[Via InfographicJournal.com]

 Scientists say they moved the ‘Doomsday Clock’ a minute closer to midnight because nations are failing to sufficiently address nuclear proliferation, climate change, and other global threats.

Citing “inaction” on renewed nuclear proliferation, climate change, and the urgent need to find sustainable sources of energy, a group of scientists has moved the “Doomsday Clock” a minute closer to midnight, saying nations are “failing to change business as usual.”

It was a back-to-the-future moment for the “Doomsday Clock,” which just two years ago had been shifted backward to indicate global catastrophe was a bit less imminent.

Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, a group originally composed of University of Chicago scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, created the clock in 1947 to use the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) to convey the peril of nuclear weapons proliferation. Through the cold war it tolled, reminding nations of the silent danger.

Over the years, the hands of the clock have moved around a lot. In 1949, the clock was moved to three minutes to midnight when President Harry Truman told the American public that the Soviets had tested their first nuclear device – starting the arms race. By 1991, with the cold war officially over and the US and Russia slashing their nuclear arsenals, the clock retreated to 17 minutes to midnight.

Terrorism, tensions between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan, renewed friction between the US and Russia, North Korea’s nuclear push, and other tensions had pushed the clock to five minutes to midnight by 2007.

But movement on nuclear arms talks, climate change, and other threats so buoyed the scientists two years ago that they ordered the so-called Doomsday Clock’s minute hand to be pushed backward to six minutes before midnight.

Now, despite the Arab Spring and other pro-democracy movements around the world, including in Russia, lowering clouds have rolled back in for these scientists. So much so that on Tuesday the BAS directors announced they were moving the minute hand of the clock back to the 2007 position – 11:55.

“Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face,” the BAS directors said in a statement. “In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed.”

“Inaction on key issues including climate change, and rising international tensions motivate the movement of the clock,” the group said in its statement. “As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity’s survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons.”

But in a year in which the Mayan calendar and other doomsday prophesies are getting more than their share of attention, how seriously, really should the public take this obviously subjective – and critics might argue meaningless – relic of the cold war?

“Is this ridiculous thing still around?” Darrin Cothran, a commenter on a Los Angeles Times web page noting the clock’s shift moaned. “Time to tell these elderly gentlemen that it’s time to retire.”

“They’re just trying to stay relevant,” piped up an anonymous commentator on Slashdot. “We all forgot about them when the Cold War ended, and they crave attention again.”

Others, however, argue in favor of at least some type of global warning clock – as a simple indicator for society that unseen looming problems exist and need public attention.

Daniel Abbasi, a former senior adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency, has argued that the world needs a Global Climate Change Index akin to the Dow Jones Industrial Average to chart humanity’s gains – and reversals. It needs to be simple enough to keep public eyes from glazing over and still hold policymakers’ feet to the fire on really lowering greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

Bulletin scientists argue that the need for their clock remains strong. Key recommendations for a safer world that they say have not been taken up include:

• Ratification by the US and China of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

• Implementing multinational management of the civilian nuclear energy fuel cycle with strict standards for safety, security, and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons

• Strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency‘s capacity to oversee nuclear materials and technology development

• Adopting climate change agreements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions

• Transforming the coal power sector of the world economy to retire older plants and require new plants to capture and store carbon dioxide they produce

• Increasing public and private investments in alternatives to carbon-emitting energy sources, such as solar and wind, and technologies for energy storage

“Whether meeting the challenges of nuclear power, or mitigating the suffering from human-caused global warming, or preventing catastrophic nuclear conflict in a volatile world, the power of people is essential,” Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said in a statement.

“For this reason, we ask other scientists and experts to join us in engaging ordinary citizens,” she said. “Together, we can present the most significant questions to policymakers and industry leaders.  Most importantly, we can demand answers and action.”

[Via CSMonitor.com]

Scott Hunt and his wood-powered truck (nationalgeographic.com)

The National Geographic Channel has launched a new program, “Doomsday Preppers” (National Geographic Channel, Tuesdays at 9pm ET/PT) that places four to six families per episode in a theoretical, apocalyptic setting and chronicles how they respond under doomsday pressure.

As part of the show, Nat Geo enlisted Scott Huntand his partner David Kobler, who run thePractical Preppers, a disaster preparedness business. Hunt evaluated how well the show’s contestants have prepared for their doomsday scenario and gives them advice on how to be better prepared to subsist on their own.

“Most people rely on [calling] 911,” Hunt said in an interview with Yahoo! News. “Most people don’t have a plan. If there’s social chaos, you won’t be able to count on someone providing goods and services.”

From zombie outbreaks to Mayan prophecies, Americans have a seemingly limitless interest in how and when civilization might end. What they appear to spend far less time on, is thinking and preparing for such an event.

“The biggest mistake people made on the show is going alone,” Hunt said. “You have to sleep. You’re making yourself vulnerable where one bad person could easily take you out.”

More than 800 people attended a recent prepping conference hosted by Hunt in Columbia, South Carolina.

So, where would be the safest place in the world to bunker down in an extinction level event? Would you want to be near an ocean or major river? Or, maybe in the mountains, far away from population centers? Hunt says there’s no one good answer to prevent against unforeseen disastrous events.

“People can’t move easily in a disaster and we’ve found most people don’t have the financial resources or desire to pick up and move before a disaster,” Hunt said.

Hunt has prepared a Top 10 list of essential items anyone should have in order to survive for at least a few days in case of disaster. But he says the most important survival element isn’t food or water.

“The most important asset is a community network,” Hunt said. “If you live in a major population center like Los Angeles, you’re going to want to tap into the community for knowledge and resources.”

“We’re trying to restore a back-to-community mentality,” Hunt said.

Beyond food, water and shelter, Hunt said the most desirable non-essential item in anyone’s survival shelter is electricity. Having access to a small manual generator or some form of solar power won’t run an entire house, “but can help power some lights, some critical piece of medical technology, or maybe even a washing machine,” Hunt said.

But what if the world doesn’t end? “Preparedness is a lifestyle,” he says. And he encourages people to possess the basic survival skills he says were commonplace only 50 or 60 years ago.

In his spare time, Hunt is pursuing one of his long-term projects. “I’m trying to get a truck to run on wood,” he said with a laugh.

[Via Yahoo.com]

That’s assuming, of course, that the world doesn’t actually end.

Fact is, these times are rife with doomsday predictions, be it Harold Camping’s failed end-times prediction this past May to his updated doomsday date of Oct. 21.

You may prefer to fret about Dec. 21, 2012, when the Mayan calendar runs out, and then there are those dubious rumors that Comet Elenin could hit Earth as early as Sept. 11.

Even though world is as likely to end on these dates as it was on previous end-of-the-world dates (meaning it won’t), there is no reason not to prepare for the worst, right?

That’s the thinking of “John,” a business consultant in Colorado, who has spent the last five years building a doomsday shelter just in case there is a calamity of biblical proportions.

“I first started decided to build one in 2006 because of the economic climate,” said John, who asked that his location and last name not be revealed, in case the worst happens and people show up at his home trying to get inside.

“I could see there were a lot of rogue groups, and I knew there was a housing bubble as early as 2004. I would drive down the road and see all these houses and wonder where all the money was coming from.”

Since then, other potential threats — including wacky weather, Japanese earthquakes, the Mayan calendar, the alleged arrival of a “Death Star” called “Planet X” that is supposed to wreak havoc here as well — have made him feel secure that he made the right decision.

“We’ve gotten out of real estate and converted everything to gold and silver,” he said.

Oh, and there’s that doomsday shelter.

“To be honest, we consider it more of a safe room,” John said. “My builder, Joe Campo, dug next to the home and created a tunnel that leads to the shelter. He covered it in dirt and basically extended our home.”

The shelter, which cost around $300,000, is big enough to keep John’s wife and two kids safe and snug from nuclear war, tornadoes and, hopefully, telemarketers for up to 30 days.

“We stocked it with food,” he said. “But we rotate it. If you’re going to spend 30 days inside, you better have food you like.”

Not only does the home have state-of-the-art filtration systems for air and water, but John says Campo “saw into the future” and installed filters to protect against electromagnetic frequencies.

According to Campo, who is also currently racing to build several of state-of-the-art floating Noah’s Ark-style survival shelters by 2012 on 80 acres of property in Alamosa County, Colorado, EMFs are the unsung doomsday danger.

