LVSteve
Member
If you want to see how all this plays out, read A Death of Grass by John Christopher. Seemed to give a believable account of human nature under stress.
Bugging Out
- Thread starter BAM-BAM
- Start date
One of the countries largest internet services crashed one Friday night a few months ago. The kids thought they were in hell as they had no Wi Fi. We had to sit down and watch a movie on the old-fashion DVD machine! That's about as close as we have come to needing to bug-out........!
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LVSteve
Member
Most likely neither is anyone else after the EMP fries the engine control systems of most vehicles built in the last 35 years.
The late, great Dr. Charles Krauthammer wrote a column some years ago on the importance of government in the lives of everyone on this planet...how the very existence of governments, and the role they play in organizing societies, prevents a descent into barbarism, and keeps the world from erupting into wholesale warfare.
People who wear their contempt of government or the law as a badge of honor...who have adopted as their mantra "you can't make ME do that!"...who believe they have the right to loot and burn cities, or threaten/assault public officials...or boldly declare that certain rules don't apply to them...or who sow doubt about the core institutions of our society...edge us closer to the nightmare scenario that inspires threads like this.
Let's be real. The average American these days has no idea how to obtain food outside of a grocery store, or how to stay warm without power supplied by utilities. Yes, many of us can get by for a week or so in the event of a temporary emergency, such as a hurricane or blizzard, but in the event of true widespread civil disturbances, the best we could hope for is that our state and federal governments restore order as quickly as possible.
People who wear their contempt of government or the law as a badge of honor...who have adopted as their mantra "you can't make ME do that!"...who believe they have the right to loot and burn cities, or threaten/assault public officials...or boldly declare that certain rules don't apply to them...or who sow doubt about the core institutions of our society...edge us closer to the nightmare scenario that inspires threads like this.
Let's be real. The average American these days has no idea how to obtain food outside of a grocery store, or how to stay warm without power supplied by utilities. Yes, many of us can get by for a week or so in the event of a temporary emergency, such as a hurricane or blizzard, but in the event of true widespread civil disturbances, the best we could hope for is that our state and federal governments restore order as quickly as possible.
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I would stay put, protect my family and myself as best I could and survive the best way I know how. Bugging out would put you in a strange place, amongst strange people, unfamiliar territory, no real shelter (unless you have a second home or that of friends or family) and out of your "castle". You are less likely to be able to get what you need being in a strange place and probably be a "fish out of water".
Yes, there might be a circumstance or two that would require "bugging out", but I believe that would be the exception, not the rule.
Yes, there might be a circumstance or two that would require "bugging out", but I believe that would be the exception, not the rule.
IronSkillet
Member
If one of these events ever happens, how soon before a neighbor knocks @ the door asking for food, and do you have the inner strength knowing you're supplies are already limited to turn them away? How soon before someone is breaking into you're home? Lets face it we all have neighbors that eat three meals a day via drive-thru lanes and don't have a can-good in the house they are going to adapt or starve. Plan on staying home and locking in, will be way safer, besides even FEMA would see me as a fat out of shape old guy and send me for a shower before allowing me into the relocation center.
ColbyBruce
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I have two words for all the fruitcake fans here…Claxton, Georgia.
BLACKHAWKNJ
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Methinks Charles Krauthammer wrote that column with tongue firmly in cheek, the late great historian Robert Conquest noted the near unanimous agreement among historians that the 20th Century was THE worst.
Try to imagine "bugging out" in traffic that would make rush hour look like a Sunday afternoon during the Oil Embargo of 1973-74 or WWII. Power outage means no traffic lights, the gas stations couldn't pump-even if they were open, one breakdown on a crowded road , water systems knocked out....
Perpetrators breaking in...how many of us would call 911-and could they even respond ? There's the episode of the Sopranos were Janice Soprano shoots her boyfriend Richie-then calls her brother.
Try to imagine "bugging out" in traffic that would make rush hour look like a Sunday afternoon during the Oil Embargo of 1973-74 or WWII. Power outage means no traffic lights, the gas stations couldn't pump-even if they were open, one breakdown on a crowded road , water systems knocked out....
Perpetrators breaking in...how many of us would call 911-and could they even respond ? There's the episode of the Sopranos were Janice Soprano shoots her boyfriend Richie-then calls her brother.
"Bugging out!?!" Around here, in the sleepy little burg of Strange Cloud, locals light up the Fazebuk daily that it "takes them 1 1/2 hours to go the 3 miles from house to the Turnpike entrance" on the way to work in Orlando. Everybody is worried about the power going off, real problem is when no water comes out of the tap. Bug out indeed. Joe
Living in the country the farmers motto makes the most sense;
Shoot, Shovel, Shut Up.
Be careful arguing with a man with 80 acres and a backhoe.
Oh, that brings up some VERY unpleasant memories for us up here in British Columbia, although you wouldn't likely have known about the Willy Pickton caseCanadian serial killer and former pig farmer. He is suspected of being one of the most prolific serial killers in Canadian history...
I remember that well while we were spending alot of time at our place on Christina Lake, B.C. It seems that was going on at about the same time as the revolt up off 100 Mile House. We were given the official title of "Seasonal Settlers."
A timely rerun...
31FordA
Member
Nuclear attack?
We had those desks in grade school, but by the time I was in school they had abandoned duck and cover. I doubt the desk would’ve been much help anyway. My grade school was less than a mile from a steel mill that supplied steel for the Navy’s nuclear subs. I figure Ivan had enough nukes targeted on us that the first I’d have known of World War III was arriving at the pearly gates.
My desk has an impenetrable layer of used gum under the top.
LVSteve
Member
There you go! The gamma rays would have no chance.
No, not at all. I searched the Washington Post's database, and found the column, which was entitled "Are We Alone in the Universe?", and was published on December 29, 2011. I've cut-and-pasted it below...
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Are We Alone in the Universe?
by
Charles Krauthammer
Huge excitement last week. Two Earth-size planetsfound orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.
Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is probably gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time — perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.
And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.
That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?
It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”
How many of them should there be? The Drake Equation (1961) tries to quantify the number of advanced civilizations in just our own galaxy. To simplify slightly, it’s the number of stars in the galaxy . . .
multiplied by the fraction that form planets . . .
multiplied by the average number of planets in the habitable zone . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that give birth to life . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that develop intelligence . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that produce interstellar communications . . .
multiplied by the fraction of the planet’s lifetime during which such civilizations survive.
Modern satellite data, applied to the Drake Equation, suggest that the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.
In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.
This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that had created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.
Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are only the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.
And forget the psychopaths: Why, a mere 17 years after Homo sapiens — born 200,000 years ago — discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, America and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.
Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.
There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.
Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.
LVSteve
Member
The issues with detecting signals from other planets can be explained by the advances in our own communications technology. A lot of the modern transmission standards have signals that look more like wideband noise, with no discernible carrier wave. Physics being what it is, that kind of signal is difficult to detect over interstellar distance without knowledge of the modulation scheme.
But definitely not something to talk about on the internet
