Where the gates opened

Most Americans don’t spend their evenings reading policy briefs about Islamist movements, and they shouldn’t have to. Yet the confusion they feel when they hear “From the river to the sea” chants echo through campuses and city streets isn’t imaginary. Something fundamental has shifted. Politics that once spoke the language of civil rights now carries a tone suspiciously anti‑Western, and increasingly anti‑Jewish.

For roughly sixty years, progressive politics in the United States has measured virtue by who is “oppressed.” In that formula, the West, and by extension the United States, ends up cast as the villain almost by default. The habit grew out of the 1960s rebellions, when race, class, and empire were folded into one sweeping narrative of guilt. That moral reflex, redeeming the self through siding with the “oppressed,” has since hardened into orthodoxy. When Western liberals went searching for the next cause to redeem, they found it in the Palestinian flag and, behind that, a romanticized view of Islam as the voice of the downtrodden.

Palestine became the perfect metaphor: brown versus white, colonized versus colonizer, faith versus materialism. It fit neatly inside a worldview shaped by post‑colonial literature and grievance politics. Within a few decades, banners that once read Peace Now were replaced by calls to intifada, revolution dressed up as humanitarian concern.

The irony is that the world they idealize bears little resemblance to the freedoms they claim to champion. Under Islamist regimes women cannot speak or dress freely; gay Palestinians flee to Israel for safety. Iran’s morality police enforce public flogging for acts Western activists call personal expression. Yet those realities are dismissed as “cultural differences.” Once a narrative becomes sacred, facts are sacrilege.

The data tell another story. Pew Research surveys show that majorities, 84 % in Pakistan, 74 % in Egypt, 71 % in Jordan, favor making Sharia official state law, while fewer than 15 % of Muslims globally say violence is acceptable in defense of faith. Sharia is not advisory; it is a binding legal code. Political Islam has long declared its goal: a state where divine law supersedes human law. The founders of liberal democracy spent centuries building systems to prevent precisely that.

When Americans watch student unions and NGOs waving the same slogans as Sunni fundamentalists, they’re witnessing two belief systems, one secular, one religious, meeting on the field of moral absolutism. The progressive Left gained power through moral language; Islamist movements speak in the same register, but with divine certainty. Different sources, same result: politics as salvation.

The consequence is not America’s “Islamization” but the erosion of boundaries between belief and law. Well‑meaning citizens, mistaking sentiment for discernment, have opened the gates slowly, forgetting that good intentions are no substitute for hard thinking. History rarely punishes arrogance all at once; it rewards it just enough to keep us convinced of our own virtue.

The 1960s Origin Story

Every movement that rewrites history starts by rewriting morality. The 1960s did that for America. The old moral vocabulary of duty and discipline gave way to one built on emotion and absolution. Real injustices, such as Jim Crow, segregation, and Vietnam’s draft, were confronted, but reform soon turned into religion. In that new faith, the West itself became the original sin.

The formula was irresistible: oppression conferred holiness, power implied guilt. Once that idea took hold, it defined cultural virtue for the next half century. What began as moral protest turned into a reflex of self‑blame dressed up as idealism. By the late seventies, Western intellectuals were romanticizing revolutions they would never survive. The Third World had become the new Bethlehem.

That moral reflex still shapes Western diplomacy. Writer Michael Snyder recently noted how France, the nation of Voltaire and laïcité, is volunteering to help the Palestinian Authority draft its constitution. It sounds noble, but look closely: the heirs of the Enlightenment are scripting the legal framework for an organization whose charter still denies Israel’s right to exist. The same pattern: virtue earned through empowering the supposedly powerless.

The cultural heirs of the New Left swapped blue‑collar revolution for academic theory, but the hierarchy of virtue stayed fixed. By the end of the Cold War, the Left had lost its working‑class audience but kept its sermon: blame the West, praise its adversaries, and call it empathy. That theology explains why movements preaching “diversity” now excuse governments that stone women and persecute gays. Compassion decoupled from judgment becomes indulgence. A civilization unwilling to defend its principles will surrender them, one humanitarian gesture at a time.

The flower children matured into policymakers, and their children staff the NGOs and editorial boards that now shape opinion. What began as conscience has congealed into bureaucracy. The moral theater of the 1960s lives on, less romantic, more administrative, but driven by the same need to purchase redemption through guilt.

Islam and the Secular West: A Structural Clash

Modern Westerners speak about religion as something optional, like a subscription you can cancel at any time. That assumption owes more to Jefferson and Locke than to Moses or Muhammad. The Judeo‑Christian world learned the hard way that the key to peace was separating the priest from the palace. Centuries of religious wars eventually produced a compromise: believe what you like, but the law belongs to everyone. That settlement is what we call secularism, and without it there would be no liberal democracy to argue about.

Islam’s origins were different. Muhammad was not simply a preacher; he was a statesman, a legislator, and a commander. The Quran doesn’t divide moral life from public life, so Islamic civilization never developed that internal firewall between creed and code. Wherever Islam became dominant, the political order generally claimed divine authority. In early Medina and later through the caliphates, religious scholars produced legal rulings that doubled as government policy. Sharia,  the body of law derived from scripture and tradition, became as all‑encompassing as canon law and parliament combined.

For many ordinary Muslims, this has been more historical backdrop than marching orders. Millions live productively and peacefully within secular states. But the ideology known as political Islam insists that true faith is incomplete without state power. Its goal is not coexistence but completeness. The Muslim Brotherhood’s motto still reads, “The Quran is our law; jihad is our way.” That doesn’t mean its members are plotting coups in every Western city, yet it does mean their endgame is theocratic: a world administered, not merely inspired, by religious law.

That theological premise sits directly across the table from the American one. Ours begins with “We the People”; theirs begins with “God commands.” In a republic, sovereignty resides with citizens and can be changed through consent. In Islamist thought, sovereignty descends from God and cannot change at all. The conflict is not primarily cultural or ethnic; it’s constitutional. You can negotiate borders; you can’t negotiate who gets the final word in law.

This distinction matters because political Islam doesn’t conquer today by armies. It works through ideas and institutions, slowly and patiently, confident that the West’s moral confusion is its best weapon. In Europe, open discussion of Islamic separatism is already treated as bigotry. Britain’s domestic intelligence service spent years investigating extremist networks embedded within “charitable” organizations while politicians congratulated themselves on multicultural harmony. France, once a militantly secular nation, now debates whether its own Enlightenment ideals are compatible with the faith of millions of new citizens. The tension is not about skin color or cuisine; it’s about authority.

The United States has been spared Europe’s immediacy largely due to geography and demographics, but the ideological challenge has arrived on our campuses and city councils. In the fashionable vocabulary of “intersectionality,” religious absolutism can masquerade as a form of cultural expression. When progressive politicians defend Islamist movements as victims of Western oppression, they confuse tolerance with surrender. People who no longer know why they separated church and state won’t notice when others decide to reunite them.

What makes this clash especially dangerous is the asymmetry of conviction. Secular society treats compromise as virtue; religious revolutionaries call it disbelief. Liberal democracies survive by persuasion; theocrats thrive on certainty. Against such confidence, mere civility is not enough. A civilization that shrugs off its own principles can lose them without ever being invaded.

Political Islam doesn’t need majorities. It only needs Western guilt to keep its opponents silent. Once an ideology that fuses religion and government enters a culture that separates them, someone’s premise has to yield. The question is whether the yielding will come from reason or from fear.

Black Identity and the Romance with Islam

When ideas lose their theological foundation, they look for a new one. After the civil‑rights era, many young Black Americans saw Christianity as the religion of parents who forgave too easily. Into that vacuum stepped a faith promising dignity through discipline and pride through defiance.

The Nation of Islam offered hierarchy where chaos reigned, purpose where poverty mocked the dream. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X didn’t win through doctrine but through presentation: suits, diets, rules, each a declaration of independence from white America’s morality. In the 1960s, polls showed about 15 % of Black college students viewing Islam as “the religion of Black self‑respect.” It was never a majority, but it supplied a symbol.

Symbols outlast sermons. When Malcolm X returned from Mecca embracing orthodox Islam, popular culture kept only the defiant half of his story. Hip‑hop artists later revived fragments of that imagery, the crescent moon chains, the Five‑Percent­‑Nation slogans. For millions of listeners, Islam became shorthand for clarity, strength, rebellion. A 1993 Brookings study found nearly 40 % of converts citing “discipline” and “structure” as motives. It wasn’t theology; it was order without condescension.

That romance still resonates. On social media, Malcolm X clips loop under soundtracks of righteous anger. Robes and Arabic calligraphy are often used as fashion statements. What once demanded faith now signals authenticity. Younger activists inherit Islamic motifs as cultural heritage rather than creed. Their chants for Palestine or against “colonialism” echo an aesthetic of resistance more than a theology of belief.

Christianity preaches patience; militant Islam demands action. One sanctifies forgiveness, the other valorizes defiance. In a culture exhausted by grievance, the latter feels cleaner. That’s why Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X now appear side by side online, as if they preached the same gospel. They did not. King appealed to universal conscience; Malcolm to divine justice against a corrupt world. Today’s campus activism follows Malcolm’s path of moral power through perpetual offense.

Progressive universities that mock Christianity’s patriarchy often post Quranic verses as art. Feminism poses beside Islamic symbolism in a kind of ideological cosplay. It’s theater, not theology, the image of purity opposing Western “corruption.” Few notice that the Middle East’s freest Muslims live under secular constitutions, the sort progressives dismiss as “colonial.”

Earlier Black leaders, such as Douglass, Washington, and Bethune, found dignity by embracing Western ideals and compelling America to honor them. Their heirs are told instead to find dignity by denouncing the civilization that made liberty possible. That inversion didn’t come from the mosque; it came from the academy. The Left’s template, oppressed versus oppressor, made the romance with Islam inevitable. Once “resistance” became a civic virtue, any doctrine opposing America earned automatic sainthood.

Most Black Muslims in the U.S. wanted structure and meaning when other institutions failed them. But elites quickly commodified that sincerity. The disciplined believer became branded for “authenticity.” Corporations monetized it as diversity, universities as decolonial chic, politicians as vote‑bank politics. Genuine faith turned into moral theater. What began as self‑respect risks ending as self‑parody.

The Elite Conversion of Idealism into Management

Every revolution eventually hires accountants. Once moral passion proves useful, someone finds a way to invoice it. Protest becomes industry, guilt becomes currency. The story of Western sympathy for political Islam followed a similar arc. What began as compassion for the “oppressed” matured into a professional enterprise run by people who never miss catered lunches.

Yesterday’s radicals run today’s foundations. Rage, when translated into grant proposals, suddenly pays. By the mid-2010s, the number of registered U.S. nonprofits devoted to “equity and justice” had tripled in a decade, generating more than $10 billion annually. Much of that came not from small donors but from corporations purchasing moral insurance. Every PR department now has a “diversity partner,” fluent in moral theater but mute on results. Success isn’t measured by outcomes but by outrage.

Corporate sponsorship turned the Palestinian cause into the perfect stage set. The image of boys with stones facing tanks is ready‑made moral drama. Social media amplified it with racial and colonial guilt, letting Western activists import Middle‑Eastern conflict as part of their own redemption story. During the Gaza crises of 2021 and 2024, dozens of corporations issued near‑identical solidarity statements while maintaining factories in countries that flog dissidents. Data from OpenSecrets showed corporate contributions to “justice” nonprofits surging by 42 % during that window. Guilt pays dividends.

Universities built the ideological scaffolding. Decades of post‑colonial theory had prepared students to see the West as oppressor and every rival culture as victim. Islam became “anti‑imperialist spirituality.” Professors didn’t need to preach jihad, only to grade as if Western civilization spoke with a guilty accent. Diversity offices turned grievance into payroll. When Islam acquired the status of “oppressed faith,” it supplied infinite content for the bureaucracy of empathy.

Governments joined by outsourcing conscience. Funding “faith‑based dialogue” costs less than confronting extremism and yields better photographs. European‑Union grants for “intercultural understanding” funneled tens of millions of euros into NGOs linked to Islamist advocacy, many openly skeptical of secular democracy. Bureaucrats call it inclusion; recipients call it dawah.

This is virtue as management science. Activists gain salary; institutions rent moral legitimacy. Together they transmute guilt into a renewable resource. The more outrage burns below, the thicker comfort grows above. The perfection of the system is its aimlessness: no one inside wants results, only funding. Moral passion becomes administrative routine.

What was once idealism now functions as supply chain. The same machinery that claims to fight oppression depends on its perpetual existence. Bureaucracies cannot repent; they can only rebrand. When every “Equity Office” survives by discovering new sins, freedom becomes over‑managed remorse. Guilt is no longer a feeling; it’s an industry standard.

The Trojan Horse in Practice

Every ideology must act, and political Islam acts through institutions. No siege engines, no armies, just slogans, committees, and paperwork. Infiltration now arrives through moral language.