“This is a very serious issue. NASA has recently published information warning the people that they forecast severe solar storms for 2012 and 2013,” Campo said by email. “It shows a strange scenario of a gigantic solar storm or solar flare breaching our magnetic sphere, torching a satellite. It appears to be prophetic in nature and is open to interpretation.”

Although John takes pride in his doomsday shelter, he doesn’t use it for entertaining and doesn’t let anyone know about its existence.

“I don’t use it for entertaining,” he said. “My parents are the only ones who know — that’s it.”

That includes building inspectors, John admits, although he quickly adds that everything his builder did exceeded any code or regulations because it’s designed to survive practically every type of conceivable disaster.

Campo declined to discuss John’s comments, citing a confidentiality agreement he signs with every client, but he is convinced that he is doing his best to help those who want to be prepared just in case something dreadful happens.

“No one responsible is saying that it is the end of the world, but there is alarming evidence that most of us may be living on borrowed time,” Campo said. “Clearly the recent Japanese tsunami, earthquake and nuclear meltdown was merely the tip of the iceberg.”

Campo learned much of his skills building doomsday shelters by building 1,500 McDonald’s restaurants.

“There are some similarities,” he said. “McDonald’s had three or four different plans, but they ended up looking the same. But many of those had underground areas that were sort of like minishelters, with emergency generators, but the walls weren’t as thick.”

Campo got interested in the doomsday market after 9/11, but has seen interest skyrocket in recent years because of the aforementioned Mayan prophecies and other alleged end-of-world predictions.

Despite his suggestion that “there is alarming evidence that most of us may be living on borrowed time,” he insists that he is not fear-mongering to get business.

“I do not believe the world is coming to an end, and I refuse to use fear tactics,” he said.

Campo also points out to potential customers that even if the shelter isn’t needed for survival, it can also work as a basement or spare room.

“This is not like an austere post-World War II-type shelter,” he insisted.

Although some people have doomsday shelters built for them, others prefer to do the work themselves, such as “Glenn,” a liquidator in east Texas, who has built a shelter using a kit purchased from Monolithic, an Italy, Texas-based maker of dome-home kits. Glenn is a survivalist who decided to build the underground home inside a mountain near his house.

“In the long term, things are not going to be as they are now, and I might need the extra benefit,” he said.

It doesn’t have to be a flood or a tornado or an earthquake, he said, even the record heat plaguing much of the country is reason enough.

“It’s got a great insulation factor,” he said. “We are protected from hurricanes, tornadoes, bullets and bombs. And the utility bills are low.”

There is one thing that the home may not be safe from (two, if you count the aforementioned telemarketers).

“The only thing that could be a problem is a flood, but I am higher than my neighbor’s house.”

Another issue: The homes are dark when the power is out, which Glenn says means he has to keep flashlights and candles on hand.

“There’s an upside to that, though,” he laughed. “You don’t have the sun shining in your eyes in the morning.”

David South is the CEO and President of Monolithic Dome Institute, the company that supplied the dome-home kit to Glenn. It has been in the business for 35 years.

Depending on what is happening, his product appeals to different groups.

“Sometimes people buy them to store potatoes or for underground homes, and I’ve been getting calls from Joplin, Mo., from people trying to rebuild after the tornado.”

Although many people want to build them underground, South says that’s not really necessary.

“The basic egg shape is the strongest there is, and with concrete it becomes stronger,” he said. “My buildings can handle pretty much anything.”

South says his dome homes cost the same as any custom home, but recommends that any person who wants one should write down what they want the home to do.

“Do you want it to protect you? Well, who or what do you want protection from? What do you expect it to do?” he asked rhetorically. “If you’re worried most about nuclear fallout, you’ll have to bury it five feet underground. On the other hand, if you fear tornadoes, put it on top of your property because those really only happen once every 40 years.”

South has a droll, laid-back way of speaking that probably comes, in part, from surviving 35 years of doomsday predictions. Although he seems comfortable that the end of the world is probably not nigh, he says it never hurts to have a plan.

“If we live long enough, we learn that we don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” he said.

[Via TheHuffingtonPost.com]

Marc Kroll/Sharp Entertainment

There’s a new modifier on the TV grid, and we should all be afraid.

Television has long been full of “Americans” (“American Restoration,” “American Chopper,” “American Hoggers”) and “Extremes” (“Extreme Marksmen,” “Extreme Makeover,” “Extreme Couponing”) and “Tops” (“Top Gear,” “Top Chef,” “Top Shot”). In recent weeks, though, an interloper has staked a claim: “Doomsday.”

Last month the National Geographic Channel introduced “Doomsday Preppers,” a Tuesday-night reality series about people who are stockpiling, arming and otherwise preparing for some kind of apocalypse. Last week it was the Discovery Channel’s turn. Its new “Doomsday Bunkers,” on Wednesday nights, is about Deep Earth Bunker, a company that builds underground getaways for the types of people seen in “Doomsday Preppers.”

Watch either show for a short while and, unless you’re a prepper yourself, you might be moderately amused at the absurd excess on display and at what an easy target the prepper worldview is for ridicule. Watch a bit longer, though, and amusement may give way to annoyance at how offensively anti-life these shows are, full of contempt for humankind.

“Doomsday Preppers” introduces an array of end-of-civilization types who at first seem surprisingly varied. These preppers live all over the country, in rural areas, suburbs and cities. Each has a different reason for turning a perfectly adequate home into a canned-food warehouse or building an escape hideaway (or bug-out location, to use the prepper term) in the mountains. One expects the North and South Poles to swap places, one a global economic collapse, one “an electromagnetic pulse that will disable the transportation system of the United States.”

National Geographic Channels/Sharp Entertainment

But the people on this show and the customers of Deep Earth Bunker are more alike than diverse. Who knows how representative these shows are of the prepper universe, but the people they feature are disproportionately white. They can’t speak for long without employing that cliché involving excrement and a fan. And whatever their religious beliefs might be, something “Preppers” doesn’t generally explore, most of them put their real faith in firearms.

“Preppers” and “Bunkers” are both full of footage of people firing or lovingly cradling their weaponry, which in many cases is frighteningly extensive. (You really don’t want the guy in last week’s “Preppers” living next door; in addition to a house full of ammunition, he has stockpiled 50 gallons of gasoline, an unsettling combination.) One notable exception was Kathy Harrison, a New England woman profiled on a recent “Preppers.”

“It’s easy to feel a little left out of the prepper community if you live in New England and if you’re not fairly right wing and conservative politically,” she said in the segment. “But I just don’t spend my time worrying about stockpiling guns and ammunition, because our security comes not from stockpiling weapons but from having a community that respects each other, supports each other, and we have each others’ backs.”

A noble sentiment. But the unmistakable impression left by these programs is that what these folks want most of all is not to protect their families — the standard explanation for why they’re doing what they’re doing — or even the dubious pleasure of being able to say to the rest of us, “See, I told you the world was going to end.” What they want is a license to open fire.

The number of bullets sprayed around in these shows, by adults and even their children, might give Rambo pause. Yet “Doomsday Preppers” and “Doomsday Bunkers” might still qualify as decent television if they were less credulous — if, for instance, they asked a few basic questions:

Won’t it be hard to find a plumber after civilization collapses? What will happen when that methane-harvesting septic system clogs?

Have the “Doomsday Bunker” diggers talked to the “Doomsday Prepper” people who think the Big Catastrophe will originate underground, via volcano or earthquake?

More seriously, what is the attraction of continuing to live in a world that forces people to cower in an underground box and spend all their time fending off those who want their freeze-dried apricots?

Even more seriously, what is the attraction of continuing to live in a world that will almost certainly not have television or the Internet, depriving doomsday types of the shows and Web sites that fuel their paranoia and sell products exploiting it?

“Doomsday Preppers” even offers the people it profiles advice on improving their preparations. (National Geographic, though, on a Facebook page, gives commenters a chance to mock the preppers with a photo caption contest. Under a picture of a man neck-deep in a hole in the ground, someone has written, “It looks like we’ll be alright as long as the end of the world doesn’t involve rain.”)

At their worst the shows don’t merely give the prepper universe a pass on difficult questions; they reinforce its ugliest undercurrents. The most recent “Doomsday Preppers” included a white family 40 miles from Atlanta that is worried about rioting caused by economic collapse. “Civil unrest will most likely ensue in the metropolitan areas and then spread out to the suburbs,” the patriarch says.

