New Y2K articles not yet published

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I have written 2 more articles for my website, but they will not be posted to it for some days. The Food one is 2x the length of the version currently on my site; the other one is totally new. I am posting them here for those people who find some usefulness in my writings (pollyannas, there is nothing here you will like, so you should leave now). If I have made any errors of fact (not interpretation), please bring them to my attention. www.y2ksafeminnesota.com Necessary Action Summary

This whole Y2K thing could have been prevented. We need never have gotten into the situation we are now in. The first few drops of what will be a terrible flood of disruptions to the systems that enable our current lives are already falling in the form of isolated but often mysterious and intractable cyber failures. We do not know anywhere near all the particulars about what will happen nor how long specific effects will last. What in my opinion can be stated with certainty at this point (6/20/1999) are the following:

1) Y2K is coming. 2) The date is now far too close to be prevented. 3) It will be very bad. 4) Its direct effects have a high probability of lasting a long time in much of the world. 5) Many consequences of the effects of Y2K on the society we live in have substantial potential to threaten those people closest to you. 6) If you could take action to better the likelihood of your loved ones coming out the other side of all of this onrushing chaos/famine/disorder alive, healthy, and with reasonable prospects for the future, you would surely want to do it. You unquestionably are bound by the obligations of duty and honor to those you call family to do this. 7) The requirements of this proposed action are largely understood. 8) You don't have anywhere close to all of the year to provision and protect your family against the effects of Y2K. 9) You must successfully complete all of the critical aspects of your preparation activities before any of the following inevitable phenomena begin to seriously interfere with your ability to do them: a) The direct effects of Y2K and the other associated effects not based primarily on subsequent human reactions (GPS rollover, 9/9/1999 EOF problems, solar storms, etc.). b) Widespread public panic before most Y2K direct effects proper hit. These will have the primary effect of drastically, immediately, and permanently (in the time remaining before Y2K fully hits) reducing availability and raising prices for critical survival items, ranging from long-term storage food to rural housing. It will likely have two other effects. Panic will surely accompany virtually overnight massive increases in public awareness of the subject, thus making preparedness-related activities more difficult to keep inconspicuous. This panic may also be expected to initiate a fall in demand for products and services that will be viewed (largely correctly) as irrelevant to Y2K survival. Examples of the latter include new motor vehicles, most expensive recreation, and numerous items/activities listed in my "Finding Y2K Prep Time" article. If you are counting on business activity in those areas supporting your preparations into late 1999, you may be unemployed or out of business with critical preparations still undone, before the economy as a whole is in serious trouble. c) Government action will also surely interfere with survival item availability, using the extensive (and often unnecessary) rationing of food that was imposed in the U.S. during WWII as some indication of how they might act. I doubt very much that an individual would legally be able to purchase an entire truckload of wheat in October. Some interference with movement/employment choice for IT professionals can be expected, especially mainframe programmers. Note that currently certain USAF personnel with critical specialties are not being allowed to leave government service as their terms of enlistment expire; this may very well be extended to other military people as well later in 1999. A number of military servicemen have already been recently quietly encouraged to stockpile at least a month's supply of food and move their families onto military bases, presumably to discourage desertions in early 2000. Some controls over residence/employment of certain non-IT civilians may be put in place as well before 2000; police, medical, and utilities workers are probably most at risk, especially in/near major population centers. If you or any member of your household is a member of any of these categories, you may have less time than the general public to make your preparations. This is due to needing to change/leave employers to ones that are in safer locations and that are less likely to use legal force to keep you from leaving your workplace and going to your family when things start to get worse fast later this year.

Task List for the Y2K-Preparer

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it covers the main critical areas. If you have taken care of all of these, you will be ahead of >99% of the U.S. population in your readiness for the wide variety and severity of the changes/events in the world as it now exists. I have written a number of articles already on this website on some of these topics, and will attempt to provide at least a summary for every subject on this list in the near future.

Food Water Storage Water Treatment Alternate Heat/Light/Power Avoiding Being Looted/Injured by Other People Medical Needs Sanitation (trash, garbage, wastewater, bodily wastes) Personal Hygiene Mental Health Communications Financial Bartering and Other Means of Exchange in Post-1999 Children and Y2K Continuing Education Protective Measures Versus Non-Local Events (war, terrorism, nuclear reactor meltdowns) Relationships Survival Reference Library (obtaining it and using it) Understanding and Adapting to Changes in Society Miscellaneous Working Towards a Better Future For Your Family

Food

You will need to plan on requiring little or no food that people outside your household have any role in providing for a long time (my estimate is a minimum of 19 months). So much has been said by other people on this subject, I believe I have only a modest amount to contribute. The points I would add/emphasize are:

1) Absolutely go hog-wild on stockpiling in this category. It is one area in which you unquestionably need preparation. Guns, gold, and medical care are maybes; this is a definite.

