This IS the Collapse—Prepper Manifesto

Project: Pioneer #72, January 26, 2025 Sunday 9am

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

It’s hard times here in pioneer-land. The extreme cold will not relent, causing a ton of daily battles for Giavana, Pia, and me. Now that we’ve made our big decision, the lifestyle seems to revolt against us. The sub-zero temps freeze our door closed overnight and throughout the day. Attempts to open it have resulted in a broken panel that now needs repair. Sinks have to be dripped overnight to prevent our water sources and tanks from freezing solid. However, if the drip isn’t just right, our grey tanks will fill overnight and spill out onto the floor—a flood. A few drips from the overhead AC unit caused a panic—roof leak, or just condensation? It would be a bitch to get up on that curved, slippery roof in this cold to try to fix that. When we move to our new location, White House is going to the RV spa to get inspected and fixed up so she’s ready to bug out if necessary.

We had to reflectix all the windows, so there’s no sunlight, we’re blacked-in every day in this modern covered wagon due to the Siberian cold. Meanwhile, outside our cozy little Hobbit-hole, America is being dismantled before our eyes. TBH, it sucks. But, we’re tough. We’re going to pull through. America likely will not, which escalates our preparations. As promised, we’re seeing a flood-the-zone shock and awe campaign of horror to overwhelm you, get you to give up, tune out, and put your head in the sand. Please don’t do that.

Several key areas of justification for this thesis are below, along with what we’re doing to prepare for it. Again, I’m not doing this for click-bait or to scare you. I’m hoping you’ll take heed, follow our prepping practices, and share this vital information with others.

We’re All Going to Get Sick and Die

The good news is Giavana and I have now closed another very important hole in our preparations. I’ve commented that we have comprehensive and solid medical supplies, including good quality tourniquets, anti-clotting materials, etc. I’ve posted links in the past to what we bought. We just ordered another case of good quality NIOSH N95 masks.

The big gap has been prescription only medical supplies. We’ve accelerated refills of all our scripts in order to stock up on those. Those are for problems we already have. The exposure is for things that might happen. We wanted our own little ER with antibiotics, antifungals, and more—the good stuff. We found Jace due to many rave reviews in the prepper forums we frequent, and our order is on the way. Whew. Problem solved, just as the anti-medical, anti-science regime is dismantling our public health and medical research infrastructure. WARNING: Be very careful about self-administering any prescription drugs. You can die. Giavana is an RN. We have several good prepper medical books to guide us (I’ve linked to those in the past posts). Jace also provides a free guidebook PDF. This tactic is strictly for emergency life or death conditions.

In the first short few days of this dystopian new regime, our public health agencies have already been silenced—not allowed to let the public know about health emergencies or prevention. This, with several deadly potential pandemics on the rise. Remember when Trump said that testing was bad, because the numbers make him look bad, so he secretly sent all our test kits to his friend Putin? How many Americans died because of that idiotic move? He has paused science, halted cancer and other important medical research here in the United States, but disease marches on. Disease don’t care. If disease could be happy, disease would be ecstatic. Anyway, no more bird flu updates, and we'll never see the next pandemic coming.

This is how you get to a place like North Korea, where all public-facing communication, run by the government, assure you that all is well and everyone is happy. Meanwhile, all around you, people are miserable, sick, and starving to death. Trump has also eliminated Biden’s legislation to provide lower prescription drug prices to families and seniors. Big pharma and all those lobbyists are ecstatic as well. Critical clinical trial studies at the National Institutes of Health hospital have been stopped. Those ill, hopeful patients will be sent home, their dreams crushed by this evil. The important studies lost.

Mother Nature is Coming for Us

As well, we’re now throwing fuel on the climate crisis. Thumbing your nose at Mother Nature has never worked out well. It’s colder where we are than it is in Siberia. There’s snow in Florida. The oceans are boiling. California is burning. Tornadoes are springing up unexpectedly all over America and wiping out entire towns. This was a primary factor in our recent decision to keep our White House RV covered wagon loaded and ready to run, but move to a sticks and bricks small apartment. Given some notice, we could have hitched up the RV and fled, but sometimes you get no notice—such as with earthquakes, tornadoes. As well, roads will immediately be jammed.