His defenses include a generous supply of guns and a couple of German shepherds. An expert with a trained attack dog comes by to demonstrate what a properly schooled dog can do. He has a man dress up in protective gear and act menacing, then turns the dog loose. The fake intruder is black, the only black face in the hourlong program.

A free country, of course, includes the freedom to be a prepper. From a television perspective the real question is: What are these shows, so disdainful of life and human potential, doing on these outlets?

Discovery Channel

The Discovery Channel has on its résumé some of the most beautiful, life-affirming documentaries ever broadcast, among them “Life” (2010) and “Planet Earth” (2007), with another, “Frozen Planet,” coming up this weekend. And National Geographic plasters this motto on most everything, including the television channel’s Web site: “Inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888.”

Hmm. Apparently “inspiring people to prepare a personal fortress and pray for cataclysm so they can start blasting away at their neighbors” was deemed not to have quite the same ring to it.

[Via NYTimes.com]

Well, the truth is that the motivation for prepping is different for each person.  Some preppers believe that a complete collapse of the economy is coming.  Others saw what happened to so many during Hurricane Katrina are are determined not to let that happen to them.  Some preppers just want to become more independent and self-sufficient.  There are yet others that are deeply concerned about “end of the world as we know it” scenarios such as terrorists using weapons of mass destruction, killer pandemics, alien invasions, World War III or EMP attacks.

But whatever the motivation is, the prepper movement is clearly growing.  Today, millions of Americans are converting spare rooms into storage pantries, learning how to grow survival gardens and stocking up on everything from gas masks to auxiliary generators.

Recently, the Salina Journal gathered together about two dozen preppers.  What they found is that there is a tremendous amount of diversity among preppers, but that they also clearly share a common passion….

It was a diverse bunch. All different shapes, sizes, ages, gender and political persuasions.

Some were ex-military. Some never served. Some were unemployed, some had jobs. A few were retired.

But they all shared a common bond: They call themselves Preppers, and they had gathered to share ideas, demonstrate various skills, enjoy each other’s company and to put faces to the online names they use to disguise their identity.

Never before in U.S. history have we seen anything like this.  We are at peace and most of us still have a relatively high standard of living and yet millions of Americans feel called to start preparing for the worst.

A lot of preppers don’t like to publicize the fact that they are prepping.  As the Salina Journal discovered, a lot of preppers try very hard to keep their prepping to themselves…..

They are trying to keep their passion for prepping hidden from neighbors and, in some cases, employers who they said would frown on their association with such a group. Two admitted their appearance here would probably get them fired if their companies found out.

Many people believe that it takes a lot of money and resources to be a prepper, but that is not necessarily the case.

For some, the best way to get prepared is to radically simplify things.

For example, a recent article posted on Yahoo Finance profiled a man that lives in his RV and that survives on about $11,000 a year….

I had an apartment in Burbank and was the typical Los Angeles apartment dweller. I started to feel a strong desire to simplify my life. I had a garage full of stuff I never used, my closets were full, and I started to see that it was costing me money to have an apartment big enough to hold all the stuff I never use.

My initial plan was to scale back and move into a smaller apartment. Before long, I realized I didn’t need too much to be happy. I could fit into a small space. That’s when the RV idea occurred to me. I was just sitting in traffic and an RV pulled up. I said, “I could probably fit in that thing.” The more I looked into it, the more I realized how practical it would be. For what I was paying for rent in LA, I could own my “house” free and clear and not pay rent, and own my car as well.

Other people make the most of what they already have.  It is absolutely amazing what some families are able to do with limited resources.

For example, there is one family that is actually producing 6000 pounds of produce a year on just 1/10th of an acre right in the middle of Pasadena, California.

This family grows more food than they need and they sell the excess to restaurants in the surrounding area.  You can see video of their amazing garden right here.

Other Americans take prepping to the other extreme.  For example, Steven Huff is building a 72,000 square foot “home” (some call it a fortress) in Missouri.  Huff is the chairman of Wisconsin-based TF Concrete Forming Systems, and he wants to show off what his firm is capable of.  Huff claims that this will be “a home that uses very low energy, as well as having strong resistance to tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, fire, flood and insect damage”.

In reality, what Huff is building kind of resembles a castle.  You can see pictures of this remarkable “home” right here.

But Huff is not the only one taking things to extremes.

In a recent article, I detailed how renowned Texas investor Kyle Bass appears to be very well prepared for the horrible economic collapse that he believes is coming.  The following is how one reporter described his recent visit to the 40,000 square foot “fortress” owned by Bass….

“We hopped into his Hummer, decorated with bumper stickers (God Bless Our Troops, Especially Our Snipers) and customized to maximize the amount of fun its owner could have in it: for instance, he could press a button and, James Bond–like, coat the road behind him in giant tacks. We roared out into the Texas hill country, where, with the fortune he’d made off the subprime crisis, Kyle Bass had purchased what amounted to a fort: a forty-thousand-square-foot ranch house on thousands of acres in the middle of nowhere, with its own water supply, and an arsenal of automatic weapons and sniper rifles and small explosives to equip a battalion.”

Do you think that Bass is taking things too far?

Well, there are other big names that are busy preparing for the worst as well.

For instance, Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling author of the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” series of books is now a full-fledged prepper.

He says that he is “prepared for the worst” and that he and his wife “have food, we have water, we have guns, gold and silver, and cash”.

So should the rest of us be preparing?

Of course we should be.  Our nation is drowning in debt, the U.S. economy is dying, the number of earthquakes and other natural disasters is increasing, and the entire globe is becoming an extremely unstable place.  If you read my articles on a regular basis, then you know that there are a whole host of reasons to try to become more independent and self-sufficient.

So what can we all do to get prepared?

Well, in a previous article I listed a few things that can be done by most people….

#1 Become Less Dependent On Your Job

#2 Get Out Of Debt

#3 Reduce Expenses

#4 Purchase Land

#5 Learn To Grow Food

#6 Find A Reliable Source Of Water

#7 Explore Alternative Energy Sources

#8 Store Supplies

#9 Protect Your Assets With Gold And Silver

#10 Learn Self-Defense

#11 Keep Yourself Fit

#12 Make Friends

SOURCE

Eventually, one man offers a double-take. The head turn probably has something to do with the fact that Fiorino’s belt contains an openly holstered firearm alongside his cell phone and keys. After all, Fiorino’s story hadn’t yet appeared in the Daily News, so his face wasn’t yet recognizable.

Surprisingly, that one brief stare was about the only bit of reaction Fiorino received on that particular day, a few days before the Daily News story broke. But minimal public feedback is often the norm. People typically go about their business unaware that someone like Fiorino has a gun strapped to his hip—even when it’s in full view. “For the most part, it’s either a look or a dismissal or nobody notices,” says Fiorino. And unbeknownst to many Pennsylvanians, “open carry,” or the act of carrying one’s firearm unconcealed by clothing, is actually quite legal. Even in Philadelphia, legal gun owners who have a license can wear their holstered handguns in plain sight. In the rest of the state, open carry requires no license. Still, despite the law being quite clear on the issue, open-carry advocates like Fiorino sometimes find themselves in the crosshairs of an ignorant public.

But what happens when the ignorance comes from the very people who are paid to uphold the law? For open carriers like Fiorino, it’s a problem that can have dire consequences.

Like the time he found himself with a gun pointed at his head. Back in February, when he was visiting his native Northeast Philadelphia, his gun attracted the attention of a passing city cop. After a 40-minute ordeal in which Fiorino was ordered to the ground and detained, the cops eventually cleared him for release, but not before they got in a few choice words. But it wasn’t the profanity used by the responding officers—audio from Fiorino’s recorder was posted to Youtube—that totally offended Fiorino. Rather, it was the lack of police knowledge regarding the open-carry law. “I obviously did a ton of research beforehand,” says Fiorino. Police, he says, ought to do the same.

Not that Fiorino totally faults cops for having a heightened sense of awareness. But he does take issue with the fact that officers aren’t being trained to respect law-abiding citizens. “In my experience, in the city, it’s always been negative,” Fiorino says of his interaction with Philly cops, many of whom appear unaware of the legality of open carry. “There’s always a lot of attention with the police because they know you’re armed and they automatically perceive you as a threat,” he says.

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One city cop, who requested anonymity, said that he was unaware carrying a firearm openly within the city limits was legal. “To see somebody carrying a gun in full view, it’s kind of, I would say, scary in a big city,” the officer says. But as Fiorino sat on a bench at Dilworth Plaza talking about his cause, very few eyes glanced his way. Passers-by didn’t even seem to notice him—even though his gun was out in the open on his left hip. “Nobody’s screaming or running around,” Fiorino says.

