Prepper Recon

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Navy Seal Matt Bracken is on the show today to provide some historical perspective about the coming Civil War 2.0 in America. He breaks down what is happening in America’s cities and gives detailed action steps of what you need to do in order to survive an internal conflict.

Congratulations to the winner of the Upheaval Giveaway, Linda D!

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The Second American Civil War has begun. NC Scout is on the show today to offer a military perspective on the escalating violence occurring in American cities around the country. He tell us what we need to do right now to prepare.

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I hope you’re doing well and keeping your chin up during these uncertain times. I’ve got lots of stuff to talk about this month so let’s dive right in.

First of all, let me say thank you to all the folks who have written since our last conversation. I’ve had several emails wanting to hear my thoughts on everything that’s going on. I’ll do my best to address all of those. However, part of the reason I’ve been so busy is that I’ve been focusing on solutions and not been able to allocate much time toward listening to the talking heads drone on and on about the problems. So, forgive me if I seem a little disconnected.

I would have gotten something out earlier this month, but I’ve been absolutely covered in multiple projects.

For all of you who are working on a garden, you know what kind of time commitment that can be. Most of my staple crops are doing well. I’ve put up 25 quarts of green beans. Most of those were canned, but I also froze 6 quarts. Obviously, freezing is faster, cheaper, and much less messy as opposed to canning, but I’m a prepper, so that means I always do things the hard way.

No, just kidding, but it does seem like that sometimes. I think it’s important to keep the canning skills honed. Plus, in the event of a grid down scenario, those jars of green beans are one less thing I’ll have to worry about using up before they go bad from the freezer.

If you’ve ever tried to run a large stand up freezer for any length of time on a solar generator, you’ll know that a stand up freezer can suck a lot of juice. You’ll need quite a few batteries to keep that going.

For those of you who are keeping your canning supplies for a rainy day, right now is a great time to take stock of your supply of jars, lids, and rings. Jars are, of course, reusable, but if you’re planning to can everything you produce in a grid down event, make sure you have enough. Rings are also reusable, but they can get rusty, so it makes sense to have a few extra rings on hand. Lids are not reusable. They’re also not as cheap as they once were. I use wide mouth jars because they’re easier to clean. Those lids run a few cents more. A dozen runs about $4 at my local grocery.

Since the apocalypse lite began, canning supplies have been in short supply. Our nearest Walmart has almost nothing but I’ve been able to piece together some extra canning supplies at the local grocery.

It’s not just canning supplies. Anything that can potentially fit into the prepper category is scarce. All of the gardeners can attest that it wasn’t as easy to source seed this spring. I highly encourage folks to stock up on seeds. Most will store for years in the freezer.

Another thing that’s kept me busy is rabbits. I finally pulled the trigger and got two does and a buck. We went with New Zealands which make good meat rabbits. They run about 10 lbs each so not too big and not too small. I had really hoped that I was going to be able to pick some low hanging fruit and just buy a couple of decent hutches off of Amazon. I tried the two models with the best reviews and both are pretty much junk. So, I ended up having to build my own. I finally bit the bullet and committed to the project. Now I have a good hutch that should serve me well for a decade or more. It’s 8 feet long and subdivided in the center providing separate quarters for bucks and does. It also has half inch by one inch wire screen along the bottom which allows the manure to drop through to a length of metal roofing installed at an angle. This lets the dropping roll down to a plastic bin where the manure can captured and taken to the garden for organic fertilizer.

The junk hutches that I bought off of Amazon can still be used for breeding, so they’re not a complete waste. In fact, I probably couldn’t breed in the main hutch because the baby rabbits’ feet would probably get caught in the screen. The Amazon hutches have solid bottoms.

If you decide to get into rabbits, you can find several hutch designs on line. I took ideas from a few different ones I saw to build a custom hutch that would meet my needs. You’ll also need to think about where you’re going to place the hutch. Rabbits tolerate cold fairly well, but not heat. Select a location that’s never exposed to direct sunlight.