2) Set up a balanced plan designed for years of little outside food availability, but in addition, also emphasize those materials that give the biggest bang for the buck if you have to rely on your stored food beyond your expectations. My answer for this is to have extra wheat (under $100/person/year) and multivitamin/mineral pills. I honestly think that a 25,000 lb. truckload of wheat (>50 person/years of supply) per household of four people is a reasonable purchase; it's only about $1500, after all.

3) Use of regular refrigeration and freezing will probably not be realistic options for most people. Generators/windmills (for electrical generation) are expensive, and have other disadvantages; both increase your visibility to looters (noise for generators, visibility at distance for windmills, electric light risks being seen at night, and fuel runs out for generators, which are < 40% efficient at energy conversion in any event). Propane-powered units with HUGE amounts of fuel storage may be an option for the well-to-do. However, nothing says you cannot take advantage of your local conditions for food preservation. If you live in an area with long periods of cool or freezing temperatures, consider paying for fabrication of a large lockable stainless-steel/aluminum box with a hinged lid, and using it outside during appropriate times of the year as a refrigerator/freezer. Arid and predominantly sunny areas are especially easy places to dry fresh meat/fish/fruit/vegetables you may obtain post-1999. Salting meat for preservation is possible without stored salt if you have access to any body of water that is naturally salty (oceans, bays, salt lakes, brine wells).

4) I do not think that most freeze-dried foods (of types not commonly seen in regular grocery stores) have a legitimate major role in most people's food storage planning, increasingly true even for wealthy people. This is because A) the expense is so high compared to do-it-yourself plans, and B) availability is tough and worsening. There are two exceptions to this; one is to have a few highly nutritious vegetables in this form not really available otherwise in a form that is able to survive freezing and loss of power to freezers/refrigerators. Broccoli, asparagus, and green peas are examples of this. The other exception is holidays; for morale purposes, even if it's only 3 or 4 times in a year, you should try to have freeze-dried meals of the kind of fare your family is accustomed to eating in restaurants.

5) Mix all of your dried beans together for amino acid complementation.

6) Spread out consumption of foodstuffs that help complete amino acid combinations over as many meals as possible; this refers emphatically to meat, fish, milk, soybeans, and to a lesser extent to dried beans.

7) Don't forget the essential fatty acids; this is another reason to have at least some meat in your diet on a continuing basis, even if it is only one small can of sardines/tuna packed in oil and one can of corned beef total per family of four per week. Flaxseed oil is one of the better vegetable oil sources for aiding in this area of nutrition , although olive oil is reputed to resist oxidation rancidity better than most in the pure form. (Try to select oils with preservatives, all else being equal). Solid shortening such as Crisco has preservatives so that it will last an extremely long time; unfortunately, its solidity (like any hydrogenated oil) indicates it is relatively low in the most desirable FAs, as well as being less desirable with respect to cardiac health issues. Soybean and corn oils are of moderate use for the FA concern. Note that all liquid vegetable oils can be expected to become rancid in under two years, so having alternate supplies of oils will eventually be needed if Y2K effects on food availability goes on long enough (growing sunflower seeds, eating fresh nuts, getting more fresh meat, using animal fats, etc.). Also remember that children have needs for more fats in their diets than adults, and apportion accordingly. This is especially true for those younger than age 13 if nonobese.

8) Ration all food except grains and all beverages except water from the beginning, and have security measures in place to ensure this is successful (locks, etc.). If you do not have lockable doors on your kitchen and basement, installing them would be an extremely good idea if you will have any adults of less than unusually high willpower or any children in your household when Y2K hits. This probably sounds a bit extreme, but consider the lack of success most overweight people have with reducing diets before you dismiss this idea as of little use.

9) Eat all of the fresh vegetables you can get, especially naturally dark green ones and some yellow/orange ones. Note that certain plants such as celery and lettuce have so little food value that they should be considered part of the sawdust family.

10) The internal organs in animals are where the vitamins are.

11) Start getting used to whole wheat bread, powdered milk, mixed beans, etc., now.

12) Find spices that will make staples more palatable (cocoa for powdered milk, garlic & boullion for beans/rice dishes, etc.). 13) Remember that all sorts of things are edible in extremis, such as inner tree bark, boiled leather, the white grubs found under fallen trees, and the like. Monkey brains are still eaten in Asia, as are domestic dogs. American aborigines were known to eat field mice during famines. If you desperately need food, then availability, safety, and nutritive value outweigh whether or not it tastes good.

14) There can be no wasting of food. Throwing out half a plate of bean & rice casserole that is edible should be greeted with the same enthusiasm and lasting approval that getting into a fender-bender while driving Dad's car used to receive.