Still, the officer maintains that the sight of a gun on someone without a badge could cause a problem. “When people see you doing that, people assume you’re a police officer,” the cop says, adding that even off-duty, most city cops carry concealed. “I think all guns should be concealed.”

Fiorino says open carry is meant to raise awareness, to let people know that they still have rights. And in Philadelphia, they are, thanks to people like Fiorino.

“Technically, the answer is yes,” says Lt. Fran Healy, a special adviser to Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey. “You can carry openly within Philadelphia as long as you have a license.” Healy, who is also an attorney, doesn’t dispute the claim that city cops are often ignorant on the open-carry law, which has been on the books since 1995. He says it’s just never been a problem, that citizens were simply never observed carrying openly in the city. He adds that incidents such as Fiorino’s have prompted the PPD to better train its officers. The training has come in various forms, Healy says, including educating beat officers during roll call and conducting “teletype training,” which is when a sergeant receives a message from the commissioner that is passed down to his or her subordinates. “When they [officers on the street] know the law, that helps them respond better,” he says. “These [citizens] are decent people. They’re not criminals.”

But Healy certainly understands why the sight of someone openly carrying a firearm might put off some cops. “The bottom line is this: If I stop you and your behavior and conduct is such that I feel at risk … I personally may have my gun out,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I’m pointing it at your head. I don’t know who or what you are yet.”

The other factor contributing to cops’ confusion is that according to state law, a license is needed to carry openly in the city, but it’s not required in the rest of the commonwealth. Because of that, officers don’t technically have cause to detain an open carrier without reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime having been committed. But in Philly, because a license is needed, law enforcement officers contend they have authority to stop people to make sure they’re legit. Gun-rights activists take issue with this, saying probable cause is still required for a police stop. They liken it to driving: Officers aren’t legally allowed to stop everyone who is driving a car to ensure they’re licensed, unless a violation has been committed.

Healy, however, says it comes down to an “officer safety” issue, meaning if an open carrier is spotted, there might be brief police interaction. “I think the officers are well justified in Philadelphia … to do an investigation,” he says. “We just want to confirm that you’re lawful, and we’ll let you go on your way.”

Add to all that the convoluted wording of the state law, which essentially makes open carry de-facto legal: “No person shall carry a firearm, rifle or shotgun at any time upon the public streets or upon any public property in a city of the first class unless:(1) such person is licensed to carry a firearm; or (2) such person is exempt from licensing under section 6106 of this title (relating to firearms not to be carried without a license). The second bullet point generally refers to law enforcement and others for whom their job requires the carrying of a gun. Because the law doesn’t explicitly say open carry is legal, some question whether it really is. State law also doesn’t make a distinction between open versus concealed carry. “By not addressing it, the Legislature has left it open,” Healy says. “The statute is vague, which leaves a little bit of a problem.”

To gun-rights advocates, the law is quite clear. After all, if there isn’t a law against something, anything, it’s legal, right? Proponents of open carry were so adamant about getting their message out that they organized a rally in Center City last weekend. One of the activists was Derek Price, who on May 14 was strolling up the steps toward City Hall wearing black pants, a blue button-down shirt, a black vest and a gun on one hip. The Harleysville resident arrived for a gathering organized by members of the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association. “Open carry, concealed carry, it’s totally up to the individual,” said Price, 38, who has been open carrying since getting his license in 2007.

Price, like the others attending the rally, aim to make open carry more visible. One woman came up to Price, asking him to point her in the direction of the Ritz Carlton. “Perception is everything,” Price said.

As more protesters arrived, it seemed as though the rally had the makings for some interesting feedback. Again, nothing. Here they were, a group of about 25 or so gun-toting average Joe’s, walking through the outdoor plaza at City Hall, and nobody seemed to notice. “We’ve been standing here, what, 20 minutes?” Price asked. “Nobody’s complained.”

Finally, Healy arrived with officers from the department’s Civil Affairs Unit, the armband-clad cops who monitor protests and labor disputes, and off the group went. During the next four hours, the gun-wearers and a handful of cops, all in plainclothes, strolled downtown Philadelphia. There were stops outside police headquarters and the District Attorney’s Office. Since federal law was recently changed to allow for firearms in gun-friendly states to be brought into national parks, the group figured it would stop by and take a photo near the Liberty Bell, too. “Exercising our Second Amendment where the Second Amendment was signed,” one member could be heard calling out.

Over the next four hours, the group walked, held signs and handed out pamphlets to members of the public. A few people cast stares. Some asked questions. None seemed worried or concerned in the least. That’s the way it should be, the open carriers contend. Even Healy seemed pleased with the results of the peaceful protest. “These interactions can be positive,” he said at the rally. “I’m looking at this as more of an educational thing on both sides.”

Ted Noga, the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association member who organized the rally, was also pleased that everything went off without a hitch that rainy Saturday. “I’m quite impressed with the response by the police department,” he said.

Lt. Lisa King, head of the department’s Gun Permits Unit, said her division is now working to amend language on a supplemental sheet accompanying the firearms license application that says a licensee must conceal. The wording on is old, she concedes. King, who attended the rally, says didn’t even know the practice was legal before it was brought to her attention.

“It’s definitely going to do something,” says Josh Dillon, a Philly gun owner who typically carries concealed. Dillon, who carried openly on this day, says the whole aim of the event was to create awareness. Still, since he doesn’t want to be harassed, he keeps it concealed. But that’s not to say he opposes open carry. People can choose for themselves, he says.

As for Fiorino, he’s just glad the encounter in Northeast Philly sparked some awareness. “I think that if people like myself don’t get out there and do it, that often misinformation and ignorance continues to spread,” he says.

SOURCE

The 137,000sq ft bunker – designed to house 950 people for a year and withstand a 50 megaton blast – is currently being built under the grasslands of Nebraska.

Vivos, the California-based company behind it, is taking $5,000 (£3,100) deposits, which will have to be topped up to $25,000 (£15,600) to secure a place.

Cower in luxury: Vivos’s doomsday shelters are to be kitted out with all the modern conveniences American consumers would expect

It says applications have soared 1000 per cent in the wake of the disasters in Japan. And the bunkers will be kitted out with all the modern conveniences the American consumer has come to expect.

Once finished the complex will feature four levels of residential suites, a dental and medical center, kitchens, pet kennels, a bakery, a prayer room, a fully stocked wine cellar and even a prison to detain any misbehaving residents.

Read Entire Article

State Rep. Wendy Warburton (R) introduced House Bill 278, which she said was “just about local volunteers being prepared in case of emergency to support the National Guard, support the sheriff, support the governor as needed,” the Associated Press reports.

The governor would be required to “recruit, mobilize, administer, train, discipline, equip, and supply the organized militia,” which the AP estimates would cost the state $45,000 a year.

Nick Wing of the Huffington Post points out that the original bill referred to the groups as “militias,” but Warburton since changed the language to call them the more neutral “home guards.”

The bill describes how the forces would be divided into companies, and then platoons and squads. Each company would have a “company flag, company creed, company colors,” as well as a uniform with the company insignia.

Last month another Montana Republican introduced a bill to give local sheriffs supremacy in their counties, and requiring “that federal employees shall obtain the county sheriff’s permission to arrest, search, and seize.”

SOURCE

Record-breaking heat and cold are striking all corners of the globe; earthquake activity has spiked, even in places thought not to have active fault lines; birds, bees, fish, and other animals are dropping dead with no coherent cause, and there is a flurry of talk about galactic anomalies beginning to happen.

Since the man-made global warming theory has simmered down from a boil, many other concerns have surfaced that appear to minimize possible effects of CO2 concentrations as our greatest concern. Sure, many of these changes may be connected in some way, but the idea that there is a silver bullet to stop this train of collective events is unlikely.

One thing we can say is that we live in very interesting times. These unprecedented events are accelerating at a blistering pace, as we hurl through space on this ball we call Earth. It seems this turbulent cycle is going to continue to manifest despite our best human efforts to stop it. The only thing we can hope to do is digest the available information and plan for the worst, while hoping for the best. Assuredly, humans possess a far greater ability to adapt through technology than the animal kingdom, yet we certainly can’t thrive without protecting the entire biosphere.

