Tag Archives: disaster preparedness

College, Preppers, & The Future

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Instead of Providing “Safe Spaces” This University Teaches Survival Skills

Daisy Luther
Contributor, ZenGardner.com

Once upon a time, the goal of higher education was to prepare kids for life, but in past decades they’ve gotten further and further from that path. Now, in an era of crybabies and safe spaces, one university teaches survival skills and is completely bucking the status quo.

Frostburg State University has a freshman-level interdisciplinary course called Doomsday Preppers and Surviving the Unexpected Emergency, playing off the popularity of the National Geographic Channel’s show of the same name. In the class, Recreation and Parks Management Professor Robert Kauffman teaches disaster preparedness to help the kids get ready for a variety of scenarios. Kauffman is the author of a paper about “the rescue curve” that discusses the point at which injury, damage or loss can increase as time between an incident and an intervention increases. The class is now in its second semester of preparing students for emergencies, and the professor plans to continue it next year. Here’s a little bit more about the course:

In Kauffman’s class, he uses clips from “Castaway” and “Blast From the Past” among others to augment his examples of the psychological and physical effects of disaster preparedness.

As January’s snowstorm demonstrated, these skills come in handy whether stranded on a highway or isolated in your neighborhood.

Among the assignments in IDIS 150, students have to plan for short-term disasters and one-year disasters, take inventory of their food at home, design a shelter, determine how much in supplies and food they need, organize communication tools and, yes, learn how to prep for life in an underground bunker. But it’s the more likely scenarios that Kauffman really hopes the students will be prepared for.

“It is a reprocessing of your camping skills. Really, what we did is take the old-fashioned camping course and repackaged it,” Kauffman said. “The real emphasis is surviving the unexpected emergency we could be thrust into anytime, our car breaking down on the road, being stranded at a rest stop, or we just had a storm where people were stranded for three days.”

Ebersole, of New Enterprise, Pa., found the course helpful for when he goes hunting in the winter. He now makes sure he has an extra coat and supplies in his car for unexpected situations. It was a simple exercise in class that showed him why it’s important to have extra supplies.

“We pulled out everything from our pockets, and whatever you had with you at the time is what you’ll have during an emergency,” he said.

He also was well-prepared for the January snowstorm in part thanks to the class, having stocked up on enough food and supplies to make it until his neighborhood’s streets were cleared.

These kids are being prepared for actual life, toughening up by considering the possibilities, and gaining the confidence that comes from being ready to meet challenges.

Liberal Institutions of Wussification

This is in sharp contrast to what many colleges are teaching these days. Instead of nurturing competent kids into adults that can go out and conquer the world, they’re wrapping them in cotton and turning them into wusses who require shelter from mean words.

Just last week, Rutgers University was the scene of a dramatic protest with an aftermath that required trauma counseling. If you’re wondering what awful thing happened, there was a guest lecturer who hurt some of the students feelings. In protest, they smeared blood on their faces, because words. Words had wounded them.

Afterward, they had to seek help in a group therapy session to deal with the trauma of listening to another opinion. Many students said in the aftermath that they were fearful as they slunk around the campus for days after the event.

Protesters at the University of Missouri required a “safe space” to recuperate from the rigors of protesting, in which no one could say mean things to them and the media couldn’t report on them.

So unbelievably gutless are many young adults that numerous guides have been written about how to keep from offending, treading upon, or discriminating against anyone. (You can see a list of these guides here so you can laugh at themfollow the new rules of conduct.)

Matthew McConaughey gave the 2015 commencement speech at the University of Houston, and may not be invited back. ““Life’s not fair. It never was, isn’t now and won’t ever be. Do not fall into the entitled trap of feeling like you’re a victim. You are not.”

What do you think kids should be learning to prepare them for adult life?

If we really wanted kids to be prepared for an adult life full of accomplishments and freedom, we’d teach them that overcoming obstacles is the route to success, not hiding under your blankie. Never have I seen it so well said than in this essay by a combat veteran Marine.

If you were designing a course for life for kids stepping into adulthood, what would that course teach? Disaster preparedness? How to handle your finances? How to budget? Home economics? Shop? It seems that none of these things is included in education anymore, and we’re sending kids out into the world completely unprepared, deeply in debt, and unable to find employment.