We’ll have options. Options are good. Because Trump has announced he wants to eliminate FEMA, so if your town is wrecked, you’re on your own. Insurers aren’t insuring. No help is coming. Prepping has never been more important. NOAA is also being canceled, so as with the next pandemic, you’ll likely never see the next cataclysmic climate event coming. Trump, his family, and his oligarchs will likely be safe far away, while you and your family burn or drown. I’m sorry to be harsh, but people better wake up. I don’t want this for anyone. I benefit in no way from scaring anyone. I’m trying to help. I’m trying to save people from this horror to come.

I’m Hungry Mama, Ain’t Nuthin’ to Eat

On top of the food shortages caused by climate disasters and bird flu, the idiotic decision to start rounding up 70% of our farm workers and send them away will be cataclysmic to our food supply. It’s already happening, as they’re not showing up for work out of fear. Food is rotting out there in the fields <checks food prices Trump said he’d fix on day one…>. At the same time, we’re alienating and threatening the allies that we buy food from. In response, they are rightfully threatening to cut us off, just when we need them most.

We’re going into growing our own stuff mode. We’ll report back on what products we select after our research. As well, with the new tactic we’ll have much more room to stock up on MREs, freeze-dried prepper stores, canned goods, water, ammo, and much more.

War and Draft Cards are Coming

Desperation leads to war. Given the above, we’re going to be big desperate. Got loved ones, male or female, ages 14-40? There’s a good chance they’ll be drafted at some point in the coming years into Generalissimo Trump’s meat grinder war. You can take it to the bank his kids, Musk’s kids, will safely be far away.

This is much more likely as of yesterday, when our Congress put an alcoholic, abusive, cheating, party boy news personality in charge of our nuclear stores, trillion dollar budget, and three million people in the military and Defense Department as a whole. The guy who has only run two micro-businesses in his life, and shamed, bankrupted, and ran both into the ground. He’s there to do whatever the Fuhrer says to do, which is incredibly dangerous to all of us and those we love.

To make this scenario worse, we’ve alienated our allies. We are a pariah to the rest of the civilized world. Our enemies, who Trump stupidly thinks are his friends, are salivating.

Due to the possibility of war and nuclear or EMP strikes we’re looking at Geiger counters, radiation suits, and building or buying faraday cages for our sensitive critical electronics. We already have very high quality gas masks and CBRN filters. I mentioned that I’m working on my ham radio license. We’re also looking to add a shotgun to our arsenal. It’s a very good means of close-range self defense.

Yes, We Broke

Last night, Trump illegally fired the inspectors general in charge of reporting fraud, waste, and abuse of our government agencies. Of course, that’s so the fraud, waste, and abuse of he and his minions are not reported. Last time he was in charge, these agencies reported their excessive and egregious spending on furniture sets, travel for their families, and so much more. This will result in massive additional deficit spending, but of course, it will never be reported. We’ll never again know reliably how much in debt we are, until our creditors swoop in and take us over without a shot being fired. They're using military aircraft to send a few dozen undocumented people at a time back, at a million dollars a flight cost to taxpayers, just for show, when there are far, far less expensive options.

Trump is already demanding the Fed lower interest rates to make him look good, and make people like him who live on debt more rich. The results of this kind of intervention will be catastrophic to our economy, especially combined with the inflation the tariffs will cause. The stock markets are already at a red-warning level bubble. The amount of job loss could be irreparable.

Of course, most of this is being done out of hatred for anyone who isn’t white, straight, male, wealthy, and Christian (fake or otherwise). Much of our government is being eviscerated to pay for the massive tax cuts for billionaires to come, and for Trump and his oligarchs to plunder the rest. See the chart below. 95% of us will pay more taxes under Trump’s new tax legislation, and it goes straight to the top 1%.

Get to the Point, Already

The point is, the collapse is here. It’s happening right in front of us. That frog pot is boiling now, the kettle on the stove is whistling loudly. The time is here. The battle is lost. I don’t want to hear about mid-terms. Do you really think, given the rapidity with with he’s shutting everything down, and likelihood of war, he’s going to allow an election that will likely curtail or take away his power? Please. Cue up the martial law and state of emergency, along with “perhaps we’ll have an election when things get a little better, someday.”

