Hi, there.

We’re going to talk about that viral article predicting empty shelves and famine (one more time), because the world needs to hear a full, cogent critique of it—and all the attention it got. We’re not doing it because we like bashing prophets, but because this snafu illustrates a problem that runs deep in western culture, especially American culture. It has plagued us all decade. So, I thought, who better to offer a critique of this mess than the writer once referred to as “the queen of doom,” the one roasted online daily for her “fearmongering?”

So, let us begin.

Maybe some of you still haven’t seen this article, which has gone super viral, even outside Substack, inspiring urgent and often panicked discussions across Reddit and YouTube about starvation in America this summer. If not, it’s worth skimming, just so you know the context. Read this one, too. The author himself told us he got hundreds of thousands of views just over the first couple of days. There’s nothing too unique about the content. It predicts mass shortages and famine by early July, driven by the Iran War and the ensuing oil crisis. We’ve seen these predictions for years now, since the pandemic began. What’s unique about the article?

The tone, and the spiritual element.

The author doesn’t just discuss the likelihood or the probability of the famine. He frames it as a certainty, something he’s seen coming “spiritually” for decades. He says fate has selected him to share this message. In fact, he describes all this nonsense as his “assignment” and perhaps the reason for his struggles as an artist and father. No messiah complex there, am I right?

He goes on to say that “your” mortgage, “your” debt, and “your” other responsibilities are no longer “your” priority. He commands you to start building community, stocking up on food, and preparing for the end of our financial system, because money will become completely useless, and the entire government system is going to come crashing down. By the end, I was just sitting there shaking my head at how reckless someone could possibly be in their advice.

It would be one thing if this article had simply vanished into the ether, another false alarm by another false prophet. Instead, it pleased the algorithm gods. They presented the nonsense to us as truth, and people bit. They liked. They shared. They heaped praise on this guy. And that’s a problem.

The Collective Failure

This is not simply the story of one bad writer.

When a platform’s algorithms reward that story, when everyone who allegedly “isn’t a doomer” clicks and shares and heaps praise on the bad writing and research, that’s when it becomes a collective failure.

A big one.

The same calm cucumbers who’ve disregarded every warning about every real threat we’ve faced for years, suddenly felt that this guy was worth listening to, because something godlike had touched him with prophecy. His age, and no doubt his gender, conferred a sense of authority on him.

Everyone started freaking out.

In all honesty, it was not a well-written article. On top of all the froth and long-winded explanations, the author drops all their sources in one big pile at the end, poorly formatted, not contextualized, not cited in text, or even discussed. They’re just vomited down at the bottom, with the assurance that he has read them carefully, with the help of AI, to arrive at his conclusion of mass famine by July. Why would you trust this guy? Because he’s an expert in logistics or energy? No. Because he’s a journalist with a reputation for being right? No.

Because he explains it all very well?

No.

Hundreds of thousands of people listened to him because he checked all the boxes of what counts as an authority in America.

The author had a chance to apologize, and he bombed that as well. In a follow-up post, he talks about his spiritual and mystical insights into collapse. He says the data “now backs everything I have been tracking spiritually for forty years.” He talks about his struggles as an artist.

He also backtracks:

When I talk about bare shelves and famine, I am not talking about the United States in sixty days. That is not what I have said. That is not what I have ever said. I think the idea that famine hits the United States in six to eight weeks is, frankly, kind of crazy. That is not what I see.

What I see, and what I have said consistently for over two years, going back long before Trump attacked the Strait, is that in the United States, by June and July, things will start getting hard to get. You will go to the store and you will not be able to find this or that. Supply chains will begin to visibly buckle. Not famine. Not total collapse. But friction. Intermittency.

Oh, now he tells everyone…

Go back and read the original article, if you have the stomach for it. This is not how he frames the crisis. Alas, to sum things up:

No, you don’t need to panic about a famine by July. You shouldn’t stop paying your mortgage or your other bills.

Unlike the author, I’m no mystic.

I haven’t been tracking anything spiritually for 40 years. But now we get to the core of the problem in American culture. If you’re a scientist, or you just understand science, nobody listens to you. They don’t look at your data.

They don’t want your evidence.

A Real Prophet: John Wesley Powell

You know who actually predicted all this?

John Wesley Powell.

We’re not living through a fuel crisis; we’re living through a climate crisis. The fuel crisis is a driver. Empty shelves are coming with or without dumb presidents and their wars. And this was foretold by guys like Powell, long before any mystics entered the picture. A Civil War veteran who lost his arm at Shiloh, Powell led the first major expedition along the Colorado River, explicitly for the sake of determining its viability for settlement. He told everyone: Don’t do it.

That’s right. The U.S. federal government hired John Wesley Powell to lead an expedition through the west, then come back and tell them whether it was a good idea to develop that territory. His exact words:

“I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not enough water to supply the land.”

He said that in 1893.

120+ years ago.

As the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Powell continued to argue against the settlement of the southwest.

He called it unsustainable.

Nobody listened.

Instead, they settled. They built big cities, exactly where Powell told them not to do it. They built dams and giant reservoirs, thinking they would outsmart nature. They named one after him. Yep, Lake Powell. Lake Powell is now drying up. It won’t supply the land, exactly as Powell said it would.

Americans have a long heritage of disregarding facts and evidence in favor of mystical thinking, and it’s exactly why we’re in this mess. Most Americans have no clue what they could be doing to actually prepare for, or even prevent, many of these catastrophes, because they don’t listen. They don’t listen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about. They listen to grifters and charlatans, who are right by accident sometimes, often too late.

So, I guess it’s fitting for Americans to continue shrugging off warnings from their actual Cassandras, like John Wesley Powell. It’s fitting for them to completely freak out when some dude with zero training or background tells us he has spiritually foreseen a famine, backed by data delivered to him via AI models designed to validate his thoughts, run by robots that will also tell you to eat pebbles and poisonous mushrooms. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

This Has to Stop

Please, stop sharing clickbait articles about famines in 8 weeks.

Guys like this, who write articles like this, aren’t helping anyone. They’re making it that much harder for the real Cassandras to get their message out. They’re making it that much harder for us to be taken seriously.

The next time someone like me talks about real threats now and down the line, like Dust Bowls and failing breadbaskets, or airborne diseases, people are going to remember Mr. Famine and his mystical clickbait article that scared them into thinking they were going to starve.

They’re going to remember how they overreacted, and how the author dodged responsibility for predictions he ultimately retracted.

They’re going to ignore the next warning.

There are times when I’ve gone too far in my predictions, when I was certain something was going to happen.

Then again, the most I ever asked anyone to do was wear an N95 mask and take some precautions. And you know what? Most of my predictions have come true, because they were backed by actual data done by real human beings, peer-reviewed, and subjected to intense skepticism.

The problem is that the world has simply learned to accept slow-moving disasters. We have various names for this phenomenon. Call it shifting baseline syndrome. Call it normalcy bias. Call it the Region Beta Paradox.

I’ve written about them all.

The world doesn’t seem to care if you tell them that 6 million children have been disabled by an airborne virus, because it happened slowly and it doesn’t affect them directly. They can ignore it. They can keep blaming social media. The same goes for my warnings about Trump and the flaws of our two-party system, or the cascade of biblical record-breaking disasters we’re seeing every week now. They can continue throwing hopium at each other.

If I have any advice:

Stop ignoring your real Cassandras for years on end, then freaking out over viral articles about empty shelves in 8 weeks.

This is not healthy behavior.

It’s not productive behavior. There are things you can be doing now to help prepare for and even prevent pandemics and famines in the future. They require you to put in some effort, not because you’re absolutely going to starve 8 weeks from now, but because you might starve 8 years from now.

A related example:

We committed tens of billions to preparing for pandemics, and then… we didn’t do it. Our leaders spent the money on everything from cop cities to wrestling tournaments. People didn’t get used to wearing N95 masks. They taught each other to see them as symbols of trauma instead of protection. Universities threw hundreds of air purifiers into dumpsters. I’m serious. If you don’t believe me, look it up. Now, people are wondering if they should freak out over hantavirus. They’re missing the point. If we had done the right thing, then we wouldn’t need to freak out over hantavirus, because we would have the tools to manage it. We didn’t commit the sustained time and energy, and now we don’t have the tools.

It’s like this with famine, with pandemics, on and on.

Maybe you get it.

Between each one of these viral freakout articles over empty shelves or a new virus, there are so many things we could be doing. There are ways to clean the air and make pandemic viruses much less dangerous. There are ways to grow food in parking lots. There are ways to capture water even if it’s not raining. There are ways to localize prescription drug production.

Lots of us are working on these ideas, and we need help. We need sustained support. What we don’t need is to be ignored, laughed off, and insulted when we try to talk about all these problems, only for the exact same skeptics to freak out and give all of their bandwidth to the next viral article written by a mystic, with AI insights, who doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.

One day, the mystics will accidentally be right.

The shelves will be empty.

Then what?

You’re going to starve in 8 weeks. Oh, wait. Never mind. The guy who wrote that essay walked back his bold claims. You won’t necessarily starve. Someone will, somewhere. Turns out, his AI-driven research might’ve been based on some faulty assumptions. Sorry if you already made any down payments on a large wooded lot between those two posts and told your mortgage company to go to hell. But, hey, he got 3,000 likes and a big boost to his new Substack. He appreciates you.

Fun fact: A famine is already underway in Afghanistan. Back in January, Reuters interviewed an Afghan family who eats one meal a day, a little bit of bread. They said, “We’re content to die.” So, that’s a real famine. Even then, the media doesn’t say “famine.” They say “the brink of famine.” We’ll get there soon enough. By the time it happens, Reuters will show up to interview you about it. They’ll run the story. Nobody will read it. You’ll welcome death.

And that will be that…

This debacle over the “eight weeks to famine” article zooming around speaks to an issue we should address, because it comes up over and over. Are you going to starve? When is everything going to collapse? How much longer do you have to keep faking small talk at your job? Nobody has an answer for you.

Cheer up, here’s another cat in a box:

I’m sure some risk analyst out there has a pretty good idea of when you’re going to starve, but they get paid vast amounts of money to sit around and crunch numbers. They have access to tools you don’t.

You don’t have 14 hours a day to sit around and calculate your risks of famine over the next 12 months. You have to make the best decisions you can with the information you have. You have to dedicate a certain portion of your time to staying informed. Then you have to make judgment calls.

That’s why it’s hard.

Would you like to know the life of a prepper? Some of you already do. As I keep saying, it’s not about bunkers. It’s not about predicting the exact date when a famine or a Cat 5 hurricane is going to hit. It’s not about surviving every disaster and living forever. It’s not even about this glorified notion of “community.” In short, it’s about being MacGyver, but there’s no camera, no dramatic music, no bombs to diffuse, and often nobody even appreciates what you’re doing.

You do it anyway.

For the last month, I’ve been trying to design a dew catcher. I know that sounds painfully boring compared to the sensationalist declarations of imminent famine we all enjoyed over the last few days.

Stay with me.

My dew catcher isn’t fancy. It’s made out of trash bags and PVC pipe. That’s on purpose. I want something everyone can make. So far, it’s been a mixed success. It works great as an emergency rain catcher. I’ve collected gallons of rain, with just one trash bag and some pipes. But it fails as a dew catcher. So, we keep working on it, looking for the right material. Will drinking water from a trash bag kill me in ten years, even if I filter it with a Berkey? I don’t know. But I do know that if I have zero water, that will kill me faster.

Meanwhile, I’m working on other plans.

Soon, I’m going to start learning about growing antibiotics from dirt. Do you want to hear about my emergency composting toilet?

Okay, maybe later…

I could tell you about my community, with the other homeschool parents who lean toward homesteading and prepping. We have to be careful around them. There’s a good deal of raw milk and Jesus talk. Out of all of them, there’s maybe one family we could probably count on during an emergency. My daughter is best friends with their daughter, and I’ve already made a decision.

I am not going to let my daughter’s best friend starve. I am not going to let her parents starve. We will share everything with them.

If things get really bad, here’s my plan: Round up the best friend’s family and our aging parents, my brother, a couple of my in-laws, pool our financial resources, and all share one house together with my preps. It will be extremely difficult, but we’ll make it work. My apocalypse team will come together not because they finally saw the truth of my prophecies, but because I’m offering the best chance they have of staying alive. I’ll be taking care of a lot of people, and putting up with a lot of bullshit, and specifically not going around saying “I told you so,” because nobody is going to want to hear that once things cross the threshold.

See, I told you.

Boring.

Maybe your eyes are glazing over. Maybe it’s more interesting to calculate your odds of famine and then fantasize about building a community and starting a vegetable garden. Doing it is hard, and it’s often boring, with mixed results, and that’s why everyone keeps reading the articles without actually doing it.

Here’s another cat:

This morning, I worked hard to convince my spouse to start storing our daughter’s favorite frozen food in mylar bags. Why? To save space. Because you can store twice as much in a mylar bag, for a longer period. They said they didn’t like the idea of creating more plastic waste with mylar, but ultimately consented. For me. To do it. After all, there’s going to be empty shelves and a famine in 8 weeks.

Haven’t you heard?

I know what you’re going to say. I should just tell my daughter she should get used to the idea of living without her favorite food, because the world is collapsing. But she’s seven years old. Doesn’t she deserve a few more months of her favorite food? Even if it’s frozen? Even if it becomes hard to get?

Even if it creates an extra burden?

And no, I don’t just go to the store and deplete the frozen food section of my daughter’s favorite food. Yesterday, I called stores and talked to clerks. I asked them about their supply situation. I asked how many I could get from the back end, what’s reasonable for someone to buy in bulk, without inconveniencing others. Again, that’s boring. It’s a pain to be considerate.

But that’s also a specific example of what often gets filed under “community,” actually giving a dam about other people, even strangers, people you’ll never meet. They’re part of the community as well.

That’s Schrodinger’s apocalypse. You’re somewhere between stuffing frozen plant meat in mylar bags, and telling your daughter to give up her favorite food. You know she’ll have to give it up eventually. Why rush it?

Go ahead, tell me I’m privileged.

Prepping would be so much easier without kids, without family, without responsibilities. I could live in a tiny house, with a small solar array, prepping away, eating my beans, and probably do just fine during almost any catastrophe.

The guy who wrote the “8 weeks to famine” article opines that his own family is weeks away from eating canned beans. Are you kidding me? I’ve been eating dried beans for years. It’s my staple. I love them. My daughter will get there in her own time. For now, she can have what she wants.

That’s the thing…

You can’t live life based on someone else’s prediction that there’s going to be a famine in 8 weeks. You can’t make decisions just because they make prepping easier. You have to make some kind of future to live for.

You have to live as though there’s going to be an apocalypse, slow or fast. And you have to live as though there won’t be one.

You have to exist with those two realities. It’s the quantum physics of doom. I wish it weren’t. I wish the world would wake up and see our predicament. They won’t, except every now and then, when someone manages to get them riled up over empty shelves. Between those moments, when the public oscillates between panic and toxic positivity, we get to reconcile the two realms, every day.

At least we have cats in boxes.

By now, I’m assuming you know all about John B. Calhoun’s social experiments and behavioral sinks. I’ll try to do a quick recap without putting everyone to sleep. At Johns Hopkins, Calhoun ran a series of projects with mice. He built utopias for them. He gave them everything they needed, even space. The mice didn’t even come close to the utopia’s carrying capacity before tearing each other apart, engaging in the most brutal behavior you could imagine. Mothers even started abandoning their own children. Calhoun called it a “behavioral sink.”

For some reason, the mice insisted on clustering into the center of Calhoun’s utopias, forming little mouse gangs, and going on killing sprees. The only mice to survive quit the scene, moving to the outskirts of the utopias, where they could still get plenty of food and water. They groomed. They slept. They didn’t socialize. They left each other alone. Calhoun came up with a name for them.

He called them the beautiful ones.

After the mouse population collapsed, these beautiful ones didn’t regroup or rebuild. They kept to themselves. That probably sounds bleak to most of us, but I suspect those mice were fine with it. Maybe they knew something we don’t. Maybe they were neurodivergent mice, if that’s possible.

Here’s my point:

Over the last few weeks, the internet has been overflowing with confident dudes making all kinds of predictions about famines and global economic collapse, just lapping up praise and support for their “insight.” They cite the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Look, it’s bad. There’s no debating it. Some of us were talking about that weeks ago. We’ve processed it. We made our plans, along with our resignations. We cut expenses. We canceled travel. We redirected budgets to prioritize yet another mess we didn’t make. It’s one of the reasons I expedited the completion of my own survival guide, then decided to make it free and open source. A writer named Sarah Connor did some of the best work on the Hormuz crisis (also here), and she didn’t get nearly enough credit. So, it’s just slightly irritating when the podcast bros and the clickbait artists show up at the 11th hour, pretending they’re the ones who figured all this out, when they’re very late to the situation.