The great thing about rabbits is that in a matter of about three months, you can go from three rabbits to over fifty. Then, the sky is the limit. You can produce as many as you have room to put them and food to feed them. They eat about anything. We feed our watermelon rinds, apple cores, banana peels, carrot tops, and celery bottoms. I pick clover, plantain, and wild carrots from the field to feed them also. But, if you just want to grab a bale of hay from Tractor Supply, they’ll eat that too. Timothy hay is the recommended variety, but they can also eat alfalfa and oat straw. I keep a bale that is a blend of those three which is sold for horses. The rabbits love it. I could do an entire show on rabbits. But I’ve got too much to cover, so let’s move on.

I’ve also finally committed to getting my Ham license. I’m actually taking my test tomorrow morning. So by the time you get this, hopefully I will have passed already. I’ve been averaging in the low 90s for my past few practice exams over on ham exam dot com. I should be okay. For my study materials, I got the audio version of Michael Burnette’s The Fast Track to Your Technician Class Ham Radio License. I found it to be pretty thorough. The entire book is a 14 hour listen. You can multi-task through most of each chapter if you’ll pause to take notes on the last 2 minutes of each chapter to write down the highlights which are the answers from the test pool. There’s a couple of editions, so make sure you get the current editions with the answers to the current exam. All in, I would estimate this to be about a 20 hour commitment from studying the materials, note taking, practice tests, and then the exam. It isn’t bad if you’re not keeping up with a garden, building rabbit hutches, and trying to get the next post-apocalyptic novel out while the manuscript can still be classified as fiction.

While we’re on that topic, the final installment of The Beginning of Sorrows should be out in late August. The audio edition will be out a little sooner, hint, hint. After that, I’ll be putting out a follow on series which picks up where The Beginning of Sorrows leaves off.

If you still haven’t read Cabal, the first book from The Beginning of Sorrows series, the Kindle edition is available this weekend only for $0.99.

Now on to the emails.

I’ve probably received more emails about Dana Coverstone’s three prophetic dreams than anything else. If you haven’t heard about this and you’re still interested after what I have to say about it, you can search it on YouTube by entering Dana Coverstone Three Prophetic Dreams. My synopsis of the dreams is going to be brutally brief.

I’m hesitant to even get into this because I’m not prepared to promote or advertise this video. But, now that I’ve mentioned it, all of the folks who haven’t heard of it are probably going to go listen now. However, it’s really catching fire, particularly in the more charismatic circles of faith, so I feel like the amount of damage I can cause by bringing attention to it is limited.

Let me start by saying that Pastor Dana seems very sincere during his delivery of his message. And, a large part of my skepticism can be attributed to the bad taste left in my mouth from 2015 when I caught a bad case of Shemitah Fever. Everything Rabbi Johnathan Cahn had to say about the Shemitah Cycle made sense to me. If you’ve been following me since then, you’ll recall that I was pretty wrapped up in it. Not that Rabbi Cahn said anything wrong, or misrepresented anything, but I’ve grown a little more cautious from that experience.

So, from now on, I need to see a track record from a prophetic voice before I get overly invested. The first of the dreams Pastor Dana had was back in December, where he saw a finger pointing to March on a calendar, then he saw lots of people sick. Next, he saw a finger pointing to June followed by riots and cities burning. Unfortunately, he didn’t make a video for that dream so we have to take that one on faith. He did put out a video on Facebook with two men from his church who claim he told them about the dream in December, but we’re still basically left to take it on faith.

In his most recent dreams, which he explains in his June, 25^th YouTube video features the finger pointing to September which he says means there will be a resurgence of Covid worse than what we saw in the spring. Then, he saw a fist punch a calendar marked November. He saw DC in flames, no leadership, and UN troops with blue helmets. He also saw Chinese and Russian troops incarcerating US citizens. Finally, he explains another dream that indicates a collapse of the US dollar and hyperinflation.

So what’s my take on all of this? Nothing in his dreams would surprise me. It’s all stuff I’ve been watching and writing about for the better part of a decade. However, I’m going to need to see some proof before I start formulating an action plan around his dreams. Although, if I did, it wouldn’t diverge very far from my current action plan anyway.

Why do I say that? Whether Pastor Dana’s dream is legitimately prophetic or just a nightmare, I think we’re in for some rough waters ahead. And, long before I heard about Pastor Dana’s dream, November 2020 is a time that has been on my heart and mind as very volatile period. Some of you may recall a series called Ava’s Crucible that I wrote in April of 2018 about the Second American Civil War. While it doesn’t state a specific date, November 2020 is certainly what was on my mind when I penned it. I think it’s pretty clear for those who like to read between the lines.

