When Plans Turn to
Ashes
Scripture: Luke 15:11-24
I. Introduction: Rebelling against God always ends in disappointment. Whatever you acquire outside of God’s will eventually turns to ashes (Life Principle #16). The parable of the prodigal son illustrates this truth. The young man used his early inheritance to fulfill selfish desires. Yet when the money ran out, he found himself in a worse state than his father’s servants. Rebellion resulted in spiritual, relational, and physical poverty.
II. God allows us to acquire things outside of His will.
A. In the parable, the father let
his son leave home with his inheritance even though the young man planned to
lead a reckless, immoral lifestyle.
B. In a similar way, we have the
freedom to make unwise decisions. Otherwise, we would be like robots programmed
to follow commands.
III. God may allow us to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a little while.
A. The prodigal son traveled far
from home to follow his passions. He chose to live immorally and lavishly spend
his inheritance (Luke 15:15, 30).
B. Why is rebellion enjoyable?
1. It momentarily
fulfills a desire.
2. The fact that
sin is forbidden can increase its appeal.
3. Transgression
typically offers immediate gratification.
4. Disobedience is
pleasurable in some ways, for a short time (Heb. 11:25).
C. Why do we disobey God’s will for
our lives?
1. Satan
encourages us to focus on immediate desires.
2. We forget about
the blessings we already enjoy.
3. We fail to
consider the consequences of wrong choices.
IV. God warns us that what we
acquire outside of His will turns to ashes.
A. When a house burns down,
nothing is left but ashes—insubstantial fragments of what was. Spiritually
speaking, ashes are the remains of disobedience and rebellion.
B. Sin may look appealing, but it
leads to destruction (see Numbers 32:23). People may be able to cover up the
external consequences of sin. But unless they turn from it, their wrongdoings
will eventually destroy them.
V. When we come to our senses, God responds with forgiveness, acceptance, restoration, and rejoicing.
A. The prodigal son’s so-called
friends no longer wanted him once his money was gone. He had to feed pigs, the
most demeaning job any Hebrew could imagine. No one was willing to help him
find decent work, much less care for his daily needs.
B. Christ told this parable to
reveal the heavenly Father’s heart for broken people. In it, the prodigal’s
father, who represents God, ran toward his repentant son. The young man asked
for a job as a servant, but his father called for a ring and a robe—and threw a
party instead. Rather than simply offering forgiveness, the father delighted in
restoring to his child all the benefits of sonship.
C. We can have hope, even when
parts of our lives turn to ashes.
1. Like the
prodigal son, we must come to our senses (Luke 15:17). We have to admit that
life would be better if we were within God’s will.
2. Those who have
never trusted Jesus as Savior must begin by accepting His forgiveness for a
lifetime of rebellion against Him. Believers are already forgiven for every
transgression—past, present, and future.
3. God doesn’t
necessarily remove the natural consequences of poor choices. We may lose
opportunities, health, finances, or relationships. But we won’t pay an eternal
price for sin—Christ handled that already (Rom. 6:23). We simply have to ask
Him to cleanse us from disobedience (1 John 1:9). The Lord joyfully receives us
and willingly restores all the benefits of membership in His family.
VI. Conclusion: Has your life been reduced to ashes? Perhaps the devastation is obvious to everyone. Or maybe the fires of sin have burned in a less visible way, leaving mostly internal damage. Our heavenly Father can bring restoration, no matter how severe the destruction is. Come to your senses, admit you have wandered away from His will, and turn back to God. Let Him demonstrate His amazing mercy in a personal way.
2) The 30-Day Reading List That
Will Lead You to Becoming a Knowledgeable Libertarian by Robert Wenzel
Repudiating the
National Debt
by Murray N. Rothbard
In
the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives
cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was
supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a
balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own
leadership to vote for an increase in the statutory limit on the federal public
debt, which was then scraping the legal ceiling of $1 trillion. They cried
because all of their lives they had voted against an increase in public debt,
and now they were being asked, by their own party and their own movement, to
violate their lifelong principles. The White House and its leadership assured
them that this breach in principle would be their last: that it was necessary
for one last increase in the debt limit to give President Reagan a chance to
bring about a balanced budget and to begin to reduce the debt. Many of these
Republicans tearfully announced that they were taking this fateful step because
they deeply trusted their president, who would not let them down.