But the collapse bros have sunk their teeth into it, and they’re preying on the fear that’s finally settling over the American psyche as everyone finally wakes up and realizes what a mess we’re in. But there’s nothing new there, either. We’ve been in a mess for years. It’s just that something new happened to remind everyone of the mess. The bros lay out vague plans for survival. They tell us “exactly” what we should be doing. In one very recent and very popular article, the author tells us our bills and mortgages “aren’t your priority” anymore.

Okay, what?

The whole system is about to collapse in 8 weeks. Money is going to become worthless. Cities will become death traps. And blah blah blah. We should all be forming “communities,” storing food and gas, making friends with farmers, and hunkering down for the famine that’s going to reset the global order. And I’ve gotta say, that sounds awfully nice. You mean a famine is going to wipe out my bills, my mortgage, and all my loans?

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

If you’re in touch with reality at all, if you listen to anyone under 40, then you probably know something. A lot of people out there are secretly praying for a famine, a pandemic, or some other biblical disaster to swoop in and annihilate the system that’s crushing them. It’s the only hope they have left. It’s either that, or become a crypto millionaire grifter. They certainly aren’t going to be buying a home. They certainly aren’t going to be getting married. They certainly aren’t going to be raising a family. They certainly aren’t going to be saving up for a nice, quiet retirement. They certainly aren’t going on any vacations. They certainly aren’t going to be starting any rural homesteads. What else is there for them, other than some overwhelming crisis that dwarfs their personal ones, while offering them an opportunity to start over, with all slates wiped clean? Maybe if they can keep their heads down long enough, scurry off to the corners like the beautiful ones…

For millions, a crisis offers a second chance. Ironically enough, they put their odds of surviving a famine or a pandemic higher than surviving the status quo. They understand very well. We’re talking about real people, forced to work through tornadoes and hurricanes, and pandemics, without any protection, obliged to work three jobs, doomed to be replaced by robots.

Yes, please give us the famine. Give us another raging pandemic. Give us an alien invasion. Anything. If there’s not going to be a revolution, then let there be an apocalypse. I like my chances better. Let’s expedite this collapse. Let’s give our governments something to focus on other than slowly grinding us to a pulp. It’s gotta be better than what we’re dealing with now. If a meteor struck the Met Gala, taking out a good chunk of the Epstein class, even if it killed half of humanity, including me, I wouldn’t immediately dismiss that prospect.

Sad, isn’t it?

As tempting as all that sounds, a famine or a pandemic resetting the global order, we know it won’t happen like that. Anyone who actually studies collapse, anyone who actually engages in real prepping, knows better.

We know our mortgage isn’t going away. Our rent and utilities aren’t going away. Our credit card bills aren’t going away.

Not. Ever.

The billionaire oligarchs aren’t going to let you starve in peace. They’re not going to let you fend for yourself. Even if there’s no gas, they’ll dispatch a deputy on horseback before they cancel your debt. They’ll throw you in a county jail, even if there’s no electricity to run the jail. They don’t care if you have running water, a toilet, or even a bucket. That’s not how they operate.

Study the history of any famine, any collapse. Power structures didn’t evaporate. They became more repressive. They raided your house for food. They arrested you for hoarding. They didn’t leave you alone.

I’m not saying any of this to negate prepping. I’m a prepper. My family has preps. We grow food. We have stockpiles.

But…

We occupy two worlds. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t still be here online writing about collapse. I’d have my doomsday plan all sorted, and I’d be doing it. I wouldn’t be talking about empty shelves and famine in 8 weeks. But it’s not up to me. I have a family, and they wanted… something different.

So, here I am.

The world that’s collapsing isn’t going to let us go, not just yet. We can’t abandon our responsibilities and obligations, no matter how unfair or futile we find them. If you’re going to unburden yourself from all this, you still have to extricate yourself with a plan. There’s no easy escape “famine” button that’s going to alleviate all of this. The advice suggesting otherwise comes from a place of deep privilege. For the rest of us, it’s incredibly reckless to think like that. If you followed that advice as it’s written, you might end up even worse off than you are now.

Most of the advice you see about prepping for a crisis completely misses the point. It doesn’t take climate science into account. It doesn’t take social psychology into account. It doesn’t take history into account. It doesn’t take economics or class privilege into account. It ignores the simple fact that just breathing around someone now poses its own existential risks. Or did we forget all the airborne diseases circulating now, which almost nobody takes any precautions for, even as they prepare for their famines and global economic collapses?

Anyway, that’s the most infuriating and dangerous part of this advice. It offers things you “must do” to survive, exhortations that most of us can’t follow, plans that could land us in bankruptcy, jail, the hospital, or worse.

Most of all, this advice doesn’t take you into account. It doesn’t care about your life situation. Do you have children, dependents? Are you a caretaker? They don’t care. They just want to scare the shit out of you, then toss out vague ideas like “community” as the answer. They do everything that the true doomers and Cassandras do, but they elevate it to the level of clickbait, somehow making you feel safe and exempt from all the catastrophes on the way.

And I’m sick of it.

Aren’t you?

As I reflect on this content, I’ve realized something:

When these dudes lay out their plans, they’re not talking to me. They’re not talking to the atheist, neurodivergent, queer millennial mom with complex PTSD from severe childhood abuse. (Yes, I’m queer. Sorry for not mentioning this more often.) In their scenarios, I’m not supposed to survive. I’m supposed to be the one who dies. If I die, it’s my fault for caring too much about my bills.

I’m not supposed to make it.

I’m supposed to starve.

There aren’t many communities for someone like me. Nobody wants to help me survive. They want to take from me. They want my stuff. I’ve become the workhorse of any community I’ve ever joined. The minute I speak up, the minute I advocate for myself, the minute I become “difficult,” I’m kicked out.

Maybe you know the feeling, and it’s why you bristle every time the word “community” comes up, as some kind of magic solution that’s going to save you from the droughts and famines. What if it doesn’t? What if community wasn’t meant for you? The collapse bros have no answer for this, except to remind you that you’re going to starve to death because you’re too weird.

For some of us, seeking out community isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds. It’s not even safe. It could even make things worse.

It could get you killed.

One dude spouting stereotypical advice recently assured me it’s all true, the economy is going to collapse, money will become worthless, and he has a plan to meet up with his relatives at the 120-acre family farm.

That’s great for him, but what if you don’t have a family farm?

What if you’re like me, and your “family land” is being hoarded by your MAGA uncle, a man who won’t get vaccinated, won’t wear an N95 mask, drops the N-word more than Soldier Boy, and has multiple restraining orders from women he’s fallen in love with over the years? What if he built his bugout cabin across the highway from a meth park, and he routinely has to fend off “curious” visitors?

Would you feel safe riding out a famine there?

See, that’s how reality works.

I’m good at reality checks, so here’s one: A famine won’t alleviate your financial responsibilities. A community won’t always save you.

I’m not saying this to be mean. I’m not saying this to be a “doomer.” I’m saying this because some of what the millionaire podcasters and clickbait artists are saying is true. There will be droughts. There will be famines.

There will be blood.

If there’s a famine in 8 weeks, we’ll be as ready as we can be. I’ve spent years working on a plan, and you can find all the details here. It’s specific. It’s free. I have nothing to sell, only something to offer. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best set of options I’ve got. But I’m going to leave you with something else.

It’s the best piece of prepping advice I’ve got:

For the last 5 years, I’ve been living as if there’s always a potential famine in 8 weeks. I would recommend you do the same. Before the lists of preps, you have to shift your mindset. Normal is gone. This is life now.

It’s a life with prepping, but also joy. That’s how you have to live, if you have any shot at dealing with reality and these constant shocks to our nervous systems. You have to get used to the idea of ever-present danger. You have to come up with a way of dealing with threats that’s not denial, but also not constant dread or panic. That’s not something I can explain in a 5-minute article.

You have to get there yourself.

I’ll say this:

The real collapse isn’t being talked about on podcasts and viral articles. These articles and podcasts about famines or nuclear holocuasts go viral for one simple reason. We all know what’s happening to the planet. We all see what’s happening to our lives, and to the futures we hoped to live. Those futures aren’t going to happen. We’re going to be living through a future that falls somewhere in the vicinity of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. If you really want a good, hard look at collapse and what you should be preparing for, read that. Then read actual science articles. Understand that a vast majority of your friends and family would choose the famine over that any day, and they’re secretly excited about it.

It’s a form of displacement. Focus on the famine. Focus on the current crisis or political scandal. Forget the big picture. The big picture is too terrifying. The big picture calls for too much inconvenience, too much sacrifice, more change than the vast majority of our friends can tolerate.

It’s comforting to think you can build a community, but actually doing it is incredibly hard. It’s harder than ever. Look around. How many people in your life actually want to start a vegetable garden with you? How many of them would stand there and listen to you talk about famines and pandemics?

Some of us tried, and we lost all of our friends…

Now we’re the lone wolves we read about, the ones doomed to starve alone. Well, I don’t accept that. There’s a way for us to survive, at least for a little longer, even if we have to become like the beautiful ones.

Stop getting worked up over every article that predicts a famine in 8 weeks, then tells you to go out and build community with people who can’t stand you, who would probably eat you during a real famine.

For us, it’s not going to be one black swan event or one disaster that signals the arrival of the collapse. We’re not preparing for disasters anymore.

We’re living in a sink.

Stay beautiful.

As you might know, the UN recently announced that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy,” years ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, vast stretches of Europe and North America are going through the worst droughts in their recorded history. It’s safe to say, we’re running out of water.

You don’t need a crystal ball to know what severe droughts will look like in the U.S. Go back through history. Look at the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Read about the Texas Drought of the 1950s. It’s scary stuff.

We need a plan.

So, I’ve spent the last few weeks digging hard into solutions. My illustrated survival guide covers the very basics of setting up a dew harvester, but now I’m improving and scaling up the design. For many of us, you can count on reaching a point in the future when you’ll need more than a few ounces.

Rain harvesters fail when it doesn’t rain. Meanwhile, most regions around the world produce dew on a fairly regular basis. Even if the weather conditions don’t reach the exact dew point, you can use materials that capture dew anyway. Civilizations and small communities have been harvesting dew for millennia, even in the desert. It’s a very good way to make sure you don’t die of thirst.

When I was going back over my research for dew harvesting, I kept thinking about a structure called the warka tower, an open-source project.

Here’s their site.

Communities have built these towers all over the world, in water-scarce regions. The project goes back more than ten years, to about 2013, when the project’s engineers started putting out their first designs. You can build them to almost any size, small or huge. The larger ones can generate dozens of gallons of water per day. I’ve paired that with other research I’ve done, showing that black HDPE plastic (high-density polyethylene) works great for catching dew.

Guess what trash bags are made from?

Yep, black HDPE plastic…

I’ll be trying out a range of materials, including raschel netting, but if trash bags work, then that’s something in ready supply, and something that people pretty much anywhere in North America can use.

I’ve made a few different kinds of dew catchers over the last year. They work okay, but not great, not enough to fully replace your water source during a real emergency. But recently, I came up with a better design.

I’ve made a small version of this, and it works.

Now, I’m making the tower version.

Soon, I’ll be posting full instructions with illustrations. For now, I’ll just lay out the basic premise and a list of parts:

1. Get a bunch of 2 ft PVC pipe, 3/4 inch works well.

2. Get 3-way and 4-way pipe couplings.

3. Build the outer frame (shown above).

4. Cut some of the PVC pipe into shorter lengths. Use them to make an inside square, to help funnel the big bag.

5. Make a black HDPE funnel bag by cutting a big trash bag (40 gallons or bigger) diagonally, as shown below). Measure the bottom side so that it matches the height. That way, you have a square funnel.

6. Punch holes in the ends, so you can lash them to the PVC structure with paracord or shoelaces, whatever you want.

7. Before you lash the funnel bag:

8. Get a plastic funnel, not too big, not too small. Spray the inside with a good adhesive spray. Put the corner of your bag into the funnel. Pack it with damp sand. That will keep pressure uniform on the bag, so that corner dries nice and flat along the inside of the funnel.

9. Punch a hole in the bottom corner of your funnel bag, once it’s dried to the plastic funnel. Now you have a giant funnel with a nice, structured hole for dew to flow through. You can sit the plastic funnel end into any rigid plastic PVC pipe, and run the pipe into pretty much any container. (I tried a flexible hose, but it wouldn’t stay straight and kept janking up the shape of my funnel.) For my prototype, I used 3M max strength adhesive spray. I know it’s not foodsafe, but we’re just making a prototype. Besides, you’re going to be filtering this water anyway before you drink it. Also, the spray is going outside the bag. It’s not going to be inside the bag, and it’s not likely to leach through anytime soon. I’ll be looking for food-safe spray adhesives for the final version.

10. You might wonder why you’re gluing the bag to the inside of the funnel instead of the funnel to the inside of the bag. My reasoning: You don’t want a lip, bulge, edge, or anything else inside your dew funnel. You want a completely smooth funnel that tapers straight into the PVC pipe. At least, you want to get as close to that as possible.

This is what it looks like when you’re done with the first part:

11. For the big bag: Take several big trash bags. Cut the bottoms off. Tape them together. Now you have one very big dew harvesting surface that fits inside your PVC structure. I’m wondering whether it’ll help to turn the big bag inside out when I’m done, so the tape goes on the inside.

We’ll see…

12. Poke some holes in the bag, and secure it to the PVC structure with paracord, string, whatever you want.

13. Secure the PVC structure to a deck, a gutter, a tree, whatever you think will help steady it during wind gusts, etc.

14. You can also stake it down.

That’s my plan.

We’ll see how it works. I’ll update everyone on the process and results. In the meantime, feel free to make your own version or suggest any modifications. We need these things to work as well as possible.

When I was eight, we were hit by “not a tornado.”

Nobody in my neighborhood said the word “tornado.” But we all knew we’d just lived through something powerful. We simply didn’t know which words to use. Whatever it was, it felled a dozen trees across the roads in our subdivision. It shredded roofs and bent basketball poles in half. We spent weeks cleaning up the destruction. In the end, words didn’t matter. The thing didn’t need a name.

It was a force of nature.

Life lessons can work into us before we even know what life lessons are. For me, it was simple. When you go to bed, the world doesn’t shut down. Forces of nature continue to act. They’ll send threats your way in the dead of night. It doesn’t matter how safe you think you are. It’s a trick we play on ourselves.

Safety is a bedtime story.

Still, you do your best. You adapt. You develop knowledge and skills to meet the world you live in. The world we live in now requires different tools from the ones we needed ten or twenty years ago. We call those tools “preps,” but they’re not so different from the way earlier generations lived.

Forces of nature are ripping through the world now, from energy crises to assassination attempts. The podcast world is finally getting riled up over reality, talking in very urgent tones and throwing around words like famine and genocide, and yet you can hear it in their voices. You can see it in their faces. Sometimes, they even say it out loud: They don’t believe they’ll be affected. They think it’s just going to happen to the rest of us, the ones working two or three jobs, the ones who don’t have six figures sitting in bank accounts, the ones who don’t have a line into the world of insider trading and polymarket grifts.

For them, it’s another topic.

So, word on the street is that the oil buffer that kept things relatively sane over here in North America is officially gone. It’s a matter of days before things get really bad. The Trump regime has been lying about everything from ceasefire deals to oil production, running pump and dump schemes through warfare, and preparing to saddle us with the outcome after they cash out.

The stock market has priced in TACO (Trump always chickens out). But as analysts have explained, you can chicken out of tariffs. You can’t really chicken out of a war where your opponent now holds all the leverage, and they’ve now realized the best way to ensure their own safety is to keep a vital transportation route closed until our military no longer poses a threat.

Nobody knows where it ends…

It’s a strange thing to watch everyone finally get so worked up over the things you’ve spent years preparing for. You and I prepare because we know we’ll be affected, and we know something else: Nobody is coming to save us.

We’ve seen it from Katrina to Helene.

These forces don’t simply end. They change the world. For example, Helene carved a path of dead timber through the South up through Appalachia, turning the entire region into a “ticking time bomb” of dead timber that’s now fueling forest fires during record droughts. You see how it works?

One record disaster paves the way for another. A hurricane from two years ago, which the podcast world has already forgotten, fuels wildfires today.