Coalition capture is the first tactic. Broad activist movements open with universal goals, peace, equality, and human rights, but are gradually repurposed for narrower agendas. Once Islamist‑aligned groups adopt the same slogans, they’re treated as allies. Within a few years, leadership shifts even as supporters imagine the mission unchanged. Europe’s “Stop the War” coalitions of the early 2000s began as anti-imperialist; they ended up condemning Western secularism itself.

Financial diversion follows. In 2024, Britain’s Charity Commission uncovered millions of pounds redirected from humanitarian accounts to Islamist advocacy networks. Donors thought they were feeding children; they were financing clerics. Similar patterns appear wherever oversight fears “Islamophobia” more than fraud.

Media repetition locks the illusion in place. Reporting privileges emotion over accuracy because outrage sells. During the 2025 Gaza conflict, major Western outlets repeated figures from Hamas’s information office as verified data. Few retractions followed. The result was not overt lying but selective truth, a fog in which sentiment becomes policy.

Algorithmic amplification finishes the job. Social‑media design rewards indignation, short, moralistic bursts that spread faster than analysis. Political Islam gains digital allies who have never opened a Quran but who chant the same hashtags. Informational laundering converts borrowed moral energy into political leverage.

Bureaucratic cementing gives the final payoff. Once slogans become common language, politicians adopt them to demonstrate awareness; bureaucrats convert rhetoric into regulation. Votes follow sympathy; funding follows votes. By the time anyone notices ideology inside the system, it appears as standard procedure, diversity training, cultural partnerships, and “inclusive language” mandates. The Trojan Horse has parked itself inside the castle with a grant number stenciled on the side.

The pattern feeds on fatigue. Idealists believe they advance justice; managers know they advance budgets. Liberty erodes quietly as compassion’s paperwork expands.

Consequences

Ideas have consequences, and so does delusion. A culture that rewards performance virtue instead of principle decays by degrees. The erosion is visible everywhere: in campuses where antisemitism parades as conscience, in media that mistake fairness for fear, in governments apologizing for their own foundations.

After recent Middle‑East wars, student groups chanted slogans that plainly endorse Israel’s eradication while demanding “safe spaces” for themselves. Administrators issue statements against “all hate” but avoid naming the hate in front of them. Surveys at elite universities show nearly half of Jewish students afraid to speak openly. Their grandparents faced burning crosses; they face polite ostracism. The form differs, the cowardice stays.

Editorial boards once proud of free thought now practice moral censorship. Criticize Islamist ideology and you’re branded phobic; denounce Western civilization and you’re booked for Sunday talk shows. The result is anesthesia disguised as tolerance.

Education reflects the same rot. The university that once taught logic now teaches grievance. Hundreds of courses across major schools frame Western civilization solely as oppression. An education built on selective outrage cannot produce citizens, only spectators of decline. Lawmakers mirror the disease: they trade justice and duty for emotion and identity. Once law bends to tribe, it ceases to be law at all.

Foreign policy decays with equal hypocrisy. Governments that sermonize about rights sign energy contracts with the regimes that flog women. Cultural “sensitivity” becomes moral surrender. Guilt, outsourced as diplomacy, replaces strength with supplication.

The deeper damage is psychological. Generations raised on systemic guilt inherit cynicism, not reform. They demolish what they no longer believe worth saving. A culture convinced of its own corruption cannot defend itself; it mistakes exhaustion for wisdom. Authoritarian states notice. Russia, China, Iran hold conferences on Western hypocrisy, and the West nods along, mistaking shame for honesty.

Religious institutions mirror the confusion, staging interfaith panels with clerics who oppose interfaith freedom itself. Families and communities fracture as ideology replaces kinship. Identity becomes franchise. The state grows while the citizen shrinks. Managing grievance is the new prosperity engine, even as real wealth and trust decline.

Civilizations don’t collapse from invasion; they hollow from within. The lights stay on long after the meaning goes dark.

The Way Back

Recovery starts with honesty. After half a century of ritual apology, the West doesn’t need new slogans; it needs nerve. The first step is to restore universal law: one standard for believers and skeptics, the majority and the minority. No sacred exemptions. When theology redraws legality, voters become subjects. The same applies to secular dogmas enforced as creed.

Next comes distinction: Muslim faith versus Islamist politics. The first is private devotion, the second political absolutism. Confusing them betrays both. The devout Muslim who seeks liberty shares more with the Western liberal than with the theocrat who seeks power. Protect worship; resist rule by revelation.

Then audit the machinery of influence. Universities, NGOs, and grant systems shaping policy must disclose funding and ideological links. Oversight is not prejudice; it’s hygiene. Taxpayers deserve to know when “dialogue” doubles as propaganda.

Education must return to reason, logic, and civic philosophy. Teach how to argue before teaching whom to pity. A society fluent only in accusation will soon forget deliberation.

Moral courage follows: guilt is easy, gratitude takes discipline. Freedom without effort breeds contempt. National service, community labor, and shared projects rebuild mutual trust. Patriotism is not arrogance but maintenance.

Speech must be untouchable. Offense is not harm, and censorship is not care. Once emotion licenses silencing, truth dies by etiquette.

Foreign policy must regain moral clarity. Alliances should rest on governance, not guilt. Religious dictatorships are not moral creditors. Saying no is sometimes the highest form of respect.

Finally, revive cultural imagination. Tell stories of mastery, sacrifice, integrity. Heroes can defend civilization without apology. When every rebel fights the West, the West forgets why it’s worth defending.

Freedom does not need reinvention; it needs maintenance. The trowel and hammer of reason, discipline, and gratitude still hang ready. Pick them up.

Crossroads

Every civilization arrives eventually at a moment when it must decide what it believes about itself. Some choose rediscovery, others choose fatigue. America stands at that moment now. The battle is not between faiths or parties but between remembering and forgetting. A people can survive disagreement, but not the loss of conviction that any truth is worth defending.

The United States is not yet an Islamic state, nor is it immune to the quiet corrosion that makes such fantasies plausible. Each time progressivism grants theological movements political immunity, the boundary between belief and law thins. Freedom erodes not through conquest but through permission. We invite decay under the name of tolerance.

The irony is that the American experiment began with the hardest kind of tolerance, one disciplined by truth. The founders knew that liberty without virtue collapses into license, and virtue without liberty turns into tyranny. Their solution was the civic covenant: law independent of creed, conscience independent of state. That principle allowed religions to flourish while keeping them from ruling. It also allowed skeptics to speak without fear. We forget that simple architecture at our peril.

The new generation is told that Western ideals are hypocritical relics. Yet those ideals gave the world its longest period of expanding freedom. The same society that once abolished slavery, enfranchised women, and built constitutional rights for minorities now apologizes for existing. That reversal is not progress. It is moral exhaustion disguised as empathy.

History offers clues to what happens next. Civilizations that abandon confidence do not vanish all at once. They drift. Education fills with slogans. Art worships rebellion instead of beauty. Faith becomes self‑help. Law bends to emotion. By the time anyone asks how things reached that point, the answer is already history.

America does not have to drift. The machinery of self‑correction still works if we choose to use it. Truth has never needed majorities, only people willing to defend it. The courage of a few citizens who understand their inheritance has always outweighed the noise of crowds repeating approved feelings. The republic was built on argument, not whispers of guilt.

To recover that spirit is to reclaim adulthood. The task ahead is not to purge religion or idealism but to restore proportion. Belief must remain private and voluntary. Law must remain common and secular. Compassion must be tempered by discernment, and justice must again mean equality under rules, not privilege under slogans.

If these things sound old‑fashioned, that is because they have stood the test that most new theories fail. Freedom does not need reinvention; it needs maintenance. The hammer and trowel of reason, discipline, and courage still hang on the wall. The question is whether anyone will pick them up.

The title of this essay asked a question: The Islamic States of America? The mark at the end matters. It is a question only while doubt endures. If we continue to treat our principles as relics and our hesitation as wisdom, the mark will change. History will erase the question and leave only the answer, the one we were too sophisticated to believe could happen here.

There’s little doubt that, once the dust settles, the post-collapse life is going to be tough. Most of the conveniences we take for granted today will be hard to acquire, regardless of whether or not money will still be worth anything. People who want them will say and do anything, people who sell them will come up with all sorts of strategies and you need to be prepared because, no matter how prepped you are, it’s still likely you’ll end up in desperate positions. That is why it is important to know how to barter.

In what follows I want to give you a few solid bartering and negotiation tactics and techniques that will help you get food, water or medicine when you’ll need them most. However, if you truly want them to work for you, you have to practice them. Reading them just isn’t enough, that’s why included a special section at the end where I suggest how you can do that.

Top 10 Barter Items To Stockpile

Item	Why It’s Great For Bartering
1. Bandages	First aid items are very valuable, especially care for larger wounds since they will require more dressing and frequent changes.
2. Batteries	AA and AAA are popular sizes for flashlights, headlamps, radios, and numerous other electronics. Batteries inevitably run out so these are a surefire need after SHTF.
3. MREs	Food. Need we say more? Keep in mind that someone desparate for food is very vulnerable and use caution when negotiating a deal.
4. Duct Tape	Infinite survival uses, including splinting a broken bone, repairing a tent, fletching an arrow, and marking a trail. An entire roll of duct tape should yield a high value in a trade.
5. Zip Ties	Versatile and strong, zip ties are great for hanging gear, securing shelter, fixing clothes and shoes, and more. It’s easy to carry a large number of them and separate into smaller bundles to trade.
6. Fish Antibiotics	Fish antibiotics can be purchased OTC and contain the same ingredients as human antibiotics. For more information on types and dosages, check out Fish Antibiotics For Humans: A Safe Option For Your Survival Kit?
7. Condoms	In addition to contraception, condoms have many survival uses such as carrying water (up to 2 gallons!), waterproofing gear, even a slingshot for hunting small game. They are also lightweight and easy to carry.
8. Water Purification Tablets	Since each tablet treats 16 oz of water, one bottle contains many bartering opportunities. Or trade the whole bottle for a larger item you need.
9. Waterproof Matches	Fire is essential to survival so waterproof matches can be a great bartering tool. You can also carry extra capsule lighters, such as the Everstryke Pro to add long-term value to your trade.
10. Button Compasses	Small and inexpensive yet very useful, especially in the absence of GPS or cell phone navigation. They can be used to find the way back to camp, locate family and friends, or to migrate to a new area.

How To Barter After Disaster

Forget About Meeting The Other Person In The Middle

For some reason, many negotiations end before they begin. One of the parties gives a number, the other gives another and they both know they’ll agree to the sum of their offers divided by 2.

You can do better than that. The reason this happens is because they’re not taking into consideration other factors such as how bad one party needs what the other has to offer. Another thing you can do is find out as much as you can about your opponent beforehand.

The more you know about them and their situation, the more leverage you’ll have. And if you can’t find out much about them, it’s best to avoid doing any kind of post-SHTF deals. Those could be dangerous, anyway.

Start With A Lowball Offer

If you can do this and your opponent doesn’t turn around and leave, you just saved yourself a lot of money (or whatever you are using for currency). Starting really low means that the other party will eventually have to settle for a much lower price than if you’d started with something more reasonable.

Don’t Be Afraid To Walk Away From A Deal

Everything is a number’s game. Just because you need what the other person has to offer, this doesn’t mean you have to take it. You might find 5 or 10 other guys out there that will gladly take your deal and give you what you need, you just need to have the guts to end the negotiations and look for them.

Most people don’t see it this way, though. They might say:

What? You mean I have to go through the pain of finding someone else, especially since I have this guy right here who can give me what I need?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The reason you don’t want to do it is because it’s painful to think you have to spend more energy to find other people. But that’s the thing. If you can train yourself to do it regularly, if you allow yourself to play the numbers’ game, walking away from bad deals will become second nature.

Throw In A Bonus

People love things they can get for free. If you feel you’re close to closing a deal but still not happy with it, how about giving away a small bonus? Maybe something from your get home bag that you already have plenty of at home. You never know what the other person needs besides your money or bartering items, this is why due diligence and talking to them are a must.

Say “No” To Lowball Offers

We talked about giving really low offers but what if someone does that to you? This puts you in a weak position so the best way to counteract it is to simply say:

No, this isn’t an offer I might consider. If you can come back with a more decent offer, I’m open to negotiation.

If they like it, fine. They’ll give you a more reasonable first offer. If they don’t, like I said, there’re plenty of other guys who might be interested in the deal.

The More You Tell, The More You Sell

What I’m trying to say is, the more arguments you bring in your favor, the better you can justify the price. Particularly in the absence of money (read: bartering), it’ll be hard to put value on things. This is why thinking and then stating every possible reason that works in your favor will bring you one step closer to what you want, how you want it.

Make Small Concessions

If you started with a really low offer, there’s no better way to seal a deal than to give your opponent more than his new expectations. Of course, you shouldn’t do that if you think you can get a better deal but if you really want to wrap things up, making a small concession might bring the negotiations to a quick and happy ending.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Like any other survival skill, you shouldn’t wait for the end of the world to put into practice bartering and negotiations. You need to do it beforehand because when you’re desperate for food or water, your emotions will get in the way.