Famous
last words. In a sense, the Reagan handlers were right: there were no more
tears, no more complaints, because the principles themselves were quickly
forgotten, swept into the dustbin of history. Deficits and the public debt have
piled up mountainously since then, and few people care, least of all
conservative Republicans. Every few years, the legal limit is raised
automatically. By the end of the Reagan reign the federal debt was $2.6
trillion; now it is $3.5 trillion and rising rapidly. And this is the rosy side
of the picture, because if you add in "off-budget" loan guarantees
and contingencies, the grand total federal debt is $20 trillion.
Before
the Reagan era, conservatives were clear about how they felt about deficits and
the public debt: a balanced budget was good, and deficits and the public debt
were bad, piled up by free-spending Keynesians and socialists, who absurdly
proclaimed that there was nothing wrong or onerous about the public debt. In
the famous words of the left-Keynesian apostle of "functional
finance," Professor Abba Lernr, there is nothing wrong with the public
debt because "we owe it to ourselves." In those days, at least,
conservatives were astute enough to realize that it made an enormous amount of
difference whether – slicing through the obfuscatory collective nouns – one is
a member of the "we" (the burdened taxpayer) or of the
"ourselves" (those living off the proceeds of taxation).
To
think sensibly about the public debt, we first have to go back to first
principles and consider debt in general. Put simply, a credit transaction
occurs when C, the creditor, transfers a sum of money (say $1,000) to D, the
debtor, in exchange for a promise that D will repay C in a year's time the
principal plus interest. If the agreed interest rate on the transaction is 10
percent, then the debtor obligates himself to pay in a year's time $1,100 to
the creditor. This repayment completes the transaction, which in contrast to a
regular sale, takes place over time.
So
far, it is clear that there is nothing "wrong" with private debt. As
with any private trade or exchange on the market, both parties to the exchange
benefit, and no one loses. But suppose that the debtor is foolish, gets himself
in over his head, and then finds that he can't repay the sum he had agreed on?
This, of course is a risk incurred by debt, and the debtor had better keep his
debts down to what he can surely repay. But this is not a problem of debt
alone. Any consumer may spend foolishly; a man may blow his entire paycheck on
an expensive trinket and then find that he can't feed his family. So consumer
foolishness is hardly a problem confined to debt alone. But there is one
crucial difference: if a man gets in over his head and he can't pay, the
creditor suffers too, because the debtor has failed to return the creditor's
property. In a profound sense, the debtor who fails to repay the $1,100 owed to
the creditor has stolen property that belongs to the creditor; we have here not
simply a civil debt, but a tort, an aggression against another's property.
In
earlier centuries, the insolvent debtor's offense was considered grave, and
unless the creditor was willing to "forgive" the debt out of charity,
the debtor continued to owe the money plus accumulating interest, plus penalty
for continuing nonpayment. Often, debtors were clapped into jail until they
could pay – a bit draconian perhaps, but at least in the proper spirit of
enforcing property rights and defending the sanctity of contracts. The major
practical problem was the difficulty for debtors in prison to earn the money to
repay the loan; perhaps it would have been better to allow the debtor to be
free, provided that his continuing income went to paying the creditor his just
due.
As
early as the 17th century, however, governments began sobbing about the plight
of the unfortunate debtors, ignoring the fact that the insolvent debtors had
gotten themselves into their own fix, and they began to subvert their own
proclaimed function of enforcing contracts. Bankruptcy laws were passed which,
increasingly, let the debtors off the hook and prevented the creditors from
obtaining their own property. Theft was increasingly condoned, improvidence was
subsidized, and thrift was hobbled. In fact, with the modern device of Chapter
11, instituted by the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, inefficient and
improvident managers and stockholders are not only let off the hook, but they
often remain in positions of power, debt-free and still running their firms,
and plaguing consumers and creditors with their inefficiencies. Modern
utilitarian neoclassical economists see nothing wrong with any of this; the
market, after all, "adjusts" to these changes in the law. It is true
that the market can adjust to almost anything, but so what? Hobbling creditors
means that interest rates rise permanently, to the sober and honest as well as
the improvident; but why should the former be taxed to subsidize the latter?