Even as the podcast world finally catches up to the Hormuz crisis, finally starts asking the right questions, we see them offer up the most worthless solutions. They tell us to buy crypto. They give us investing advice. Why? Because it’s all they know how to do. They would be completely useless during a real emergency. The only kind of “prepping” they do is filling bunkers with gold and food buckets. If the end of the world didn’t kill you, the food would.

Meanwhile, what am I doing?

Earlier this week, we stocked up on cheap wood shavings and pine bedding for an emergency compost toilet. We rigged up a dew catcher with PVC pipe and a leak diverter. We cleaned up our water generator. We picked our first strawberry of the season. We started shopping for a barometer.

This weekend, I’m going to start learning how to fix a bicycle. I’m learning about which bicycles are the best, the cheapest, and the most suitable for different emergencies. We might even get a roof rack, not because we’re adventurists, but because if you’re trying to bug out during a wildfire, and you end up in a traffic jam, then a bicycle just might save your life.

This is the kind of prepping we do.

I’ve read about preppers who charter helicopters or collect dirt bikes for emergency bugouts. I’m not the kind of prepper.

I’m the bicycle kind.

We’re not looking for opportunities to get rich. We don’t have a portfolio to protect. We’re living in the real world. We’re preparing for the forces of nature that the podcast class feels insulated from, the kind of events they dissect endlessly in their interviews and financial fearmongering.

Me?

I’ve lived through almost every kind of disaster now, even a brushfire, and my preps are responses to real situations, like picking my kid up from a mountain that caught fire and shut down roads last year.

That’s what I’m preparing for, to rescue my daughter from a burning mountain. I don’t prepare for this by sitting around pontificating about geopolitics. I gather information. I assess threats. I prepare.

I share what I’ve learned.

That’s a part of life now.

Many of you live this same life now, and you get it.

Strangely, the very podcast class that sits around predicting famines and energy crises will look at the kind of prepping we do and call us doomers and fearmongers. They sneer at our victory gardens. They tell us to peel open a can of spam and deal with it. For years now, I’ve wondered about this double standard.

Then it finally occurred to me:

It’s class warfare.

The podcast class doesn’t want us to be ready for these catastrophes. They don’t want us to develop resilience. They don’t want us to grow our own food. They don’t want us to make fire escape kits or rain catchment systems. They want to sell us their solutions, which sometimes include overpriced gadgets. They want us to stay glued to their feeds and their channels, clicking on the doom until it finally swallows us up, and then we die. They believe that by the time the famines finally come for us, they’ll be safe on their fortified ranches. They believe they’ll get invited to some billionaire’s bunker, because they interviewed him.

Would “what kind of bike is best for escaping wildfires?” ever wind up on a podcast like that? Probably not. It’s too practical. It’s too responsible. You’re not supposed to actually know what to do during a wildfire, a drought, a tornado, a famine, or a hurricane. You’re just supposed to sit around and worry about its impact on your 401K or the value of the dollar. You’re supposed to listen to them talk in circles about it. You’re supposed to clap for Mark Carney or King Charles when they say something halfway truthful about the state of the world. You’re supposed to bash Trump for the collapse of the petro-dollar, even if the petro-dollar is what got all of us into this mess in the first place. The minute you connect this or that crisis to the larger picture, the minute you suggest we would be in deep trouble even without this reckless war, the moment you try to save lives rather than simply predicting death tolls and furrowing your eyebrows, you become the fearmonger.

It’s interesting…

If there’s one upside, it’s that many of us who’ve been taking the warnings seriously are more prepared, materially and emotionally, for what’s happening now. I’m glad, because it’s perhaps the only upside…

As for the validation of those “I told you so” moments, that turns out to be a myth. There’s no real validation to be had. Even if you predicted all this, it doesn’t matter. Everyone just rolls their eyes at you anyway. The ones shouting about it the loudest now, the ones who suddenly discovered it was a bad idea to make the world dependent on fossil fuels, they get all the credit. The MAGA conspirators who suddenly had a change of heart, the agents of misinformation who are finally telling the truth for clicks, they get all the praise.

It’s almost like the world rewards you for being wrong.

And punishes you for being right.

There are many excellent writers and researchers on this platform who warned us about the energy crisis weeks ago. These podcast bruhs? Even as they throw around words like “famine” and “genocide” now, they still don’t believe it’s actually happening. You can tell. You can tell by the way they talk about all this. You can tell by how long it took them to say the word “genocide” in the context of Israel. One minute, they’re mocking you for wearing an N95 mask. The next minute, they’re encouraging you to hoard antivirals.

Watching them, listening to them, you get the sense that none of them have dealt with a real emergency. They just like to sit around and talk about other people’s emergencies, our emergencies, our disasters.

Our struggles are interesting to them.

It’s great content.

A few years ago, my family lived through an F3 tornado.

It passed right by us.

Even now, this feels like an exaggeration. It’s not. Even while sitting there in the bathroom of our one-level home, having gone through dozens of tornado warnings and storms, something felt different. I’ve gone online and traced its path, and we got lucky. A few streets over, and we might not be here. So, that was a wakeup call. Our prepping wasn’t theoretical anymore.

This month marks something of an anniversary for us.

Last year’s deep, reckless, sinister cuts to the National Weather Service made one thing very clear: As the climate crisis upends our world and brings evermore intense threats to our doors, the super-rich and their political puppets intend to strip us of the tools we need to protect ourselves. And while it’s true that public pressure and legal action forced the current regime to reverse course and approve hires that offset the worst losses from the DOGE cuts, it’s also true that the agency is still recovering—and it’s never going to be quite the same. It’s also true that longterm cuts and efforts to decimate public services will never stop.

It’s fitting for those of us interested in dealing with reality and preparing for the future to bring that down into the most concrete levels, learning how to predict bad weather before it hits us.

That’s the whole point.

No matter how much we resist, one other basic truth remains. It’s in our interest to know how to deal with disasters when we can’t rely on local or federal leadership. That’s been the theme of my work for a couple of years.

So, reading the weather without a forecast?

Where do you even start?

Learn how to read a barometer

A barometer could save your life. It gives you one of the most reliable ways to predict severe weather ahead of time. Some of us barely know what a barometer does. Well, it measures atmospheric pressure, and atmospheric pressure indicates the conditions that favor severe storms and tornadoes.

This article does a good job explaining how and why barometers can help us predict the weather. In simple terms, barometers rise during dry weather, indicating high pressure and little chance for rain or storms.

When they fall, the chances of bad weather rise.

If you go out and get a barometer, you’ll need to adjust it to your local elevation. You can do that manually, or you can get a fancy digital barometer that adjusts the elevation for you. It might even be a good idea to get a watch that reads barometric pressure, so you’ve always got it on.

A pressure reading above 1013.25 millibars (mb) or hectopascals (hPA) provides the baseline meteorologists use. A barometer might use mb or hPA, but they’re the same. For once, you don’t have to do any conversions

Barometers drop when the pressure does. So a falling barometer indicates a higher chance for rain and storms. The faster a barometer drops, the better the chances for severe weather. A pressure reading that falls below 1009 mb indicates a stronger chance of rain and storms. If the barometer drops 4 mb or more over the course of three hours, that increases the chances even more.

A barometer will tend to gradually fall for 12 hours straight before a storm rolls in. If it falls slower, that tends to indicate a warm front moving in. If it falls faster, that tends to indicate a cold front. Either one can mean storms.

You can be pretty sure of a major storm if:

• Your barometer falls 8 mb or more over 12 hours

• Your barometer drops below 1009 mb

• It heads to 1005 mb or below

• It keeps dropping

Sudden rises in barometric pressure can also mean trouble. If a barometer swings up 6-10 mb over the course of a few hours, that tends to indicate strong winds. Strong winds and dry weather can fuel wildfires. That’s why you pay attention to sudden changes in a barometer in either direction.

It’s a good tool to have.

Stir your coffee

It’s a bit of folklore, but apparently it works pretty well. Make a strong pot of coffee. Pour it into your cup. Stir it until bubbles form. If the bubbles gather in the center, that indicates high pressure and decent weather. If the bubbles move to the walls of the cup, that indicates lower pressure and bad weather.

Pay attention to the wind

According to hikers and farming records, the direction of the wind can provide you with clues about the weather. Winds from the south indicate rain. Winds from the east also indicate rain and bad weather. Strong winds followed by a sudden calm indicate a major storm close at hand.

Do the dew

Heavy dew or fog in the morning or evening indicates decent weather for the next 12 hours. So does frost, during the winter.

Look at the sun and the moon

Haze around the sun or moon at night often predicts rain and storms the next day. A red or hazy moon often indicates dust pushed in from low-pressure systems. On the other hand, a red sun at sunset predicts good weather.

Look at the clouds

Clouds can tell you a lot about the immediate weather you’re facing. Thin, white clouds usually mean decent weather. So do flat clouds. Flat gray sheets of clouds can mean rain and storms, but generally not severe ones. Fluffy clouds shaped like an anvil often mean major storms are forming. A range of cloud types:

Cumulus: Cauliflower clouds that signal good weather

Cirrocumulus: Small, white, patchy clouds that signal cold weather

Altocumulus: Grayish white sheets that signal potential storms

Stratocumulus: Lumpy gray clouds that signal rain

Cirrus: Feathery clouds that signal decent weather

Cirrostratus: Sheets of clouds that signal rain or snow

Altostratus: Thicker, lower, darker sheets that signal warm fronts

Nimbus/Nimbostratus: Fluffy dark clouds that signal rain

Cumulonimbus: Towering clouds often shaped like anvils that signal strong storms. Of all the cloud types, these mean the most trouble.

Start a fire

Smoke behaves differently during high and low pressure. During high pressure, smoke rises straight into the air. During low pressure, it wafts and spirals back down. A smoky fire often predicts bad weather.

Look at the plants and trees

Flowers tend to close up as rain and storms approach, especially common ones like dandelions and tulips. Pine cones open during dry weather and close during humid weather, as rain approaches. During high humidity, leaves will also tend to go limp and turn over more easily, blown by the wind. In general, vegetation gives off stronger scents during impending rainfall.

Look at the animals and insects

Many animals and insects can sense changes in barometric pressure. Cows lie down together in groups. Birds fly closer to the ground. Frogs get louder. Some insects, like cicadas, flies, and mosquitoes, also get louder and more active before a storm. Of course, it can go either way. You’ll also find advice out there saying that flying insects like butterflies and bees get quiet and shelter down before a storm. You’ll also see contradictory statements that cicadas quiet down their mating calls before a storm. In general, it makes more sense for insects sensing barometric pressure to go quiet and disappear, moving to safer locations.

Other ideas?

I’ll be adding this information to the next major update to the guide. In the meantime, if you know other ways to predict the weather, drop a line in the comments. The more information we have, the better.

It looks like someone tried to assassinate Trump…

Again…

The pundits will spend days talking it to death. Conspiracy theories will spin and spin, saying it was staged, calling it a false flag, etc. Countless politicians, celebrities, and “journalists” will make statements condeming the violence. And I’m just sitting here thinking, my god, this has all gotten so…

Absolutely, definitively boring.

You know?

Wake me up when this talking pig is actually dead. Otherwise, I’ve already seen this episode. I don’t care. The writing is poop. The acting is poop. The directing is poop. The soundtrack is poop. I have no interest in this whatsoever. I have a hundred more interesting things to do.

I’m sorry to swear, but hopefully you appreciate the sentiment. You get it. This is how you feel, deep down, right? Despite all the self-important podcastarati telling you that you should care, that this incident means something, that it has some relevance to you and all of your struggles, personal, financial, existential.

Raise your hand if you don’t care.

Perhaps it matters to the extent that it represents a further descent into political instability, assuming it was a genuine assassination attempt. Even if it wasn’t, even if every attempt on Trump was staged, it points to the same unraveling. Political violence has become the norm, politics is the new reality television, and it’s upending every event that attempts to bring any sense of normalcy to our shattered civic sphere. I’ve always hated reality television. I’m not about to start watching it now.

If there’s any meaning here:

It was always naive, even ludicrous, to think journalists could kick back and have a few laughs with the head of a fascist crime mafia. That was the insane part. The assassination attempt? That actually makes sense. Far be it from any of us to speculate on the “motives” of the shooter, but hear me out:

He wanted Trump dead, maybe?

Even for those among us who reject violence, who hasn’t secretly hoped Trump would keel over at some point? Who hasn’t openly hoped? I’m not even religious, and I remember praying for any god to take him back in 2020 when he got Covid. I’ve never hoped anyone would die as much and as many times as I’ve hoped Trump would die, via natural causes, via his own political violence.

Whatever works for me.

I’m not sure Trump really has staying power as a martyr. We thought Charlie Kirk would be a martyr, but instead, he became a meme.

I think Trump would go the same way.

Anyway…

No, Trump’s death wouldn’t bring order to the universe. It wouldn’t solve all our problems. But it would solve a few of the biggest, most immediate ones. Of course, it’s also worth acknowledging that Trump has fundamentally, permanently altered our politics. We’ll never get back to normal. We don’t know exactly what the world will look like without him, but we sure as hell know what a world with him looks like, and there’s a 99 percent chance it would be better if he died, because almost any road we take is better than the one we’re on now.

There are plenty of awful people out there, but it’s hard to imagine anyone more universally hated than this man.

So, no, after thinking about it for a few minutes, after the initial awe wears off, I’m left with a decided feeling of nonplussed. Unimpressed.

Even bored…

And honestly, a little disappointed…

The only surprising thing about this whole mess is how many times this scourge on humanity has managed to cheat death and defeat, how many times he’s declared bankruptcy, how many times his career has been over, and yet he keeps coming back. It’s really starting to feel like there might be a god after all, and he’s trolling us, he’s rolling on the floor laughing.

That’s what it feels like.

On a more realistic level, it confirms what some of us know: There’s nobody up there looking out for us. There’s no divine justice. There’s no karma. The only justice in this world is the justice we make. Evil only gets what it deserves if someone gives it to them. Regardless of what we hear over the next few days, we know this: If Trump were actually in jail, where he belongs, then people wouldn’t have to keep trying to kill him. In their own sloppy, misguided way, they’re trying to do the job that our politicians could never bring themselves to do.

There’s a pattern here, of course.

Like it or not, the system has failed. Everyone sees it now. That’s why Chamel Abdulkarim torched a corporate warehouse, incinerating $600 million. It’s why someone shot a healthcare CEO dead in the street.

Even the seemingly senseless mass shootings we see more and more of every year have their roots in a failing socio-economic system that no longer even pretends to take care of us, but instead grinds us up, exploits us, pays us starvation wages, makes us lonely, sells us poison, fills our head with self-righteous rage, drives us nuts, then does everything it can to load us up with drugs and guns. And they wonder why the violence is getting out of control?

Lol, okay…

That’s why I’m writing this up late at night on a weekend. It wasn’t my intention, but this thing happened, and I think you might like to know that while the internet is blowing up with every sensationalist spin on this assassination attempt, if that’s what it turns out to be, you’re not the only one who doesn’t care, like, at all.

Wake me up when he’s finally dead.

Otherwise…

Meh.

The title for this essay comes from Earnest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a book I hadn’t thought about for years. It’s worth rereading, especially now. It reminds me just how many books you read in your teens or 20s that you don’t truly appreciate until later in life. Now, in my 40th year, I understand what Hemingway was getting at. Whatever else you might have to say about him as a person, he nails what many of us are feeling now, so I’m going to talk about it.

Here we go:

You might remember the basics: An American named Frederic Henry winds up driving an ambulance in the Italian Army during the First World War. That world and its ideals inspire very little in him.

From the beginning, Henry cringes at words like “glory” and “patriotism.” And yet, he carries out his duties. Then he gets hit by a bomb while eating a cold macaroni lunch in the trenches, with the other ambulance drivers.

During his recovery, he meets the love of his life, a beautiful nurse named Catherine. For once, he feels something, a sense of connection with someone else. She’s also recovering from loss. In just a few weeks, they start a family. It doesn’t matter to the institutions. They don’t care about his injuries or his health, or his future. They send Henry back to the front anyway, knowing he’ll likely die.

He walks into a total mess.

Days later, Henry gets caught up in an embarrassing retreat as the German army starts to break through the Italian lines. It’s a real shit show. Nobody does their job. Nobody listens. Nobody follows orders. Honestly, there aren’t many orders to follow anyway. Everyone, from commanding officers all the way down to ambulance drivers and engineers, start running scared. They refuse to help each other when their vehicles break down. They leave little girls stranded on back roads. At one point, terrified soldiers simply start shooting each other.