Some of ways to practice bartering and negotiations, include:

• simulations with your family,
• playing poker (it allows you to read people and develops your greed),
• going to a flea market (you’ll find plenty of cheap things that you may need for your stockpile),
• start a business (and negotiate every little thing with your supplies and partners)
• …and, provided that you have something to offer that you yourself produce (honey, veggies etc.), try bartering them for other things.

Conclusion

Just keep in mind that everything in this world is negotiable, you just need to have the right mindset. Understand the value of your own items and give a detailed explanation when trading. Know how to barter for the things you need and don’t be afraid to walk away from a bad deal. Teach it to your kids too, studies show that the sooner, the better.

I had my last conversation with my MAGA supporting cousin in November of 2020. Until that point, he had led me to believe he cared for my immigrant family enough that he wouldn’t cast a vote for a lying, treasonous xenophobe who had turned a call for violence into a campaign slogan.

But my cousin had been drinking and he let the truth slip out.

His final, slurred admission made me lose interest in anything he had to say. However, until that point, I’d been trying to understand his perspective.

Perhaps I was making it more complicated than it needed to be. His perspective was this: GUNS!

That’s it. There’s no nuance. There’s no complexity. There’s no hidden meaning. My MAGA supporting cousin wanted guns.

“I won’t live beneath the rule of a tyrant!” he declared.

“Okay,” I said. “But right now, your dear leader is claiming he’s not going to step down even though he lost. Without any evidence, he’s spreading lies about election irregularities that threaten to shake our country apart at the seams. He’s behaving like a dictator. If you refuse to live beneath the rule of a tyrant, will you march on Washington if your dear leader unlawfully attempts to retain power?”

“Er… the government listens in on these phone calls you know. So, I’m not going to say anything.”

“That’s what I thought.”

My MAGA supporting cousin’s personal mythology was that if he was in the possession of guns, he would be able to magically save himself from “tyrants.” He considers himself a “law and order patriot” but also firmly believes the government represents the greatest single threat to his freedom.

For some reason, he completely fails to recognize the danger of a billionaire who longs to become a tyrant, not just in practice but also in name. Why do conservatives have this blind spot? Why can’t they recognize that billionaires are tyrants already?

The most shocking videos in the world!

My cousin’s heart pills

My cousin thinks he’s free, but he can’t live without his heart pills. He’s always complaining about how expensive his heart pills are. Pills are more expensive in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

Why are life-saving pharmaceuticals expensive in the USA? It’s because the physical suffering of American citizens is secondary to appeasing the billionaires’ insatiable hunger for profit.

You may have a gun, but how free are you if your heart doesn’t work?

Billionaires control the price of everything. If working class people start to get ahead, billionaires have enough power to crash the economy. Inflation doesn’t bother them. They can just wait it out. They can hold on to assets until the economy recovers. It’s only working class people who feel the burden.

The whole idea that it’s possible to “get ahead” in the USA is an illusion. Billionaires dangle that carrot to keep us docile as we work ourselves to death while they reap all the rewards. Wake up! We’ve got the yoke of the tyrants on our backs. The government is supposed to protect us from “all enemies foreign and domestic.”

Why does the government refuse to protect us from the tyranny of billionaires?

The government is based on following the will of the people. We go through the charade of having elections, but in the end it doesn’t matter who we elect. Every representative from the state to the federal level follows the will of the billionaires, not the will of the people.

The result is that everything in the United States is unfairly tipped to favor obscenely wealthy sociopaths. These individuals who accrue massive fortunes are able to push through the laws that they want, manipulate markets, deny your access to health care… the list goes on and on.

We live under the rule of tyrants now

The government is supposed to protect us from tyrants, but conservatives have duped their followers into thinking the government is the only threat to freedom we face. Freedom has MANY enemies. That should be obvious.

Why can’t the American public see that individual citizens who are more powerful than the government are also a threat to our freedom?

We’ve all been disenfranchised by the fact that billionaires own every candidate that runs for office.

The truth is government isn’t a threat. Government is a tool. In the right hands, the tool can be wielded for good. In the wrong hands, the tool can be wielded for evil. It’s ironic because that’s what conservatives say about guns.

Right now, the tool of government is being wielded to establish a class of billionaires who think the “rule of law” shouldn’t apply to them. Just a few years ago, we witnessed a billionaire make an attempt to overthrow the government.

That’s a pretty blatant attack on your freedom.

Anyone who is paying attention should have seen this coming in 2016. The government isn’t our enemy, the billionaires are. Electing a billionaire to the highest office in our country was like making Freddy Krueger chief of staff at a nursery.

It should tell you something when the most tyrannical people in our society crack a smile at you and say, “You can keep your guns.” It’s because tyrants know guns in the hands of citizens do not represent a threat to their power.

The billionaire mentality

Billionaires have a gaping hole in their psyche that can never be filled. Our corrupt president has placed himself squarely in the spotlight, so he serves as an appropriate example. All you have to do is look at his life with unfiltered eyes and it’s obvious how detestable and miserable it is.

The way he chases attention is pathetic. What other word could you use? His behavior lacks any sign of dignity or self-respect. People only tolerate his company because they want something from him.

You don’t have to be a billionaire to see this unfortunate side of human nature. I’ve been in the presence of people who liked to flash money around. Every time they did so, a certain class of individual came crawling out of the underworld to shower them with intoxicating praise.

When people get in the habit of flashing money, every interaction in their life becomes transactional. They begin to delude themselves into believing that this is the only form of relationship that can exist. They think, “It all comes down to money in the end, there are no sincere emotions.”

Watch this video below to find out the great secrets hidden by the government.

Don’t build your whole life upon a lie

Billionaires delude themselves into believing all human interactions are transactional because flashing money around is easier than being a decent human being.

But the thing is, billionaires are wrong. There is sincere affection in the world where the party who loves you does so unconditionally and wants nothing in return.

Don’t believe me?

Get a dog. A dog will love you until the day he dies and never ask you for a penny.

I bet billionaires avoid owning dogs because they know the existence of dogs is a proof that exposes their flawed ideology. They’ll mock dogs, and then cry inside because they so desperately want the love a dog provides.

Dogs aren’t dumb.

If a you hire somebody to take care of your dog, the dog will love the person you hired. If you refuse to do the work, no love for you.

Billionaires have learned all the wrong lessons

Deep down, billionaires want to be loved just like anyone else. However, their psyche has been so corrupted that achieving true, selfless, vulnerable love is impossible for them. Therefore, rather than change, they convince themselves that things like empathy, compassion, and true affection are various forms of weakness. It’s a toxic state of mind.

Billionaires don’t deserve our praise. In fact, they need an intervention. They’re miserable, conniving people who labor ceaselessly to make the world worse.

It’s largely due to their selfish behavior that the oceans have begun to overheat. Poor people aren’t doing that. Poor people don’t have the resources to destroy the planet.

Billionaires have learned all the wrong lessons from life, that’s why their hunger for wealth is insatiable.

There is always a short term profit to be gained through a betrayal of love. This is why people who are fixated on profit have trained themselves to see true affection as a weakness. By conditioning themselves to believe love is a “weakness” they can avoid thinking of themselves as monsters.

Inferior men are always able to turn betrayals of love into huge fortunes, but betraying love incurs a greater debt that comes due at a later date. This is the inevitable consequence all rich men are frantic to escape. This is why they expend such effort promoting the false narrative that wealth acquisition is to be praised. They are destitute, and they don’t want the world to perceive this truth.

You must strive to be worthy of the love people give you

Being worthy of love is the most admirable ambition of any human being, not the acquisition of wealth.

Love is a responsibility, not an entitlement.

It feeds the ego when somebody reveres you, but you can’t succumb to ego and abuse the love you’re freely given. You’re not entitled to that. You’ll destroy your chance at life satisfaction unless you’re ceaselessly dedicated to living up to vulnerable faith of the people who truly care for you.

Billionaires see love the same way as they see any other object. Once it’s in their possession, they think it belongs to them. But love doesn’t work that way.

Anyone has a right to withdraw their love at any time. Actually, “withdraw” is not the right term. What happens is that love is murdered by the abuser. The fault always lies with the unworthy.

A sincere person can do nothing more than extend an olive branch of vulnerability. If the object of your affection tears up the branch from its roots, the chance of growth is lost. That destructive action, though painful, frees the sincere person from the abuser. The abuser is left to scream in defiant anger as the decent person leaves them forever.

It’s not the purpose of this life to indulge in the wanton destruction of anything beautiful that comes across your path. The way to happiness lies in cultivation. Our whole society needs to understand this.

Acquiring wealth is the path of moral debt

The whole of the United States is charging down the road to ruin. There’s a reason our nation has accrued a debt in excess of 32 trillion dollars. When you chose the path of profit over compassion you doom yourself to future destruction.

Terror over inevitable accountability is what has compelled the corrupt president to go to such lengths to retain power, but his actions have always driven him further from the deepest longing of the human heart. The billionaire, traitor president has condemned himself to hatred and his crimes are so terrible that his own mortality has robbed him of the possibility of completing his required penance.

As I look upon the devastated political landscape of the United States, I see a lot of frustrated souls that still express their love and reverence for MAGA. The saddest part about this is that our corrupt president, like all billionaires, is unworthy of anyone’s love.

Throughout its history, the focus of the United States has always been on profits at the expense of humanity. Human beings were enslaved in order to build obscene wealth that could only be enjoyed by a privileged few. Genocide was committed so that land could be stolen. The justifications for those inexcusable transgressions against humanity form the backbone of our philosophy even to this day.

We won’t be free of tyrants until we learn to revere human beings over profit. The United States isn’t “the land of the free,” it’s the land of tyrants and it always has been.

First watch this video- All Americans Will Lose Their Home, Income And Power By November 27, 2025

Keywords:
Bitcoin Standard, Gold Standard, Keynesian Economics, Government Debt, Fiscal Policy, Infrastructure Investment, Deficit Spending, Economic Growth, Monetary Policy, Fiscal Responsibility

Abstract:
The contemporary fascination with a so-called “Bitcoin Standard” rests on the same utopian fantasy that once sustained the Gold Standard—that monetary scarcity can restrain political excess. This essay dismantles that illusion. Through historical analysis of the American experience from 1921 to 1971, and a critical exploration of modern fiscal theory, it argues that the problem of government overspending lies not in the nature of money, but in the nature of governance itself. States do not “print” in the naïve sense of creating currency without backing; they borrow, they bond, and they spend the unearned wealth of future generations. Whether denominated in gold, fiat, or digital tokens, the principle remains: borrowing is justified only when it produces tangible, growth-generating returns. Infrastructure investment, by expanding productive capacity, meets that criterion. Ideological boondoggles, designed for political gratification rather than economic yield, do not. A Bitcoin-backed regime would not neutralise state debt—it would merely gild it with cryptographic rhetoric before the inevitable default.

WARNING VIDEO!!! They Know What’s Coming. You Don’t. Most Americans Aren’t Ready for This Plan.

Thesis Statement:
A Bitcoin Standard would neither prevent deficit spending nor enforce fiscal discipline. It would replicate the structural failures of the Gold Standard, revealing once again that monetary systems cannot cure political irresponsibility. Sound economics arises from productive investment, not ideological austerity or speculative scarcity.

Section I — The Fetish of the Standard

Civilisations invent standards when they lose faith in themselves. The standard is the moral prosthetic of a bankrupt culture, a totem erected in the ruins of trust. When men no longer believe in the integrity of their institutions, they seek refuge in metal or code, mistaking mechanical certainty for virtue. The gold standard, and now the fantasy of a Bitcoin standard, both emerge from the same intellectual poverty — the hope that scarcity can substitute for discipline.

The nineteenth century worshipped gold as the embodiment of order. Its adherents believed that tethering money to a finite metal would chain the ambitions of politicians and the appetites of mobs. The faith was theological: gold was immutable, incorruptible, and therefore, by extension, moral. Yet history is unkind to those who mistake symbols for systems. Every empire that swore fidelity to its metallic god quietly betrayed it when power demanded flexibility. The standard remained in rhetoric long after it had been broken in practice. When the ledger conflicted with the sword, the sword always won.

The modern cult of Bitcoin repeats the same catechism, only now in binary form. Instead of divine metal, there is divine mathematics. Instead of vaults, ledgers. Instead of priests, programmers. The narrative is identical: scarcity will purify the system; code will banish corruption. Yet scarcity does not civilise—it merely constrains. And code, like law, is only as incorruptible as the people who execute it. To believe otherwise is to mistake cryptography for character.

The fetish of the standard endures because it absolves responsibility. It allows men to imagine that moral failure can be corrected by mechanism. A politician can promise rectitude without reform; an economist can preach restraint without courage. Both can appeal to an external order to justify their weakness. The standard becomes a moral surrogate, an instrument of denial wrapped in the language of discipline.