But there are deeper problems with this utilitarian attitude. It is the same
amoral claim, from the same economists, that there is nothing wrong with rising
crime against residents or storekeepers of the inner cities. The market, they
assert, will adjust and discount for such high crime rates, and therefore rents
and housing values will be lower in the inner-city areas. So everything will be
taken care of. But what sort of consolation is that? And what sort of
justification for aggression and crime?
In
a just society, then, only voluntary forgiveness by creditors would let debtors
off the hook; otherwise, bankruptcy laws are an unjust invasion of the property
rights of creditors.
One
myth about "debtors'" relief is that debtors are habitually poor and
creditors rich, so that intervening to save debtors is merely a requirement of
egalitarian "fairness." But this assumption was never true: in
business, the wealthier the businessman the more likely he is to be a large
debtor. It is the Donald Trumps and Robert Maxwells of this world whose debts
spectacularly exceed their assets. Intervention on behalf of debtors has
generally been lobbied for by large businesses with large debts. In modern corporations,
the effect of ever-tightening bankruptcy laws has been to hobble the
creditor-bondholders for the benefit of the stockholders and the existing
managers, who are usually installed by, and allied with, a few dominant large
stockholders. The very fact that a corporation is insolvent demonstrates that
its managers have been inefficient, and they should be removed promptly from
the scene. Bankruptcy laws that keep prolonging the rule of existing managers,
then, not only invade the property rights of the creditors; they also injure
the consumers and the entire economic system by preventing the market from
purging the inefficient and improvident managers and stockholders and from
shifting the ownership of industrial assets to the more efficient creditors.
Not only that; in a recent law review article, Bradley and Rosenzweig have
shown that the stockholders, too, as well as the creditors, have lost a
significant amount of assets due to the installation of Chapter 11 in 1978. As
they write, "if bondholders and stockholders are both losers under Chapter
11, then who are the winners?" The winners, remarkably but unsurprisingly,
turn out to be the existing, inefficient corporate managers, as well as the
assorted lawyers, accountants, and financial advisers who earn huge fees from
bankruptcy reorganizations.
In
a free-market economy that respects property rights, the volume of private debt
is self-policed by the necessity to repay the creditor, since no Papa
Government is letting you off the hook. In addition, the interest rate a debtor
must pay depends not only on the general rate of time preference but on the
degree of risk he as a debtor poses to the creditor. A good credit risk will be
a "prime borrower," who will pay relatively low interest; on the
other hand, an improvident person or a transient who has been bankrupt before,
will have to pay a much higher interest rate, commensurate with the degree of
risk on the loan.
Most
people, unfortunately, apply the same analysis to public debt as they do to
private. If sanctity of contracts should rule in the world of private debt,
shouldn't they be equally as sacrosanct in public debt? Shouldn't public debt
be governed by the same principles as private? The answer is no, even though
such an answer may shock the sensibilities of most people. The reason is that
the two forms of debt-transaction are totally different. If I borrow money from
a mortgage bank, I have made a contract to transfer my money to a creditor at a
future date; in a deep sense, he is the true owner of the money at that point,
and if I don't pay I am robbing him of his just property. But when government
borrows money, it does not pledge its own money; its own resources are not
liable. Government commits not its own life, fortune, and sacred honor to repay
the debt, but ours. This is a horse, and a transaction, of a very different
color.
For
unlike the rest of us, government sells no productive good or service and
therefore earns nothing. It can only get money by looting our resources through
taxes, or through the hidden tax of legalized counterfeiting known as
"inflation." There are some exceptions, of course, such as when the
government sells stamps to collectors or carries our mail with gross
inefficiency, but the overwhelming bulk of government revenues is acquired
through taxation or its monetary equivalent. Actually, in the days of monarchy,
and especially in the medieval period before the rise of the modern state,
kings got the bulk of their income from their private estates – such as forests
and agricultural lands. Their debt, in other words, was more private than
public, and as a result, their debt amounted to next to nothing compared to the
public debt that began with a flourish in the late 17th century.