No longer do youngsters seek adventure and live to tell the tale (at least not without someone getting arrested or taken away by CPS). Helicopter parenting and “higher education” are lowering the thresholds of common sense and, well, cajones. These coddled, wimpy kids could be the sensitive future leaders of our country, an alarming thought at best.

The course at Frostburg is a refreshing change from the tripe we’re seeing in the news from other colleges. I would much rather send my kids to a place where the headline is “University Teaches Survival Skills” than one that says “University Creates Safe Spaces for Word-Wounded Students.”

Here’s hoping that other schools follow their leads.

from:     http://www.zengardner.com/instead-providing-safe-spaces-university-teaches-survival-skills/

Preppers for Disaster

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What I saw at the doomsday prepper convention

November 11, 2013: 10:24 AM

The market for preparedness supplies tracks to broader anxieties: some sensible, some not so much. And it’s not just conspiracy theorists buying in.

By David Z. Morris

131108124516-apocalypse-business-man-620xaFORTUNE — More and more Americans are spending money to get ready for an uncertain future — gathering food, water, tools, and skills to help them weather anything from a hurricane to a pandemic. Contrary to images of deluded or gun-obsessed “lone wolves,” many preppers are average consumers reacting to concrete worries, and their way of thinking is spreading, fueling an emerging lifestyle trend. That lifestyle is generating demand for a broad spectrum of products offering survival — or even comfort — when large-scale systems go down.

An array of preparedness expos and conferences have cropped up around the country to serve this emerging and fast-changing market. To get a closer look, I visited Life Changes, Be Ready!, or LCBR, a new expo that held its second event on the weekend of November 2nd and 3rd, in Lakeland, Fla. LCBR gave an immediate sense of one big way that the preparedness crowd isn’t marginal at all — economically. The show floor was packed with a dizzying array of small businesses and products that defied stereotypical “prepper” classification — not just ammunition and crossbows and camping gear, but also seed banks, beehives, financial planning, and acupressure.

According to many of the entrepreneurs on the floor, business is trending upwards. John Egger of Self Reliance Strategies has been producing and selling prepackaged seed banks for nearly four years and sees his market expanding. “It’s definitely picking up. It’s not just country people anymore. We really cater to a suburban market … We call it suburban homesteading.” You can see this broadening of the market in the range of price points, from the $5,600 portable solar charging stations flogged by Alternative Energy, Inc., to the $649 “Stomp Supreme” field medic kit offered by Doom and Bloom, LLC. (“This is the one recommended for people expecting civil unrest.”) Clearly, LCBR’s vendors saw a crowd ready to drop major cash today to assuage their worries about tomorrow.

The diversity and type of products on offer was also remarkable. Egger’s seeds, for example, were prominently labelled “Organic” and “Non-GMO” — and so were all the other seeds on sale at the show. Those are distinctions you might not think were important to the same crowd in the market for a crossbow, but according to Egger, “you don’t have to explain to people anymore” why eating organic matters. That was just one element of the unique mix of gritty survivalism, back-to-the land self-sufficiency, and outright hippie dream-science on display at LCBR. There were earthworm farms and beehives for sale, and two different companies dealing in essential oils. In a back corner, Mike Mah, or “No Stress Mike,” offered $30 pain reduction sessions using his “Hoy Chi” energy healing techniques. Mah’s flyers proudly advertised that he attended every Tea Party event he could, and he manipulated the spines of dozens of willing customers with a pistol tucked discreetly in his waistband.

There are still uncertainties in the preparedness market, some driven by ideology, according to Charley Hogwood of Personal Readiness Education Programs. “All last year it was up and up and up. But after the [presidential] election, it flattened out.” Hogwood thinks that some in the market were overwrought over doomsday scenarios surrounding the reelection of Barack Obama. “Last year, I heard 100 different conspiracy theories” about what a second Obama presidency might mean. But when the election wasn’t followed by martial law and FEMA camps, both the rhetoric and the market cooled off a bit. “I rarely hear the crazy theories now. Now everyone’s worried mainly about the collapse of the dollar,” says Hogwood, referring to widespread prepper fears of hyperinflation triggered by the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing.