15) Feeling hungry is not always a sufficient reason to eat; not taking in enough calories to sustain health (not necessarily weight) is. A third of U.S. adults are obese, which will make unairconditioned summers possibly life-threatening and certainly more miserable than necessary for many; losing substantial weight is a desirable event for many people. The idea that discomfort is not necessarily a justification for relief is likely to be tough for the pampered set to accept and adjust to during the days ahead. 16) Most canned goods are water-packed. These types of cans are subject to rupture from freezing and subsequent spoilage in at least the northern 3/5 of the U.S. Storage of water-packed canned goods during northern winters involves ensuring keeping them from ever being exposed even once to temperatures below their freezing point for a sufficient length of time to freeze. Inexpensive dehydrated foods are best, although oil-packed cans are worth counting on to some extent.

17) Horsemeat ends up very tough if you put it directly into a frying pan; better to boil it some first. I read this years ago in All Quiet On The Western Front; hope you never need to use this bit of information.

18) When food is very scarce, be very suspicious of people with ground (and only ground) meat for sale. During the seige of Leningrad during World War II, much human flesh was sold to the unsuspecting by this route. You don't much want to eat rat, tularemic rabbit, or other unsafe meat, either, and this is a particularly likely route for unscrupulous types to sell these materials.

19) If a rabbit has white spots on its organs, especially the liver, you don't want to eat it. There is too much chance of it having tularemia, a disease that makes the meat unsafe to eat. Also, if the animal was listless or hopped only once before you shot/trapped it, let it be -- don't even touch it.

20) If you find yourself subsisting for a time on a diet dominated by meat, you will have to have a source of fats or you will suffer from serious digestive upsets. A common scenario in pioneer/far-North (e.g. Alaska) explorer days was for rabbits (which are low in fat) to be all they could find in quantity, and to be desperately searching for a bear (which can have fatty meat) to kill to end their "rabbit diarrhea". 21) If you are going to do any gardening (a good way to get fresh vegetables at least part of the year after Y2K hits), you REALLY should till the part of your property you expect to garden on THIS year, before the ground freezes; breaking sod with a shovel is not my idea of a really good time, and using a powered tilling device to break the ground this year (when electricity/fuel are widely available) will help limit forced use of the shovel method. If you have access to a considerable area for gardening on your property adjoining your Y2K house (3/4 acre or more), consider hiring a nearby farmer to perform this service for you, ideally mixing in manure/fertilizer/pH-adjustment chemicals/other materials at the same time. While I'm on this subject, immediately stop using persistent pesticides and fertilizers (e.g., dried sewage plant products) not intended for food plants on that part of your property, and purchase some nonhybrid (heirloom) vegetable seeds. The hybrid seeds mainly used in modern agronomy are not stable over multiple generations (holding some of the harvest back for seed to replant next year doesn't work well, and they worsen with each succeeding generation). If you are going to go to the effort of setting up gardening at all, you might as well have seeds capable of providing your family with food over many years. Lastly, vegetables should be your main concern for gardening; grain is too cheap and stores long-term so easily (IF you have a grinder) that it is better simply stockpiled.

22) You have GOT to grind most grains to avoid health problems (diarrhea, etc.). Since grains ground into flour do not keep as well as unground material, you will have to have a way to accomplish this. Rice does not need grinding, and neither do beans/peas/nuts. Corn is a borderline case; if it is unground but cooked to softness, it won't hurt you even in quantity, (some minor effects), but you will probably waste much of its nutritive value. Wheat emphatically needs grinding, and barley/oats/rye even more so (some special techniques are usually used for the last three). A rather coarse grind is generally sufficient for adults accustomed to it; people of extreme youth/age or in poor health will need further indulgence in this matter.