The retreat breaks down into further chaos as soldiers begin executing their officers on sight, blaming them for everything gone wrong. Understandably, Henry deserts. He understands something critical: If this is how his own side treats each other, there’s nothing left to fight for anyway.

He grabs Catherine, and they escape to Switzerland.

“The war seemed as far away as the football games of someone else’s college.” That’s how Henry feels, watching the insanity from afar.

It’s exactly on point.

This isn’t the story of a coward who abandons his post. It’s the story of a reasonable individual who gets fed up with the massive incompetence and indifference of the people who are supposed to be his allies, supposed to be on his side, who are instead trying to kill him. Henry has already gotten blown up once. He’s already done everything he can do. His own team doesn’t want his help. They don’t want to listen to him. They just want him to shut up and drive the ambulance. They just want him to follow orders, even if they get everyone killed, even if it makes the love of his life a widow for a second time, and forces her to raise a child in a post-apocalyptic world, all by herself, with nobody to count on.

And for what?

A cause?

The story means so much more when you read it in light of the historical context, and when you think about its relevance today. When you come to understand the real Woodrow Wilson, the one described in John Barry’s The Great Influenza, you don’t see a great man. You don’t see a defender of democracy. You see a card-carrying eugenecist warhawk, a reckless tyrant who just might’ve been responsible for catalyzing the 1918 flu pandemic with his abhorrent public health policies and exclusive focus on not only winning the war, but completely annihilating the German Empire and securing American dominance around the world.

For Wilson, the war was personal. He wrapped his vendetta against Germany up in a moral crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Does that sound familiar?

Why was it so personal?

Wilson was shocked and enraged over the 1917 Zimmerman Telegram, in which Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico, promising to help them reclaim parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—all lost to the U.S. during our territorial and largely unlawful expansions during the 19th century.

Germany wanted to promote Mexican sovereignty against American imperial expansion, and that enraged Wilson. More than anything, even unrestricted submarine warfare, that fueled his aggression.

It wasn’t about protecting democracy.

It was about protecting empire.

In many ways, Woodrow Wilson got us involved in a war that had almost nothing to do with us and cooked up reasons for American intervention in Europe, in order to promote American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, all while pushing eugenics at home and completely ignoring all the warning signs leading up to the 1918 pandemic, and continuing to ignore said pandemic as it unfolded. As a bonus, historians widely acknowledge that Wilson “indirectly” helped create the brutal post-war Germany that enabled Hitler’s rise to power.

Henry was serving in the Italian Army, but Hemingway’s critiques apply broadly. The Italian Army’s flaws provide a metaphor for the futility of global politics and warfare in general. When you understand all that, you start to understand why someone would desert the army and start thinking of a world war as “the football games of someone else’s college.” You’re not fighting for anything. You’re not saving anyone. You’re just helping the corrupt leaders of one side or the other. In that sense, you’re better off getting as far away from it as you can.

All of that describes how many of us might feel after reading story after story about:

• The Ellison family taking over yet another media platform

• The head of the FBI spending his days blackout drunk

• Judges undoing state referendums, against the people’s will

• Wars and genocides that continue regardless of what we do

• Climate disasters already baked into a collapsing ecosystem

• A public constantly distracted by superficial headlines

• One hollow political promise after another

• Trump’s latest meltdowns

We start to feel more and more like Frederic Henry, sent off to fight for causes that don’t help anyone but a handful of individuals at the very top, who push those causes for the sake of ulterior motives. We’re told to follow orders that don’t make sense. We’re expected to help allies and comrades who don’t want our help, who don’t listen to us, who abandon us and their values at the first opportunity.

Our allies talk a big game, but they flee from every moment that requires them to endure the slightest hardship or risk. They run scared. They refuse to help. And then when we manage to survive their incompetence, they want to blame us for everything. They want to drag us off and execute us.

It’s more than a sense of futility.

It’s more than a sense of indifference. It’s a sense of having done everything you can, and watching the communities and institutions you sacrificed yourself for shrug you off, while telling you it wasn’t enough, while sending you back to the front, but not with a better plan, not with better tools, not with any promise to make your next sacrifice worthwhile or even valued.

Maybe that’s how you feel.

You’ve stopped caring as much, but not because you feel unaffected. You’ve stopped caring as a matter of self-preservation. Often, it feels like nobody cares if you care. Nobody wants to hear your opinion. Nobody wants your solutions. Nobody shares your cause. Nobody thinks you matter.

They just want you to adopt their cause. They want you to adopt their solution. They want you to follow their plan. They want you to put your life on the line for it, even if they’re not. When their plan fails, they’re going to flee. They’re going to leave you in the broken-down ambulance in the ditch. If you manage to make it back in one piece, they’re going to shoot you anyway.

So, why bother?

It’s not giving up, it’s letting go. There’s a difference.

When you give up, you admit defeat. You do nothing. When you let go, you simply make better decisions about where to focus. You make the decisions for yourself, and you stop joining causes simply because they sound noble at the time, or because they make you feel good about yourself. It’s maturity.

I’m not here now to tell you what to care about. I’m here to name a feeling. If you’re thinking that there’s actually no “good guys” in these struggles we’re in, if you’re feeling like you can’t even count on your own party or your own friends, if you feel like everyone is giving all their time and energy to the wrong things, if you feel like it’s time to bail, to grab who and what you care about, and leave everything else behind as if it’s the football games of another college, maybe you’re not wrong. Maybe you’re not giving up. You’re evolving. You’re becoming wiser.

Maybe you’re not a coward. Maybe you’re not indifferent or privileged. Maybe you’re not insulated. You’re not jaded, just seasoned.

Maybe it’s time for you to stop listening to what everyone else thinks you should do, and to start doing what you know is the right thing. Not the right thing according to politicians and political parties. Not the right thing according to cable news networks. Not the right thing according to slogans and viral posts on social media. But the right thing for you and your family. The right thing for your community, however you define that. Maybe you don’t even know what the right thing is. If so, it’s worth taking some time to figure that out.

If you want to vote, then do it. If you want to protest, then do it. If you want to yell at your senators, then do it. But if you’re starting to feel like you’re getting blown up for no reason, just driving the ambulance into one ditch after another, only to make it back and be shot anyway, by your own side, it’s fine to take some time out. It’s fine to find your own cause, and to put your time and energy there.

If the enemies are breaking through the lines, but your own side is too busy shooting each other to do anything about it, are you a bad person for bailing? No, I would say you’re not. You’re not giving up.

You’re letting go.

Every day now, the headlines offer a whiplashing jumble of hope and doom. Wars. Crises. Upheavals. It’s a mess. Nobody in charge is dealing with it. And while the world is busy hyperfixating on every political scandal, the earth’s climate is fundamentally changing, and not in our favor.

Earlier this year, the UN declared a “global water bankruptcy.” It should’ve been headline news everywhere, but it wasn’t. A growing number of cities around the world, from Tehran to Baton Rouge, now live on the brink of critical water shortages. It’s not just droughts you have to worry about. Floods also overwhelm the grid and cause damage to water treatment plants.

At some point, you’ve probably imagined the day you go to turn on your bathroom faucet, and nothing comes out. You go to flush your toilet, and… nothing. What would you do? If you haven’t thought that out, you should.

Because it’s going to happen soon.

We’ve got answers, and solutions.

As many of you know, I’ve spent the last several months working on solutions and putting them in an illustrated guide. I’m still working on it. For the last few weeks, I’ve circled back around to the most important topics to tweak my plans and offer even better solutions. So, let’s talk about a big one:

Toilets.

Previously, I’ve written about ways to generate water during a crisis. I’ve written about rain catchment systems, water generators, and dew harvesters. You can find all of that information in my guide. For now, we’re focusing on toilets. Because if you and your neighbors don’t have a clean way to dispose of your waste, that’s a problem. Lack of sanitation after disasters drives disease.

It can be worse than the disaster itself.

So, that’s the reason...

We love flush toilets too much

Up here in the first world, we spoiled Americans defecate in potable water and flush it off to water treatment plants that clean it and deliver it back into the system, ready to be drunk or defecated in again. In rural areas, they rely on septic tanks and other solutions that still require a functional grid for long-term feasibility. They almost never think about their waste, not really. At best, many of us have emergency bucket toilets, but no long-term plan beyond that. These buckets take care of the immediate problem, but if you don’t have a sustainable way to actually break down and cleanse your waste, then you’re just piling it up.

Eventually, that won’t work.

When you read the climate science, and you come to understand our future of water scarcity and droughts, then you understand something simple and profound. It’s not sustainable. The first world wastes vast amounts of energy producing clean water just to take a dump in it and then clean it again. Meanwhile, 1-2 billion people on this planet are squatting in rivers, bushes, or dirty latrines and pits.

Something magical happens when you introduce composting toilets to these communities. They use them. Sanitation improves.

One day, you’ll want one. You’ll wake up and find all the comfort and conveniences of the first world eroded, reserved for the few. It will be slow and gradual, and then it’ll hit some people all at once.

It’s already happening.

The simplest solution

If you don’t know anything about composting toilets, that’s because CEOs and politicians don’t care. There’s not much money to be made off the idea of depositing your waste in a bucket and then letting it decompose naturally in a corner in your yard. There’s a lot of money to be made off the other solutions, including composting toilets that don’t actually compost anything.

True composting toilets don’t need running water, and they don’t need electricity. They don’t require special chemicals, or even much effort. They simply require a fundamental shift in our attitudes about how we deal with our “waste.” Once you shift, everything else gets easier.

Many of us see the phrase “composting toilet” and immediately dismiss it as the domain of tiny houses, homesteads, bugout cabins, and eco-hippies living off the grid. But they offer a solution for those of us living in cities, too.

We just have to be innovative.

How do composting toilets work?

You can find plenty of online articles explaining the basics of composting toilets, but Joseph Jenkins provides the best detailed breakdown in two books widely considered to be the definitive guides on composting: The Humanure Handbook and The Composting Toilet Handbook. A few readers recommended them to me, so I got them and read them. Then my family started to innovate. We’re not experts, and we don’t know everything yet. But we know enough to change.

So, what’s the fundamental philosophy here?

Let microbes do the work.

The world is full of thermophilic bacteria that evolved especially to break down organic matter. These microbes don’t pose a threat to us. They reside everywhere, dormant, in spores, waiting for things to die. Then they activate and go to work. They destroy the pathogens that cause diseases, including E. coli and Salmonella. They cleanse the dead. It just takes a while.

We’re using the term “waste” in this article, because that’s what most people consider it. Of course, Jenkins and other composters use the term “toilet material,” because what we drop into our toilets isn’t waste. It’s food for healthy microbes, and it’s a foundational ingredient of soil.

How long does composting toilet material take?

How much space do you need?

Compost heaps don’t have to be big, 4x4x4 feet is fine. The minimum size is one cubic yard, or about 1 cubic meter (.76, to be exact). That’s 3x3 at the base, and 3 feet high. In metric, that’s about 1m x 1m, and 1 meter high. Generally, you don’t want one heap to get higher than 5 feet, or 1.5 meters. A family of 4 would fill one cubic yard in about 3 months. Once you fill an enclosure, leave it for about a year. The microbes will do their job and destroy the pathogens, creating clean compost. Meanwhile, you just start another pile. So, do some simple math. An average family fills 4-5 cubic yards or meters of space in one year. That means you’ll need a second space of the same size to use while the filled-up enclosures are composting.

Add it all up…

You could do all this in a space of 8-10 cubic yards or meters. That translates into 215-270 cubic feet (6-7 cubic meters).

That’s about the size of a living room. It’s a fraction of the size of an average back yard. So, it’s a manageable amount of space. No, not everyone can do it. But many of us could. If you live downtown or you have a landlord, then the major obstacle becomes convincing others to help you make it work. They might act like you’re crazy at first. When they start to envision the alternative…

They might come around.

What happens during that year?

So, you fill up the cubic meter. You let it sit there and mature. That’s the precise term for it. You’re not adding to it anymore. You’re letting it mature. That’s what composters say, meaning you just leave it alone.

You leave it alone for an entire year.

What happens, exactly?

Thermophilic bacteria dine out, producing heat. If you provide the right mix of waste and carbon cover material, these microbes will activate and maintain a high temperature on their own, even during cold winter months. It could be snowing outside. The environmental temperature could plunge well below freezing. Feed your compost pile, and it will keep taking care of itself, even if the temperature drops and the microorganisms go dormant. They’ll reactivate in the spring.

Jenkins advises keeping the ratio of carbon cover material to waste at 20:1. You don’t have to measure it exactly. Just track it.

You can also buy a compost thermometer. It will tell you when the temperature is running low. When the temperature runs low, add a little more material. Pour some water on it to add moisture. Turn it a little. You don’t have to turn it as much as some of the composting gurus say. Jenkins cites research that excessive turning doesn’t make much difference.

That’s it.

If you compost human waste properly, then you don’t need much except carbon cover material and an enclosure. Cover material means everything from sawdust to kitchen scraps and yard clippings. Your waste provides the nitrogen. Nature provides the carbon. You build your enclosure, using whatever materials you have on hand. You can screw together some palettes. You can use t-posts and mesh. You just need some kind of structure. You dig a shallow pit in the middle. You put down a base layer of cover material. You dump your waste and scraps in the center. You cover it. You keep adding to the center, raking it outward as it grows.

You don’t need a thick base layer. In fact, initial contact with soil is good, because microbes will come in and start feasting.

Here it is, in list form:

1. Dig a shallow pit.

2. Build an enclosure.

3. Put down a layer of cover material.

4. Add waste to the center.

5. Don’t bury it. Cover it with sawdust, clippings, scraps, etc.

6. Keep the ratio 20:1 carbon to nitrogen.

7. Get a compost thermometer to help maintain the temperature. If you have a few heaps, then get a few thermometers.

8. Every time you add waste, rake the pile outward a little. Add more cover material on top.

9. When it’s 4-5 feet high (1m-1.5m), leave it for a year. Keep an eye on the temperature. Add a little cover material or moisture as needed. Agitate a little as needed. Otherwise, let it mature.

You don’t need a basin or a bin in most cases, because active composting piles absorb huge amounts of moisture. They police themselves and prevent leaching. If you live in an area with excessive rain, the most you might need to do is add a roof, or even just a tent with a tarp.

What about local laws and codes?

You would be surprised…

Where we live, no codes exist for composting. There’s only one law, that you can’t use it in a garden. (Honestly, who is going to know?) We live in the suburbs of a mid-size city. We don’t live in the sticks. So, you just need to manage your piles. Don’t do anything reckless or dumb. If your compost stinks, if it attracts flies, if it starts to look ugly and neglected, your neighbors will notice.

That’s when you have problems.

If you just want an emergency composting toilet…?

You don’t have to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a composting toilet. You don’t have to give up your flush toilet yet, either. You can buy (or make) something that offers a medium or even long-term solution.

After months, even years crawling around on the web, calling composting toilet manufactuers, and staring at drought maps, I came across something that looks remarkably similar to the emergency composting toilet I designed on my own. It’s a better version, easier to set up:

The Nettygo by Johnny Compost Toilets comes with a divider and urine separator. It allows you to convert any 5-gallon bucket into a composting toilet. You put a jug in the front. You put a 13-gallon composting bag in the back. You get the ventilation kit (sold separately). The ventilation hose comes with a fan compartment and a fan. It attaches to the lid, as shown. The lid closes down nice and tidy over the entire configuration.

Next:

You get a big piece of rigid foam insulation board from your hardware store. You size it to fit your bathroom window. You trace a hole in the foam board, using the hose from the ventilation kit. Or you just cut a 1.5-inch hole in the board with a hole saw, because that’s the outer diameter of the hose:

You follow the instructions to connect the fan to a power source. It involves a minimal amount of wiring.

If you don’t want to buy the toilet, you can follow this basic design and make something yourself. You could even just buy the hose and fan attachment. You can buy your own 60x60x25mm 12V fan, and connect it to an AC/DC converter. You might have to modify the fan attachment, but that’s why god made dremels. You don’t even have to buy anything from Johnny Compost. You can just take the basic idea and source your own parts. But it’s nice to have the option of buying everything you need from one place, and knowing it all fits.

Now you have an emergency composting toilet. It does everything that a fancy composting toilet does. But instead of shelling out a thousand bucks for a composting toilet and permanently modifying your bathroom, you now have something you can set up and take down as needed.

Just remember, drying your waste out isn’t the same as composting it. Drying it out makes it easier to manage. It helps with the smell. You still have to compost it, as described in the steps above.

Why aren’t we talking about these solutions?

Go on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds of videos about composting toilets by off-griders who live in RVs, tiny homes, and cabins. All of that presents the composting toilet as something incompatible with life in cities and suburbs. That’s not true, it’s just how we’ve been taught how to think.