Under the gold standard, nations inflated through debt while denouncing inflation in speech. The mechanism of deceit was simple: borrow abroad, spend domestically, and swear that redemption remained sacred—until it wasn’t. Gold never failed them; they failed gold. The same dynamic will haunt any Bitcoin-based regime. Governments will borrow against future Bitcoin flows, issue bonds indexed to digital reserves, and construct a labyrinth of derivatives to simulate liquidity. When reality intrudes, they will call it “temporary suspension,” just as Nixon did in 1971. And another generation will learn that scarcity without integrity is merely a slower road to default.

The moral allure of the standard lies in its false promise of objectivity. It whispers that numbers can tame men, that mathematics can impose virtue on vice. But economics is not a physics of atoms; it is a politics of appetites. The state does not violate standards because they are weak—it violates them because survival demands it. A fixed supply cannot withstand a variable will.

Thus the Bitcoin standard is not revolutionary; it is recursive. It is the latest costume of an old delusion: that systems, once made rigid, will make men righteous. The truth is less elegant and infinitely harder—discipline is not a consequence of scarcity; it is a product of moral and intellectual strength. Gold failed to bestow it. Bitcoin will too.

Section II — The Mechanics of Debt: Printing Without Presses

The image of governments “printing money” is a rhetorical ghost that refuses to die. It conjures visions of reckless bureaucrats flooding the economy with worthless paper, spinning inflation from ink. The truth, however, is far more subtle—and far more insidious. Modern states do not print; they borrow. They transform promises into liquidity, pledging the future to sustain the present. Debt, not the printing press, is the engine of contemporary money creation.

When a government announces new spending, it does not conjure cash from the ether. It issues bonds. Those bonds are bought by institutions, banks, pension funds, and increasingly by the central bank itself. Each bond is a certificate of faith—faith that tomorrow’s taxpayers will honour yesterday’s ambitions. The state thus becomes a conduit for temporal arbitrage: it spends today what it claims it will earn tomorrow. This sleight of hand is the modern alchemy of finance. And like all alchemy, it is sustained by belief.

Central banks operationalise this ritual. When they “expand the money supply,” they are not pushing buttons to mint coins; they are buying government debt, placing those bonds on their balance sheets in exchange for new reserves. These reserves, in turn, ripple through commercial banks as lending capacity, multiplying into credit, investment, and speculation. The entire system rests on the assumption that growth will outpace obligation—that the future will be richer than the past, and thus the debt can be serviced. It is not money that sustains the system, but confidence.

Even under a Bitcoin standard, this process would persist. A government could peg its currency to Bitcoin, claim a fixed supply, and yet continue to issue bonds denominated in Bitcoin units. Investors, lured by yield, would still lend. Banks would still leverage deposits into layered credit instruments. The system would still inflate—not by printing, but by promising. Monetary purity cannot abolish temporal preference. A digital reserve merely changes the vocabulary of deceit.

This is why the inflation debate so often misfires. Inflation is not the consequence of “money printing” but of systemic borrowing against productivity that does not yet exist. When the borrowed funds build roads, energy networks, and productive infrastructure, they seed future returns capable of repaying the debt. When they finance consumption, political patronage, or subsidies that generate no growth, they cannibalise the very economy that must redeem them. Inflation, then, is not a monetary failure—it is a moral one. It is the symptom of a civilisation that spends not to build but to appease.

During the so-called sound-money eras—the gold standard, Bretton Woods, even the early years of fiat—the same mechanism prevailed. The United States financed wars, public works, and global expansion through debt. Gold was the decorative myth, the psychological anchor. The dollar’s credibility rested not on the contents of Fort Knox but on the productivity of the American economy. When that productivity faltered and the liabilities grew intolerable, the peg dissolved. The paper endured because the myth was replaced by another: that fiat itself could embody trust.

Bitcoin’s advocates imagine that immutable code will succeed where gold failed. But mathematics cannot restrain politics. The government that cannot borrow will tax; the one that cannot tax will seize. Power finds its liquidity. Whether through treasury bonds, digital instruments, or backdoor derivatives, the machinery of credit will persist because the machinery of ambition never ceases. To think otherwise is to confuse the protocol for the polity.

The phrase “printing money” survives because it flatters indignation. It gives the illusion that corruption lies in the mechanism, not the motive. Yet the printing press is a relic; the bond auction is the true altar of excess. Nations collapse not because they print too much, but because they promise too much—and lack the courage to stop. Bitcoin will not change this arithmetic. Scarcity cannot sanctify deceit.

You’ll Understand Everything After Watching This VIDEO! 

Section III — Keynes and the Paradox of Productive Deficit

Few economic thinkers have been more misunderstood than John Maynard Keynes. To his disciples, he became the prophet of spending; to his enemies, the architect of moral decay. Both readings are caricatures. Keynes never preached excess for its own sake. His argument was simple and devastating: when private demand collapses, the state must spend—not to indulge consumption, but to sustain the machinery of production until confidence returns. His doctrine was one of temporary intervention, not permanent dependency.

At its core, Keynesianism was an argument about investment. Deficit spending was justified only when it built the conditions for future surplus. The concept of “the multiplier” was not a licence for profligacy; it was an accounting of return. Each pound borrowed was to yield more than a pound in output, through the restoration of employment and the expansion of productive capacity. The end was growth, not indulgence. The error of later governments was to mistake this emergency medicine for a diet.

The post-war consensus distorted Keynes into a bureaucratic idol. Politicians found in his name a rationalisation for perpetual deficit—a policy of pleasure without pain, borrowing without consequence. They ignored the distinction between capital expenditure and current expenditure. Building a bridge was productive: it connected markets, accelerated trade, and multiplied returns. Expanding welfare without reform was parasitic: it consumed output without creating new value. One increased the capacity of the economy to repay its debts; the other merely redistributed the burden.

Keynes’s actual warning was moral, not mathematical. He wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” His philosophy depended on reciprocity—the willingness of governments to save in prosperity what they spent in crisis. But the modern state, addicted to electoral gratification, inverted the principle. Spending became the norm, restraint the anomaly. Every administration promised growth through generosity, not through discipline. Deficit became destiny.

Under such conditions, the deficit ceases to be Keynesian and becomes decadent. When money is borrowed to consume rather than to create, debt no longer serves the economy—it devours it. The productive deficit transforms into the unproductive one: the infrastructure of tomorrow is replaced by the appeasement of today. Subsidised idleness masquerades as compassion; temporary stimulus becomes permanent entitlement. The ledger swells, while output stagnates.

This degeneration is not merely fiscal—it is philosophical. It reveals the abandonment of the causal relationship between effort and reward. A society that borrows for comfort rather than construction loses the moral logic of credit itself. The promise to repay is credible only when what is built yields more than what is spent. Once the purpose of debt becomes political tranquillity, the bond market becomes a mirror of decay.

This distinction—between debt that seeds growth and debt that smothers it—remains the fulcrum of economic integrity. Infrastructure spending, when directed toward projects that unlock productivity, is not wasteful; it is the temporal bridge between potential and performance. A rail network, a power grid, a port—these are engines of compounding utility. They transform labour into leverage. Their debt is repaid not through taxation, but through prosperity.

The opposite holds for ideological projects. Bureaucratic make-work, social redistribution without reform, and vanity subsidies erode both fiscal balance and moral coherence. They feed dependency under the banner of equality, and debt under the illusion of progress. The political left, intoxicated by compassion, calls this justice. The right, terrified of consequence, dares not oppose it. The result is bipartisan insolvency.

Thus, the paradox of productive deficit: debt, used rightly, is civilisation’s accelerator; used wrongly, its executioner. Keynes understood this. His intellectual heirs did not. They took the language of growth and filled it with sentiment. They mistook liquidity for wealth, redistribution for recovery, and permanence for stability. The state became a consumer of capital rather than its steward.

A Bitcoin or gold-backed economy would not change this pattern. It would merely compress the timeline of failure. When the government borrows under a hard standard, the limits appear sooner, but the psychology remains identical. The moral question is not what backs the currency, but what justifies the debt. The ledger can be honest only when purpose is.

Keynes’s original sin was not in his theory but in his followers. He believed in intervention; they believed in indulgence. He sought to preserve capitalism; they used him to dilute it. A century later, his ghost haunts every treasury and parliament that borrows for applause. The paradox endures: a system designed to prevent collapse became the blueprint for perpetual decline.

Section IV — The Gold Standard: Discipline as Delusion

The gold standard is revered as the altar of fiscal virtue, the shining emblem of restraint against the dark appetites of government. Its advocates treat it as scripture—an immutable covenant between state and metal, promising honesty through scarcity. But history, ever the cynic, reveals it to be theatre. Behind the glittering façade of discipline lay the same habits of deceit, the same political cowardice, and the same incurable addiction to debt. Gold did not civilise fiscal policy; it merely concealed its corruption under a metallic sheen.

From 1921 to 1971, the United States embodied this contradiction with almost religious precision. The economy flourished, but the books were poisoned. Every dollar was supposed to be redeemable in gold, yet the nation spent as if gold were infinite. Wars were financed, public works expanded, and social programmes multiplied—all while maintaining the rhetorical illusion of convertibility. The gold standard did not restrain spending; it sanctified it. It allowed politicians to posture as custodians of virtue while quietly mortgaging the nation’s future.

The reality was arithmetic, not moral. Gold reserves grew slowly; debt ballooned rapidly. When the costs of empire and domestic indulgence collided with the rigidities of the peg, the system strained to breaking point. By the 1950s, foreign holders of dollars began to doubt American credibility. By the 1960s, they started demanding redemption in gold rather than promises. And by 1971, the United States—bloated with liabilities and stripped of integrity—simply refused to honour its own covenant. Nixon’s suspension of convertibility was not a bold innovation; it was an admission of insolvency. Fiat currency did not replace discipline; it exposed its absence.

The fatal flaw of the gold standard was philosophical. It assumed that scarcity could enforce morality—that if governments were tethered to a finite reserve, they would act prudently. But scarcity without virtue is mere inconvenience. The state that cannot borrow in gold will borrow in paper. The politician who cannot mint currency will mint deceit. Mechanistic restraint cannot compensate for moral decay. When the lust for expenditure exceeds the capacity for production, the medium of exchange is irrelevant. The gold standard did not fail because it was unsound; it failed because men were.

It is no coincidence that Keynes—so often caricatured as gold’s eternal enemy—called the standard a “barbarous relic.” He did not mean that it was evil, only that it was obsolete. In a modern industrial economy, productivity, not metal, is the measure of wealth. Yet the defenders of the standard clung to it like monks clutching relics in the ruins of their monastery, convinced that the sanctity of gold could redeem the sins of policy. They mistook rigidity for righteousness. In truth, a monetary system chained to a lump of metal can no more save a decadent civilisation than a chastity belt can reform a whore.

The half-century of gold convertibility between the world wars and Bretton Woods was not a period of stability but of chronic tension. Every crisis—military, financial, or social—forced nations to choose between principle and survival, and they always chose survival. Britain suspended gold payments in 1931, France abandoned them soon after, and the United States followed four decades later. Each withdrawal was rationalised as temporary, but history knows no temporary abandonment of virtue. The gold standard’s collapse was not a deviation from its logic but the fulfilment of it.

Those who now advocate a Bitcoin standard repeat this same delusion, though with digital solemnity. They imagine that code can succeed where gold failed, that cryptographic scarcity can triumph where metallic scarcity did not. But the flaw is not in the substrate; it is in the species. The state cannot be automated into honesty. It will borrow, it will overspend, and it will default—whether the reserve is gold, fiat, or blockchain. The standard merely dictates the timing of the betrayal.

The gold standard’s defenders often point to the post-war boom as proof of its virtue. Yet that prosperity was not born of restraint; it was born of production. The factories of America and Europe were rebuilt, innovation exploded, and output surged. The peg endured only because the economy outgrew the constraints it pretended to obey. Once the balance shifted—once consumption overtook creation—the illusion collapsed. It was not gold that created the boom, but the human engine beneath it. The metal merely reflected the light of progress until the lamps went out.

In the final reckoning, the gold standard offered not discipline but denial. It gave politicians a scapegoat and the public a false comfort. Its collapse revealed what had always been true: a government will always choose inflation over austerity, deception over confession, and power over principle. The lesson is eternal—no standard can redeem a corrupt will. Gold failed because it assumed men could be governed by metal. Bitcoin will fail because it assumes men can be governed by code. Neither gold nor mathematics can restrain a civilisation determined to live beyond its means. The only standard that endures is truth, and truth is never convertible.

Section V — The Bitcoin Standard: Digital Austerity and Political Amnesia

Every generation of idealists resurrects the same fantasy under a different banner. The gold standard’s corpse now wears the mask of Bitcoin. The language has changed; the delusion has not. The disciples of the Bitcoin Standard promise liberation from political corruption through mathematics, as though scarcity encoded in software can purify the impulses of men. They mistake constraint for virtue, mistaking a technical feature for a moral law. It is the same utopian reflex that drove the priests of gold—a yearning to outsource discipline to the inanimate, to escape the burden of human responsibility by placing faith in metal or machine.