The
public debt transaction, then, is very different from private debt. Instead of
a low-time-preference creditor exchanging money for an IOU from a
high-time-preference debtor, the government now receives money from creditors,
both parties realizing that the money will be paid back not out of the pockets
or the hides of the politicians and bureaucrats, but out of the looted wallets
and purses of the hapless taxpayers, the subjects of the state. The government
gets the money by tax-coercion; and the public creditors, far from being
innocents, know full well that their proceeds will come out of that selfsame
coercion. In short, public creditors are willing to hand over money to the
government now in order to receive a share of tax loot in the future. This is
the opposite of a free market, or a genuinely voluntary transaction. Both
parties are immorally contracting to participate in the violation of the
property rights of citizens in the future. Both parties, therefore, are making
agreements about other people's property, and both deserve the back of our
hand. The public credit transaction is not a genuine contract that need be
considered sacrosanct, any more than robbers parceling out their shares of loot
in advance should be treated as some sort of sanctified contract.
Any
melding of public debt into a private transaction must rest on the common but
absurd notion that taxation is really "voluntary," and that whenever
the government does anything, "we" are willingly doing it. This
convenient myth was wittily and trenchantly disposed of by the great economist
Joseph Schumpeter: "The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of
club dues or of the purchases of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed
this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind."
Morality and economic utility generally go hand in hand. Contrary to Alexander
Hamilton, who spoke for a small but powerful clique of New York and
Philadelphia public creditors, the national debt is not a "national
blessing." The annual government deficit, plus the annual interest payment
that keeps rising as the total debt accumulates, increasingly channels scarce
and precious private savings into wasteful government boondoggles, which
"crowd out" productive investments. Establishment economists,
including Reaganomists, cleverly fudge the issue by arbitrarily labeling
virtually all government spending as "investments," making it sound
as if everything is fine and dandy because savings are being productively
"invested." In reality, however, government spending only qualifies
as "investment" in an Orwellian sense; government actually spends on
behalf of the "consumer goods" and desires of bureaucrats,
politicians, and their dependent client groups. Government spending, therefore,
rather than being "investment," is consumer spending of a peculiarly
wasteful and unproductive sort, since it is indulged not by producers but by a
parasitic class that is living off, and increasingly weakening, the productive
private sector. Thus, we see that statistics are not in the least
"scientific" or "value-free"; how data are classified –
whether, for example, government spending is "consumption" or
"investment" – depends upon the political philosophy and insights of
the classifier.
Deficits
and a mounting debt, therefore, are a growing and intolerable burden on the
society and economy, both because they raise the tax burden and increasingly
drain resources from the productive to the parasitic, counterproductive,
"public" sector. Moreover, whenever deficits are financed by
expanding bank credit – in other words, by creating new money – matters become
still worse, since credit inflation creates permanent and rising price
inflation as well as waves of boom-bust "business cycles."
It
is for all these reasons that the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians (who, contrary
to the myths of historians, were extraordinarily knowledgeable in economic and
monetary theory) hated and reviled the public debt. Indeed, the national debt
was paid off twice in American history, the first time by Thomas Jefferson and
the second, and undoubtedly the last time, by Andrew Jackson.
Unfortunately,
paying off a national debt that will soon reach $4 trillion would quickly
bankrupt the entire country. Think about the consequences of imposing new taxes
of $4 trillion in the United States next year! Another way, and almost as devastating,
a way to pay off the public debt would be to print $4 trillion of new money –
either in paper dollars or by creating new bank credit. This method would be
extraordinarily inflationary, and prices would quickly skyrocket, ruining all
groups whose earnings did not increase to the same extent, and destroying the
value of the dollar. But in essence this is what happens in countries that
hyper-inflate, as Germany did in 1923, and in countless countries since,
particularly the Third World. If a country inflates the currency to pay off its
debt, prices will rise so that the dollars or marks or pesos the creditor
receives are worth a lot less than the dollars or pesos they originally lent
out. When an American purchased a 10,000 mark German bond in 1914, it was worth
several thousand dollars; those 10,000 marks by late 1923 would not have been
worth more than a stick of bubble gum. Inflation, then, is an underhanded and
terribly destructive way of indirectly repudiating the "public debt";
destructive because it ruins the currency unit, which individuals and
businesses depend upon for calculating all their economic decisions.
I
propose, then, a seemingly drastic but actually far less destructive way of
paying off the public debt at a single blow: outright debt repudiation.