Everything I’m seeing, the unfounded hysteria over Covid, the coin shortage, the aluminum can shortage, the toppling of monuments, the talk of more bailouts, the renaming of streets after a group promoting a communist agenda makes me think that the Luciferian death cult pulling the strings of the democrats is going all out this November. I think the plandemic was originally scheduled as another conditioning campaign much like 9/11. But I think it is going much better than they ever dreamed. So, I think they’re going to try to take it over the goal line; I think they’re going all the way.

Hold your horses if you’ve already started writing me a nasty email. If you’re uniformed about Black Lives Matter being a far-left communist organization, go to their website and click the what-we-believe tab. They clearly voice their support of the gay, queer, and transgender community, refer to allies as “comrades”, and denounce the nuclear family which is the design created by God Almighty. Be very careful about standing side by side with such an organization, because in so doing, you are shaking your fist at the Creator Himself. And by the way, if black lives really mattered to these people, they’d start with banning abortion. The most dangerous place for a black American is in his mother’s womb.

And a quick note about the plandemic hysteria. When daily deaths were growing at an exponential rate, cause for concern was very well justified. However, deaths began flattening out after April 16^th. This is according to Johns Hopkins numbers which include people who were already in hospice, people who died in motorcycle accidents, and had multitudes of other misfortunes, but also happened to be positive for Covid. Their number show around 4,500 deaths per day on April 16^th and they’ve flattened out below 1,000 per day since June 28^th. Heart disease alone kills over 2,000 people a day yet there’s no hysteria over a supersized order of McDonalds fries.

This brings me back to Pastor Dana’s dream. I’m skeptical about a resurgence of Covid in the fall. For me to take his predictions seriously about November, I’d have to see the September daily deaths attributed to Covid climb above that 4,500 number which was reported back in April.

So, if I’m not taking his dream seriously, why does it seem that I’ve put my own prepping efforts into fifth gear? After all, I’m canning beans, building rabbit hutches, and getting my ham license. There’s another prophecy that I’m going to leave you with that does have me concerned.

The prophet Jeremiah writes in chapter 7:

“So you shall say to them, ‘This is a nation that does not obey the voice of the Lord their God nor receive correction. Truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth.  Cut off your hair and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on the desolate heights; for the Lord has rejected and forsaken the generation of His wrath.’  For the children of Judah have done evil in My sight,” says the Lord. “They have set their abominations in the house which is called by My name, to pollute it.  And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into My heart.

“Therefore behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “when it will no more be called Tophet, or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter; for they will bury in Tophet until there is no room. The corpses of this people will be food for the birds of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth. And no one will frighten them away. Then I will cause to cease from the cities of Judah and from the streets of Jerusalem the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride. For the land shall be desolate.

Because the Israelites would not repent of murdering their children, these prophecies came true. God turned the Valley of Hinnom into the Valley of Slaughter. In fact, that valley where they sacrificed their children to Molech became the trash heap known as Gehenna, a cursed place that Jesus used as an allegory for hell.

If we do not repent of our national sin of abortion, I fear that the United States of America may become the United States of Slaughter. Let us pray that the land of the free and home of the brave isn’t turned into a trash heap, into Gehenna.

Get ready. Prepare spiritually, physically, and mentally. I think we’re in for rough waters ahead.

May God bless you and keep you from the coming storm,

Mark

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Hey preppers and patriots, I hope you all are well and doing what you can to stay safe. I’ve been staying busy through the lockdown. I’ve got the garden started, recently put in some more fruit trees, and of course, I’ve been hammering away at the keyboard to get out the next installment of The Beginning of Sorrows.

As promised, I’m going to address some emails I’ve received since the beginning of the COVID crisis about what to expect on the economic level.

To start, I’m going to answer a letter I got from a reader. As a disclaimer, I’m not offering financial advice but simply stating what I would do in a given situation.

Ray writes,

What is your opinion on continuing to contribute to a 401k? I’m not cashing out but am not sure it makes sense to keep adding. I have a really good company match and some other prepper-minded people are saying now is the time to buy. But, I’m considering stopping or reducing my contribution and buying silver instead.