We thought differently.

We’re still going with our emergency setup, and I ordered the Johnny Composting Kit, to have something one step up from my DIY toilet. I’ll update everyone when it comes and I’ve managed to test it out.

Meanwhile:

Over the last few weeks, I called around and talked to some of the biggest companies that sell composting toilets: Separett; Sun-Mar; Nature’s Head; OGO; Biolet. The consensus is that it’s perfectly feasible to install a permanent composting toilet in a suburban bathroom, no matter where you live.

You can install a composting toilet anywhere. You just need to manage it properly with cover material. If you’re extra skeptical, you can install ventilation kits that come with many of the brands. The ventilation kits help with any lingering odors, but they also help dry out the solid waste.

You might decide to buy a composting toilet with an internal urine diverter. Joseph Jenkins, among many other composters, would tell you that it’s not strictly necessary to separate solids and liquids. But you can, and it makes a big difference with immediate odors and sanitation.

So, you can install a composting toilet with a urine diverter and a ventilation fan. That keeps things extra sanitary in your suburban bathroom.

No odors, no complaints…

Where do you route the ventilation?

If you decide to ventilate your permanent composting toilet:

Ventilation poses challenges.

Most composting toilets will route the ventilation straight through an exterior wall. Some give you the extra option of going through your ceiling. That’s fine for a cabin or a tiny home. It won’t work very well for a home in the suburbs, especially if you anticipate ever selling your home. You can certainly repair a hole, but it’s never going to look the same as before. Depending on where you live, buyers and real estate agents might decide to make a big deal out of it.

We contacted plumbers in our area.

What they said:

You can absolutely design and install an exhaust port for a composting toilet that looks just like a regular dryer vent or bathroom exhaust.

We even came up with a plan to design and 3D print a cover for our vent that matches our existing ports. If we ever have to sell our home, and nobody wants our composting toilet, they would just replace it and then cap off the vents. We wouldn’t have to plug any holes or repair any siding or joists. In short, you spend more on the front end to make the exhaust as unobtrusive as possible, and then you pay very little on the back end if you ever decide to move.

The problem:

You’re routing the exhaust internally, behind your drywall. That requires opening up the drywall, and the ceiling, and that gets expensive.

Plumbers quoted us $3,000-$4,000 for that work.

That doesn’t include the toilet.

If you don’t care about your home’s resale value, then just install the toilet with standard ventilation. If you’re confident enough to forego ventilation, then it’s technically not necessary. You empty your composting toilet into your composting heap, follow best practices, and carry on.

It’s that simple.

The short summary:

Odds are, you’re going to need a longterm toilet solution that doesn’t use running water. The alternative is crossing your fingers and hoping the droughts never get bad enough to impact you personally, or that a data center never decides to open up close enough to kill your water pressure. Either way, that’s a rather passive way to approach the climate crisis, and it denies reality.

Composting is the way.

You can do it in the suburbs. You can do it in the city. Composting doesn’t have to remain the domain of farms and homesteads.

You can do it anywhere.

Even if you never use the compost to grow anything, you’re still turning human “waste” into something safe and manageable. You’re not simply creating sewage and then dumping it down a storm drain or letting it fester in a pit somewhere. You’re taking responsibility, and you’re thinking ahead.

So if you’ve ever wondered how you’ll be going to the bathroom in a few years, I hope this post answers some of that uncertainty.

Composting toilets.

That’s how.

In this post, I want to do something radical.

I want to talk about the world after Trump.

It’s hard to think about that world, because he’s been such a force in the lives of so many for the last decade, dominating headlines and fueling nightmares. But he doesn’t have much longer. Either through death or political upheaval, he’ll be gone. It’s hard to believe, but forces at the top have already started planning for that world, and we should also start planning for it, because it’s happening. It’s just a question of when, and what exactly it’s going to look like.

I’m not a political scientist, and maybe that’s a good thing. Most of the people we call “experts” have been wrong over and over again. Meanwhile, the “amateurs” and “dilettantes” have been right more than once.

Here’s my take:

Yes, MAGA has been turning on Trump.

No, not all of them. Many of them will stand by their king no matter what he does.

That’s a problem for the billionaires.

It’s a problem for investment giants like BlackRock. It’s a problem for Peter Thiel. It’s a problem for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a problem for Sam Altman. It’s a problem for Alex Karp. It’s a problem for Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a problem for the entire techno-broligarchy that got Trump elected.

They look at Trump, and they see a 79-year-old man in poor health, up to his neck in scandals. They also just don’t like dealing with him very much. (Would you?) He was a tool, a necessary one, and just about worn out.

So, it’s time to expedite their evil plans.

That’s what they’re doing. They’re proceeding with the worst parts of their plan, the ones that entail the most pain, suffering, and death. They’re doing it while they can get away with it. They’re doing it so they can hang it around the neck of an historically unpopular president, the one who couldn’t stop them now even if he wanted to, the one getting eaten by his own conspiracy theories. They’re working incredibly fast, have you noticed?

They have two years left to get it all done

Let’s say Trump leaves office in 2029, one way or another.

That gives the billionaires about 2.5 years to do pretty much whatever they want. Do you think they’re going to squander that time?

They’re proceeding to dismantle our government, first with DOGE and now with a series of catastrophic shutdowns. They’re eliminating what’s left of our healthcare. They’re gutting everything. They’re building the concentration camps. They’re building the cop cities (like they’ve been doing the last several years). They’re building the surveillance infrastructure and the AI data centers. They’re moving forward with their wars and coups in Venezuela, in Cuba, in Iran, in Lebanon. They’re laying the groundwork to acquire Greenland. All of it carries disastrous consequences for us, but it’s making them even more unfathomably wealthy than ever. They don’t care what it does to the rest of the world.

Will keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed drive more inflation? Will it spark shortages and famines? They’re counting on it. They already said they want the world to starve while they hide in their bunkers, didn’t they?

This war expedites the timeline.

As for the Epstein files:

It’s tempting to think things are spiraling out of their control, and that it will save us from fascism. But ask yourself a few questions.

Who lit the Epstein fuse?

Go back and confirm. Nobody was really talking about Epstein anymore until about halfway through 2025. Were they? Then it started gaining traction in blogs, newsletters, podcasts. Now it’s all over the mainstream news.

The avalanche started all the way back in early June, when a bitter Elon Musk packed his bags and left D.C. He offered up excuses, but essentially, his work was done. If nothing else, he was just tired. It was time to refocus on his empire. He just had to accomplish one last goal:

Start wedging Tump apart from his base.

So Musk engineered a feud with the king, over the details of the big beautiful bill. Trump took the bait and started insulting Musk on his familiar posting sprees. Then Musk dropped the bomb. He told everyone that “Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” It really wasn’t a bombshell revelation. Was it? Journalists have already made Trump’s ties to Epstein abundantly clear. Nobody cared much anymore, until suddenly the richest man in the world gave everyone permission to say what they knew.

And while we’ve learned all kinds of new details about Epstein and his network, the contours of it remain the same.

So ask yourself:

Why would the billionaires who own the vast majority of our media be letting us all talk about the Epstein files, but not other things? Why would they be letting us criticize the Iran war at all? Is it possible that continuing to talk about Trump’s Epstein ties, while continuing to let Trump hang himself with disastrous economic and foreign policy, all has an ulterior motive?

Maybe the billionaires don’t want Trump to seek a third term. Maybe they don’t even want him to think about it. They heard him giggle about it, float it during a few interviews, and they decided to head him off at the pass.

That’s plausible.

After all, he’s 79 years old. He’s in poor health. He’s also extremely unpleasant to deal with. He delivered twice already. Maybe they want someone else. From their perspective, it makes total sense to start plotting Trump’s downfall, and making the space to insert someone like JD Vance.

The billionaires are done with MAGA

It’s highly possible that the billionaires are using MAGA Republicans to execute a round of real dirty work, like the Iran War. Nobody wants to take responsibility for that mess, even if it ultimately advances their goals.

So, use MAGA, then throw them away.

Meanwhile, they’re working on both sides. They’re positioning JD Vance to take over, but that’s not all they’re doing. That would be foolish. It’s highly possible that this mess tarnishes the entire Republican party, for years to come. It’s possible that Vance can’t distance himself enough from the regime.

After all, Kamala Harris couldn’t…

So, they’re also finding a neoliberal, billionaire-friendly alternative like Gavin Newsom and positioning him as the “obvious” choice as a Democratic candidate in 2028. With someone like Newsom, it doesn’t matter if MAGA Republicans crash and burn. It doesn’t matter if they can rig elections. Under Newsom, billionaires still get most of what they want anyway.

The billionaires know that MAGA might’ve run its course. MAGA voters probably won’t embrace Vance the same way. He just doesn’t have the mojo. That’s how cults work. They tend to unravel after their leader dies.

They know they can’t replace Trump.

They’re not trying.

So, what does the world look like after Trump?

There’s a happier version of the future, and maybe I’ll write about that next. But we need to talk about the risk of the likely future.

Here’s what I see:

The Middle East lies in ruins, along with our energy infrastructure. Sure, there’s a silver lining in there, a chance to build something less destructive. But that depends on us all putting aside our differences and cooperating. If I painted that future, just as many of you would assail my naive optimism.

So, let’s look at the bleak version:

Massive suffering afflicts the world, from famines and super droughts to things we can’t imagine. Everyone blames Trump, who is either dead or living in exile like Richard Nixon. Israel has concluded their wars and genocide. They now dominate the region, unopposed, if somewhat depleted. Iran, having put up a noble fight, no longer poses a threat. Not just because of war. Don’t forget that they’ve been hollowed out by their own climate catastrophes.

So, the techno-bureaucracy uses Trump to destroy the world, which was already falling apart slowly. They dump all the blame on him. They bring in someone like Vance. But honestly, even Gavin Newsom will do.

They’ll get to rebuild the world in their image. It’s going to be full of crypto cities and robot girlfriends. The vast majority of the public will sigh with relief, because at least it’s better than what they were living through, endless death and destruction. They’ll be so traumatized, they won’t resist.

That’s one version of what the world could look like. And while we’re all sitting around talking about the Epstein files and praying for the end of Trump, that’s what the billionaires are planning for.

Just my thoughts on a Friday afternoon.

The bolt broke loose, and down he fell.

Straight into hell…

And just like that, a rock climbing trip turned into a bloodbath, with the frontman for one of the hardest death metal bands in the world hanging upside down from a rock for over an hour, bleeding out, with 25 fractures, including one in his skull. To keep himself from slipping completely out of his harness, he clipped together some carabiners, draped his shattered arm over his neck, and waited.

The doctors wanted to amputate his arm. Instead, they managed to rebuild it around a prosthetic elbow, but he initially lost 70 percent of the movement in his left hand. What did he do? Do you think he quit?

No, he got together with his band.

He wrote an album.

In 2024, Opera quickly earned a reputation as one of the best metal albums of the decade, and perhaps of all time. If you’re a metal fan, or even if you’re not, listen to it and you can hear why. It gives me chills.

To me, this is what masculinity looks like when it’s not trying. It’s just being. And it conveys emotions that women can experience as well.

It’s passionate, and it includes women.

Unreal…

If angry young men are looking for a model of healthy masculinity that can do rage, sadness, vulnerability, and more, I’d like to introduce them to someone whose music might appeal to anyone with rough edges:

Francesco Paoli.

The band is Fleshgod Apocalypse, and I stumbled across them just a few weeks ago when I was diving back into heavy metal, looking for music that could match and channel all the emotions I’ve been feeling over the last few years. They’re not so different from the emotions that many young men—and women—are feeling now: isolation, alienation, anger, and despair.

This is what heavy metal and all its subgenres were meant to help us navigate. As it happens, they’re an Italian band.

The album resonates so much because Francesco Paoli worked with the other members to weave their sense of grief, tragedy, and misfortune into every note. But they also imbued it with hope and courage.

It’s an album about overcoming.

Call me crazy, but maybe this is what millions of us need right now. You could certainly call it masculine. It’s got that energy. It’s got that rage. It’s everything you would expect out of an angry dude who’s been through hell. But he’s not raging out at women or minorities. He’s rocking out on a guitar.

He’s yelling at the sky.

That’s the difference.

And while we might choose to direct our rage elsewhere, that’s not the band’s job. They’re simply giving us permission to feel our emotions, to express them, to make them known. And we need that. We need it a thousand times more than some little twerp selling memberships to a hustler’s university.

There’s a certain male influencer who recently joined this platform. I’ve already said his name, and I’m not going to do him the favor of saying it over and over. You know who I’m talking about. Even if you don’t, you get the idea. There’s not just one of him. There’s dozens. They’re named Joe or Tucker or whatever.

They all sell the same snake oil.

They work overtime to convince millions of young, struggling men that their problems don’t lie with a corrupted system, designed to exploit them, rigged against them. They convince these men that their problem is smart, educated, independent young women. That’s why they can’t get laid. That’s why they can’t pay their rent. That’s why they can’t see any hope for the future. So they learn to hate women, but it’s even worse than that. They learn to hate each other.

This has become an enormous problem.

It’s a gateway to fascism.

That’s the damage they do. They hurt women, yes, but they do just as much damage to men. In fact, you could say they do even more. Because while they demonize women, they’re targeting men. They’re exploiting men.

They’re profiting off men.

So men learn to see each other as competition instead of companions. They learn they must compete with each other for money, for sex, for attention, for value, for dominance. They learn to avoid their feelings, to push them down, and to project superficial charm and confidence all the time. That’s what they learn. No wonder they’re so lonely, so angry, so miserable. That’s exactly how the manosphere influencers want them to stay.

Metal does the opposite.

It’s not the only outlet, but it’s a great example of something we’ve lost. You can take all the anger, all the rage, all the despair you’re feeling, all the trauma you’ve been through, and you can make something beautiful out of it. And the beauty can be dark, angry, bloody, but also tender, vulnerable, and poetic.

It can be all those things.

Do American masculinity influencers tell young men that they can let all their emotions out in one guttural scream? Do they teach them to value the arts? Do they teach them about opera, about classicl music?

Do they sing in Latin?

Do they cook pasta?

I don’t think so…

You can howl at the void in a thunderstorm of blood one minute. The next, you can sit in a bathtub and whisper the wind plucks a harp while your soul disappears. Then you can share your favorite recipes.

That’s what you can do, as a man or a woman.

This is what the incel kings don’t want young men to know. They would rather their followers keep blaming women and everyone else for their problems, because that keeps them alone and bitter and angry. And when you’re alone and bitter and angry, and you believe you have no outlet or refuge for your feelings other than robot girlfriends and crypto fantasies, you get stuck there. You give all your money to grifters, and you stay in that hell.

It’s highly profitable for them.

There’s a way out.

Regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman, you can do what Francesco Paoli did. You can take your trauma, your pain, and make something beautiful. You can pour all of yourself into it. You can make something like that for the world. It doesn’t have to be one of the greatest death metal albums of all time.

It just has to be sincere, and kind.

I don’t need Fleshgod Apocalypse to talk about toxic masculinity or feminism. I just need them to keep doing what they do best, rocking out, being dark, being loud, and cooking spaghetti. I like that a lot better.

Don’t you?

Andrew Tate recently joined Substack, appearing on the bestseller’s list almost immediately. Justifiably, there’s been quite an uproar. Before you pack up your stuff and leave, let me promise you something.

This post isn’t really about Andrew Tate.

I’m not going to run us through the last several years of his controversies, crimes, or statements about women. If you don’t know, there’s this great thing called the internet to fill you in. I’m here to talk about an attitude in our public discourse, something you see coming from a lot of men—but also a lot of women.

Let me paraphrase:

Why are you talking about Andrew Tate? He doesn’t matter. He’s irrelevant. Just ignore him and get on with your life.

Look, I get it.

If you’ve ever felt this way or said something like this, I’m not trying to attack you. But I believe this attitude is deeply flawed.

We need to address it.

Over the last four years, I’ve written about Andrew Tate twice, maybe three times total. He represents less than 1 percent of my content. I’ve written hundreds of posts on dozens of different topics, including history, psychology, philosophy, survival, you name it. Here’s where things get interesting:

When I write about airborne diseases, I often hear the same thing:

Why are you talking about airborne diseases? They don’t matter. They’re irrelevant. Just ignore them and get on with your life.

And when I write about the history of eugenics:

Why are you talking about eugenics? That was 100 years ago. It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant. Just ignore it and get on with your life.

And when I write about the climate crisis:

Why are you talking about the weather? We’re already taking care of that problem. We’ll figure it out. Just ignore it and get on with your life.

