Baggywrinkle

Indeed. Before answering your question we must define terms. Preparing is something you do before the fact. This is a positive act and makes you part of the solution rather than part of the problem because you have put away supplies during times of plenty and you will be one less person in line needing aid. In fact, you might even be in a position to dispense aid to those in need. This is bad how? An example is Mennonite Disaster Services responding to people in need.

Hoarding, on the other hand is something done during a crisis and may well be associated with the gouging and price fixing that is seen with a disaster. An example is the gas station jacking the price up two dollars a gallon or the man with a pallet of generators making an unfair killing during a time of need.

What evidence you ask. The signs are very subtle indeed and have only within the last eight months or so spurred more and more of the sleeping masses to action. We had been reading and researching since 2004. We woke up to action in spring of 2006 with a report from a think tank calling for financial collapse and for gold to rise as high as 2000 per ounce. Other signs were the looming legislation chipping away at our freedoms. Patriot act I and II, the military commissions act removing habeas corpus, the real ID act, NAIS legislation which tracks our food sources, agenda 21 and the rewilding of America with the concurrent loss of property rights and the sequestering of populations into urban centers. The rise of communitarianism with the fabian socialist molding of society. The fact that most Americans believe that they live in a democracy rather than a democratic republic is proof of how dumbed down we have become. Most could not tell you the difference on a bet.

This soft peddled fascist shift runs concurrent with information calling for looming earth changes which were known about by the powers that be and down played in the media. The fact that this fascist shift seems to be occurring in all english speaking countries concurrently with the UK seeming to lead the way. We have been listening for several years now to J.R. Moore.
Moore is a former green beret and still has connections in the good old boys circle. Moore lives in central Missouri and is as conservative as they come. When he noted that certain zip codes in the Ozarks of Missouri were unusually populated with retired navy and the REASON they were there was because of secret briefings and maps related to earth changes. The Ozarks were identified in these briefings as a stable area. This information was verified by Moore to his satisfaction by three independent sources from the submarine fleet who did not know each other.

Along with this information came information that the Government was moving critical functions to higher ground. Go to google and plug in key words CIA and Denver. Moore also asserted that Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth was mostly factual, but the time line was a lie. His information asserted that the U.S. Government planned to have their move complete by January 2009. That 2012 was a hoax, it was actually more like summer 2009.

The lynch pin for us that something was up was the Svalbard Seed Bank. Known as the doomsday vault it was financed by the likes of Bill Gates, the Rockefellar foundation and Monsanto. What are they up to?

We started listening to Steve Shenk of the J Michael Stevens Group. Steve belongs to the LDS Church who wrote the book on preparedness. He has been in the long term storable food biz for over twenty years and he has NEVER seen conditions like they are today. He was predicting three years ago the rise in food prices today. He knows from his suppliers what availability will be like next year and two years from now. It was from Steve that we learned we are in the third year of a global famine. It was from Steve that we learned the existence and potential impact of the wheat blight UG99, and the loss of the pollinators - the honey bee.

We put up long term storable food two years ago now. Since then we have watched the price of a fifty pound bag of hard white winter wheat rise from nine dollars to twenty five dollars. We have watched food banks pop up in our local neighborhood. Our new habits allow us to go once a month to the grovery. Even buying in bulk as we do we have noticed our bill has doubled. Three days ago we dropped over five hundred dollars, but we are buying the same stuff. It will last us a long long time because we think in terms of #10 cans and fifty pound bags. Buying the way we used to; in small quantities once a week, what we brought home would have easily topped a thousand dollars.

There is more going on here than survival. Please understand that. It is a change of attitude and a change of lifestyle. The LDS Church calls it the law of provident living. James Wesley Rawles calls it the deep larder. I call it a return to the ethic of our grand parents and our great grand parents. We could close our gate for the rest of the winter never coming out and not miss very much.
We wouldn't be cold, and we wouldn't be hungry. That is peace of mind my friend. Two months ago I purchased one hundred pounds of green coffee beans, a sixteen month supply. Life's little pleasures,ehh? One of my rituals now is roasting a weeks worth of fresh colombian supremo on the kerosene stove in the summer kitchen. Usually done by lamp light, it connects me with my ancestors. Where we live taught us some of this. We endured the great Seattle power outage. We were without power for seven days. We did well, but now we would do better and could go longer. I'm writing this by the light of a petromax CP150 pressurized lantern. We have kerosene heat and a beautiful kosmos kerosene
lamp hanging over the dinner table. We are almost immune to another outage. We can pump water by hand when the gasoline runs out for the generator. That leaves refrigeration. We are prepared to eat or can everything in cold storage. Welcome back to 1880. Life isn't bad at all. Yeah, I'd miss the computer. But we have the good book to keep us company. It isn't about surviving. It is about living well on very little no matter what life throws at you.