The seduction of this myth lies in its elegance. Bitcoin appears incorruptible: finite, verifiable, beyond the reach of bureaucratic tampering. It promises a world where governments cannot inflate away value, where debt cannot metastasise into tyranny. In theory, it is a triumph of engineering over politics. In reality, it is the latest monument to political amnesia. Those who believe that scarcity will enforce honesty forget that states have always found ways to counterfeit discipline. When governments can no longer print, they borrow; when they can no longer borrow, they seize. The method changes; the impulse does not.

Under a so-called Bitcoin Standard, this pattern would merely adopt digital clothes. Governments would issue bonds denominated in Bitcoin, just as they once issued notes backed by gold. They would promise redemption in kind, all the while expanding liabilities through credit instruments and off-chain IOUs. Financial intermediaries would reappear as they always do—creating layers of synthetic Bitcoin, derivatives and futures that dilute the very scarcity they profess to respect. The rigidity of supply would not restrain excess; it would accelerate fragility. When the inevitable mismatch between debt and reserve emerges, redemption would again be “temporarily suspended.” The spectacle would be the same—only the syntax different.

The fundamental error lies in the belief that Bitcoin, being digital and decentralised, is immune to political manipulation. It is not. Control does not require possession of the protocol; it requires domination of law, exchange, and enforcement. A state does not need to hack the blockchain when it can regulate the gateways. It can tax, surveil, and expropriate in Bitcoin as easily as in fiat. The apparatus of coercion does not depend on the format of money—it depends on the authority of the issuer. The Bitcoin Standard would not abolish this hierarchy; it would merely conceal it behind a cryptographic veil.

The economists who advocate for this digital asceticism commit the same fallacy as the gold fetishists of the 1920s: they conflate scarcity with stability. But scarcity without elasticity is not discipline—it is paralysis. A monetary system that cannot expand to match productive capacity will strangle its own growth. Capital formation depends on liquidity; innovation depends on risk. A deflationary unit discourages both. Under a Bitcoin regime, capital would retreat into hoarding, investment would wither, and the economy would grind beneath the weight of its own sanctity. The dream of incorruptible money would become a nightmare of inelastic despair.

What its proponents call “sound money” is, in fact, sterile money. It cannot adapt, cannot invest, cannot respond to crisis. It is an idol of purity in a world that runs on exchange. True discipline in an economy comes not from immobility but from proportionality—from aligning debt with productivity, and speculation with tangible creation. Bitcoin’s rigidity would destroy that alignment. It would turn every recession into a depression, every contraction into collapse, because it forbids the flexibility that allows a society to absorb shocks.

Yet the mythology persists because it flatters the moral vanity of its believers. The Bitcoin Standard appeals to those who mistake cynicism for wisdom. They look upon fiat’s failures—its inflation, its deficits, its corruption—and declare that the cure is abstinence. They want a world where government cannot err because government cannot act. But a state stripped of the ability to spend is not virtuous; it is impotent. It cannot invest in infrastructure, respond to crisis, or finance innovation. It becomes a spectator to its own decline. The Bitcoin Standard would not create a disciplined state—it would create a paralysed one, watching its roads decay in the name of purity.

And yet, even this asceticism would prove temporary. The moment a government finds itself unable to meet obligations under a hard Bitcoin regime, it will do what every government has always done—it will cheat. It will invent credit extensions, synthetic derivatives, “temporary exceptions,” and digital equivalents of fractional reserve. The sanctity of code will give way to the elasticity of politics, just as gold gave way to fiat. The faith will collapse, not because Bitcoin failed as software, but because human beings failed as stewards.

The tragic irony is that Bitcoin’s architects sought to escape politics through technology. In doing so, they merely reprogrammed the same illusions into a new format. Their creation promises decentralisation but delivers concentration; it claims immutability but guarantees stagnation. The political delusion endures: that a perfect system can replace imperfect men. But perfection in economics is not a property of design; it is a consequence of discipline.

Thus, the Bitcoin Standard is not the future of sound money—it is the digital resurrection of an old superstition. It mistakes scarcity for virtue, mechanism for morality, and limitation for strength. It would not save civilisation from its fiscal sins; it would codify them into permanence. The problem has never been the medium. It has always been the man.

Section VI — Productive Capital vs. Political Capital

There are two forms of capital in any civilisation: the kind that builds, and the kind that buys applause. The first is slow, disciplined, and cumulative. It manifests as infrastructure, innovation, and enterprise—the foundations on which prosperity compounds. The second is impulsive, sentimental, and parasitic. It feeds bureaucracy, funds vanity, and purchases loyalty with other people’s money. The distinction between productive capital and political capital is not merely economic; it is moral. One sustains a civilisation, the other consumes it.

Productive capital begins with intent—the deliberate act of investment in systems that yield growth beyond their cost. Building a bridge, expanding an energy grid, constructing a port, funding research: these are acts of temporal leverage. They create capacity, transforming the effort of the present into the wealth of the future. Each dollar borrowed for such a purpose is an advance against tomorrow’s productivity, not a theft from it. This is the legitimate purpose of public debt: to fertilise the soil of the economy so that private enterprise can grow.

Political capital, by contrast, is economic cannibalism disguised as compassion. It manifests in subsidies, populist handouts, and ideological programmes masquerading as progress. Its purpose is not to produce, but to please. It redistributes rather than creates, depleting the very base from which real wealth must arise. Debt spent this way is a narcotic: it buys tranquillity while numbing accountability. Each election cycle demands a larger dose, until the state is intoxicated on its own benevolence and cannot distinguish generosity from decay.

The tragedy of modern governance is that the distinction between these forms of capital has collapsed. Infrastructure spending—the most legitimate expression of public borrowing—has been subordinated to political theatre. Projects are selected for optics rather than efficiency, geography rather than necessity. A new train line becomes a campaign slogan, not an artery of commerce. The bridge to nowhere is no longer a metaphor; it is fiscal policy. The state borrows not to build, but to be seen building.

True infrastructure investment, when properly directed, generates self-reinforcing growth. A road network multiplies trade; a research university multiplies knowledge; an energy system multiplies productivity. These are assets that repay their debt through expansion. Their value is measurable not only in returns but in the freedom they enable: they lower the cost of creation and increase the yield of effort. Political capital does the opposite—it constrains, diverts, and suffocates. It creates dependence where there should be capacity, resentment where there should be enterprise.

This is why debt itself is not the enemy. Debt is a tool, and like any tool, its virtue lies in its use. The same bond that finances a power grid can also finance an ideology. The difference is purpose. Productive debt is governed by arithmetic; political debt is governed by appetite. The first demands repayment through growth; the second assumes forgiveness through popularity. One is an act of investment; the other, an act of consumption dressed in moral rhetoric.

The left has perfected this perversion. Their economic doctrine treats capital as a moral pollutant and redistribution as virtue. They demand “equity” without productivity, “justice” without discipline. They spend not to empower citizens but to cultivate dependence—the electorate as client, the treasury as narcotic. The right, too timid to confront this decay, now imitates it under the guise of “stimulus.” The result is bipartisan insolvency, a culture that mistakes debt for generosity and taxation for compassion.

A society cannot borrow its way to virtue. It can, however, invest its way to freedom. Productive capital enhances autonomy because it builds capacity; political capital erodes it because it manufactures dependency. The distinction determines whether a nation ascends or ossifies. Debt tied to creation becomes the engine of civilisation; debt tied to politics becomes its funeral procession.

If a Bitcoin or gold-backed economy were to emerge tomorrow, the same dichotomy would persist. Governments would still borrow, still issue bonds, still plead necessity for folly. The standard might slow the rate of decay, but not the cause. The problem is not that states borrow; it is that they borrow without vision. No algorithm, no commodity, no cryptographic scarcity can replace foresight.

In the arithmetic of nations, capital is destiny. Build with it, and you rise. Waste it, and you fall. The ledger keeps no secrets, and time forgives no indulgence. The world does not collapse when debt grows; it collapses when debt ceases to build. That is the difference between an empire and a bureaucracy, between civilisation and its caricature.

Section VII — The Eternal Default: Why Promises Outlive Standards

Every monetary system begins as a covenant and ends as a confession. The covenant is that money will retain its integrity; the confession is that it cannot. From gold to fiat to Bitcoin, each new system is built upon the same premise—that this time, men will restrain themselves. And each collapses under the same inevitability: the inability of political will to honour economic law. The problem is not that governments default; the problem is that they were always destined to.

A state, by its nature, trades in promises. It promises security, prosperity, and redemption—promises made not merely to citizens, but to creditors, allies, and generations unborn. Every budget is an act of faith; every bond, a prayer that the future will be able and willing to pay for the past. The machinery of state finance is a vast pyramid of deferred obligation. What collapses it is not arithmetic error, but moral fatigue—the moment a society ceases to believe in the sanctity of repayment.

Under the gold standard, that fatigue was disguised as policy. When Britain suspended gold payments in 1931, it was described as a “temporary measure.” When the United States followed suit four decades later, Nixon called it “necessary.” Temporary became permanent; necessity became precedent. These euphemisms are the language of default. Nations do not renounce standards; they quietly outgrow them, then deny ever believing in them. The promise to redeem in gold, like every governmental promise of restraint, survived only as long as it was convenient.

The same cycle would play out under a Bitcoin standard. A government could peg its currency to a fixed supply of digital assets, promise redeemability, and swear that debt would remain within limits. Then a crisis would come—war, depression, political panic—and the covenant would shatter. They would “temporarily suspend” convertibility while maintaining all the rhetoric of responsibility. The blockchain would remain incorruptible; the state would not. The pattern is historical law, not conjecture. Scarcity does not reform men; it only delays their confession.

The elegance of any standard lies in its promise of permanence. Gold could not be forged; Bitcoin cannot be inflated. Yet permanence in physics is irrelevant when impermanence in politics reigns. Governments are not ruled by code or metal but by necessity—by the primal drive to survive the next election, the next crisis, the next revolt. They will debase anything—currency, constitution, or conscience—if it buys time. It is not the mechanism that fails but the morality behind it.

Default, therefore, is not an event—it is a continuum. Every inflation is a partial default, every unredeemed bond a quiet betrayal. The state survives by spreading this default thinly across generations, dissolving responsibility through time. The citizen never sees the crime in full; he feels it as the slow theft of purchasing power, the creeping dilution of his savings, the silent expropriation that occurs when promises mature into air. The brilliance of modern finance is that it has turned insolvency into a process rather than a catastrophe.

To see this clearly is to recognise that no standard—metallic, digital, or metaphysical—can enforce integrity upon those who rule. The power to define value is the power to evade it. When the arithmetic becomes unbearable, the state will redefine the equation. The language of money changes; the logic of evasion remains. The gold standard fell not because it was inefficient, but because it made honesty impossible to disguise. Bitcoin, for all its cryptographic majesty, would suffer the same fate. Its incorruptibility would become its greatest inconvenience.

History is a graveyard of promises broken with dignity. The Latin phrase fiat justitia ruat caelum—let justice be done though the heavens fall—has no fiscal equivalent. No government will let its heavens fall for the sake of monetary virtue. When faced with collapse or confession, it will always choose deceit, wrap it in patriotic language, and call it reform. The eternal default is not a crisis of balance sheets but of character.

The lesson is brutal and unchanging: every standard dies the same death, smothered not by mathematics but by men. The gold bars of Fort Knox, the digits of the blockchain, the printed notes of fiat—all are merely different scripts in the same tragedy. Scarcity can discipline arithmetic, but it cannot redeem appetite. The default is not an aberration of systems; it is the signature of civilisation itself.

Section VIII — Conclusion: The Arithmetic of Reality

In the final reckoning, money is not an invention of machinery or metal—it is a mirror of man. Every attempt to purify it through restraint, scarcity, or code has failed, not because the instruments were unsound, but because the hands that wielded them were unworthy. The delusion that a perfect standard—gold, fiat, or Bitcoin—can cure the sickness of excess is the economic heresy of our age. Scarcity does not create virtue; discipline does. And discipline cannot be programmed into a civilisation that refuses to face the arithmetic of reality.

The story repeats with clinical precision. A society grows prosperous; prosperity breeds entitlement; entitlement demands protection from consequence. The standard—once a symbol of honesty—becomes a shield for hypocrisy. Gold was supposed to enforce integrity, yet it financed wars. Fiat was supposed to free markets, yet it enslaved them to debt. Bitcoin was supposed to restore discipline, yet it threatens to fossilise growth beneath the weight of its own austerity. Each system inherits the same flaw: it is built by men who imagine that virtue can be delegated to design.

The truth is colder, simpler, and infinitely more demanding. Economic stability arises not from the rigidity of systems but from the integrity of stewardship. A government that borrows for creation—roads, power, research, and productive enterprise—acts as a custodian of the future. A government that borrows for indulgence—benefits, subsidies, and spectacle—acts as its executioner. The medium through which it borrows is irrelevant. The discipline that governs the borrowing is everything.