Click here to read 8 strange Earth changes that should demand our attention

Matterhorn, 1865

[Via Guardian.co.uk]

Be sure to tune in to hear Will’s take on what lies ahead for America in 2011 and why now is a more crucial time than ever to have your preparations in order.

Listen to internet radio with Prepper Podcast on Blog Talk Radio

In this Friday, Dec. 17, 2010 photo, Allison Ward poses with her car, painted with a message about the rapture, in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

RALEIGH, N.C. – If there had been time, Marie Exley would have liked to start a family. Instead, the 32-year-old Army veteran has less than six months left, which she’ll spend spreading a stark warning: Judgment Day is almost here.

Exley is part of a movement of Christians loosely organized by radio broadcasts and websites, independent of churches and convinced by their reading of the Bible that the end of the world will begin May 21, 2011.

To get the word out, they’re using billboards and bus stop benches, traveling caravans of RVs and volunteers passing out pamphlets on street corners. Cities from Bridgeport, Conn., to Little Rock, Ark., now have billboards with the ominous message, and mission groups are traveling through Latin America and Africa to spread the news outside the U.S.

“A lot of people might think, ‘The end’s coming, let’s go party,’” said Exley, a veteran of two deployments in Iraq. “But we’re commanded by God to warn people. I wish I could just be like everybody else, but it’s so much better to know that when the end comes, you’ll be safe.”

In August, Exley left her home in Colorado Springs, Colo., to work with Oakland, Calif.-based Family Radio Worldwide, the independent Christian ministry whose leader, Harold Camping, has calculated the May 21 date based on his reading of the Bible.

She is organizing traveling columns of RVs carrying the message from city to city, a logistics challenge that her military experience has helped solve. The vehicles are scheduled to be in five North Carolina cities between now and the second week of January, but Exley will shortly be gone: overseas, where she hopes to eventually make it back to Iraq.

“I don’t really have plans to come back,” she said. “Time is short.”

Not everyone who’s heard Camping’s message is taking such a dramatic step. They’re remaining in their day-to-day lives, but helping publicize the prophecy in other ways. Allison Warden, of Raleigh, has been helping organize a campaign using billboards, post cards and other media in cities across the U.S. through a website, We Can Know.

The 29-year-old payroll clerk laughs when asked about reactions to the message, which is plastered all over her car.

“It’s definitely against the grain, I know that,” she said. “We’re hoping people won’t take our word for it, or Harold Camping’s word for it. We’re hoping that people will search the scriptures for themselves.”

Camping, 89, believes the Bible essentially functions as a cosmic calendar explaining exactly when various prophecies will be fulfilled.

The retired civil engineer said all his calculations come from close readings of the Bible, but that external events like the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 are signs confirming the date.

“Beyond the shadow of a doubt, May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment,” he said.

The doctrine known as the Rapture teaches that believers will be taken up to heaven, while everyone else will remain on earth for a period of torment, concluding with the end of time. Camping believes that will happen in October.

“If May 21 passes and I’m still here, that means I wasn’t saved. Does that mean God’s word is inaccurate or untrue? Not at all,” Warden said.

The belief that Christ will return to earth and bring an end to history has been a basic element of Christian belief since the first century. The Book of Revelation, which comes last in the New Testament, describes this conclusion in vivid language that has inspired Christians for centuries.

But few churches are willing to set a date for the end of the world, heeding Jesus’ words in the gospels of Mark and Matthew that no one can know the day or hour it will happen. Predictions like Camping’s, though, aren’t new. One of the most famous in history was by the Baptist leader William Miller, who predicted the end for Oct. 22, 1844, which came to be known as the Great Disappointment among his followers, some of whom subsequently founded the Seventh Day Adventist church.

“In the U.S., there is still a significant population, mostly Protestant, who look at the Bible as kind of a puzzle, and the puzzle is God’s word and it’s predicting when the end times will come,” said Catherine Wessinger, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who studies millennialism, the belief in pending apocalypse.

“A lot of times these prophecies gain traction when difficulties are happening in society,” she said. “Right now, there’s a lot of insecurity, and this is a promise that says it’s not all random, it’s part of God’s plan.”

Past predictions that failed to come true don’t have any bearing on the current calculation, believers maintain.

“It would be like telling the Wright brothers that every other attempt to fly has failed, so you shouldn’t even try,” said Chris McCann, who works with eBible Fellowship, one of the groups spreading the message.

For believers like McCann, theirs is actually a message of hope and compassion: God’s compassion for people, and the hope that there’s still time to be saved.

That, ultimately, is what spurs on Exley, who said her beliefs have alienated her from most of her friends and family. Her hope is that not everyone who hears her message will mock it, and that even people who dismiss her now might still come to believe.

“If you still want to say we’re crazy, go ahead,” she said. “But it doesn’t hurt to look into it.”

___

Online:

Family Radio Worldwide: http://www.familyradio.com

eBible Fellowship: http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/

[Via News.Yahoo.com and MSNBC.MSN.com]

Prepared for the end of the world: model of the living quarters in a Vivos underground bunker. Photograph: Terra Vivos/Barcroft USA

Abandon any notion of surviving the apocalypse by doing anything as boringly obvious as running for the highest hill, or eating cockroaches. The American firm Vivos is now offering you the chance to meet global catastrophe (caused by terrorism, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, pole shift, Iran, “social anarchy”, solar flare – a staggering list of potential world-murderers are considered) in style.

Vivos is building 20 underground “assurance of life” resorts across the US, capable of sustaining up to 4,000 people for a year when the earth no longer can. The cost? A little over £32,000 a head, plus a demeaning-sounding screening test that determines whether you are able to offer meaningful contribution to the continuation of the human race. Company literature posits, gently, that “Vivos may prove to be the next Genesis”, and they are understandably reluctant to flub the responsibility.

Should you have the credentials and the cash, the rewards of a berth in a Vivos shelter seem high. Each staffed complex has a decontamination shower and a jogging machine; a refrigerated vault for human DNA and a conference room with wheely chairs. There are TVs and radios, flat-screen computers, a hospital ward, even a dentist’s surgery ready to serve those who forgot to pack a toothbrush in the hurry. “Virtually any meal” can be cooked from a stockpile of ingredients that includes “baked potato soup” but, strangely, no fish, tinned or otherwise. Framed pictures of mountain ranges should help ease the loss of a world left behind.

Vivos says it has already received 1,000 applications.

How long do the rest of us have to decide? “Nobody knows” when disaster will strike but Vivos takes a shot at guessing, sourcing clues from Nostradamus, the Bible and Native American lore to suggest 2019, 2029 and 2036 as danger years. But the real fear is for 21 December 2012, a date forecast for doom by the Mayans and towards which a countdown clock on Vivos’s website ticks.

We ought not to get too comfy over the next couple of years either: President Obama’s recent warnings about nuclear terrorism proved “timely”, a Vivos spokesperson told the Observer. “Doomsday may be closer than many would otherwise like to believe…”

It’s warning enough. £32,000? Check. Carpentry skills? Check. Jogging bottoms? Check. Good luck in the hills.

[Via Guardian.co.uk]

]]> http://www.survival-spot.com/survival-blog/heartwarming-survival-stories/feed/ 3 http://www.survival-spot.com/survival-blog/74-year-old-woman-headed-to-casinos-spends-2-days-trapped-under-car-by-i-10-and-lives/ http://www.survival-spot.com/survival-blog/74-year-old-woman-headed-to-casinos-spends-2-days-trapped-under-car-by-i-10-and-lives/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:25:28 +0000 Survival Spot http://www.survival-spot.com/survival-blog/?p=7061 MOSS POINT, Mississippi — A Mobile woman spent most of 2 days pinned under her car near Interstate 10 last week, only to be discovered by a highway grounds crew Saturday morning and eventually rescued by the Moss Point Fire Department.

Shirley Ann Smith, 74, was driving westbound on I-10 Thursday evening and stopped near the on ramp at the Miss. 613 exit to stretch her legs, according to authorities. Before she could get out of the vehicle, it came out of gear and rolled down into an adjacent drainage ditch, trapping her left hand under the left-rear tire.

The front of the vehicle was submerged.

Lt. David Morace, the on-scene officer in charge for the fire department, said the Moss Point Police Department initially responded after the grounds crew called 911, and he arrived shortly thereafter, around 9 a.m.

Morace said he was immediately able to speak to Smith, who was “groggy, but coherent.”

He said Smith indicated to him on the scene that she had been on her way to the casinos at the time of the incident.

“She’d been out there Thursday night to Saturday morning, trapped under that car,” he said.