And genocide:

Why are you talking about Gaza? We’re already doing everything we can, and beating Trump is way more important. Just ignore it, vote for the less fascist candidate, and get on with your life.

This is how many of us, women, doomers, and the like, are treated when we try to call attention to important issues when we can still do something about them. Something else is always more important. Something else always matters more. We’re always talking about the wrong thing at the wrong time. Whatever we happen to care about, whatever we think matters, that’s irrelevant.

It’s fascinating.

Years ago, women tried to get the world to pay attention to Jeffrey Epstein. So did a few men. And we were told:

Why are you talking about Jeffrey Epstein? He doesn’t matter. He’s irrelevant. Just ignore him and get on with your life.

Now the world won’t stop talking about him.

Why?

Sadly, it’s not because the world has become a better place. It’s because the Epstein files now serve a political purpose, and they’ll help those now seeking power. The patriarchal world of politics and media feels like they can leverage Epstein’s crimes to bring down their favorite villain, without having to reflect too much on their own systems of thought, you know, the systems that have already produced a thousand more Epsteins. It’s safe to talk about him now.

It’s not safe to talk about Andrew Tate because he still commands a rather large following, despite everything. If we were ever close to defeating someone like him, it wasn’t because we ignored him. It was because we finally started doing something about him. Social media companies finally deplatformed him. Governments finally brought him to justice. Greta Thunberg gave him a dose of his own medicine, and he had an epic meltdown. That’s what happened.

Ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away.

Dealing with them does.

Like so many of our problems, including Trump, we didn’t finish the job when we had the chance. We got complacent. Now like Trump, Tate is back.

It’s a pattern that repeats, over and over.

Ten years ago, some of us were trying to warn the world about the threat Trump posed. And again, we heard this line:

Why are you talking about Donald Trump? He doesn’t matter. He’s irrelevant. Just ignore him and get on with your life.

So, what matters?

What is okay to talk about, and when is it okay to talk about it? Do we have to wait until it’s too late to deal with a problem to talk about it? And then, do we have to talk about it as if we can still do something, while insisting that all of our other problems don’t matter, and we should ignore them?

Do we have to start fights with people we agree with, simply because they’re talking about something we’ll only care about in five years?

I’m writing about this because I think many of you might feel the same way, you’ll appreciate having something articulated that was in the back of your mind, on the tip of your tongue, but you just couldn’t quite…

You know what I mean.

And if you want solutions, we have plenty of those. The solution was to prosecute Trump and throw him in jail, denying him the chance to run for office again. The solution was to keep Andrew Tate deplatformed. It was to expedite his trials. The solution to airborne diseases is better masks, better vaccines, and cleaner air. The solution to climate change is steady-state economics and degrowth. There’s a solution for every single problem that people like us talk about. The bigger problem? Not enough people want those solutions. They want something easier. They want something magical that requires less effort.

They want something perfect and free.

Well, there are no easier answers, no magical solutions, and no perfect happy endings. Every solution comes with a cost. There are only the solutions that work, and they’re the only solutions worth talking about.

Thank you for reading.

The “president” of the United States recently shared an AI-generated image depicting him as Jesus, even though he says he meant to portray himself as a doctor, another role he’s remarkably unqualified for.

Yeah, that’s propaganda.

But also:

A flurry of notes has been circulating through the homeschooling co-ops I’m in, offering guides to help parents talk about the “Iranian propaganda videos” that have taken over the internet lately. It made me realize something:

Americans think they understand propaganda.

They don’t.

They keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means. So, we’re going to talk about Jacques Ellul in a minute.

But first:

We learned about propaganda in history class. At least, we thought we did. We looked at those cringe war posters from the Wilson and Roosevelt eras. We laughed. They’re so obvious. We’d never fall for that, we said.

We’re too smart.

And since we think we know what propaganda looks like, because we studied a bunch of war posters, we miss everything else.

So when Iran releases a series of Lego videos that beats almost anything SNL or Comedy Central has done in years, something more honest than 90 percent of our own media, it gets labeled as “propaganda.”

But it’s not propaganda. It’s satire. It’s clearly engaging in satire. It has all the features of satire. So why aren’t we calling them the “Iranian satire videos” or the “satirical music videos from Iran?” It’s a good question.

Americans don’t say “Iran’s satirical music videos,” because they’ve been conditioned to see Iran as some kind of existential threat, a hardline regime run by lunatics, a place where you can’t even crack a joke. Even the snooty Americans think they understand Iran because they skimmed a few pages of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Anything and everything out of Iran that isn’t dripping with pro-Western honey must be propaganda. That’s how propagandized we are.

And it shows.

So, what does American propaganda look like?

You and I already know that billionaires control the vast majority of our news outlets, and we’ve watched them gradually apply more and more influence over the years. Now they also own the vast majority of our social media, and most Americans just sat back and let it happen, drinking down propaganda about their personal security and TikTok. It wasn’t so direct at first. Even five years ago, papers still published rather blistering critiques of Amazon. Now, we get this:

That right there, that’s American propaganda.

That’s American propaganda in its purest, most unadulterated form. It’s the red, white, and blue meth of propaganda, the Heisenberg special. It kicks like a mule with its balls wrapped in duct tape and rubber bands.

(And it has a special ingredient.)

The newspaper didn’t just publish that piece about Bezos. They promoted it. They pushed it out to our devices. It showed up in my NYT feed, right up there with war coverage. This was not a backpage fluff piece. The editors and owners of the paper wanted everyone to see it and read it, even knowing it would stoke anger. Ironically, it’s just as cringe as those war posters from a century ago.

They’re getting sloppy. The propaganda is getting more obvious, and that speaks to how much control they have. When they act like they don’t have to sneak it by us anymore, that should scare you a little.

It scares me.

Imagine what Jacques Ellul would say about that headline. A French philosopher and sociologist, Ellul published more than 60 books on propaganda and related topics while teaching at the University of Bordeaux. Even though he died in 1994, right around the birth of the internet, he warned us about “technological tyranny.” This man gets the Cassandra Gold Medal.

What did he say about propaganda?

According to Ellul, propaganda doesn’t just come from your government. It comes from everywhere. It’s not as blunt and obvious as we’re taught in school. It’s slower, more insidious. It sneaks into you over time. It promotes bigger ideas, beliefs, and ideologies. It sells you on social norms. It sells you on life aspirations. It sells you on “technological imperatives,” otherwise known as beliefs that adoption of new technologies is inevitable, and resistance is futile.

When you look at all the tech bros salivating over AI, all the big companies shoving it down our throats on every app, constantly telling us how great it is, warning us we’ll be left behind if we don’t use it, that it’s worth risking Skynet and extinction-level events, that’s a technological imperative. That’s them telling you that you have no choice but to use it, no matter the costs.

That’s propaganda.

Propaganda for MAGA Dummies

Propaganda doesn’t have to slap you in the face.

It can be subtle.

It guides public opinion over time. It shifts the window of debate, and it frames our discourse. It tells us what we’re allowed to talk about, what’s plausible, and what’s extreme. It tells you what to believe in, and what’s an unhinged conspiracy theory. It’s a kind of gaslighting.

Jacques Ellul outlined three main kinds of propaganda in his 1962 book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. And while the title could use an update, everything else is spot on, and more relevant than ever.

He shows us how smart people fall for propaganda.

First, he drew a distinction between “agitation” propaganda and “integration” propaganda. You see agitation propaganda in those cringe war posters from the last century. It advocates for direct, specific, and often violent action. It often comes from a single, centralized source, like a government office. Trump’s regime often engages in agitation propaganda. If it looks bad, or it makes you laugh, then it’s probably not even directed at you. It’s targeting someone else.

Here’s an example:

As you’ll see by the end, Ellul would call this post propaganda for dummies. It’s very direct, very overt, and very specific. It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. Trump wants to liken himself to Jesus.

It practically parodies itself.

But that’s not the kind of propaganda you need to worry about falling for. It’s the other kind, as Ellul continues to explain.

Next, Ellul distinguished between “vertical” and “horizontal” propaganda. Government offices and agencies engage in vertical propaganda, sending out messages and memes over all kinds of media, telling you exactly what to think. Again, Trump appears to prefer this vertical kind of propaganda, and it’s why he puts so much pressure on big companies like CBS.

And posting ridiculous AI memes of himself…

Guys like Jeffrey Epstein and Stephen Miller understand horizontal propaganda, which happens through peer networks. It’s more sophisticated. All the incel nonsense, all the QAnon conspiracy theories, that evolved via horizontal propaganda. These things didn’t just happen spontaneously. At the top, someone was guiding them and nudging them along, in the background, out of sight. That’s horizontal propaganda. You plant the misinformation like a seed. You water it. You give it sunlight. Otherwise, you mostly try to let it grow on its own.

Finally, Ellul distinguished “sociological” propaganda from “political” propaganda. Like “agitation” propaganda, political propaganda focuses on specific actions. It comes from an explicit, specific source. It focuses on the short term, like a revolution. Sociological propaganda focuses on more general worldviews and orientations. It comes from a number of sources. On some level, it’s not even “intentional,” so much as a nearly unconscious motivation to reinforce and privilege certain economic systems, class divisions, and hierarchies.

Trump’s direct actions often take the form of agitation, vertical, political propaganda. It’s so easy to spot, and it works extremely well on his MAGA base. It doesn’t work on you or me, but that doesn’t mean we’re free from propaganda. We’re often exposed to the other kinds: the integration propaganda, the horizontal propaganda, the sociological propaganda. It tends to work on “smarter” people, you know, those of us with advanced degrees, who think we’re above it.

We’re not.

You and I are always at risk of falling for this other propaganda, because it’s far more insidious and sinister. It works on you over time, from multiple angles. It worms its way into your hopes and dreams. Sometimes, the source of propaganda doesn’t even truly realize that they’re spreading propaganda.

It’s sleeper propaganda.

Propaganda for Liberal Brainiacs

Sociological propaganda doesn’t tell you exactly what to do. It just asks you, in a very innocuous way, why Lauren Sanchez Bezos doesn’t deserve happiness, because she’s trying to protect the narwhal after all.

She’s won environmental awards.

She can’t be that bad. She’s no Melania Trump.

Is she?

When Trump hijacks the Kennedy Center to show the Melania movie, that’s overt propaganda. Meanwhile, sociological propaganda comes in the form of Bill Gates publishing a book on the climate crisis, telling us to drink from paper straws while he traverses the globe on his private jets, buying up all the farmland, and paving the way for AI data centers. It comes in the form of supposedly liberal billionaires declaring their desire to pay more in taxes, when they can just cut a check to the IRS any time. It comes in the form of world leaders hopping from one climate conference to the next, giving the mic to oil executives. And I know this will make you angry, but you need to hear it: Sociological propaganda even comes in the form of AOC telling you that Kamala Harris is “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” in Gaza, when she’s not. That’s propaganda aimed at you, a reasonably intelligent person.

Political propaganda works on dummies. It’s bottom-shelf.

You, my friends, get the top-shelf propaganda.

Feeling special?

We must resist all forms of propaganda

Sociological propaganda works on you, even if you’re smart, because it often tells you what you want to hear, while enabling the exact opposite of what’s good for you. And many of our friends fall for it. They fall for it despite their liberal politics. They fall for it despite their test scores. They fall for it despite their degrees.

That’s why we have to pay attention to it.

You find Ellul’s propaganda in your Netflix and chill. You find it in commercials. You find it on the local news. You find it in Marvel movies. You find it in fluff pieces. You find it in Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, and Forbes.

You find it all over the personal wellness industry and their bazillion podcasts, listicles, and online courses.

In America, it’s all selling the same message:

All of your problems are personal. The mountain is you. Get out of your own way. You only have to work 4 hours a week. Girl, wash your face! Think and grow rich. Here’s the secret, you can just ask the universe for everything. Here’s 7 habits of high effective people. Actually, it’s grit. Don’t waste your time on protest and politics. It won’t serve you. You are a badass. Make your bed.

And so on…

When CNBC or Business Insider devotes an entire section to how this or that millennial made a million bucks while living in their parents’ carriage house, that’s horizontal, integration, sociological propaganda. If you have a good bullshit detector, you can smell the hidden message: “Millennials complain about the economy all the time, but we found a few who struck it rich. Why can’t you do that? What’s wrong with you??? It’s not the system’s fault. It’s not lack of regulation. It’s not capitalism. It’s not neoliberalism. It’s your poor, deafest attitude.”

Does Jim Cramer know that he’s an agent of Western propaganda?

Probably not. He’s just a CNBC host.

A book like Rich Dad, Poor Dad delivers just as much propaganda per page as anything coming out of Iran or China. But since Robert Kiyosaki doesn’t work for the government (he’s just really good friends with Trump), his book doesn’t get labeled as propaganda. He’s just a good little capitalist whose book, published in 1997, taught an entire generation of young men to resent their hardworking fathers simply because they weren’t cutthroat CEOs or tax evaders.

Nobody regards a book like The Secret as propaganda. The author isn’t even American. But her book mainstreamed Christian Science into the American public consciousness, with a big boost from Oprah. It conditioned an entire generation to believe diseases only exist in your head, you can think your way out of cancer, and the universe exists for the sake of granting wishes.

Nobody considers that propaganda, because it doesn’t come from a government source, and it doesn’t look like a war poster.

It’s still propaganda.

Ellul said that the U.S., China, and Russia have always engaged in propaganda. He even said that Maoist China leaned more heavily on more overt propaganda because it’s how they reached their rural populations. As they modernized, their propaganda evolved. His theories explain why we see these two competing strands of propaganda in the U.S. The glossy, sociological propaganda works on educated Americans and ensures they don’t deviate too much from the larger goals of the Epstein class. They use guys like Epstein and Miller to run sophisticated, horizontal networks of propaganda. Meanwhile, Trump posts the more overt, vertical propaganda that works so well on his rural MAGA voters.

It’s almost like they’ve read Jacques Ellul…

But that’s crazy, right?

That’s why the work of sociologists and philosophers like Jacques Ellul is so important now. It probably sounds like a conspiracy theory to talk about books, magazines, and podcasts as forms of propaganda. But it’s there. It’s true. There’s an entire body of research, an entire discipline, devoted to carefully explaining why and how it functions, and why it works so well.

There’s no easy solution for this problem. You just have to practice good listening. You have to be willing to examine your own thoughts. You have to look at your own sacred kittens. You have to be willing to admit you were wrong about something, and you have to realize that you’re not simply the sum of all your political beliefs and opinions. You’re a thinking machine. You’re allowed to change.

I was raised as a “moderate” Republican. For a while, I was a diehard “vote blue no matter who” liberal. Over the years, I’ve changed. I’ve had to look back on things I said and did, and decide that I can do better. I learned something else: Propaganda works best on people who are scared to admit they were wrong. It gives them the license to cling to beliefs they know aren’t true.

So, that’s what American propaganda looks like.

You can fall for it, and so can I.

But we can do better.

If you don’t watch City Prepping, you should. Their main guy, Kris, delivers some of the sanest breakdowns of world events on the internet. You don’t even have to call yourself a prepper to appreciate his insights.

In his latest video, Kris warns us against taking the ceasefire with Iran at face value. And if you’ve kept up with the news, you already know some of the things he covers. Namely, none of the headlines add up to a reassuring path to peace. Instead, ships remain stranded outside the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s long-term proposal has zero chance of impressing American politicians, not because they’re unreasonable points, but because it amounts to a dismantling of the U.S. empire, and the stewards of that empire are never going to sign off on it.

This ceasefire looks like the ceasefires we usually see:

It’s a chance to refuel and rearm.

It’s a breather.

So if that’s the logic, if the U.S. is using the ceasefire to restock and prepare, it stands to reason the rest of us should be doing the same thing, in whatever ways we can, and doing our best to help others do the same.

Meanwhile, Iran has been dropping some devastating propaganda in the form of Lego videos. I’ve just learned about these, and whew…

It burns (in a good way):

Iran has become the District 13 of the post-Epstein world. In many ways, they always were. They’re the ones standing up to the global ring of human traffickers, the predator class, they’re the ones shouting that line:

“If we burn, you burn with us!”

I’ve wondered what to call this world we live in now, what kind of name gives justice to everything we’re seeing and feeling right now.

I think “post-Epstein” does the job.

In a post-Epstein world, Epstein is dead. The networks he built are being exposed, and the public is learning the truth about who was always running the world and ruining their lives. His ideology lives on, but it’s flailing. And that’s not to minimize the threat it still poses. These men, and the women who protect them for personal gain, are never more dangerous than when they’re cornered.