History’s arithmetic is merciless. Between 1921 and 1971, the United States proved that even a gold-backed empire could accumulate unpayable debts under the banner of prudence. The promises endured longer than the integrity that made them credible, and when the final reckoning arrived, the standard fell, replaced not by reform but by reinvention. Fiat was simply the next mask worn by the same appetite. Bitcoin, should it ever rise to that mantle, will be the next. The cycle is not technological—it is moral.

The Keynesian paradox—spend to grow, restrain to sustain—has been stripped of its wisdom and left as a slogan. Keynes himself understood that the state’s duty was to bridge recessions, not to subsidise them. His principle was balance: a government should borrow only for projects that multiply future wealth, not for those that purchase present comfort. It was not a doctrine of consumption but of creation. That distinction has been obliterated by politics. Today, the deficit is not a strategy—it is a lifestyle.

Bitcoin’s evangelists make the same mistake in reverse. Where the Keynesian bureaucrat believes in infinite liquidity, the Bitcoin purist believes in absolute abstinence. Both are extremes of the same disease: the belief that perfection can replace prudence. The former inflates itself to ruin; the latter starves itself to death. Economics, like biology, requires balance—enough elasticity to survive shocks, enough constraint to prevent decay. Neither the bureaucrat nor the maximalist understands this equilibrium.

And so, the lesson returns to the beginning: the standard is not salvation. Whether measured in gold bars, government notes, or digital signatures, value is sustained by productivity, not by ideology. A sound economy is not one that hoards but one that builds; not one that worships scarcity, but one that converts effort into lasting structure. The foundation of prosperity is not what backs money, but what money builds.

The arithmetic of reality is indifferent to dogma. A government that spends more than it creates will collapse, whether its currency is redeemable in gold, anchored to code, or floating on faith. The difference lies only in how long it takes and how honest the ruin appears. Each generation invents new instruments to disguise the same theft—the borrowing of tomorrow for the comfort of today. But numbers, unlike politics, cannot be bribed. They expose the fraud in time.

So the argument ends where reason begins: no monetary system can redeem moral failure. Gold was too heavy to carry; fiat was too easy to print; Bitcoin will prove too rigid to live. None of these fail because they are flawed in concept—they fail because they demand integrity from a species addicted to evasion. The future will not be secured by another standard, but by a reformation of purpose. To borrow only for what builds, to spend only for what endures—this is the only discipline that survives the collapse of systems.

When the rhetoric fades and the slogans rot, the ledger remains. It records without passion, without ideology, without forgiveness. It measures truth in arithmetic form. And the lesson written across its history is eternal: wealth that is not earned cannot endure, debt that is not invested cannot be repaid, and no standard—gold, fiat, or Bitcoin—can save a civilisation that refuses to balance its own books.

How Much Emergency Food Supply Do You Currently Have?

Calculating How Long Your Food Stockpile Will Last

To get the total number of days your stockpile will last, you need to take the:

Total calories in your stockpile ÷ Calories your family needs per day

Let’s start with the top half of the equation.

Calculating How Many Calories You Have

Ideally, your pantry is well organized, making the process much faster.

But if it’s not…perhaps this will allow you to do so…?!?

Because you’re about to take inventory.

Yup. Just like ALL successful retail businesses do regularly.

Now you may ask, “Should I count EVERYTHING” on my shelves?

If it’s shelf stable and you replace it regularly, then YES, count it.

Sure, some items will fluctuate as you use them up and then buy more.

But a snapshot of the shelf life stable calories in your pantry is “close enough” …

Obviously count all freeze-dried foods, MREs, canned meats, and #10 Cans.

Also, don’t count ANY calories in your refrigerator or freezer.

Power outages make freezers highly vulnerable disaster appliances.

The only exception is if you have a robust backup energy plan or you are already living off the grid.

A robust backup energy plan means having a Power station (or a generator with a few weeks of fuel).

Otherwise, I DON’T count your refrigerated and frozen goods.

I used a simple spreadsheet for this to help make the calculations easy. Plus, I can sort and filter as needed later with a spreadsheet.

Start by making a few columns titled:

1. Food – Brand
2. Number of items (pouches, bags, containers)
3. Servings Per Container
4. Calories per Serving
5. Total Calories

Once you fill out an entire row with that info, multiply the “number of items” by the “servings per container” by the “calories per serving.”

This will give you the number of calories you have in your inventory for THAT specific food item.

Now, you need to be careful here.

I added the Brand to the first column because not ALL brands use the same servings/calorie info.

For example:

Separate Brands of canned beans may seem identical but often are not.

The difference can add up, especially if you have a lot of dried beans…

Now, IF the foods are the same, AND the info per serving is the same, you can put them in the same line.

Otherwise, if any of those numbers are different, add a new line item.

Now keep going and inventory everything that makes sense for you.

Once done, you should add up all the calories.

And now you know exactly how much non-perishable food you currently have.

This calorie number may seem massive if you’ve got a decent-sized stockpile.

Perhaps even a few hundred thousand calories, like 358,753 or something like that.

WOW. Massive, right? Not so fast…

Having your total calories may seem like an important number to know, but it’s not all that helpful…yet.

Why? Because it’s relative to the size of your family, right?

For example, 358,753 calories is a stellar long term food storage for a retired couple of 2.

But what about a growing family of 5? Not so much.

That’s why we need to figure out how many calories YOUR family consumes each day…

How Many Calories Does Your Family Need Per Day?

At first, this may seem like a difficult task, but with the proper tools, it’s easy.

You must figure out how many replacement calories each family member needs daily.

1. And this is NOT the same for males and females.
2. It’s also NOT the same for babies, kids, young adults, adults, or mature adults.
3. And it’s NOT the same for those who live an active or sedentary lifestyle.

You need to consider ALL 3 of these variables to make an educated guess.

The good news is I created a simple chart to do just THAT.

You can use this chart to determine your sex, age, and activity level for each family member.

Then add up each number.

The TOTAL is how many calories you’re family needs per day.

Now, THIS is a very good number to know!

This is the number you need to figure out how long your food stockpile will last.

Your Final Calculation

Take your total calories and divide by your family’s daily calorie requirement.

Viola! THAT new number is a very good approximation of How Long Your Current Food Stockpile Will Last.

Perhaps your number is 58.63 days?

That means you’re very close to having 2 months’ worth of food in your emergency stockpile.

Now, of course, you may be able to ration those calories a bit in a longer-term emergency.

But I don’t recommend “rationing” your calculation.

Why? Because I’d rather underestimate the duration of my stockpile by a few days and NOT the other way around.

Said another way, I’d rather be pleasantly surprised…

You now know how long you have before starvation begins after the grocery store shelves go bare.

We can now finally circle back around to the original question:

How Much Emergency Food Should I Have?

Ok, are you ready for YOUR answer? Do you have a pen and paper ready?

A minimum of 2 weeks and a maximum of 1 year…

I can hear you booing at me already…

You were probably hoping for something a bit more specific, weren’t you…

Like most things, everyone’s situation, risk tolerance, and resources vary.

I can hardly give a more specific answer for everyone.

But I CAN do better than THAT.

So let’s break things down into a few different categories.

Only then can we zero in on something more meaningful.

Here are a few categories:

1. Those ONLY Worry About High-Frequency, Short Term Natural Disasters
2. Those Who Worry About Medium Term Disasters (natural and/or manmade)
3. Those Worried About an Extensive Lawless, SHTF Type Event…

1. Those Worried About Shorter-Term Natural Disasters

Some folks are mainly concerned with short-term natural disasters.

They don’t accept that the world is becoming less stable and more uncertain by the day.

They deny the risk of major societal upheavals is rising.

That’s NOT me, but hey, perhaps that’s you.

Well, in this case, you need to get 2 weeks’ worth of survival food in place.

That’s the bare minimum, in my opinion.

Any less, and you’re not living up to your primary adult responsibilities.

I recommend 2 weeks as the first target for 2 reasons:

1. It’s meaningful – gives you a basic level of resiliency
2. It’s achievable – everyone can hit this mark in a short period of time

Sure, some folks will scoff at only 2 weeks of emergency food.

But it’s actually a solid start, good for MOST likely emergencies we’ll all encounter year in and year out.

And it’s way more resilient than MOST people…

53% of Americans admit to having less than 3 days’ worth of nonperishable food and water.

That’s gross negligence!

Sorry but if you have only 2 or 3 days of short term food, you’re completely fragile.

You’re dependent on handouts in a crisis.

This is unacceptable and irresponsible.

So, get 2 weeks, and then I’ll stop the name-calling…

And perhaps I can encourage you to shoot for a month.

A month is so much more resilient than 2 weeks.

At a month’s worth, you’ll be able to ride out 99.9% of natural disasters.

And you’ll also have a bit of extra resiliency to civil unrest, chaos, famines, etc.

2. Those Worried About Medium-Term SHTF Disasters

Ok, this category is for those who don’t feel like 1 month is enough,

But also think a SHTF-type event way worse than the recent pandemic is zero…

I mean, the more widespread and the longer the emergency crisis, the LESS likely it is to occur, right?

It’s simple statistics.

Yet, I believe there’s a greater than zero chance we do have a SHTF event in our lifetimes.

Why? Because the world is getting more vulnerable as:

1. technology advances at a breakneck pace
2. the world becomes more and more interconnected.

So, what’s “reasonable” for someone who sits between the two extremes?

I recommend somewhere between 3 and 6 months.

That solid supply of calories will keep you fed for ALL but the most unlikely doomsday events.

3. Those Worried About a Worst Case-SHTF Type Event…

Well, here we are…the resilient few.

Those of us who think there’s a non-zero chance of life as we know it coming to an end in our lifetimes.

We tend to see our emergency food stockpiles as cheap self-insurance.

A policy you own that lasts up to 25 or 30 years if done right.

So why not go big and sleep really well at night, even as the world continues to crumble?

To enter this realm, you’ll be targeting at least 1’ year’s worth of emergency food…

Now perhaps we’re NOT there yet, but that’s ok; 1 year is an excellent goal.

You can do more if you’d like, heck, 2 years if you’re really dedicated.

But after you hit 1 year, your time and energy are better spent elsewhere.

At that point, I recommend focusing on skills to bring more calories into your storerooms.

I’m talking about:

• Canning, Gardening & Seed Saving
• Foraging and Gathering
• Hunting & Fishing
• Farming & Raising Farm Animals (chickens, rabbits, goats, etc.)
• Aquaponics

These more advanced prepping techniques.

Why? Because they not only give you a runway should grocery store foods go bare.

They extend your calorie runway into the future.

If all you do is stockpile (without adding any new calories), then your time to starvation is on a countdown clock.

You keep adding calories back into your stockpiles.

This helps to extend that time to starvation even longer into the future.

If you ever get to more calories in than out, you’ll never starve, right?

Dispelling The 5 Most Common Stockpiling Amount Myths

I’ve heard a lot of misconceptions about this topic.

Let’s set the record straight:

Myth #1: “I only need a month’s supply.”

A one-month stockpile just won’t cut it.

Emergencies can last longer than that, and you don’t want to be caught with empty shelves.

Aim for at least three to six months’ worth of food to be truly prepared.

Myth #2: “Canned goods will last forever.”

While canned foods have a long shelf life, they don’t last indefinitely.

Over time, the quality and nutritional value can degrade.

Rotate your canned goods regularly and check expiration dates to ensure you have fresh supplies.

Myth #3: “I’ll survive on MREs and freeze-dried meals.”

While these are convenient options, relying solely on MREs and freeze-dried meals can get expensive and monotonous.

Diversify your stockpile with staples like rice, beans, and pasta to create a balanced and sustainable food reserve.

Myth #4: “I’ll catch or hunt for food during an emergency.”

Hunting and fishing can be great survival skills, but they’re not guaranteed sources of food.

Wildlife can be scarce, and fishing might not yield results every time.

Stockpile food as your primary source and use hunting and fishing as supplementary options.

Myth #5: “I’ll just grow my own food.”

Gardening is a valuable skill, but it takes time and effort to yield a significant harvest.

Plus, it’s season-dependent.

Don’t rely solely on your garden; have a well-stocked pantry to bridge the gaps.

Final Thoughts

Everyone reading this needs to build a stockpile a food (and gallon of water) that will last at least 2 weeks

No excuses!

Once you get there, I recommend you keep building for up to 1 month.

And if you want even more protection, try to get to the 3 – 6 months window.

Or perhaps you want lots of food security.

A nice long runway to give you ample time to let the post-modern world sort itself out – then go with 1 year.

After that, move to advanced skills such as farming, raising animals, aquaponics, etc.

Ok, if you’re ready to get started, you should check out my review of Valley Food Storage or watch the video below:

Remember, folks, it’s better to have more food than you need than to come up short during an emergency.

Plan and prepare for the unexpected, and you’ll have peace of mind knowing your family is well-fed.

Stories about killer robots, machine-augmented heroes, laser weapons and battles in space – outer or cyber – have always been good for filling cinema seats, but now they have started to liven up sober academic journals and government white papers.