After securing the car with a towline attached to a wrecker, Morace said his department then inflated airbags that had been placed under the rear of the vehicle, which he characterized as a “small van.” Morace held Smith’s sleeve during the operation, and helped pull her free once the tire was lifted off of her hand.

Smith was then transported by ambulance to Singing River Hospital, where she was placed in the Medical Intensive Care Unit. According to hospital administrators, Smith is still listed in serious condition, though she could be moved to a private room as early as Monday night.

“I’ve been on several calls like that, but never anybody that laid out there for two days,” Morace said. “This woman here is a miracle. She is tough.”

Smith’s son, Kenneth Woodward, agreed with Morace, saying his mother’s “not a feeble woman, she’s very alert and very smart.”

“We’re all very happy that she’s still with us, she’s a very strong individual,” Woodward said. “She has a great will to live.”

Supporters of the Transition movement in the Panida Theater in Sandpoint, Idaho. Surviving economic and environmental upheaval, the group says, depends on working together, not on building bunkers.

The stage lights went up at the Panida Theater, a classy old movie house in Sandpoint, Idaho, and the M.C. stepped out of the dark with one finger high in the air. There was an uprising of applause and cheering. Then, shouting like a head coach before a bowl game, she said, “Sandpoint, are you ready?”

It was a Friday night last November. All around the little town of Sandpoint, beetles were blighting north Idaho’s pine forests. The previous day, the U.N. reported that emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants were collecting in brown clouds over 13 Asian and African cities and blocking out the sun. Iceland’s main banks had crumpled, and American auto executives were about to fly to

North First Avenue in Sandpoint, Idaho, a town of 8,100 surrounded by two mountain ranges.

Washington in private jets to plead for a bailout. Off the coast of Africa, Somali pirates were hijacking oil tankers. But the folks at the Panida Theater wouldn’t stop clapping. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative, a new chapter of a growing, worldwide environmental movement, was officially coming to life.

The Transition movement was started four years ago by Rob Hopkins, a young British instructor of ecological design. Transition shares certain principles with environmentalism, but its vision is deeper — and more radical — than mere greenness or sustainability. “Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely. For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.

Transition’s approach is adamantly different from that of the survivalists I heard about, scattered in the mountains around Sandpoint in bunkers stocked with gold and guns. The movement may begin from a similarly dystopian idea: that cheap oil has recklessly vaulted humanity to a peak of production and consumption, and no combination of alternative technologies can generate enough energy, or be installed fast enough, to keep us at that height before the oil is gone. (Transition dismisses Al Gore types as “techno-optimists.”) But Transition then takes an almost utopian turn. Hopkins insists that if an entire community faces this stark challenge together, it might be able to design an “elegant descent” from that peak. We can consciously plot a path into a lower-energy life — a life of walkable villages, local food and artisans and greater intimacy with the natural world — which, on balance, could actually be richer and more enjoyable than what we have now. Transition, Hopkins has written, meets our era’s threats with a spirit of “elation, rather than the guilt, anger and horror” behind most environmental activism. “Change is inevitable,” he told me, “but this is a change that could be fantastic.”

After developing the rudiments of Transition with a class he was teaching at an Irish college, Hopkins moved to the English town of Totnes, and, in 2005, began mobilizing a campaign to “relocalize” the town. The all-volunteer effort has since been busily planting nut trees, starting its own local currency and offering classes on things like darning socks in order to “facilitate the Great Reskilling.”

More than 80 other initiatives across England have followed, including one in Bristol, a city of nearly half a million people. Worldwide, there are now more than 150 official Transition Towns (communities with an active group of citizens), and last winter, trainers from Totnes traveled the globe to run workshops, leaving activists on three continents to begin the relocalization of their own communities — autonomously and with whatever financing they can raise. (The Transition revolution is, loosely speaking, a franchise model.) Sandpoint, Idaho, was the second Transition Town in the United States after Boulder County, Colo. They have been joined by more than 20 others in the last year, including Portland, Maine; Berea, Kentucky; and even Los Angeles. But the American arm of the movement is expanding far faster than it is accomplishing anything, which is why the event in Sandpoint that night was so significant. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative was the first in North America to hold this kind of coming-out party, meant to engage the community in its work. This constituted Step 4 in the 12-step Transition Process laid out in Rob Hopkins’s Transition Handbook, the jargon-filled manual at the center of the movement. The handbook calls this event “A Great Unleashing.”

The Transition Handbook reads like an imaginative take on a corporate-management text. It recommends techniques for building consensus, from bureaucratic-sounding protocols like Open Space Technology to an exercise in which people decorate a potato like a superhero. “The Transition model,” the founder of one English Transition Town explained to me, “provides a structure, a foundation for organizing.” And along with Transition’s emphasis on hopefulness over fear, this rigorous playbook seems to set it apart from earlier grass-roots crusades. It is, Transition leaders say, what they hope will allow the movement to bring in the people that conventional activists have failed to reach and, just as important, keep everyone focused through the messiness and disillusionment every community-organizing effort encounters and many do not survive.

Richard and Berta Kühnel of Transition in their treehouse.

At the Panida, the keynote speaker was Michael Brownlee, the director of the Transition effort in Boulder and a representative of Transition U.S. — an even newer group that is forming to help the movement spread in America. He was like the Transition equivalent of a middle manager flown in from corporate.

Brownlee gave his own variation of the standard PowerPoint presentation distributed at Transition trainings. Up on the screen behind him came a slide showing the three convergent emergencies that Transition aims to help us through: climate change, the unraveling of the global economy and peak oil. The theory of peak oil concludes that the productivity of the earth’s oil wells will soon peak — if it hasn’t already — and, once production falls short of demand, the market for our fundamental resource will rapidly spiral into chaos, potentially pulling much of society down with it.

Brownlee spelled out some probable outcomes, quoting peak oil’s pantheon of thinkers: Oil hits $300 a barrel by 2013. Middle Eastern exports cease. Things we take for granted — supermarkets, suburbs — quickly become impossible, and the world sinks into an “unprecedented economic crisis” that will “topple governments, alter national boundaries,” incite wars and “challenge the continuation of civilized life.” Brownlee paused after reading that last quote. He hadn’t even gotten to climate change and the implosion of the American dollar.

It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it’s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We’re all starting to career down the other side of that hill — which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it’s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.

City Councilman John T. Reuter.

In Sandpoint, though, people were trying to move the stale chatter of environmental collapse out of the health-food store and into the 21st century — to pull each incongruous part of their community

together and make their town, collaboratively, the blessed place they all knew it could be. At a time when so much fuzzy energy for change ricochets through our culture, and even Chevron ads ask us touse less oil and harness “the power of human energy” instead, Transition seemed to offer this sold-out theater in Idaho both a vision and a lucid, 240-page instruction manual with which to give it a try.

Would it work? Nobody could say. But as Brownlee finished, and the crowd suddenly re-erupted into applause, even just trying it seemed to feel wonderful. Next, a group of kids raced onto the stage in Sgt. Pepper garb, holding inflatable guitars. Later came a “sustainable performance arts” troupe (they use biofuels when fire dancing) and a woman who sang about rain and peace. By the time the last guitar duo performed “Here Comes the Sun,” everyone in the room was so keyed up — so ready to turn the impending dark age of peak oil and climate change into a renaissance — that no one heard the slightest menace in the line “Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting.” Or if they did, they just kept singing along anyway.

The second phase of the Sandpoint Transition Initiative’s Great Unleashing weekend began the next afternoon. A four-hour meeting was called to divide people into working groups, Step 5 in the Transition Handbook. Each working group would focus on a necessity of the town, like food, energy or transportation. They would develop projects, then research and write a plan delineating what steps Sandpoint must take in order to relocalize over the next several decades. The Transition Handbook calls this crucial document an Energy Descent Action Plan. Producing one is Step 12.

More than 100 people turned out for the meeting in the gymnasium of a local charter school. Everyone wore name tags. Richard Kühnel, who started the Sandpoint Transition Initiative with some like-minded friends in his living room, drew a shining sun on his.

Kühnel, 54, is a smiling stick figure of a man, with wispy hair and a whitening beard. He has worked as a software designer on and off since he was a teenager but also has a degree in “ecosocial design” from Gaia University. (He is Austrian and moved to Sandpoint in 1995 with his wife, an alternative-medicine practitioner.) Kühnel organized the initiative’s first meeting early last year after returning from a pilgrimage to Totnes, where he attended one of the first Transition trainings. He was attracted to the movement, he told me, because it alone seems to understand how to persuade people to address the world’s gloomiest challenges without shoving them into denial or depression. “We are not fighting against something,” Kühnel told me. “We are for something. I wanted to be part of the solution, positively responding to all these challenges here in Sandpoint.”