Dear Ray,

If I were in your shoes, I’d probably contribute up to the match and not a penny more. You’re essentially loosing part of your paycheck if you don’t participate. But, I’d park everything in the lowest risk vehicle available through my 401k program. With a one-to-one employer match, the market has to lose 50% of its value before you lose the first dime.

Thanks for writing!

In addition to my response to Ray, I’m going to expound a little bit on that and cover concerns from several other readers and podcast listeners.

The Fed has basically said they’ll do whatever is necessary to prop up the markets. With QE infinity, they could essentially purchase every available share of stock if they so choose. The total value of all 30 companies listed on the Dow Jones index comes to around $8 trillion.

Since March the government has pledged far beyond $6.5 trillion.

Congress has passed over $2.5 trillion in bailouts plus the Fed was at $4 trillion in COVID relief programs prior to Powell announcing on March 23^rd  that they would do whatever was necessary, basically saying that they would print an unlimited amount of money to keep the economy moving at full steam ahead—right over the edge of the cliff.

Through open market activities, the Fed is restricted to purchasing treasuries and certain other debt instruments to keep the party going. They’re not allowed to buy stocks and bonds of publicly traded companies. Of course, they see that rule as more of a suggestion than a law.

They’ve set up what the government likes to call a special purpose vehicle which allows them to shuffle money to a non-Federal-Reserve entity, which allows them to purchase High-Yield ETFs, AKA Junk Bonds. If the Fed was a drug dealer we’d call that special purpose vehicle a shell corporation and people would go to prison for money laundering. And even thought the Fed is not a government entity, they do enjoy all of the special privileges of being a member of the ruling class and are entitled to all the double standard benefits that the government receives.

So, the Fed is currently purchasing ETFs—only steps away from actually buying stocks. And as I’ve already stated, they could buy every share of stock on the Dow Jones index and it would still be in the ball park of what they’ve already committed in terms of monetary creation for COVID relief.

This is why all of my fiction works either focus directly on the economy or at least brushes over the government’s vain attempts to breathe life into the corpse which was once the US dollar. If you think the scenarios in my books are hyperbole, they’re not. If anything, they fail to portray the level of ignorance and desperation of government officials and central bankers. It’s impossible to envision the recklessness, stupidity, and suicidal moves these people make when faced with anything other than perfect economic conditions.

Back to the $6.5 trillion plus in bailout money. All that free cash is going to need a home. A large portion of it will inevitably end up in the market. Then, we’ll probably see astronomical levels in the market indexes never before imagined…until it all collapses into a heap of ash and rubble, revealing the US dollar as the disaster it really is. So be prepared for the crackup boom. Does that mean you should attempt to ride the wave? If you do, you better have a strong stomach and impeccable timing. Anything less and you could lose it all.

When the crackup boom comes we’re going to see the kinds of hyperinflation that so many other countries have faced. Venezuela, Russia, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and the Weimar Republic all saw rising inflation which left working class people unable to purchase basic supplies necessary for survival. The Downfall of Money by Frederick Taylor is an in-depth look at hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic. It makes a great non-fiction primer for what’s coming to America. During that period, the annual rates of inflation for the Weimar Republic were as follows: 4% in June of 1922, 22% in September, 68% in December of 1922, 285% in March of 1923, 765% in June, 1,500,000% in September. By December of 1923, the annual inflation rate for the mark was 152 trillion percent. Those numbers are hard to grasp, especially in percentage terms. So let’s look at the gold price. In January of 1919 it took 170 marks to purchase an ounce of gold. In November of 1923 it took 87 trillion to purchase an ounce of gold. But don’t think of it in terms of gold. Think about that same rate of increase applied to groceries. If $170 dollars’ worth of groceries fill up a cart now, under that economic environment it would cost $87 trillion to fill up the same cart four years from now.

Of course, everyone would be trillionaires, thanks to constant money printing, assuming we can get the rest of the world to keep accepting the dollar. But when they won’t, it all comes crashing down and no one will sell anything for dollars.

Within weeks of the corona virus outbreak, we saw pictures of food banks all over America with cars stretched out for miles waiting for handouts. This shows us the state of preparedness in the US. Many of these cars were new, several were BMWs, Mercedes, and other luxury models. This is indicative of a nation full of people living beyond their means. They didn’t have enough savings to make it even one month without assistance.