That’s when they can do the most damage.

They’ll torch us to save themselves.

In the past, they had their reputations. Like Homelander, they’ve always cared about their image, more than they want to admit. Take away their image, reveal them as the monsters they always were, and watch them become a thousand times more destructive, because they have nothing left.

There’s only one thing worse than a Homelander.

A Homelander with nothing left to lose.

They’re going to stop at nothing to protect themselves, their money, and their power now. Consider this: If the world already knows you’re a depraved pedophile rapist and child murderer, why wouldn’t you just go ahead and start threatening to destroy entire civilizations? Why wouldn’t you just go ahead and rig the elections?

What’s holding you back?

Nothing…

That’s what we’re dealing with now.

As many of my readers know, I’m a prepper. I’m not the kind of prepper who digs bunkers and sits around waiting for nuclear war. I’m the kind of prepper who learns how to build food dehydrators.

It’s easy to laugh off the preppers and survivalists, but here’s the thing. The last year in particular has validated us. We wish it hadn’t.

Many of us wish we’d been wrong.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve found great comfort in second-guessing myself, only to watch the other boot drop and then thank myself for taking the time and making the sacrifices to prepare us a little. Life would’ve been so much easier if I could’ve just kept teaching my classes, publishing my articles in obscure little journals, and raising my family in a little house in the midwest.

That’s what I wanted.

Not this.

That’s the future most of us wanted, a life we didn’t have to prep through, a government that used our tax money to take care of us and our neighbors, instead of using it to subsidize oil companies, build massive data centers, prop up weapons manufacturers, and enrich child traffickers.

Now we’re in the middle of a war with our version of District 13, the country that our leaders decided to make our enemy, a war we didn’t want, but didn’t do much to stop either, and it’s converging with the climate crisis to bring real pain to Americans, even more than we’ve already experienced.

So when Kris from City Prepping tells you take to heed, to use the next 10 days to prepare in whatever way you can, I would listen.

I’ve written my own guide explaining what we can do to get ready. I’m not selling it. You can get the whole thing for free. I’ve put it under a creative commons license. You can take it anywhere to have it bound and printed. And I’m not writing these pieces just to plug my guide. I’ve been writing about these topics for years, and now I finally have one coherent piece of work that just lays out the basics someone can do if they want to try and get through this, if they want a little stability. I’m not the only one with a guide, but mine will work just as well. I’m going to keep working on my guide over the months and years, but what’s there is enough.

It’s harder to prep now than it was a few years ago. In a few months, it’s going to be harder to prep than it is now.

That’s how life works.

Of course, maybe you’ve noticed something about all the prepper videos, all the posts, all the articles, all the warnings. They always speak with a sense of urgency. They always tell you that you’ve got 10 days to get ready.

When the pandemic started back in 2020, we had ten days to get ready. When new variants popped up, we had ten days to get ready. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we had ten days to get ready. When news of bird flu started hitting mainstream news, we had ten days to get ready. When Trump won reelection, we had ten days to get ready. When he upended the world economy with tariffs, we had ten days to get ready. Now, once, again, we have ten days to get ready.

We’ve gone through this a few times.

I’m sure you’re skeptical.

You might be thinking that it’s a scam, because maybe you didn’t prepare, or you did prepare, and you’re still here.

There’s something in prepping circles called the paradox of preparedness. If you prepare for a disaster, and you survive, your brain plays a little trick on you. It tells you that it wasn’t that bad. You overreacted.

So next time, you don’t take the warnings as seriously.

You don’t prepare as much.

The paradox of preparedness has a corollary:

Survivorship bias.

The ones that survive each wave of disaster and upheaval don’t think about the ones who didn’t. We look at the planes that land, the pilots who make it back, but we don’t see the planes that crashed, the ones that got shot down.

Because of that, we develop a warped sense of what it means to survive. We start to consider ourselves invulnerable, and we grow complacent.

We put armor on the wrong parts of the plane.

But what if you survived simply because you were lucky?

What if you were saved by TACO?

Trump Always Chickens Out?

Every time that happens, every time we squeak through, countless others perish. We don’t see them parish. They simply “fall by the wayside.” They sink through the cracks, and nobody stops to help them. Nobody learns the lesson. (Almost nobody. There’s you, right? You’re learning. So am I.)

Look at the last five years. We know a lot of us didn’t make it. The numbers don’t lie. They’re just being hidden from us, especially now.

For many of them, it wasn’t their fault. They tried. It was just too much. We live in a system that grinds people up like cattle.

But for many, they had a choice. They chose not to prepare. They didn’t take warnings seriously. They succumbed to survivorship bias and the paradox of preparedness. They could’ve acted. They could’ve taken simple precautions. They decided not to do that, and they paid for it, with everything. Even worse, they hurt others. They made other people perish, with their own complacency.

Nobody among the Cassandra crowd will judge you if you can’t see everything or take every precaution. We should all just be trying. If we just tried, if we just acknowledged the warnings, things would go much better. As with every crisis, the one we’re dealing with now didn’t start this year. It didn’t start with this administration, it goes back years and years, with voices trying to warn us, and being ignored, not just by MAGA, but by a much larger majority. The truth tellers weren’t just ignored. They were shouted down. They were ridiculed and belittled. As we excoriate the monsters, as we indulge in every latest salacious update, we should also look at ourselves and ask the harder questions about why we didn’t listen.

And of course, if you were among the truth tellers, you get a little break on that front. But here’s the hard thing for you: The hard thing is going to be resisting the “I told you so” moments, and doing your best to help everyone learn the lessons without rubbing their faces in them, because that won’t help.

It will feel good, but it won’t help.

So if there’s any ultimate lesson here in the post-Epstein world, it’s not just that we’re ruled by monsters and mobsters, it’s that we ignored the voices who were trying to tell us that the whole time, and now we’re paying for it.

The monsters have already eaten half the world.

They’re trying to devour the rest.

The greatest prep of all isn’t measured in how many food buckets you have. It’s not measured in how much kale you can grow. It’s not measured in how many gallons of gas you can store, or how many guns you own.

The greatest prep of all is measured in how good you are at listening. It’s measured in how much uncomfortable truth you can tolerate. It’s measured in how long you can sit with unpleasant facts, and make some kind of plan, even if it’s not a plan you like very much. It’s measured in how much you can assess and accept your own shortcomings and vulnerabilities. It’s measured in how much you can acknowledge your own responsibility for the current state of the world. It’s measured in how much you can look at your own behavior, examine your own thinking, and not fall into the easy, comforting habit of simply pointing your finger at the bad guys, and blaming everything on them, even if most of that is true.

So that’s the deal. You always have 10 days to get ready.

Until one day, you don’t.

Life feels fundamentally different now.

Because it is.

Recently, a U.S. president threatened to destroy an entire civilization over a trade route. Then he walked his threats back like it was just another Tuesday. And you know the worst part? Basically, it was.

It was just another Tuesday.

When I was looking for the right photo for this essay, I stopped on this one. A rocket launch. It felt perfect. It sums up everything.

A rocket launch can represent hope and progress, but it’s also violent, chaotic, overwhelming, dangerous, destructive, and from a certain perspective, it also represents the arrogance of humanity to think we’re ready to find other planets when we can’t even manage this one. And yet, in a more humanistic sense, it’s by learning about our place in the universe that we come to develop an appropriate sense of humility and responsibility. Also: You don’t exactly un-launch a rocket. Once it leaves the ground, you’re going for a ride.

A rocket launch says it all.

So, there it is…

In this new era, threats to destroy civilization have become another news cycle. Before the latest horrors, this regime threatened to invade Greenland. They kidnapped the president of another country. They shot two civilians to death in broad daylight for almost nothing. They upended our vaccine schedules. They canceled late night talkshow hosts out of pure spite. They commandeered at least one major news network. Then they destroyed one of the world’s biggest social media platforms and arenas of free speech by handing it to a billionaire friend. Then they started turning warehouses into concentration camps.

Between tariffs and government shutdowns, it’s hard to articulate the amount of damage just one corrupt gang of fascists can do.

No doubt, all of this represents an extension of U.S. neoliberal policy and doctrine rather than a departure, but it’s quite the evolution, isn’t it? The gloves have really come off in a big way. The masks have really slipped down. Some of us always knew. We read the history, or we lived it. But if you know the history, then you also know just how disturbing it is to watch the current felons in charge double and tiple down on the absolute worst of our heritage, not even trying to do better, not even pretending, and with a reckless bravado that makes you wonder if they really don’t see a future for any of us anymore, or even themselves.

That’s just the last 12 months.

There’s so much more.

Before all of that, we spent years watching a genocide on our phones. We watched a majority of our friends and families ignore it. We watched pileups of thousand-year disasters, culminating in a hurricane so powerful it brought record floods to the mountains of Appalachia, utterly destroying supposed climate safe havens like Asheville. Since then, the world’s richest men have pledged their allegiance to AI and abandoned their climate promises.

Now, the same crew who promised to save the world tells us to stop caring so much, right before an avalanche of documents validates the worst conspiracy theories of all time. Yeah, they really were trafficking girls on private islands and ranches in the desert, murdering them, and burying them on golf courses. It’s no wonder they didn’t solve world hunger. They were too busy doing that. They spent most of their day planning wild sex parties with teenage girls.

What else?

Someone shot a healthcare CEO to death in the street, and public jubilation motivated the super rich to hire the world’s most ruthless cyber defense company to start building a massive database that tracks every detail of our lives. I know it’s not such a straight causal line, but it’s not wrong either.

As public health collapses, every year exposes us to an ever-widening list of diseases that can either kill or disable us. We watched the world quietly give up on any hope of staying under 1.5C of global warming. Taylor Swift fans started dropping dead at her concerts from heat stroke. She shed one tear and then climbed right back on her private jet, and sued the guy tracking it. Everyone from Elon Musk to Mila Kunis has shown us who they really care about.

Not us. Not survivors of sexual assault. Not survivors of climate disasters. They care about themselves, their reputations, each other.

We can just… die already.

Maybe they’re not actively trying to kill us, but they’re not trying to save us either. Not anymore, if ever. It’s too expensive. They don’t need as many of us as they thought. They’re really putting all their eggs in the robot slave basket now. Did you hear? They’re not even trying to colonize Mars anymore.

If you’re looking for one word to describe what’s changed: It’s pretense. That’s really the biggest shift. For the last few decades, our institutions offered a pretense of caring about us. They offered a narrative. There wasn’t much substance to it, but there was a sense that you could still shame the Peter Thiels of the world into doing the right thing, or at least force them to stop doing the worst things.

That pretense offered a sense of comfort, however false, however illusory, and it made everything else go down a little easier.

That pretense has largely eroded.

They’re not promising us vacations on Mars anymore. They’re not promoting hustle and grind. They’re not offering the digital nomad lifestyle.

They’re basically putting a gun to our heads and telling us to work until we die, or a robot replaces us, whichever comes first.

That’s what it feels like.

Maybe that’s the biggest shift since the release of the Epstein files. There’s no pretending anymore. Most of the politicians, billionaires, CEOs, bankers, lobbyists, and so on are just as bad as we always wondered. Perhaps they’re even worse than we feared, and there’s no sweeping it away now. It’s just there, in plain sight, and you either look at it or look away.

We’ve learned to live with a level of pain and uncertainty that felt unthinkable ten years ago. As I learned even before all of this, stress and trauma can rewire your brain. So in a sense, we’ve changed on a biochemical level.

Sit down for a minute and listen to yourself.

You can sense it.

(I can.)

Everyone is dealing with this cold new world in different ways. Some of us are facing it with fight songs and protests. Some of us are prepping our way through. Some of us are just keeping our heads above water. Millions more have learned to sublimate, to just push it all down and pretend harder that everything is fine.

Believe it or not, millions of people out there, especially Americans, have no idea what’s going on. That’s how they manage to get by.

What about the rest of us?

Well, I can only tell you what I’m doing. I’ve spent the last several years not running from any of this, but facing it and learning how to process it.

I’ve learned what I can do to protect myself from all these new threats, and what I can’t. I’ve gamed out how bad the future can get for my family. I’ve sat with it. I’ve accepted it. I’ve come up with plans and plans.

I’ve executed the plans.

We live on two wavelengths now, one where we hold on to the moral and ethical center that never allows us to become desensitized to the horrors unfolding, while simultaneously growing mental and emotional callouses that allow us to function in a world with soul-crushing, stupefying amounts of cruelty.

And that would be the right phrasing, I think.

Callouses. Tough skin.

Armor.

I’ve learned who I can be honest with. I’ve figured out how to talk to people about doom without saying the words “doom.” I’ve carved out spaces and routines for myself. I’ve learned when to turn off my phone and go outside. I’ve learned what signals to pay attention to, and what noise to ignore.

There’s no magic ride to this better place, but it starts with something simple enough. Maybe you know it, but let’s say it anyway:

You have to accept the current reality. You can devote yourself to making a better future, but you have to live in the present. You have to acknowledge what’s happening, not what you want to be happening. It sounds easy until you see how many people out there aren’t doing it. They’re not living in reality. They’re living in a matrix they created for themselves. In those moments when the matrix glitches, they comfort themselves with the notion that we’ll somehow find a way back to the comforting narrative pretenses of last decade.

But we can’t go back. In some ways, I even tried. I couldn’t recreate the high. It’s gone. Once you’ve seen what we’ve seen, once you’ve lived through what we have, you don’t go back. A big part of you doesn’t even want to.

The things that once brought me a sense of comfort and peace years ago? They don’t do that anymore. Now, I ground myself by listening to thunderstorms. I go for short walks. Or I sit in total silence, with my noise-canceling earbuds. I think about what I need to do. I anticipate problems and come up with solutions.

And then I sit and think about nothing.

I love thinking about nothing.

So, if you don’t know where to start, or you know someone who doesn’t, then go with something small and simple. Accept this:

Stop trying to go back in time. Stop trying to rewind to a prior age.

Stop trying to fast-forward to a happy ending.

Just live at normal speed.

It’s the only way.

With the current U.S. president making threats like “a whole civilization will die tonight,” while dropping F-bombs from the marble throne of his Lincoln bathroom, and with the IEA announcing “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” you might be wondering if it’s finally time to buy an electric vehicle (among other things). You might be wondering if you can afford one. You might be wondering if there’s any hidden downsides.

Let’s jump right into it.

Yes, it makes a lot of sense to get an EV for a lot of different reasons, wars and oil crises notwithstanding. It makes even more sense to get one along with solar panels, as I wrote a couple of months ago. If I can be honest, EVs have struck me as a luxury asset for a long time. But that’s because I didn’t know much about them. My tune has changed over the last few days, as I started putting together the pieces of all the different analyses of the Iran war, its long-term repercussions, and the bigger picture in terms of the climate crisis. We own an EV now.

It felt like a straightforward decision. Will it turn out to be a mistake? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Like all other things, time will tell.

But I don’t regret any of my other preps.

First, even before the war with Iran, the climate crisis has been making life unpredictable everywhere. A climate disaster could strike your city at any time, and they’re getting worse. Energy scarcity and grid erosion alone drive up your risk of blackouts 100x by 2030. Just look at the last few years…

This year, experts are predicting an historic super El Niño to drop by the fall. In fact, they’re predicting “the strongest El Nino event in 140 years.” That means more than worse droughts, floods, and storms. It means new global temperature records. It means weather events that nobody alive has seen. It means, well, we don’t know how bad things could get. That’s the most disturbing part.

Nobody has seen it before.

My family came to our senses a few days ago. For years, we’ve struggled to stock and rotate gasoline for emergencies. It was a real pain. Even with fuel stabilizers, gasoline boasts a relatively short shelf life of 1-3 years. You have to cycle your supply. It smells. The fumes aren’t safe. We could never find a truly “spill-proof” container. And who wants to store large quantities of a flammable liquid?

Not me, thanks…

From a prepping standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to get solar panels and then get an electric vehicle. You enjoy a reliable form of transportation that might meet your needs better than a bicycle or a horse, and certainly better than a gasoline-powered car, especially during a disaster. No more gas storage. No more fretting about shortages and panic buying. Need to get somewhere?

Charge it up and go.

Let’s face it, someone trying to raise a family in the middle of a suburban sprawl faces systemic disadvantages and constraints that pretty much force us to own an automobile of some kind. I wish it didn’t. It would be nice if we could all live in more pedestrian environments, but many of us are stuck where we are. Not everyone can move somewhere else. It’s just reality.

The case for an EV has changed a lot over the last year.