Narrator: We won’t. Ever. It’s over. We’ve lost this country we love, after so many died fighting for it. He will appoint two very young, hard right, corrupt, Supreme Court judges to lock this misery for the rest of our lifetimes, as well as our kids and grandkids. And, perhaps pack the court while they’re at it, as the Democrats should have done early in Biden’s or Obama’s term, if they had learned to play ball.

Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions, You Say?

There are solutions all throughout this post, as well as our others over a year and a half.

We’ve talked a lot, especially recently, about ways to fight back. First, protect yourself and your family. Prepare. That should be priority number one. Then, if you can, fight back. Disavow the runaway corporate greed that’s driving all this. Here’s a good guide to doing that.

Screw Amazon and their expensive Prime that now has you paying them to watch commercials. Go back to free safe havens like your wonderful local library. You can rent movies, games, ebooks, audiobooks for free from them over the internet. Going there is a quiet, peaceful safe haven. Netflix just announced a massive profit, and along with it, a big price hike. That has to upset you. If you check, you’ll likely find that you get a ton of free live channels for news, sports, etc as well as free movies included and built into your TV. If not, a Roku or Google (former Chromecast) HDMI device will include them.

Patronize local businesses, thrift stores, Habitat for Humanity ReStores and Salvation Army stores to buy good estate-sale stuff on the cheap and help those charities. Disavow convenient services like GrubHub, Slice, Teleflora, 800Flowers, and others that rob small businesses of the little profits they get. Call small businesses like restaurants and florists and order directly.

There’s also the General Strike movement. I talked about the Secession of the Plebeians. This is our turn. Sign up and get on the list. Hit them where it hurts, in their wallets. We can all take action on the same day, nationwide.

Our Future

Our year and a half pioneer adventure has been an incredible learning experience, and very good practice. We know how to survive with very little, and in very close quarters. We know one thing for sure, it’s harder in the extreme cold, as well in the extreme heat. This means we may look for getaway locations that have more moderate weather, if we have to bug out. We’re still looking at eco communities and villages. Banding together and sharing resources is a good survival technique. Isolation means eventual death—somebody please tell our dear leader. With our move, we'll have a gym within steps. I rarely mention one of the most important things you can do as a prepper—be fit. This life isn't easy, stay in shape to survive hard times.

Giavana and I are trying to stay mentally healthy by focusing on the things ahead. We’re excited for the move. My angel needs and deserves a nice therapeutic bathtub. I need my music and books near me. We’re hitting the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore and Salvation Army thrift stores for the basic used furniture we need. As always, we’ll fix it up and sell it for a profit when we’re done with it. We went on a date night to a nice local concert last night. We’re leaving the country soon, to hopefully finalize our second citizenship. We have a wedding coming in the spring. I have a countdown timer to the usual spring and summer festivals and our beach vacation, if I can dare to dream they’ll happen. Above all, we have each other and wonderful, loving little Pia. Our kids and grandkids seem to be OK. It’s hard to ask for more, right now.

I find myself looking forward and backward quite a bit lately. I’ve been fascinated with a Life magazine special edition, Jesus: Who Do You Say I Am? and other histories, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s fascinating and informative. History rhymes. We never seem to learn from the past, thus doomed to repeat it. The wheel keeps turning.

We try to watch less news—tuning in during the morning, mid-day, and evenings to keep an eye on things. It’s on but muted while we otherwise play music, so we can watch for that inevitable breaking news banner.

Try not to get down over all this. We know it’s not easy. Stay active. Fight back. Appease worry by prepping to eliminate things that scare you. We’re showing you the way, each and every week.

"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God."—Leviticus 19:33-34

"He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.—Deuteronomy 10:18-19

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”—Matthew 5:7, Jesus, Sermon on the Mount

So, this is where Giavana, Pia, and I are currently in our pioneer journey. Stay tuned! This pioneer journey continues…

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Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

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