California was a good strategic move for us. Here, we will be insulated from most of the worst of the decline Trump will force on our nation. Not all of it by any means. But in many ways, California is kind of its own country and that benefit of insularity and size is certainly a great thing now as we go into a long bleak time of diminution and corruption.
To re-tool something Mencken allegedly said, the electorate voted for this cataclysm and they are going to get it good and hard.
No one will be spared, but being a bit protected is better than nothing.
Any chance you might write about some of the prep you’re doing? I’ve been reading you for quite a few years, on EC, and now here; long enough to trust your judgement on most things, especially this. I have never seriously thought of prepping until now, but now I’m thinking…
It’s always a risk calculation. How much do I want to spend and be inconvenienced vs. the actual risk? It’s like insurance in that it’s still worth having even if you never use it, but going overboard is pointless.
After all that throat-clearing, the main things we’ll be doing is buying very soon all of the electronics and other similar things we might want in the next few years, and anything that is mainly sourced from China especially and East Asia in general. Those are the areas most likely to be affected by war. And in the realm of food/sustenance, we’ll buy enough rice, beans, flour, canned meat and water to last a few weeks and cycle through that over time. So we’re not doing anything too crazy, but enough that if power and logistics take a hit (which is likely in war with China, especially on the West Coast) we won’t starve until some functionality is restored. We’ve also been considering buying a battery to hook into the solar panels on the roof, but that’s a much bigger expense (and complex to implement) so we might not do that. As a compromise, we might buy a large battery pack that doesn’t hook into the existing power in a switching manner but still can run some things for a while.
We’re not buying any weapons or anything like that. It’d be to no purpose. Just some basic prep probably everyone should be doing as a matter of course, if they can afford it.