Before:

Believe it or not, experts were predicting gasoline prices to drop over the next several years. Ironically, they cited widespread EV adoption as a key factor, driving down demand for gas. They also cited increased production from oil companies in the U.S., and worldwide, resulting in a supply glut. We could talk oil and geopolitics all day, but in the end: While oil companies surging production means terrible things for us, including more disasters to prepare for, you wouldn’t have had to worry about a general lack of availability for a while. Of course, that’s assuming you made it through the next 5-10 years with no disasters or emergencies.

Trump has upended all of these trajectories.

First, he axed tax credits for EVs. Second, he upended the global economy with tariff schemes. Now he’s doing more damage through this reckless war with Iran, which threatens longterm destruction to oil and natural gas production. It’s safe to say we have no idea what’s really going to happen with gasoline and diesel prices, except now they’re going verticle. While it might seem relatively calm in the U.S., panic buying “reminiscent of an apocalypse film” is breaking out in other parts of the world, and countries are starting to ration gasoline. Energy experts in Britain expect gasoline rationing and bare shelves “within weeks.”

Recently, Trump released roughly 40 percent of the country’s strategic reserves. That alone counts as the second-largest release in history, just after Biden’s in 2022, driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Worldwide, we’re seeing something widely regarded as the largest strategic release in history. According to this piece in The Conversation, it’s pretty much a drop in the bucket.

It’s going to blunt oil prices for a few months (or weeks).

If the war continues, if Iran has to keep the Straight of Hormuz closed, if oil and natural gas production facilities keep blowing up, we’re looking at a severe and arguably permanent disruption to the world’s energy supply. That spills over into all kinds of economic and logistic consequences, including food shortages. And let’s remember that Iran is fighting an asymmetric war, using the only tools it has to fend off a megalomanical lunatic threatening to destroy their entire civilization. Do you think they’re perhaps justified here? Perhaps, perhaps.

Consider the longterm picture here. In the most optimistic case, Trump chickens out and the world starts to recover. In the more pessimistic scenario, one that considers collapse economics and politics, we’re entering a new era where endless war and severe supply chain disruptions become the norm. Look at the last few years. We’ve seen more wars with deeper implications, not fewer. If that holds true, then an EV suddenly becomes a much more attractive option.

Climate doomers like me see the world devolving into war as nations like the U.S., Russia, and China compete for dwindling resources and influence. That’s been behind the moves in Ukraine, Gaza, Venezuela, Greenland, and now Iran. The powers are dividing up the world into fiefdoms, and things are getting messy.

In short, it won’t get better—only worse.

An EV might become the only way you can get to work, the only way you can pick up groceries, the only way you can go somewhere to get seeds or gardening tools, the only way you can travel to see family, the only way you can arrange play dates for your children. That’s the situation we foresee.

How expensive is an EV?

As of now, you can buy something like an Ioniq 5 for about the cost of a nice new car. Many dealerships are running special discounts now (probably because of tax season). The deals going on now rival the tax credits we would’ve gotten. That plus trade-ins make it doable. Regardless of what you buy, you don’t have to drop $50,000 on a new car. We’re talking more like mid $30Ks. You can buy used EVs for even less, but that brings risks. You could wind up with a degraded or damaged battery. Even if the used EV comes with the original warranties, it’s a considerable headache. So, exercise your own judgment there.

What’s the range?

EVs enjoy a decent range now, around 300 miles on a full charge. That’s about a tank of gas for a smaller car. We’ll take it.

If you get folding solar panels and a portable generator, you can charge your car on the road without having to pull into a charging station.

It’s doable.

How long do the batteries last?

An EV battery lasts 15 years, even 20 with good care. Many EVs come with a 10-year warranty for the battery. You can even buy extended warranties that cover every part of the vehicle for 10 years.

Do they require more maintenance?

EVs require less maintenance than a standard car, but they come with their own hassles. You have to rotate the tires a little more often. The increased weight also puts more strain on them. Your first set of tires will likely have foam, and they’ll probably last 15-20K miles. After that, though, you can replace them with EV-compatible tires that get more mileage, more in the neighborhood of 25-50K.

How do you charge them?

You can use a level 1, 2, or 3 charger. A level 1 charger plugs straight into your wall outlet. It charges super slow, but it charges. If you don’t drive a huge amount, you can probably get away with charging at home from your solar panels. You’ll just need to keep it plugged in all the time. Your battery management system will prevent any overcharging, so don’t worry too much about that.

If you need to charge it up fast, take it to a charging station. More gas stations are installing them. You can even install a level 2 charger in your garage, but installation costs start around $2,000. (So I’ve read.)

Is it a scam?

No, they work. They’re reliable. They give you some independence from the grid, but they’re not magic. They require maintenance and upkeep like everything else, and they can break. There’s a principle at work here. It’s about reducing your exposure to risk and uncertainty. An EV will do that. It will do that without requiring you to adopt a completely different lifestyle.

Maybe it’s not for you. Maybe you can’t afford one. It’s smart to get an EV, but it’s also smart not to overstretch your finances.

So, that’s my take. We’ve already gone EV. It brings peace of mind. From the most immediate, practical standpoint, we’re a little less worried about what stupid things our president does. We have a vehicle that puts us in a better position to take care of ourselves, but also our family and friends. We can run errands for them. We can travel to see them during an emergency.

We don’t have to sit up at night wondering what we’ll do if we see panic buying because of a war, a cyber attack, a hurricane, or any other reason. It doesn’t eliminate our risks, but it reduces them. It’s one less thing to worry about.

And one less thing to worry about is…

One less thing to worry about.

Odds are, when you read this, we’ll still be living under a fascist regime.

The vast majority of us don’t support anything that’s going on. We despise it. We talk and talk. We analyze. We contextualize. We put words together. We resist.

The bad things happen anyway.

It took millions of armed soldiers from all over the world to bring down Hitler. And then there’s you. With your phone. Up against flying killbots.

Feeling a little outmatched?

It weighs on you. The futility. Then there’s the judgment. Every day, you hear about your complicity in a broken system. You watch your supposed failures trotted out, over and over. You were supposed to vote. You weren’t supposed to vote. You were supposed to convince your dad to break blue. You were supposed to protest more. You were supposed to call your representatives more. You were supposed to help organize a general strike, even though you can’t afford a week without pay. You were supposed to go out there and get murdered by goons, even if you’re trying to raise a family. You were supposed to be a martyr for your cause, or an executioner. Whatever you did, it wasn’t enough, and it’s your fault.

When you point out how bad things are, someone rolls their eyes and tells you things have always been bad. But what if you already knew that? Does that mean you shouldn’t say anything? Should you just… do what, exactly?

They tell you to change the system, but they don’t say how.

That’s because they don’t know.

They want you to figure out how to change the system, but that’s just it. Nobody knows how to change the system without risking everything they’ve got. And that’s where we are now. If we want to change the system, we have to risk everything. At the very least, we need millions of people willing to give up more than a few brunches. We need millions of people willing to risk a few nights in jail, a few bruises, a few broken bones. But I’m not willing to risk that, for several reasons. And… look around. How many people do you see willing to risk everything, and why would you risk everything if you’re just going to wind up in the news for a couple of weeks, and maybe you get turned into a meme, and nothing changes?

And if you protest the wrong thing, at the wrong time…

Anyway, I’ve got a confession to make.

Today, I didn’t bring down any fascist regimes. I didn’t stop any big oil companies from destroying the planet. I didn’t rescue anyone from poverty, war, or genocide. I didn’t bust any billionaire pedophile rings.

I didn’t stop any bad guys from doing anything.

I just lived.

It’s okay to just live. Most days, you’re just living. You’re just trying to survive. Sometimes, you put words together to try and make a difference. Sometimes the words help. Sometimes, they don’t.

For most of my adult life, I worked in education. There were many, many days when it felt like a complete wash. I left, and that feeling didn’t magically go away. Those days happen regardless of what you’re doing.

Sometimes, the most you can do is make life suck a little less for someone else. You can’t save them. You can just give them one more day. You can help them along. We underestimate how much that matters.

It’s important to try. It’s important to give a shit. In the end, you have to remember something. You’re just one person crawling through history. You have limits, and you’re surrounded by a lot of people who aren’t going to take up your cause, whatever that is. You can’t make them care. You don’t get to decide how much your actions matter. You don’t get to decide how important you are. Sometimes, you just have to focus on living, even if you feel like you haven’t done anything to deserve any sense of peace or comfort at all.

So when you feel like that, maybe it helps to remember. You can’t bring down fascist regimes by yourself. You can’t stop wars with your breath. You’re one person, with limits, and one life to give. Sometimes, the only point is to let someone else know that they’re not the only person angry about something, they’re not the only person struggling, they’re not the only person trying.

It’s okay if you didn’t bring down any fascist regimes today.

None of us did.

Every day, it gets more unhinged.

From tech giants pushing AI at the expense of humanity to military commanders bracing U.S. troops for the return of Jesus as the Middle East unravels, I don’t know how much more evidence we need that our government no longer cares about us, if they ever did. In fact, it looks more and more like they’re trying to ignite some kind of apocalypse. They want to start doomsday early. We have enough receipts.

With that, I’d like to announce a few things. First, you can go here and order the beta version of our illustrated survival guide.

It’s printed and spiral-bound.

Before you order:

Survival Book Layout

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That’s the most recent version of the guide. I’ve added a table of contents and a few other important things, including a Creative Commons license.

I’m doing this for several reasons. First, printing costs have gone up significantly. So if you want to take this guide somewhere to have it printed and bound, you should be able to do that under this license. You officially have my permission.

I just ask one thing in return:

If you haven’t, please support my work.

You might be able to find a way to print this guide cheaper than ordering it online. And btw, I only make a couple of bucks for each hard copy anyway. So it really doesn’t matter to me at this point what you do. I’m not interested in becoming a millionaire bestselling author (not anymore). That’s not my path. I’m interested in making a living, and surviving, and for me, it has always worked best when I give first.

Another reason:

A few publishers have come to me asking to collaborate on this project. They’re international, based in Canada, Europe, and the UK. Many readers outside the U.S. have wanted a more internationalized version, and I can’t think of a better way than to let these small publishers build their own teams to adapt this guide for international contexts. The best and most expedient way for us to do that, I think, is to put this guide under creative commons and let the world have at it.

(Just give me due credit.)

I’m following up with publishers this week. If you’re a small, independent publisher and you want to start a Survival Illustrated project, tell me. I’ll send you the InDesign file. You can support me back however you want.

There’s another reason I’m doing this:

You know, back in November, I had no idea what I was going to do next. I figured I would preside over the slow demise of this newsletter and try to find some kind of job to keep things afloat. Then I got the idea for this guide, and readers stepped up with support. And then the AKET Fund stepped in, and it made a huge difference. That tells me my future lies in that direction, giving first.

Like millions of others, I’ve certainly struggled over the last few years, but one thing has held true. Enough people have come together to help me that I’m doing okay. When I offer my work to the world, the world has generally paid it back and paid it forward. There’s no shortage of selfish jerks out there, and I encounter them every week. But they’re not the majority. That’s what matters.

I’ve wondered if I’m rushing it, and I don’t think so. Like I said, the work continues no matter how many versions we publish. I’ve been doing the research for this guide for almost two years now. It took me nearly three years to learn Blender, the main design software I’ve been using. I mean, look at this thing:

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished here, and it’s going to keep going. It doesn’t matter if I become an electrician in the process. It doesn’t matter what batsheet crazy wars our government starts next. We’re going to keep at it.

As long as we can.

Let me know what you think.

Take care,

Jessica

Many of us have spent our entire lives trusting a public health infrastructure that cared about people. Now, it’s falling apart. The head of that infrastructure now humble-brags about snorting cocaine off toilet seats, explaining how he’s not scared of germs because there’s worse things out there. In fact, it’s not really falling apart. It’s getting ripped apart, with astonishing speed. Meanwhile, celebrities go on latenight talkshows and joke about spreading infections.

Of course, what we’re witnessing is a decade in the making. Now we’re just as likely to catch a deadly, debilitating disease from any healthcare setting as we are to get any kind of treatment, assuming we can afford it.

Sadly, this problem will only get worse.

Anyone who studies collapse, prepping, or survival should know that illness and disease pose an even bigger threat than disasters. In fact, disasters like storms and floods are so deadly because they introduce disease. They make it incredibly difficult to get proper medical help, even from a functional system. So we’ve really got multiple problems converging: more disasters, and a government structure that is neither capable nor interested in helping most of us.

So, what can we do?

There’s good news.

For the last week, I’ve been digging deeper into wild plants, weeds, and herbal medicine. I’ve written about this topic before, but I’ve been astonished at what else I’ve discovered. We have all kinds of plants at our disposal that can treat viral and bacterial infections. They can treat chronic conditions. They can help manage high blood pressure, even diabetes. They can help reduce brain inflammation, even regenerate nerve cells. Some of them can treat wounds, even help slow or stop bleeding. This isn’t woo. This isn’t Dr. Oz miracle cure nonsense. It’s steeped in traditions thousands of years old.

It’s often backed by science.

We’re going to get the most we can out of what little remains of our healthcare system and the institutions of medical science. Maybe one day, we’ll get to rebuild them. For now, I think it’s awfully smart to put our smug attitudes aside and learn all we can about the remarkable plants in front of us. And I don’t have to sell you any supplements. You can forage this stuff yourself. You can plant and grow it yourself. You can make it yourself, for little or no money.

Herbalists and herbal enthusiasts are easily written off for a variety of reasons. As great as medical science has been, it has a major blind spot when it comes to plant-based medicine. It’s ironic, given that many of our prescription medicines are actually derived from… plants.

Any community or unit of survival would be lucky to have a dedicated herbalist, someone who studies, grows, and prepares these herbs. Some of them take years to grow, so I would get on that now. I’ll be updating and expanding this part of the guide before the final print version, but I’ve got a lot done, and I’m going to share it. If you have information, please feel free to add what you know.

This knowledge exists, but it’s scattered. Even some of the best books out there can still be confusing at times, and they don’t explain everything. So I’m trying to gather, compile, synthesize, and simplify. This won’t teach everyone everything about herbs, but it’s a great place to start, and it will (I hope) help people.

What you’re seeing is a draft, but it’s not bad.

Here you go:

Survival Illustrated focuses on practical topics, because outrage won’t save us. You can offer one-time support here.

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Whew, boy.

So last week, the Supreme Court struck down the majority of Trump’s tariffs. As many of us know by now, it was smart to wait a few minutes before breaking out the champagne. Because things have gone sideways... again... as usual. Trump has spent the last several days throwing tantrums online while his goons find new laws and loopholes for him to keep his tariff racket going. Well, big surprise.

War with Iran looms over us again.

If that weren’t enough, a record blizzard has knocked out power to more than 600,000 in the northeast and made travel almost impossible. It’s another sign that the climate crisis doesn’t just mean “warmer weather,” but more chaos.

Honestly, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago, Minneapolis and Greenland were the main stories. Now, they feel like distant memories. This is life in collapse. Every few weeks, a fresh batch of crises rises up. In the midst of all this, some agency or organization always releases a new report telling us the world has entered a state of water bankruptcy, or that we’re breaking more temperature records...

However, some things don’t change.

Some things stay the same.

Our need for food, clothing, water, and shelter... That stays the same, more or less. The strategies and plans we develop for emergencies... those evolve, but we decide them. Plans offer stability, even comfort. It doesn’t really matter whether shortages are caused by a disaster, or by disastrous trade policies. Either way, you’re ready. You can take in the news and process the headlines, with a little less anxiety.

You can work as fast or slow as you like.

In the end, just knowing what to do and how to do it, that means a lot. That’s what I keep remembering as I work on the guide.

This week, I’ve focused on solar food dehydrators. If you plan on any kind of homestead, it’s essential to have multiple ways to preserve food. It’s great if you have a dehydrator oven, but those require electricity. They use a good bit.

Solar dehydrators work without reliable power, and that’s a major plus. The tricky part is figuring out how to make your own. I looked at several guides.

Here’s the result:

Let me know your thoughts. If you’ve made a solar dehydrator before, feel free to share what you’ve learned.

I’m uploading the latest version of the guide. This one looks a lot cleaner. From here, I’ll be stepping on the gas a little and adding several pages that are primarily informational, that don’t need as much detailed illustration. I’m planning to finish a lot of that work this week. When that’s done, it’ll free me up to focus more on electrical wiring. A more robust solar panel system with several outlets will enable us to do more work with aquaponics and other items that pretty much require electricity.

Survival Illustrated 2026 Feb

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We’re not far from having a print version of the guide ready.

Survival Illustrated focuses on practical topics, because outrage won’t save us. You can offer one-time support here.