Hogwood, friendly and round-faced, reflected the resolute averageness that permeated the show. He snorted derisively at conspiracy theorists, and also acknowledged some of the ironies of a preparedness trade show. “Sometimes it’s like a toy store, and people buy stuff because they like it.” But in a real survival situation, “the more you know, the less you have to carry. A lot of people don’t know much and think they can buy their way out of it.” He sees some of the extremism surrounding the prepping industry as hype, maybe even fearmongering. “It’s so much more fun to worry about martial law than a hurricane. People like zombies as a marketing tool.”

In fact, I spot more than a few zombie-themed rifle targets at the show. But Hogwood is also emphatic that, the image aside, prepping is about skills — not guns. “You see some cool weaponry … but who needs a grenade launcher?” Despite the presence of at least five booths of firearms and accessories, many exhibitors are equally dismissive, even derisive, toward guns, gun shows, and the culture surrounding them. John Egger tried to sell seed kits at a gun show once and won’t be returning. Gun show attendees are “a different breed of people. They don’t want to learn.”

Learning was a big part of the LCBR experience — two large lecture halls, frequently packed, ran the duration of the show. In addition to seminars from well-known preppers and security experts David Kobler and James Wesley Rawles, attendees got gardening advice from local expert Tom MacCubbin, and a Q&A from author David Crawford. Crawford is the author of Lights Out, a preparedness-themed novel that he has successfully self-published to an eager audience. The premise of Lights Out is a large electromagnetic pulse (EMP), knocking out electronics across the U.S. and causing a slow decline of society. Crawford and a business partner were at LCBR as part of an effort to raise funds to turn Lights Out into a trio of feature films. The EMP scenario (or a “grid down”) was a recurring concern at the expo — and, at least technologically, it’s plausible.

Life Changes, Be Ready! was the work of Cindy and Jim Thompson, who have been organizing real estate expos since 2004 — “Back,” Jim jokes sardonically, “when that was still profitable.” But LCBR is as much a calling for them as it is business. Cindy, thin and blonde, and Jim, gray and fit, have been preppers themselves since the mid-1990s — though they don’t like that word. “We prefer ‘sustainable living,'” Jim says. “Less consumption.” Cindy was asked to speak about her lifestyle at a Tea Party event in 2012, and the response was so staggering that the two put together the first LCBR in a few weeks, ultimately attracting over 4,000 attendees. Almost all of their first batch of vendors returned the second time around, and with better planning, they were expecting much higher attendance numbers.

Jim is emphatic about the mainstream audience he’s catering to. “Our core audience is 40-75 years old. Eighty percent have college degrees. Twenty percent of those have advanced degrees,” he said. He attributes his success in attracting a higher-end clientele to the educational bent of LCBR. “When you bring in a higher caliber of speaker, you attract a different group — more disposable income, more moderate in their thinking. That [extreme] element of the preparation mindset, they still show up, they come in, but that’s not what we’re about.”

The event also has strict ground rules to produce a nonthreatening environment. “If you go to the speaking engagements, you won’t hear any racist crap, you won’t hear any discriminatory talk. We don’t allow it.” Jim is proud of what they’ve achieved in that regard: “I’ve seen homosexual couples walking around the show,” he says. “Who am I to discriminate?”

Still, it was impossible to completely ignore the presence of an element many would consider reactionary. Political and social initiatives represented at the show included the Polk County Libertarians and the admirable entrepreneurship mentoring program Patriot Mission, Inc. — but also the marginal, conspiracy-minded John Birch Society. After a relatively measured primer on the threats of inflation, featured economist Dr. Kirk Elliot encouraged me to look into how the Rothschild and Rockefeller families continue to own the Federal Reserve — a common canard among New World Order conspiracists of the Alex Jones stripe.

Finally, at the end of my conversation with John Egger about the rise of “suburban homesteading,” a man with a white shock of hair interjected himself into the conversation. “You know what chemtrails are?” he asked, referring to another conspiracist trope that sees chemical tampering in jetstream vapor trails. “They’re changing the weather, then selling drought tolerant seeds. George Soros and Bill Gates are behind it.” Egger nodded politely and smiled, tolerant of a potential customer’s eccentricities.

While normalcy and centrism may be the goal for businesspeople like Cindy and Jim Thompson, it seems the preparedness lifestyle hasn’t completely shaken loose its extremists and kooks.

from:    http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/11/life-changes-be-ready/