Consider this question: why should the poor, battered citizens of Russia or
Poland or the other ex-Communist countries be bound by the debts contracted by
their former Communist masters? In the Communist situation, the injustice is
clear: that citizens struggling for freedom and for a free-market economy
should be taxed to pay for debts contracted by the monstrous former ruling
class. But this injustice only differs by degree from "normal" public
debt. For, conversely, why should the Communist government of the Soviet Union
have been bound by debts contracted by the Czarist government they hated and
overthrew? And why should we, struggling American citizens of today, be bound
by debts created by a past ruling elite who contracted these debts at our
expense? One of the cogent arguments against paying blacks
"reparations" for past slavery is that we, the living, were not
slaveholders. Similarly, we the living did not contract for either the past or
the present debts incurred by the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington.
Although
largely forgotten by historians and by the public, repudiation of public debt
is a solid part of the American tradition. The first wave of repudiation of
state debt came during the 1840s, after the panics of 1837 and 1839. Those
panics were the consequence of a massive inflationary boom fueled by the
Whig-run Second Bank of the United States. Riding the wave of inflationary
credit, numerous state governments, largely those run by the Whigs, floated an
enormous amount of debt, most of which went into wasteful public works
(euphemistically called "internal improvements"), and into the
creation of inflationary banks. Outstanding public debt by state governments
rose from $26 million to $170 million during the decade of the 1830s. Most of
these securities were financed by British and Dutch investors.
During
the deflationary 1840s succeeding the panics, state governments faced repayment
of their debt in dollars that were now more valuable than the ones they had
borrowed. Many states, now largely in Democratic hands, met the crisis by
repudiating these debts, either totally or partially by scaling down the amount
in "readjustments." Specifically, of the 28 American states in the
1840s, 9 were in the glorious position of having no public debt, and 1
(Missouri's) was negligible; of the 18 remaining, 9 paid the interest on their
public debt without interruption, while another 9 (Maryland, Pennsylvania,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida)
repudiated part or all of their liabilities. Of these states, four defaulted
for several years in their interest payments, whereas the other five (Michigan,
Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Florida) totally and permanently
repudiated their entire outstanding public debt. As in every debt repudiation,
the result was to lift a great burden from the backs of the taxpayers in the
defaulting and repudiating states.
Apart
from the moral, or sanctity-of-contract argument against repudiation that we
have already discussed, the standard economic argument is that such repudiation
is disastrous, because who, in his right mind, would lend again to a
repudiating government? But the effective counterargument has rarely been
considered: why should more private capital be poured down government rat
holes? It is precisely the drying up of future public credit that constitutes
one of the main arguments for repudiation, for it means beneficially drying up
a major channel for the wasteful destruction of the savings of the public. What
we want is abundant savings and investment in private enterprises, and a lean,
austere, low-budget, minimal government. The people and the economy can only
wax fat and prosperous when their government is starved and puny.
The
next great wave of state debt repudiation came in the South after the blight of
Northern occupation and Reconstruction had been lifted from them. Eight
Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia) proceeded, during the late 1870s and early
1880s under Democratic regimes, to repudiate the debt foisted upon their
taxpayers by the corrupt and wasteful carpetbag Radical Republican governments
under Reconstruction.
So
what can be done now? The current federal debt is $3.5 trillion. Approximately
$1.4 trillion, or 40 percent, is owned by one or another agency of the federal
government. It is ridiculous for a citizen to be taxed by one arm of the
federal government (the IRS) to pay interest and principal on debt owned by
another agency of the federal government. It would save the taxpayer a great
deal of money, and spare savings from further waste, to simply cancel that debt
outright. The alleged debt is simply an accounting fiction that provides a mask
over reality and furnishes a convenient means for mulcting the taxpayer. Thus,
most people think that the Social Security Administration takes their premiums
and accumulates it, perhaps by sound investment, and then "pays back"
the "insured" citizen when he turns 65. Nothing could be further from
the truth. There is no insurance and there is no "fund," as there
indeed must be in any system of private insurance. The federal government
simply takes the Social Security "premiums" (taxes) of the young
person, spends them in the general expenditures of the Treasury, and then, when
the person turns 65, taxes someone else to pay the "insurance
benefit." Social Security, perhaps the most revered institution in the
American polity, is also the greatest single racket. It's simply a giant Ponzi
scheme controlled by the federal government. But this reality is masked by the
Social Security Administration's purchase of government bonds, the Treasury
then spending these funds on whatever it wishes. But the fact that the SSA has
government bonds in its portfolio, and collects interest and payment from the
American taxpayer, allows it to masquerade as a legitimate insurance business.