However, war is about much more than combat or how we fight. Is the sensationalism of high-tech weaponry blinding us to technology’s impact on the broader social, political and cultural context that determines why, where and when war happens, what makes it more or less likely, and who wins?

Consider artificial intelligence (AI). The potential for developing lethal autonomous weapons systems grabs headlines (“killer robots!”), but the greatest impact of AI on conflict may be socially mediated. Algorithmically-driven social media connections funnel individuals into trans-national but culturally enclosed echo-chambers, radicalising their world-view.

As robots relieve humans of their jobs, some societies will prove better prepared than others in their use of education and infrastructures for transitioning workers into new, socially sustainable and economically productive ways to make a living. Less prepared nations could see increasingly stark inequality, with economically-excluded young people undermining social stability, losing faith with technocratic governance, and spurring the rise of leaders who aim popular anger at an external enemy.

Looking beyond individual technologies allows us to focus on the broader and deeper dimensions of the transformation coming our way. Professor Klaus Schwab, chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum, argues that the collapse of barriers between digital and physical, and between synthetic and organic, constitutes a Fourth Industrial Revolution, promising a level of change comparable to that brought about by steam power, electricity and computing.

Something that makes this revolution fundamentally different is how it challenges ideas about what it means to be human. For instance, neuroscience is teaching us more about our own fallibility, and also just how ‘hackable’ humans are. As science continues to uncover difficult truths about how we really operate, we will have to confront basic assumptions about the nature of human beings. Whether this deep transformation will reinforce or undermine a shared sense of human dignity, and what effects it will have on our relationship with organized violence, remain open to question.

The experience of past industrial revolutions can help us begin to search for answers about how this will transform the wider context of international security. In the first industrial revolution, deposits of coal and iron ore were one factor determining the “winners” in terms of economic and geopolitical power.

Today, new modes and artefacts of industrial production will also change demand patterns, empowering countries controlling supply and transit, and disempowering others. Progress in energy production and storage efficiency, for instance, is likely to have profound consequences for the petro economies and the security challenges of their regions. Although the set of natural resources critical to strategic industries will change, their use as a geo-economic tool will probably be repeated.

For instance, this is widely thought to have happened when, in the midst of a maritime dispute with Japan in 2010, China restricted export of “rare earths” that are critical for computing, sensors, permanent magnets and energy storage. With ever more commercial and military value embedded in the technology sector, such key materials will be deemed “critical” or “strategic” in terms of national security, and be subject to political as well as market forces.

The 19th Century Industrial Revolution showed how technological asymmetry can translate into geopolitical inequality – in the words of Hilaire Belloc’s poem ‘The modern traveller’, spoken by a European about Africa: “Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim Gun, and they have not”. (The Maxim Gun was the first recoil-operated machine gun).

What will be the Maxim Gun of our time? Who will have it, and who will not? In the 20th Century, the “haves and have-nots” of the nuclear weapons club membership became the major determinant of the post-war global order, and – as seen in the cases of Iran and North Korea today – this continues to be relevant. Stealth technology and precision guided missiles used to impose a “new world order” in the early 1990s showed how the gap in military capability separated the United States from others, sustaining its leadership of a “unipolar” order.

According to the current US deputy secretary of defence Robert Work, “There’s no question that US military technological superiority is beginning to erode”.

History can only tell us only so much. There is a need for fresh thinking about the implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for international security.

Strategic de-stabilisation

1. Waging war may seem “easier”. If increased reliance on machines for remote killing makes combat more abstract from our everyday experience, could that make it more tolerable for our societies, and therefore make war more likely? Those who operate lethal systems are ever more distant from the battlefield and insulated from physical danger, but this sense of advantage may prove illusory. Those on the receiving end of technological asymmetries have a stronger incentive to find other ways to strike back: when you cannot compete on a traditional battlefield, you look to where your adversary is vulnerable, such as through opportunistic attacks on civilians.

2. Speed kills. “The speed at which machines can make decisions in the far future is likely to challenge our ability to cope, demanding a new relationship between man and machine.” This was the assessment of US Major General William Hix at a conference on the future of the Army in October 2016. The speed of technological innovation also makes it hard to keep abreast of new military capabilities, easier to be misled on the actual balance of power, and to fall victim to a strategic miscalculation. The fact that some capabilities are deliberately hidden just makes it harder. Because offensive cyber capability relies so much on exploiting one-off vulnerabilities, it is difficult to simultaneously demonstrate and maintain a capability. Once a particular vulnerability has been exploited, the victim is alerted and will take steps to fix it. General Hix again: “A conventional conflict in the near future will be extremely lethal and fast, And we will not own the stopwatch.”

3. Fear and uncertainty increase risk. The expectation that asymmetries could change quickly – as may be the case with new strategic capabilities in areas like artificial intelligence, space, deep sea and cyber – could incentivise risk-taking and aggressive behaviour. If you are confident that you have a lead in a strategically-significant but highly dynamic field of technology, but you are not confident that the lead will last, you might be more tempted to use it before a rival catches up. Enhanced capacity to operate at speed puts security actors into a constant state of high alert, incentivises investment in resilience, and forces us to live with uncertainty. Under these conditions, war by mistake – either through over-confidence in your ability to win, or because of exaggerated threat perception – becomes more likely.

4. Deterrence and pre-emption. When new capabilities cause a shift in the balance between offensive and defensive advantage – or even the perception of such a shift -, it could increase the incentives for aggression. For example, one of the pillars of nuclear deterrence is the “second strike” capability, which puts the following thought into the mind of an actor contemplating a nuclear attack: “even if I destroy my opponent’s country totally, their submarines will still be around to take revenge”. But suppose swarms of undersea drones were able to track and neutralize the submarines that launch nuclear missiles? Long-range aerial drones can already navigate freely across the oceans, and will be able to fly under the radar deep into enemy territory. Such capabilities make it possible in theory for an actor to escape the fear of second-strike retaliation, and feel safer in launching a pre-emptive strike against aircraft in their hangars, ships in port, and critical infrastructure, with practically no chance of early warning. Indeed, cyberattacks on banks, power stations and government institutions have demonstrated that it is no longer necessary to fly bombers around the world to reach a distant enemy’s critical infrastructure without early warning. The idea of striking a `knockout blow` may come to seem feasible once more.

5. The new arms race is harder to control. One of the mechanisms for strategic stability is arms control agreements, which have served to limit the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. When it comes to the multiple combinations of technology we see as a hallmark of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, one of the obstacles to international agreement is caused by uncertainty about how strategic benefits will be distributed. For instance, the international community is currently debating both the ethics and practicality of a ban on the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems. One of the factors holding this debate back from a conclusion is a lack of consensus among experts about whether such systems would give an advantage to the defender or the attacker, and hence be more likely to deter or incentivize the escalation of conflict. Where you stand on the issue may depend on whether you see yourself as a master of the technology, or a victim. Another obstacle to imposing control is the wider cast of players –

6. A wider cast of players. As cutting-edge technology becomes cheaper, it spreads to a wider range of actors. Consider the development of nuclear bombs – the last breakthrough in weapons technology that re-wrote the rules of international security. Although the potential for a fission bomb was understood in terms of theoretical physics, putting it into practice involved thousands of scientists and billions of dollars – resources on a scale only a few nations could muster. Over 70 years later, the club of nuclear weapons states remains exclusively small, and no non-state actor has succeeded in acquiring nuclear capability.

In contrast, there are more than 70 nations operating earth-orbiting satellites today. Nano-satellites are launched by Universities and Corporations. A growing list of companies can launch and recover payloads on demand, meaning even small states can buy top-notch equipment “off the shelf”. As Christopher Zember put it, “Once the pinnacle of national achievement, space has become a trophy to be traded between two business owners”. These days, even a committed enthusiast can now feasibly do genetic engineering in their basement. Other examples of dual-purpose technologies include encryption, surveillance, drones, AI and genomics. With commercial availability, proliferation of these technologies becomes wider and faster, creating more peer competitors on the state level and among non-state actors, and making it harder to broker agreements to stop them falling into the wrong hands.

7. The grey zone. The democratisation of weaponisable technology empowers non-state actors and individuals to create havoc on a massive scale. It also threatens stability by offering states more options in the form of “hybrid” warfare and the use of proxies to create plausible deniability and strategic ambiguity. When it is technically difficult to attribute an attack – already true with cyber, and becoming an issue with autonomous drones – conflicts can become more prone to escalation and unintended consequences.

8. Pushing the moral boundaries. Institutions governing legal and moral restraints on the conduct of war or controlling proliferation date from an era when massively destructive technology was reserved to a small, distinct set of actors – mostly states or people acting under state sponsorship. The function of state-centric institutions is impaired by the fact that states’ militaries are no longer necessarily at the cutting edge of technology: most of the talent driving research and development in today’s transformative dual-use technologies is privately employed, in part because the private sector simply has access to more money. For example, the private sector has invested more in AI research and development in five years than governments have since AI research first started. Diminishing state control of talent is epitomised by Uber`s recruitment of a team of robotics researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015, which decimated the research effort they had had been working on for the United States department of Defence.

The fact that the trajectory of research – and much of the infrastructure critical to security – are in private hands need not be a problem if state actors were able to exercise oversight through traditional means such as norms development, regulation and law-making. However, the pace and intensity of innovation, and difficulty of predicting what new capabilities will be unleashed as new technologies intersect, makes it difficult for states to keep up. State-centric institutions for maintaining international security have failed to develop a systematic approach to address the possible long-term security implications of advances in areas as diverse as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, big data and machine learning. Nor have industry-led measures yet filled the gap.

9. Expanding domains of conflict. Domains of potential conflict such as outer space, the deep oceans, and the Arctic – all perceived as gateways to economic and strategic advantage – are expanding via new technologies and materials that can overcome inhospitable conditions. Like cyberspace, these are less well-governed than the familiar domains of land, sea and air: their lack of natural borders can make them difficult to reconcile with existing international legal frameworks, and technological development is both rapid and private sector-driven, which makes it hard for governance institutions to keep up.

Those who secure “first mover” advantage may also seek to defend it against the establishment of regulation and governance in the common interest. Access to the technology needed to reach and exploit space, for example, allows belligerents to compromise the effectiveness of defensive measures that rely on satellites for communications, navigation, command and control technology. Even a very limited strike on a satellite would likely cause space debris, damaging systems used by the wider community. Despite a 1967 United Nations treaty calling for the peaceful use of Space, the United States Deputy Secretary of the Air Force recently warned that “there is not an agreed upon code of conduct” for space operations.

10. What is physically possible becomes likely. History suggests that any technology – even one that gives moral pause – will eventually be developed in order to be used as a weapon. As the political theorist Carl Schmitt explained, political conflict is the “realm of exception” in all sorts of ways that make the morally unthinkable not only possible, but more likely. Professor Ole Wæver and the Copenhagen School of international relations developed the concept of “securitisation” to describe how a security actor invokes the principle of necessity as a way of getting around legal or moral restraints. Policy-makers can argue that because non-state actors, terrorist and criminal groups can access new technology, they are obliged to pursue weaponization, in order to prepare an adequate defence. Public disquiet can also be bypassed by conducting research in secret; we now know from de-classified accounts of Cold War studies that soldiers were used as guinea pigs to research the effects of new weapons, and military experiments may well be underway today in areas such as human enhancement. The tendency for the logic of conflict to drive the development of technology beyond what is considered acceptable by society under normal conditions is one more reason to pay closer attention to trends in this field.

Institutional shifts

International Security is destabilised at the institutional level by the way the 4th Industrial Revolution is empowering the individual through technology, and the way that blurs the lines between war and peace, military and civilian, domestic and foreign, public and private, and physical and digital. The democratisation of destruction has been mentioned above, but non-state groups’ leveraging of global social media – whether to gain support, undermine the morale of opponents, sow confusion, or provoke a response that will create an advantage – has increased the strategic importance of shaping perceptions and narratives about international security. ISIS’s use of online videos provide an extreme example of a non-state actor using social media to drive recruitment, while state security services in select countries employ online “trolls” on a large scale. Consider the implications for democratic control over armed force when technologies like big data analytics, machine learning, behavioural science and chatbots are fully enlisted in the battle over perceptions and control of the narrative.

The hacking attack suffered by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014, allegedly motivated by North Korea’s political grievance, highlights these blurring lines – and the resulting difficulty of deciding who should be responsible for security in this new reality. If someone were so offended by a movie that they burned down the studio’s warehouse, one would expect the police to step in. But is it ultimately the responsibility of the state or of corporations to prevent or deter the kind of attack experienced by Sony Pictures? What is the appropriate response? When does an attack on a private company constitute an act of war? As an increasing proportion of what we value gets uploaded onto a global infrastructure of information and communications technology, do we expect it to be protected by service providers like Apple, or by our state’s security agencies?

Little by little, the responsibility for defending citizens is effectively shifting away from the state and towards the private sector. It is, for example, your bank’s security chief who bears responsibility for protecting your money from international cyber theft, whether it comes from straightforward criminal groups or those acting under the sponsorship of sovereign states. A report by Internet security company McAfee and the think-tank CSIS estimated the likely annual cost to the global economy from cybercrime at more than $400 billion – roughly equivalent to the combined defence spending of the European Union, or the Asia region.

