These days, Americans trust in news sources is lower than its ever been.  (Assuming I can believe the American press institute and the Pew Research Center ;)). Ratings thru fear mongering and appealing to the lowest of intellect, watering down real news, reporting fluff instead of hard hitting news stories, obvious political bias’.  Why is it so hard to find an outlet you can rely on to provide fair, balanced, accurate and complete news?

With a thousand (thousands? 10s of thousands?) different “news” sources on the internet all slanting it to support their pet political beliefs or moral imperatives, social media spreading anything like a fact (just check snopes before reposting, would you, please?), the most well known media outlets viewed with skepticism – how can anyone really be informed and be certain the thoughts and feelings and beliefs they develop from their news sources are really substantiated and are worth defending?  And then it’s just fact that most people will believe the “news” that supports the opinions they already hold.

I have avoided news for a while.  I don’t trust much of anything I read or hear from any of the major 3 letter networks. Even CNN, who I once felt was an unimpeachable news source has lost my confidence.      It depresses me, both to see the lack of journalistic integrity, and the content that is reported. Another killing, more deaths, disasters, countries approaching war, more evidence that refutes the idea that people are all basically good.

But I don’t like being uninformed.  I don’t like reading this blog or that blog and wondering if that person is as conspiracy nutcase-y as they seem, or do they have a better source of accurate intel.  I’m tentatively news seeking at the Economist, BBC and NPR.  Those are the sources I most trust when researching something specific.

So where do you get your news? Do you trust it?

So I have some things to say, which “real” preppers won’t appreciate.  I’ll just say that this is what I believe.  I’m an intelligent, well-read and moderately educated mid 40’s woman.  I’ve done my own research, seeking out non-profit, non-partisan, and scientific sources.  Of course pretty much everything and anything on the internet is suspect (like every second prepper site quoting Franklin as saying “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail” – He didn’t.  That isn’t even language aligned with the time period.  see franklinpapers.org) because people spew “facts” they read somewhere else, and the next thing you know, its everywhere.  Like a red pen in a load of whites.

I don’t expect to convince anyone who believes differently from me to change their minds, but maybe they will be a little more open to new ideas and actually try to find answers — and not from other conspiracy theory slinging, doomsday ringing folks who already think as they do.  A girl can dream.

Fukuskima – Sure, the radiation is still traveling the ocean and washing up on our shores.  That is true.  But the level recorded is so small (11 bequerels) that a single dental x-ray exposes you to 1000 times more radiation than swimming in the “contaminated” water for a year.

Fluoride in your water is safe.  Even desirable.  It doesn’t have the effect of Prozac.  Really.  Prozac does not contain fluoride.  It contains Fluoxetine, which is formed of multiple (5 I believe) different elements, including fluoride.  Chemical bonds being what they are and the way compounds are formed — well, can you breath underwater since it contains O (oxygen)?  You aren’t being drugged into submission via fluoride in your water.  That’s just crazy.

RFID chips do not cause cancer.  Neither do cell phone towers.  Maybe if you spent a lot of time CLOSE to it and PARALLEL to it, your risk of cancer might be greater.  But even directly under it, you are exposed to more radiation from your cell phone in your pocket than the cell tower above you which does not scatter down.

Vaccinations are safe.  They do not cause autism or make you sick.  If you don’t vaccinate, you are endangering the lives of others.  Please don’t come around me or my family.  Thanks.

GMOs.  sigh.  So many educated people I know even rail against them.  We’ve been practicing “genetic modification” of our food for as long as gardeners have been trying to cross-breed and keep meticulous records to breed hardiness in food, to make it more resistant to bugs, etc.  Farmers have been doing it, trying to remove aggression in certain breeds, or improve the texture of their wools, and so on.  Just because it took many generations to get it done doesn’t change what was happening at the cellular and genetic level.   OK, so now scientists can go in and gene-splice and get those results in an instant.  So what?  Doesn’t make them DANGEROUS.  Other issues with Monsanto and their ilk?  Squeezing out the small farmer?  Making seeds infertile so you have to buy a new bunch every time?  Cramming too much processed, unhealthy crap on the shelves? Possibly.  But there’s really no evidence that eating the actual crop of their GMOs causes any harm.

Amero?  really?  I can’t even.