Canceling
federal agency-held bonds, then, reduces the federal debt by 40 percent. I
would advocate going on to repudiate the entire debt outright, and let the
chips fall where they may. The glorious result would be an immediate drop of
$200 billion in federal expenditures, with at least the fighting chance of an
equivalent cut in taxes.
But
if this scheme is considered too draconian, why not treat the federal
government as any private bankrupt is treated (forgetting about Chapter 11)?
The government is an organization, so why not liquidate the assets of that
organization and pay the creditors (the government bondholders) a pro-rata
share of those assets? This solution would cost the taxpayer nothing, and, once
again, relieve him of $200 billion in annual interest payments. The United
States government should be forced to disgorge its assets, sell them at auction,
and then pay off the creditors accordingly. What government assets? There are a
great deal of assets, from TVA to the national lands to various structures such
as the Post Office. The massive CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, should
raise a pretty penny for enough condominium housing for the entire work force
inside the Beltway. Perhaps we could eject the United Nations from the United
States, reclaim the land and buildings, and sell them for luxury housing for
the East Side gliterati. Another serendipity out of this process would be a
massive privatization of the socialized land of the western United States and
of the rest of America as well. This combination of repudiation and
privatization would go a long way to reducing the tax burden, establishing
fiscal soundness, and desocializing the United States.
In
order to go this route, however, we first have to rid ourselves of the
fallacious mindset that conflates public and private, and that treats
government debt as if it were a productive contract between two legitimate
property owners.
3) Roger’s Rangers Rules or Plan
of Discipline by Major Robert Rogers
Rule #16
If the enemy
should be discovered by your detachments in the morning, and their numbers are
superior to yours, and a victory doubtful, you should not attack them till the
evening, as then they will not know your numbers, and if you are repulsed, your
retreat will be followed by the darkness of the night.
4) 52 Weeks to Preparedness by
Tess Pennington
Week 23 of 52:
External Security Preparedness
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck the Louisiana coast, reports out of New Orleans on September 1st stated that victims of the disaster were being raped and beaten and that fights and fires were out of control, leaving corpses laying in the open as the city descended into anarchy. Emergency responders in the New Orleans area were overwhelmed, and as a result their response time was lapsed.
A “bug in” scenario may be our only choice after a disaster strikes and we must prepare not only for our basic needs, but also for our safety. Since the grid may go down during a disaster, each household should prepare for crime. Looting and home invasions will more than likely be at the forefront of these crime waves and a defensible home will help your family stay safe.
Many of us easily relate to the idea that our home security needs to be beefed up. In fact, some of the homes we live in are defensive nightmares given the location, structural design, neighborhood or city we may live in. Because the home will be more vulnerable when the grid goes down (due to electrical alarm systems not working, lapsed emergency response time, etc), consider having some alternative security features for inside the home. A barking dog would be a great detection system for anyone trying to break in. And, if the pet is trained properly, could assist in protecting the family.
In an emergency where civil unrest can be a problematic issue, criminals look for accessible targets. They will concentrate on vulnerable “easy-pickings” and bypass the more secured areas. This was seen during the Rodney King Trial Verdict riots in Los Angeles and it’s suburbs, the only structures that were spared from active looting by large gangs were some stores owned by armed Korean Americans.
Security is an important preparedness measure to keep in mind when investing in your emergency supplies. Bulking up your home security features for the outside can be your first line of defense in preventing any criminals from trying to enter your home.
Given that our financial situations are each unique, I am not suggesting that you go out and purchase every item on this list. However, if you are able to invest in some security items for the home, I suggest you invest in as much as you can.
Preps To Buy:
- Reinforced doors and locks. (There
is only 1 ” of wood protecting you in normal door locks.)
- Barred windows or European-style
security/storm shutters.
- Place thorny bushes or plants around windows or
near vulnerable areas of the home.
- If possible, create a barrier from
approaching vehicles.
- Put a peep hole in the door.
- Add a bolt and chain to the door.
