in the US and across the world that have the ability to negatively impact our lives — quickly. We’ll talk through the chances some of these come to fruition as well as the best ways to prepare ahead of time so you aren’t caught with your pants down.
You WILL NOT get a straightforward and pragmatic overview of these risks and concepts in the mainstream media. You won’t even get them from popular figureheads — as these facts and realities go against the widely accepted narrative.
Did you hear about the secret Chinese Bio Lab in California raided by the FBI last week that had a range of illicit bioagents including malaria, rubella, HIV 1/11, chlamydia, E. coli, streptococcus pneumonia, hepatitis B and C, and herpes 1 and 5?
Do you know what that implies? Do you know what it could mean? What happens if there’s 50 others?
How about the two new trains that derailed in Texas today?
Or the fact that after nearly 100 years of handling freight, the trucking company Yellow Corp. ceased operations this week putting 30,000 people out of jobs?
Things are trending poorly — aim of today’s post is to provide you with the context and facts so that you are prepared to examine new events and trends accurately and make the best decisions for you and your family in response.
Let’s get into it.
“Every society is three meals away from chaos”
—Vladimir Lenin