There might be a polar shift.  The geologic record shows that hundreds of pole reversals have occurred throughout Earth’s history; they happen when patches of iron atoms in Earth’s liquid outer core become reverse-aligned, and eventually they overwhelm the original iron atoms. But the landscape won’t shift.  There will not be disaster as continents leap to the opposite side of the globe.  Our compasses would point in a different direction.  And can you feel the geomagnetic field now?  No?  That’s right, so why would you feel it if it were the other direction?  During a transition, its possible that the magnetic field that protects us from excessive solar radiation could weaken.  IF there were a massive solar event (CME) at that  time, and it was aimed right at us, MAYBE we could see some EMP like effects.  Given the length of time that would likely take, it’s not impossible. But even if the field becomes very weak, at the Earth’s surface we are shielded from radiation by the atmosphere.  The fact is, we most likely would not notice any significant change from such a reversal.

Obama is not evil.  And the world doesn’t view him as a terrible leader and look down on American because of it.  Independent polls, conducted by non-profit, non-partisan groups indicate that some really like him (India), some don’t like him at all (Russia), but for the most part, they just don’t have strong feelings one way or the other.  The slight majority feel that he is an effective leader.  And that’s pretty much like any other president we have had.

Alien Invasion?  Never say never, its a great big world out there, but the odds of encountering alien life overwhelmingly suggest we would find something more like bacteria before we ever found another form evolved into high intelligence.

Zombie Apocalypse?  Haha

There may be world threatening dangers out there.  Cyber attacks on our infrastructure, terrorism, EMP resulting from nuclear detonation or enormous CME.  I could be facing the Big One (earthquake) as I live in the Cascadia Subduction Zone.  Peak Oil Energy could happen in my lifetime.   The research is ongoing and the Jury is still out for me.

I just wish that more people would stop hearing what they want to believe, and do independent research before they spew more nonsense into the ether.  But I guess someone out there might feel that way about my post right now, so who am I to judge?

So what’s on the agenda after this “revelation” crept up on me?  Reading, research, re-reading.  I happen to have a kindle unlimited subscription, and there are tons of ebooks on Amazon about prepping and preparedness and homesteading skills.  Most are just a few dollars, but there are SO MANY of them, and the quality of the information and writing varies GREATLY, so I am quite glad that I could peruse them for “free”.   I also checked out books from the library (I particularly enjoy borrowing ebooks that I can download on Amazon and read with my kindle as well).  And of course, browsed online for more information. I played a lot of web site leapfrog.  Pinterest has lots of great preparedness boards, which would lead me to a site, which would link to another site and so on.

A word of warning — a lot of those sites are fear-mongering.  And then they want you to buy their ultimate prepping information materials.  I am particularly “fond” of the guy claiming his list of 37 must-have items when the SHTF is different, and the best.  He has professional looking videos, and then you get to the punchline.  He wants you to buy his ebooks for ONLY 49.99, and assures you that it normally sells for 200$, but he feels he must “do the right thing” and take a loss to get this information out there.  I found his list of 37 things online.  It’s no different than free lists all over the place.

Most of the sites have product links to their “favorite” supplies.  This water purifier or that survival knife or the freeze dried food kits from over there.  They undoubtedly receive a small amount of referral money if you buy from their sites.  And maybe it IS the best item for you.  Maybe it isn’t.  Research your options.  Don’t click and buy because they’ve managed to convince you the end of the world is nigh.

And those ebooks I read on Amazon? When it comes to “how to prep” or “the beginning prepper” or anything like that – I wouldn’t spend any money on those.  They are almost all the same.  And the information in them is no different than you can get on any prepping site.   They tell you that you need water, food, security, sanitation, medical supplies, communications, backup power and financial security.  They tell you how to calculate your needs and how to store them.  This info is out there on the web, I promise.

The exception I found were books providing information on projects and useful skills.  You give a fish to a man, he eats for a day, but teach him to fish and all that.  For instance, I found The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide to Whole Food on a Half-Price Budget  by Daisy Luther (note this is not an income generating link for me) to be a fairly useful resource, especially if you have no experience building a pantry.  She touches on topics I have researched in the past on frugal living, such as keeping a price book, the various types of pantries (i.e. hardcore bunker pantries, versus our day to day pantry that lets us eat well now on a budget), has not only lists of food to store, but how to store them, and several weeks of menus to eat out of the pantry.  My food storage and cooking skills are beyond what her book offers, so I wouldn’t purchase it to add to my hard copy library (because let’s face it, all the ebooks in the world won’t help if the SHTF and I have no power) but I did end up reading it cover to cover and added a few bits of information to my Emergency Preparedness Notebook (a topic for another day). And it inspired me to FINALLY clean out my pantry, re-organize it and take an inventory.