- Infrared (IR) floodlights to
illuminate the property (These can be motion-sensor activated).
- Solar garden lighting can also be
an inexpensive way to illuminate areas outside the home.
- Fence the entire property, if it is
not done so already.
- A gate at the front of the driveway
that has spikes at the top to prevent someone from jumping over the fence.
- Cameras placed strategically around
the home and near the entry points of the home can also deflect an
intruder.
- Create a safe room or vault to
where a family can go to evade their attackers.
- Buy a gun and know how to use it.
Action Items:
- Walk around the perimeter of your
home and see where the vulnerable areas are.
- Make necessary changes to the
outside of the home by bulking up on security
layers.
- Contact a security expert or friend
in the police department and see if they can provide you with additional
advice.
- If it is a good fit with your
family, look into purchasing a firearm or going to a concealed handgun
course.
- Create a neighborhood watch
program.
Week 24 of 52:
Water Preparedness (List 2)
Never can enough be said about water purification and quality water sources during an emergency. One of the reasons I am placing so much emphasis on potable water is because improper drinking water is one of the leading causes of death in third-world countries. It is also one of the four most likely ways to die in a SHTF scenario. That being said, we must take steps to have water on hand for cooking, cleaning ourselves and ensuring that our households are properly sanitized. Learn more about how to properly disperse of waste and how to create a sanitation kit.
When water is unavailable, we must trust in the skills and knowledge we have amassed. One essential skill is knowing how to properly treat water. Here are two videos you can watch to create a Homemade Water Distiller and a Solar Powered Water Distiller.
Those of you who do not have access to natural water sources will need to be more clever at finding water in an emergency situation. Knowing the hidden water sources in your home can help you find immediate water (for short time use) when you need it the most. Many preppers use some of the following methods of having additional water on hand during emergencies:
- Freeze ice cubes and place them
into zip-loc bags to melt when the electricity goes off.
- Use plastic soda cans filled with
the treated water.
- Use emergency bath tub water storage containers
to fill with water.
- Collecting rain water in plastic containers
or water barrels.
Further, those that have wells on their property with electric pumps may want to consider an alternative hand or solar pump to have on hand during disasters where the electricity is out. Hand pumps such as Flojak pumps are very popular amongst preppers and would be a solid investment for those of you needing a non-electric pump for your well.
Having multiple ways to treat water will ensure that you are able to drink clean water during times that the water supply may be contaminated or turned off. Further, having potable water will ensure that your family has what they need to survive and thrive.
Preps To Buy:
- Collapsible 2-gallon water
containers (as many as you think your family needs)
- 1-2 Bath tub storage – This is a large food
grade plastic container that holds up to 65 gallons of water and fits
convenienctly into your tub.
- Water filtration system – Big Berkey Water
Filtration Sytems are, by far a great investment for your
preparedness foundation. As for pocket water filters nothing comes close
to the Katadyn Pocket Microfilter. It has a
20-year warranty and can filter up to 13,000 gallons of water. All in a
compact size for your bug out bags. Also, the life straw also has some great reviews and
would be in your best interest to check it out. It removes 99.9% of
waterborne bacteria, 99.9% waterborne protozoan parasites, and will filter
approximately 264 gallons of water.
- Purchase extra filters for any
water filtration systems
- Water purification tablets – my
family has stocked up on micropur tablets, but there are a host of other
purification tablets out there. These tablets are great to carry in your
bug out bags, evacuation vehicles and even to use on camping trips.
Action Items:
- Have at least 7 days of water
stored up. Remember: 1 gallon of water per person/per day.
- Ensure that you have water
purification systems for the home and bug out bag. This gives you a back
up for your back up.
- Start practicing water conversation
in your home.
- Learn some alternative ways to
collecting water.
5) 110 Rules of Civility &
Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation by George Washington
#46 – Take all Admonitions thankfully in
what Time or Place Soever given but afterwards not being culpable take a Time
& Place convenient to let him him know it that gave them.
#47 – Mock not nor Jest at any thing of
Importance break [n]o Jest that are Sharp Biting and if you Deliver any thing
witty and Pleasant abstain from Laughing thereat yourself.
#48 – Wherein you reprove Another be
unblameable yourself; for example is more prevalent than Precepts.
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