Sandpoint is a town of 8,100 people, rimmed by the Cabinet and Selkirk Mountains and bordered by picturesque Lake Pend Oreille. Like many Western towns, it is the mottled product of a century of migration. Railroad workers were followed by timber workers. In the 1970s, young, long-haired back-to-the-landers arrived, and many persevered even as northern Idaho ossified into a conservative stronghold. Last year, after the rise of Sarah Palin, who is a Sandpoint native, a local magazine ran an account of the couple of months she spent there as an infant before moving to Alaska. “I was in the eighth grade,” a former baby sitter told the magazine. “I held her.”

Transition seeks to “unleash the collective genius of a community,” as Hopkins often puts it — to unify a town behind a single, critical purpose. And at first glance, unifying Sandpoint might seem impossible. But those living on the land, whether out of a left- or right-wing ideology, do have a lot in common, including an astounding amount of resourcefulness. Peggy Braunstein, who came to Sandpoint from New York 27 years ago, told me that for her and her neighbors, many of whom live off the grid, life without oil “isn’t so overwhelming or shocking. People here have already lived a scaled-down life. We’ve already bartered and shared, canned together.” A local green-tech entrepreneur told me that Transition should not have too much trouble “bridging the rednecks and the hippies.” (“The best way to bring them together is a Willie Nelson concert,” he joked.)

At the charter school, everybody found seats in a circle. Many balanced legal pads on their laps. Kühnel’s wife, Berta, began by asking everyone to join hands. She instructed them to close their eyes and transmit energy around the circle in a clockwise direction. “We’re going to journey into 2030 and see what’s there for us,” she said. She told them to feel their bodies lifting into the clouds, falling back to earth as rain, then joining a river, “flowing forward in time.” The river ran through Sandpoint. It was the future now, and Berta asked everyone to look around: “What’s the technology? Is there technology? How do we dream? How do we live?”

Sandpoint’s mayor, a painter and former hardware wholesaler named Gretchen Hellar, was sitting next to Berta. When I asked her later what she made of the exercise, Hellar told me: “First of all, I’m not a good-feelings, touchy-feely kind of person.” She added, “People wanted to talk about where we can put community gardens, how can we make our downtown more viable.” John T. Reuter, a Republican city councilman a few seats over, told me that when Berta told them to hold hands, he was looking around the room, counting up the people he knew Transition just alienated.

The crowd split into groups of nine to draw their visions. Bruce Millard, a local architect who builds with straw bales, quickly emerged as his group’s moderator. Quite tall, with a ponytail and mustache, Millard bent over and drew several circles on his group’s sheet of paper with an orange crayon. He envisioned a hub-and-spoke system: many villages, each with a different specialty, with downtown Sandpoint as a trading post in the middle.

The group started brainstorming, assuming there would no longer be cars or a power grid. One village might grow food. Another should educate children.

“Where are we going to put the corpses?” someone asked.

“Eat ’em!” said a woman in braids.

“Can you just make a rule that everybody’s cremated?” a somber-looking woman in a blazer asked. Her husband was sitting with his face in his hands.

“Well,” Millard said, “it takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules.”

Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland.

Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; “industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”

By the mid-1800s, more than 15,000 Americans had experimented with Fourieristic living, many drawn to its promise during a severe economic downturn. But Fourier’s belief that acute scientific modeling could bring disparate people together didn’t hold. It reflected, the historian Carl J. Guarneri writes, “the naïve faith that . . . Baptists would get along with freethinkers and intellectuals would make great farmers.” Arguments tore phalanxes apart. So did debt. All but eight failed within three years.

It has been an American impulse since the Puritans: feeling the world racing in the wrong direction and withdrawing to a small, insular place to start over. Hippies came to Sandpoint in the 1970s for similar reasons: to live solitary, self-reliant lives. But going back to the land was tough, particularly since many never lived on the land in the first place. (“I couldn’t build things with my hands,” one man, once part of a small commune called Huckleberry Duckleberry, told me. “It was futile.”) By the early ’80s most had either moved into town or left the region.

Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.

By now, around the charter-school gymnasium, one group was imagining year-round farmers’ markets in the buildings that would, by 2030, no longer be banks. Another discussed bicycle parking and nodded benignly at a man who pictured everyone living in caves with Internet connections. Millard’s circle was ticking off ways they could travel between the villages they had drawn. “O.K., so we’re walking, we’re bicycling, we’re skiing,” he said.

“Kayaking!” someone offered.

Peggy Braunstein spoke up, worried about the snowy north Idaho winters. “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

“There’s no problems,” Millard told her. “In a dream there’s no problems. There’s only solutions.”

Karen Lanphear, who has been steering the Transition Initiative alongside Richard Kühnel since its inception, found this portion of the meeting excruciating. “I thought we squandered at least an hour or an hour and a half of people’s time,” she told me later. Lanphear is a commanding woman of 62 with short, styled gray hair and a doctorate in education. In many ways, she is Kühnel’s temperamental opposite. She feeds off his visionary energy but felt compelled to run their earliest meetings with timed agendas.

In the six weeks before the Unleashing, Lanphear met with the Downtown Sandpoint Business Association, the University of Idaho extension office and the branch manager for U.S. Bank. She was the keynote speaker at the Greater Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce’s monthly Women in Business luncheon and penned six editorials on Transition for the local paper. Lanphear told me she has a gift for “building coalitions.” This was apparent. But it wasn’t clear if everyone she briefed had the same frame of reference. Karl Dye, head of the Bonner County Economic Development Corporation, told me, “All the things Transition’s doing basically line up with what we’re trying to do, which is create better-paying jobs.” He saw a lot of promise in Lanphear’s group, though he also said: “If you start a business to produce food locally and there are opportunities to make money by taking it to other areas, you’re going to do it. You may believe in Transitions and local production and local consumption, but hey, man, we’re still Americans.”

At the time of the Great Unleashing, most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.

Transition’s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes. Most people I met in Sandpoint seemed to have latched onto the enjoyment part and run with it. The vibe was much more Alice Waters than Mad Max. (Jeff Burns, a local food activist who joined the food working group, was a conspicuous exception. “Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”)

Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn’t yet understand that “just because you’re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn’t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.” He later added, “If I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.”

During the next few days, I surprised myself by actually arguing with people in Sandpoint about whether they were doing Transition properly — with enough intensity, given the stakes. “I can’t live with the ambiguity of pending disaster,” Lanphear told me. “I was raised to believe there are no problems without solutions.” She said she didn’t believe things would become as bad as Brownlee and others predicted. She had a lot of faith in the ethic and ingenuity of younger generations and also told me, contradicting what seems like a central tenet of Transition, “I think technology is going to be one of our saving graces.”

A few months after the Sandpoint Un-leashing, I went to a meeting of the new board of Transition U.S. in Sebastopol, Calif., north of San Francisco. The organization had just partnered with the Post Carbon Institute, another peak-oil-focused nonprofit group, and received $280,000 of seed money. The board had signed the lease on its new headquarters 12 days before I arrived.

Transition U.S. is designed to offer guidance to Transition initiatives forming around the country and to organize trainings. Already it had communicated with activists in more than 900 communities. Jennifer Gray, who started the second Transition Town in England and then went to California to found Transition U.S. last year, was spending most of her time fielding phone calls and e-mail messages. She took it as a good sign that no one in Sandpoint was reaching out to her.

Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn’t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”

Consequently, the structure Transition sets forth is intentionally very minimal, and improvisation is encouraged. The handbook’s 12 steps needn’t be done in order (Hopkins now calls them the 12 “ingredients”), and communities are free to skip ones they don’t find useful. Ultimately, the most profound thing Transition offers isn’t a methodology at all but a mood.

“The genius of the Transition message, as I see it, is that it takes what we should be doing to avert these crises and turns it into something that sounds inviting and positive and uplifting,” Richard Heinberg, a Transition U.S. board member, told me in Sebastopol. Heinberg is an icon of the peak-oil fringe and the author of the seminal, comfortless book “The Party’s Over.” In 2007, he published a wider-ranging volume called “Peak Everything.” Still, Heinberg said he worries that Transition risks losing people in the elation it inspires. He has been debating with Hopkins whether, in addition to devising a long-term descent, Transition should emphasize preparing for disasters that Heinberg says are unavoidable or already unfolding, like volatile gas prices or “being sideswiped by economic catastrophe and weather disruptions.”