23) One aspect of which foods to stockpile seems to either not be remembered at all, or to be given far too high a priority. That is the health aspect of foods aside from their proportions of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fats, etc. This includes the amount and type of fiber (water-soluble or insoluble), and the antioxidants/cancer-risk/cardiovascular disease-risk decreasing chemicals found in foods such as purple grape juice, green tea, and tomato sauce/paste. These chemicals are not to be blown out of proportion in importance, and certainly 95% of food health claims that your doctor would not tell you (eat fewer calories, less saturated fat, etc., etc.) are completely bogus. However, there are a few such food chemicals that there is objective evidence for some usefulness, and there is some wisdom to remembering them when selecting your lower-priority storage foods. Also, there actually is some difference between some vitamins that were synthesized by Man and those derived from plants and animals (biologic-origin). For example, certain vitamins are synthesized as mixtures of equal parts of the two "mirror images" that these molecules may form (racemic mixtures to anyone who took Organic Chemistry), while we only use one of those two types. Think right- and left-handed vitamins; we only use one of them, and that type is the only one you will find in vitamins of biologic-origin. Basically, try hard to find vitamin pills that have biologic-origin vitamins (the ones where they just dumped synthetic vitamins in with microbes for a while still count as synthetic). Look for rose hips for C, yeast for some B vitamins, etc. on the label. Synthetic multivitamins are still well worth having if you do not have biologic-origin vitamins, however. 24) The niacin in corn in its natural state is not particularly available for human nutrition to prevent pellagra. There is a process widely used in Latin America involving treatment with a base that makes it much more usable. Consider stocking up a few months worth of corn meal that is intended to be used in making corn tortillas. If it has some Spanish on the bag, you probably have the right stuff. It is actually easy to find; large supermarkets in urban areas are good places to look. You may also want to look into finding out what exactly is done to corn to make its niacin more available (to possibly do it yourself in the future), as corn is cheap and easy to get (buy 50# bags of raw popcorn), and niacin is a nutrient likely to be in short supply next year for many people. 25) Consider planting some fruit and nut trees. They mostly will not produce significantly for several years, but may be thought of as partial additional insurance against the effects of Y2K on food availability lasting for multiple years. The main effort they require is discouraging birds, squirrels, etc., from eating their production. This may be done by use of two concentric fences (too wide for squirrels to jump) around your orchard that one or more dogs have free run in, netting over the trees, scarecrows, hanging devices to startle animals such as disposable aluminum pie plates, placing traps and snares to catch intruder animals, etc. One of the best approaches is to put an adolescent (usually a male, ages 10-17) or older idle person in charge of shooting anything that enters the orchard when it has fruit on its branches. Depending on their maturity and the typical animal intruder size, either a good-quality air rifle or a .22 caliber rifle would be appropriate. In addition to protecting the orchard, this last idea has other good aspects as well. It provides nondrudgery useful employment for a member of the household, may yield significant fresh meat for the table, and keeps a set of friendly eyes outside watching at least part of your property, useful during these coming uncertain times.

26) The most important lessons on the subject of food during famines from Sorokin's book you must manage to sear into your long-term memory are these: a) The government will immediately confiscate all significant supplies of food they can find. This is so common in history as to be routine; do not be remotely surprised by this. b) People without food will rapidly and completely convince themselves they have a right to take the food of the better-prepared by force, often no matter how moral they were during pre-crash times. Therefore, you MUST hide (primarily by burial) most of your food. Given the phenomenon of the ground freezing hard here in Minnesota, you'll need to do this BEFORE winter this year. Do it in containers with no metal so that metal detectors will be unable to assist looters in robbing you. (Take the metal handles off plastic buckets before burial.) Consider poking a gross of large galvanized nails a few inches into the ground all over your property to further hinder such people, and poke some into the ground on a neighbor's property (at 4:00 A.M. in unpleasant weather) to further confuse looters with metal detectors. Bury some food OFF your property, and include some critical nonfood items such as a spare grain grinder, vitamins, water treatment stuff, lighting sources, gold, and a firearm with ammunition.

-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), June 21, 1999

Answers

I have consistently agreed with the tone of your info, and appreciate your contributions. I would, however, appreciate more info on your comment that select military personnel are encouraged to move on base and acquire some basics. Was aware of ground human flesh for sale during Leningrad seige, but believe perpetrators were captured and hung.

-- A. Hambley (a.hambley@usa.net), June 21, 1999.

I saw that article on families moving "on-base" and stocking up a few weeks ago. Wish I had the link... Anita, oh researching one.... Well?

-- Dennis (djolson@pressenter.com), June 21, 1999.

MinnesotaSmith,

What's the URL for your website?

Thanks,

-- Cheryl (Transplant@Oregon.com), June 21, 1999.


My site is at www.y2ksafeminnesota.com. Thank you for your comments, everybody. Some other cannibalism episodes: Donner party, the Andes plane crash a few years ago, Uganda in Idi Amin's time, the islands C. Columbus first landed on, etc. Sorokin's book "Man and Society in Calamity" has 1 in 10,000 people will actively hunt humans historically when famine is prolonged; I would put that as a minimum... Don't remember the original on the base reloc info; GN's site? Others have seen it, too. Yours in preparation.

-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), June 22, 1999.

Minnesota,

Thanks for the really useful information.

Regarding corn needing a base that makes it much more usable. This is correct. Corn, unlike some other grains, must be complemented with an appropriate base to be really useful. I believe that the Latin Americans use lime (the mineral, not the citrus fruit) in ALL of their tortillas and other ground-corn foods. Somehow the lime makes the corn usable to the body.

Also I believe that some corns need lime less than other corns.

Question for anyone in the know: is any lime useful? including the white stuff used to mark a volleyball court? or can you purchase a food-grade lime?

-- Rick (rick7@postmark.net), June 22, 1999.



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