My pantry looks nothing like this. But a girl can dream 😉

Books on gardening, canning, how to build an outdoor oven, raising backyard chickens, and other homesteading skill books — these can be worth the money where the basic Newbie Prepper books, IMO, are not.  You can find all that skill information online as well.  But unless you want to copy and paste and print it all out, or fully learn the skill NOW, those type of books are ones I will add to my physical library over time.  Borrowing them from the library or through kindle unlimited, several on the same topic, let’s me compare and see which one I want to add to my Amazon wish list to pick up as funds allow.

Finally, don’t visit one site, assume they are all knowing, and leap from there.  Researching for me has taken several months, and its astonishing how much conflicting information there is out there. (One site recommends a gallon of water a day per person.  another says 10 gallons per day — that kind of thing.)  And even when the information is solid, it may not be relevant or appropriate to your situation.  Take your time, don’t get overwhelmed, and then when you have a general idea of how you think things should look, dig deeper.

So my husband thinks I’m in tinfoil hat territory.  My mom has encouraged me to go back to therapy for anxiety.  Why?  Because they think I’m turning into some kind of Doomsday Prepper.  I can’t claim that.  At most, I am prepping to be a prepper.  There’s lots of sites out there that can tell you how to do it, and I am not about that; certainly not now.  Instead I am just starting out and thought I would document a bit of what that looks like.

I don’t know exactly when it dawned on me that something could happen, and I wasn’t ready.

It wasn’t news reports of disasters such as hurricanes Katrina & Sandy, or the tsunami that struck Japan.

It wasn’t the NY Times article on the impending 9.0+ earthquakes due to the Cascadia Subduction (although I am in the PNW, and would be affected by that to the nth degree).  No flu epidemic caused me to panic. Or stories about polar shifts, CMEs and EMPs, North Korean nuclear capacity, or impending economic collapse.

It wasn’t getting mugged and realizing the world was a dangerous place (I wasn’t).

It wasn’t even when we got snowed in for 13 days on especially, unusually brutal winter (and it was mostly just those of us on at the peak of this hilly suburbia neighborhood.  We could only get out on foot, to hike up to the 7-11 a mile or two away to get milk for my daughter’s formula (and for this parenthesis in parenthesis, don’t judge. I couldn’t nurse)).

It wasn’t remembering what it was like when Mt. St. Helens blew up (I was 10) and I was living close enough that we had deep drifts of ash everywhere and it stunk and hurt your eyes and throat.

It wasn’t watching Doomsday Preppers and being infected with paranoia (I never even saw the show until I developed an interest in preparedness and read about it on some web site; then I watched some of the episodes on demand).

I wasn’t raised in this thinking.  I didn’t grow up seeing my parents garden anything, raise anything, can anything.  I don’t think we even had pantries in the homes of my childhood.  Just a cupboard or two of dried and canned goods meant for immediate consumption.

Part of it might be a little bit of worry (paranoia?) about what is happening in my country.  I am halfway convinced if a certain republican candidate takes the presidential election, his dishonest, misogynistic, racist, homophobic and sociopathic actions will set the world against us.  This election season already (rightly) lets the rest of the world look on us as some kind of joke.

Part of it might be that I’m not feeling financially secure right now.  My family has had a more than comfortable life.  My kids don’t really know what it is like to need (or even just want) something and not get it.  But unavoidable large expense after large expense recently has left us with more debt that I am comfortable fielding.

Part of it might be a desire to seek out a bit simplicity in my life. Looking around my home and coming to the realization that we just have too much stuff.  Unnecessary stuff. An urge for a bit of self-sufficiency, a return to simpler times. To make sure I am not raising future consumeriffic self-entitled assholes.

There was no defining moment, no concrete reason.  It just came upon me slowly, like a day that creeps up and it is suddenly morning when you stepped outside with a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the pre-dawn darkness.

I am not a “Prepper”, not yet.  But I do want to be prepared.