Eventually he expects the energy grid to weaken or shut off entirely and, like Michael Brownlee, he told me he considers martial law or worse persecution possible as resources become scarcer. Jennifer Gray, meanwhile, told me she expects “a big population die-off.” Heinberg said, “There’s nothing wrong with being motivated by fear if there’s something to be genuinely afraid of.”

I returned to Sandpoint in late February. The 11 working groups formed at the charter school in November were meeting regularly. They ranged in size from half a dozen to about 20 people and were all filing minutes to a steering committee as they plotted their first projects.

Jennifer Gray describes one of Transition’s goals as creating a “parallel community,” putting things like local power generation or local food networks in place to survive the slow crumbling of our current ones. But for the most part, the projects evolving in Sandpoint seemed designed to make the town’s current infrastructure a little greener and more livable. One group hoped to facilitate energy audits, making Sandpoint’s buildings more efficient users of the energy grid. The mobility working group, meanwhile, was planning to install a barrel of brightly colored flags at a dangerous intersection downtown. Pedestrians could pick up a flag and cross the street waving it, making themselves more visible to automobile traffic. Ideally, one member told me, they would persuade the city to put a traffic light there, “but that’s two, three years down the road.”

I was also surprised by the degree to which Transition members were intermixing with city authorities. Shortly after the Great Unleashing, Shelby Rognstad, a young cafe owner and an early Sandpoint Transition Initiative board member alongside Kühnel and Lanphear, was appointed to the town’s planning and zoning commission — a significant position, because Sandpoint was writing its first new comprehensive plan in 30 years. Rognstad spent the winter reading thick books on urban planning and cut down his involvement with Transition significantly. His outlook was changing. “Philosophically, I want to look 100 years down the road and just shoot for that vision,” he told me. “But the city’s only going to go for what’s real and achievable right now, in this fiscal year, in this election cycle.” He said he was thinking of running for office.

Kühnel was serving on the mayor’s advisory council on sustainability, a panel that was assessing a proposal by Transition’s food working group for an organic community garden.

By all estimates, the food group was far ahead of the others. When Jeff Burns approached the city about doing a garden as a first project, the parks director immediately pulled out satellite maps and started recommending plots. The parks director and the mayor had already scouted locations for gardens and were only waiting for some kind of volunteer organization or beautification committee to come and ask for one. Transition was given a third of an acre of an unused athletic field near the center of town and agreed to help keep the rest of the property weed-free in exchange. The food group had already lined up donations of seeds and tools and had a built-in pool of exuberant volunteer gardeners. A groundbreaking party was planned for early May.

And so, the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was taking its first steps. They were baby steps and, it seemed, pointed in only the general direction of the revolutionary postcarbon future the Transition Handbook had called them toward last fall. Other working groups are now volunteering to help the Chamber of Commerce, which happened to be starting its own “buy local” campaign. Transition Initiative members will organize a contest to design the campaign’s logo and will go around town, asking shop owners to hang up posters. Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.

“I love Richard’s energy,” Councilman John T. Reuter told me during my last afternoon in Sandpoint. “I can’t say that enough times. I just think he’s the best thing since sliced bread. But I guess I can’t really say that because sliced bread is a problem — that’s part of the industrial-food complex. So he’s better than that! Richard is the best thing to recover us from the crime of sliced bread.”

Reuter is 25. Bearded but otherwise baby-faced, he is one of three City Council members under the age of 31. He comes from a family of Greek Orthodox sheep ranchers in southern Idaho and now heads the county Young Republicans. He talks fast, scurrying through wry digressions like a comedian at a Catskills resort.

“Have you read Rob what’s-his-name’s book?” he asked me, meaning the Transition Handbook. Almost before I could answer, he said, “I read that whole thing.” Reuter didn’t like it, though. “There’s no question oil is a limited quantity,” he said, adding that we should prepare for a life without it. But the handbook struck him as overly pessimistic, resigning humanity to the sort of druidic life people at the charter school were romanticizing. “I guess I don’t celebrate the loss of energy the way some of the people in the Transition group do,” he said. “I like having a dishwasher.”

What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”

More than anyone else I had spoken to in Sandpoint, including the initiative’s own organizers at times, Reuter was able to articulate a cohesive understanding of what Transition was actually doing. The movement wasn’t going to unify everybody in Sandpoint, he said: “I know that’s their dream, but I just don’t see it happening.” But it was inspiring for Reuter to watch the group emerge as one fervently turning gear in the larger mechanism of self-governance.

“It’s like any other civic organization,” he said approvingly. It wasn’t a very romantic notion, and maybe achieving that status so easily was a sign that the initiative wasn’t really tackling the level of paradigm-busting work Transition wants to awaken us to. Maybe that will turn out to be regrettable. But, as utopian movements go, it also struck me as an unusually constructive outcome.

Writing an Energy Descent Plan or building a parallel community — bridges to carry us over the terrible time ahead and into a world we long for — wasn’t going to be Transition’s strength or its usefulness, as Reuter saw it. “Government used to be the place in our community where people came together and made civic decisions,” he told me. “That’s what we should do again, and that’s what’s going to bring us back together: not having government be this force somehow outside of us, that’s bearing down on us or annoying us, but as a force that we actually embrace and want and that does what we want.”

Reuter had a utopian vision, too: the one laid out in the U.S. Constitution. And the Sandpoint Transition Initiative seemed to be moving Sandpoint closer to that ideal in its own small way, even though it was working out of a totally different handbook. They were managing to make the functioning democracy in their town a little more productive. For a wide range of not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that Transition could help them build the world they wanted. And now, only because enough people stepped forward and made that decision, Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging it as earnestly as they could.

[Via NYTimes.com]

In the journal PLoS Medicine, BYU professors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy Smith report that social connections — friends, family, neighbors or colleagues — improve our odds of survival by 50 percent. Here is how low social interaction compares to more well-known risk factors:

• Equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day
• Equivalent to being an alcoholic
• More harmful than not exercising
• Twice as harmful as obesity

“The idea that a lack of social relationships is a risk factor for death is still not widely recognized by health organizations and the public,” write the PLoS Medicine editors in a summary of the BYU study and why it was done.

The researchers analyzed data from 148 previously published longitudinal studies that measured frequency of human interaction and tracked health outcomes for a period of seven and a half years on average. Because information on relationship quality was unavailable, the 50 percent increased odds of survival may underestimate the benefit of healthy relationships.

“The data simply show whether they were integrated in a social network,” Holt-Lunstad said. “That means the effects of negative relationships are lumped in there with the positive ones. They are all averaged together.”

Holt-Lunstad said there are many pathways through which friends and family influence health for the better, ranging from a calming touch to finding meaning in life.

“When someone is connected to a group and feels responsibility for other people, that sense of purpose and meaning translates to taking better care of themselves and taking fewer risks,” Holt-Lunstad said.

In examining the data, Smith took a careful look at whether the results were driven primarily by people helping each other prolong their golden years.

“This effect is not isolated to older adults,” Smith said. “Relationships provide a level of protection across all ages.”

Smith said that modern conveniences and technology can lead some people to think that social networks aren’t necessary.

“We take relationships for granted as humans — we’re like fish that don’t notice the water,” Smith said. “That constant interaction is not only beneficial psychologically but directly to our physical health.”

Brad Layton worked on the study as an undergrad at BYU and appears as a co-author on the new study. Layton’s involvement in this project helped him secure a spot as a Ph.D. candidate in the highly ranked epidemiology program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[Via ScienceDaily.com]

And as one wise author once said, are you going to eat your silver coins? Definitely not, we seem to be too concerned about consumerism and miss out on the basic necessities of life. When you go into a third world country, you don’t see them living the same we do, with big houses, 2 cars, brand name clothing and a bunch of stuff mountain high. Instead, their focus is on community, helping each other out to survive. They learned the hard way when they were burnt by their government and companies, because they relied on them for help. Instead they took matters into their own hands and started to be self sufficient.

So when will we learn, now or the hard way?

Before we jump on the bandwagon of buying silver, have we satisfied our basic needs? These include, food, shelter, water and to a certain extent social. By social I mean creating communities that become self sufficient because of the members inside of it who understand the goal is to help others out. You can read more about this, here.