The bailouts are helping these people in the short run, but only because of the false confidence still placed in the US dollar. Once the rest of the world refuses to take our funny money as payment for goods and services, bailouts will come to an abrupt end.

Whatever the expiration date on the dollar was prior to the COVID crisis, it’s now much closer. The people who live hand-to-mouth have been taught that the government will take care of them no matter what. So, most will change none of their current budgeting habits. When the dollar collapses, these same people will have nothing in their pantry, nothing in their refrigerator, and the Fed won’t be able to bail them out. Then, they’ll get desperate. Think about what you would do if your child was crying, begging you for food. And you’re a nice person. Now, think about what someone not quite as civilized as yourself might do if their kids were starving to death. My vision of the future isn’t a very rosy picture, is it? Trust me, it’s euphoric compared to what reality has in store.

Next is unemployment. The official number now stands at 14.7%. Of course, many people still haven’t been able to file due to overwhelmed state systems which are struggling to catch up. The president of the Minneapolis Fed, Neel Kashkari said the actual unemployment number is closer to 24%. To put those numbers into historical perspective, at the height of the 2008 crisis, unemployment was at 10%. In the great depression, it was 25%.

Of course if an official at the Fed is claiming unemployment is at 24%, we know it’s actually much worse. John Williams at Shaddowstats has the U3 unemployment number at 35.4%. The CBO expects the official unemployment rate to stay above 10% for the next year or two. We’re in for a long, painful period.

What can you do to prepare? Keep doing what you’re doing. Invest in self-sufficiency. Pay down debt. Build a cash reserve of 9 to 12 months’ worth of total expenses. Build up your pantry—all the stuff I talk about in the Seven Step Survival Plan.

If you’re considering investing in gold and silver to hedge against the coming inflation, make sure all your other bases are covered first. I think we’re in for a prolonged period of erratic instability. We could see periods of deep deflation as people scramble for cash to survive the immediate future before hyperinflation ultimately takes hold and collapses our economy. During that initial phase of deflation, we could see prices of hard assets like gold and real-estate take a beating. But in the end, they’ll be some of the only safe havens for protecting wealth long term.

On the constitutional front, freedom is hardly worth talking about anymore. We’ve seen far more egregious abuses of power as a result of COVID 19 than we ever saw from the 9/11 panic. In our modern age, we’ve seen a father arrested for playing ball with his daughter in New York, a newlywed couple who spent their honeymoon in jail because they had a home wedding, a beautician thrown in prison for cutting hair, all the while marijuana dispensaries and abortion clinics remained open as essential businesses. Only in America do murders and drug dealers get classified as essential workers while people go to jail for cutting hair, getting married, or playing ball with their child.

I often hear this fantasy that people believe the police and military are going to draw a line in the sand, that they’ll refuse to take unconstitutional orders. No doubt, many will indeed. I applaud the work of Oathkeepers, which reminds soldiers and law enforcement of their oath to uphold the US constitution. I think many men and women in those professions who are confronted with what that means will determine ahead of time not to go along with unjust and unlawful orders. However, I fear they will be in the minority.

During the COVID crisis, Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order for the National Guard to seize ventilators and protective gear from private hospitals, a blatant infraction against the 4^th amendment. But, I heard of no mass refusals by the National Guard to carry out this terrible crime.

In Dare County, North Carolina, the Sheriff’s Department banned non-resident homeowners from accessing their own houses. The very people who pay these deputies salaries through property taxes were denied being able to go to their own homes. And once again, I heard nothing about any major protests by the deputies in that department. Neither did I hear about any law enforcement officers in Texas who refused to arrest Shelly Luther for cutting hair.

I know I have a lot of readers and listeners who are in law enforcement. I know it’s a tough line to toe and I appreciate your service. But, if you’re not already involved with Oathkeepers, I’d encourage you to take the time today to look into getting involved. If you’re already involved, start having some conversations with your co-workers in your department. Try to get them to take a look at Oathkeepers as well. I believe we are getting perilously close to the end of the American experiment and this country won’t survive in its intended form without your support.

Until next month, God bless and happy prepping!

Mark