According to 17th century political theorist Thomas Hobbes, the citizen agrees to give up some freedom and render loyalty in exchange for protection and to escape the “natural condition” of life, which was otherwise “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In return, the state expects respect for its laws. But if citizens lose confidence in the state’s capacity to guarantee their security, be it through military protection or domestic justice and policing or social safety nets, they may also feel less of an obligation to be loyal to the state in return. In effect, the unravelling of the Hobbesian ”social contract”. This can undermine mechanisms for global governance, which consist of inter-state institutions that rely on state power for their effectiveness.

Could the relative loss of state power fatally undermine the system of international security? Several well-known tech entrepreneurs have talked in ways that suggest they see national governments not as a leader in norms development, but as an unnecessary inconvenience. Genetics innovator Balaji Srinivasan has envisioned “Silicon Valley`s ultimate exit” from the USA. Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has floated the idea of establishing a sea colony to literally offshore himself from government regulation. Elon Musk has talked about colonising Mars. There is serious interest in businesses formulating their own foreign policy. These are interesting ideas, but until there is a credible rival the state for the role of main international security actor to meet the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the character of state action on security will need to adapt to the new environment, re-position itself to accommodate other actors, and renegotiate relations across a widespread network of partnerships.

What is to be done?

As attitudes adapt to the new distribution of security responsibility between individuals, companies and institutions of governance, there is a need for a new approach to international security. There is plenty of room for debate about how that approach should look, but the baseline can be drawn through three points: it will need to be able to think long-term, adapt rapidly to the implications of technological advances, and work in a spirit of partnership with a wide range of stakeholders.

Institutional barriers between civilian and military spheres are being torn down. Outreach to Silicon Valley is a feature of current US Defence policy, for example, as are invitations to hackers to help the Department of Defence to maintain its advantage in the digital domain. The “third offset strategy” promoted by US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter is based on a recognition that private sector innovation has outstripped that of military institutions in the post-Cold War era, and a more open relationship with business as well as with academic and science institutions could prove vital to maintaining the dominance of US military capabilities.

Such is the speed, complexity and ubiquity of innovation today, we need a regulation process that looks ahead to how emerging technologies could conceivably be weaponized, without holding back the development of those technologies for beneficial ends. “Hard governance” of laws and regulations remain necessary, but we will also need to make more use of faster-moving “soft governance” mechanisms such as laboratory standards, testing and certification regimes, insurance policies and mechanisms like those set up by academics to make potentially dangerous research subject to approval and oversight. This will need to proactively anticipate and adapt to not only technological changes, but also macro-cultural ones, which are a lot harder to predict.

States and other security actors need to start exploring with each other some of the concepts and modes of operation that would make such a networked approach sustainable, legitimate and fit for the ultimate purpose of maintaining stability and promoting peaceful coexistence in the emerging international security landscape.

Instead of meeting each other in court, as the FBI met the Apple Corporation to settle their dispute about encryption, security providers could meet across a table, under new forms of public oversight and agile governance, as partners in a common endeavour. Instead of struggling along in denial, or wasting energy trying to fight the inevitable, stakeholders who have been working in parallel siloes can learn to collaborate for a safer world. What cast of actors populate this wider security ecosystem? What are shared priorities in terms of risks? What are some of the potential models for peer to peer security? How can the 4th Industrial Revolution be used to give citizens a stronger sense of control over choices of governance, or to deny space to criminal organizations and corrupt practices? Can smart contracts using block chain technology be applied to build confidence in financial transactions and peace agreements? Can defensive alliances be expanded to include or even consist entirely of non-state actors? Should international law extend the right to use proportionate force in self-defence in cyber conflict to commercial actors? What aspects of these challenges are a matter for legal instruments and regulation, and what aspects will require a new approach?

The future of national security may lie in models of self-defence that are decentralised and networked. As Jean-Marie Guéhenno, CEO of the International Crisis Group, wrote: “distribution of security measures among a multiplicity of actors – neighbourhoods, cities, private stakeholders – will make society more resilient. And over time, smaller but well-connected communities may be more effective at preventing and identifying terrorist threats among their members.” Several of the critical ingredients of such a de-centralized model are becoming available: more security responsibility is being taken up by city mayors and even civil society groups like the global hacktivist collective “Anonymous”, who declared war on the self-styled Islamic State. So far, however, this has been a haphazard phenomenon and its impact is diminished by a lack of coordination.

The answers that may emerge to these questions are unpredictable – but what is clear is the need to have a conversation that reaches across generations and across disciplines. This conversation has to be global. International security is threatened by a loss of trust, in particular between those who drew power from the last industrial revolution and those whose power is rising within a fluid and complex environment. The conversation needs to foster mutual understanding, dispel unjustified fears, and revive public confidence in new forms of responsive leadership that manifestly serve the common good.

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It can be hard to imagine a looming food crisis when you can walk into your local grocery store and see shelves overflowing with abundance. You can find easily find everything you need, and plenty that you don’t.

You might even ignore those around you warning you to stock up on food while you still can. In fact, they might seem like Chicken Little desperately calling out, “The sky is falling!”

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But don’t let the full shelves fool you. While the sky may not actually be falling, the world is facing a food shortage. It’s only a matter of time until it hits. Until then, the government wants you to keep walking into the stores, feeling like everything is fine.

The world’s food situation is not fine. Here are just eight of the many indicators that it’s time to stockpile food, and start growing some of your own.

1. Raising Food Prices

Have you noticed the price of groceries rising in your area? I sure have here, especially for basic staple ingredients such as butter, flour, and rice. Every time I head to the store, it seems like I have to stretch my food dollars a little further.

It’s not just in my neck of the woods where prices are creeping up. According to a study by the USDA Economic Research Service, supermarket prices are expected to rise .25-1.25 percent during 2025, and 1.0-2.0 percent during 2026. While those percentage points may seem low, they’re still moving up.

But, since the price of gas and food are intertwined, those numbers could soar past predictions if gas goes up again. Most of the food in the supermarket wasn’t grown in your local area. It was shipped there, requiring fuel.

As food prices continue rising, it’s getting harder and harder for families to buy what they need. That means the number of families now getting food assistance from the government continues to grow. It’s not a healthy outlook for our food supply.

2. Drought

Plants need water to grow and produce harvestable yields. As temperatures around the world rise, droughts are becoming more common.

Widespread droughts are hitting fertile cropland across the planet. From California to India, low rainfall and high temperatures cause devastation on crop production. Long-term forecasts indicate these weather patterns are likely to continue.

3. Diseases Wiping Out Crops & Animals

It’s not just the weather wreaking havoc on our food supply, it’s also disease. From the virulent Panama disease taking out bananas to African Swine Fever that can wipe out entire pig farms, diseases are running rampant in the food supply.

Modern food production techniques such as CAFOs create the perfect environment for peril. In a natural setting, you’d see a couple of pigs on farms across the landscape. They’d be interacting with nature, and have other animals and plant life around to help keep disease causing parasites at bay.

Instead, the majority of today’s pig farms are just pigs and concrete all around. When a disease comes in, it quickly moves through the whole herd. Often entire farms have to execute their animals to prevent the disease from spreading.

The loss of that many animals plays a role in rising food prices. Supply can no longer keep up with demand.

These issues aren’t just a problem for pigs. Cows, chickens, and other animals are being raised in conditions that make them prone for disease.

Crops are being raised in similar fashion. Instead of farmers growing a variety of crops, you see corn growing in huge fields for miles around. There are similar fields for soybeans, wheat, and other crops.

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4. Food Safety Concerns

Have you noticed how often food is being recalled? From peanuts to frozen vegetables, meat to processed foods, it’s hard to trust the establishment to deliver safe food to your table. Listeria, e-coli, salmonella, and a host of other food borne illnesses are harming and killing people around the globe. Modern food handling practices have led to these food safety concerns.

Factories play a part in the production of numerous food products. When one factory has a role to play in the bulk of the food system, a containment can quickly spread.

Add transportation, storage, and unsafe handling, and you’ve got food that’s ready to play host to multiple strains of bacteria. Then there’s that whole GMO debate. Some countries don’t believe that genetically modified foods are safe for consumption. Others have drunk the GMO Kool-Aid and are pushing them on the marketplace at an astounding rate.

That’s another reason to grow your own food. You can pick heirloom varieties that haven’t been modified. No matter what you grow and preserve, be sure to inspect what you stockpile to ensure it’s safe.

5. Crops Being Used for Other Purposes

Crops aren’t just being grown to feed humans anymore. A huge portion of our food supply goes to feed cows. Cows were never meant to eat grains in the first place! Let them eat hay, and that’ll relieve a huge burden on our food supply.

Then there’s the whole ethanol thing. About a quarter of US corn is being used for fuel instead of food now. With a food crisis already in the works, using food for other purposes adds to the problem.

6. The Death of Small Farms

The family farmer is slowly become obsolete. Small family farms are being bought out by large mega-farms.

When single companies have their hands in so much of the food chain, a blow to one can cause huge problems. Conversely, when you have hundreds of small farms producing, it’s easy for the others to step in and make up the difference if one experiences loss.

But with rules and regulations definitely favoring mega-farms, it’s no wonder that small ones are selling out and shutting down. As governments continue persecuting small farmers, the number of farms producing your food will continue to shrink.

7. Mistreated Soil

The Fukushima crisis spewed nuclear material onto much of Japan. That soil isn’t safe to grow food in, and probably won’t be for a long time.

Nuclear disasters aren’t the only thing polluting our soil. Farming practices that strip all the nutrients out and dump chemicals back in also play a role.

Mega-farms don’t tend to care about the soil. They just like the money. Until sustainable practices are used in the ag industry, our soil will continue being mistreated.

Bad soil won’t grow as much food. However, it will keep bringing the food crisis closer to our reality.

8. Dependence on Processed Food

The majority of food on supermarket shelves is highly processed. This is the food that many people rely on to supply their nutrition on a daily basis. This boxed and packaged food hardly resembles real food. Because of this, people are becoming further removed from the source of their food.

Many don’t know how to make bread. They don’t know how to cut apart a chicken. They don’t know what animal hamburger comes from. For many people, food just comes from the store. That’s all they know, and this attitude is dangerous.

The further people get from their food, the easier it is for a crisis to occur. They’re totally dependent on other people to supply what they eat. When those farms or factories shut down, they simply won’t have a clue how to begin feeding themselves and their family.

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How to Prepare for the Food Crisis

It’s not too late to begin preparing for the coming food crisis. You can begin taking steps to ensure your family’s survival when the grocery store shelves are empty. Here are a few important ones:

Education

Ensure you know where your food comes from. If you are currently food ignorant, make friends with some farmers. Do some research. Learn all you can. Feeding yourself doesn’t have to be complicated!

To take it a step further, you can educate yourself about local food regulations. Be on the lookout for laws that are restricting your right to feed your family. Play an active role in the political process to end the regulations that are strangling small farms.

Buy Local

Source food that’s grown as close to you as possible. Not only will you be supporting your local economy and farmers, you’ll also be eating food that’s fresher.

Local sources of food are less likely to be affected by national food shortages. If you’re already used to finding food that’s not in a supermarket, you’ll be a step ahead when the time comes.

Start Producing Your Own Food

No matter where you live, you can begin growing your own food. If you don’t have much space, put a couple of containers in your windowsills. Learn how to grow food in small spaces.

If you have more space, consider getting some livestock. Rabbits and chickens are allowed in many cities, and you’ll be producing your own meat and eggs.

You can continue to expand your survival garden as space allows. Try to grow some of the nutritious foods described in this Survivopedia article.

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If you grow too much, learn how to preserve your harvest. Freezing, dehydrating, canning, and fermenting are some of the methods used to save food for later.

Producing your own food will help you lower your food bill and gain self-sufficiency. Everything you grow better prepares you for the food crisis.

Learn How to Cook

Stop buying processed food and take back your kitchen. Learn how to prepare simple, nutritious food that your family enjoys. Good food doesn’t have to be complicated!

Stockpile Food

Each time you go shopping, make it a point to buy some extra food. But, you shouldn’t just buy any food. You really need to stockpile what you actually eat.

Otherwise your family will have to adjust to both a crisis and new food when the time comes. It’s much better to have food on hand that you enjoy.

You don’t have to spend a ton of money to stock up. If your budget is really tight, try allocating just $5 or $10 a shopping trip. While it doesn’t sound like much, you’ll begin growing your reserves.

Be sure you store your stockpiles properly to keep pests and bacteria out. You also need to rotate your stores, which is why you should be eating what you’re storing. When I add to my stockpile, I put the new in the back. That way I use the older food first.

How Are You Preparing?

Have you noticed these eight signs of an approaching food crisis? Are there others you’d add to my list?

What basic steps are you taking to prepare? What advice would you give someone who is just starting to develop a preparedness mindset? Please share your tips in the comments section below so others can learn from you!

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