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Feb. 19, 2021 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:03:28
Situation Update, Feb. 18th, 2021 - TEXAGEDDON: Eyewitness report inside the collapse of Texas
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Alright, I got a special situation update for you from the front lines of the blackouts in Texas.
This is Mike Adams here recording this late at night, nearly midnight on Wednesday the 17th.
So almost the 18th of February.
And I'm going to find a way to get this file...
Uploaded as soon as I can so you can get this information.
The media are not reporting how bad the situation has become in Texas, at least in Central Texas.
So I'm an eyewitness.
I went out today.
I was able to witness things with my own eyes that were just shocking, and I'm going to report that here.
Again, this is all firsthand information with my own two eyes.
I could not believe what I saw.
And of course, we're experiencing now day four of the rolling blackouts in Texas because the power companies did not anticipate this event because it's outside their standard deviations of possibilities.
And so we are now suffering a series of cascading failures of infrastructure.
Where, for example, the power outages are leading to collapse of municipal water systems, and then the power outages are also causing businesses, even power generation companies, To be unable to operate their circulation pumps, so their systems are freezing and pipes are bursting.
And it's, no, it's bad.
I mean, I'm kind of chuckling because I guess ultimately I'm an optimist, but this is as bad as I've ever seen it.
And I lived in South America.
It wasn't this bad.
You know, I lived in a third world developing nation, essentially, and it wasn't this bad.
So here's what's really happening.
I went out today.
The roads are still very bad, still icy.
And those of you who live in northern states, you're like, what's the big deal?
It's just a little bit of snow.
Well, the problem is there are no snow plows in most of Texas.
Except in the very northern areas.
There are no snow plows because there's never any snow, really.
And so there is not even a system of snow plows and snow plow drivers and salt for the roads.
Like those of you who live in Montana, you have a whole system of how to deal with this.
Your city has a system.
Once the snow starts, the snowplow drivers kick into action and they clear the roads.
And everybody's got four-wheel drive vehicles and people are experienced in driving in the snow and so on.
And the snow is not even the problem here.
The problem is the freezing rain.
It's the black ice on the roads.
And people from Texas have no experience driving on black ice.
Now, I'm from the Midwest.
So I have some experience.
Well, you know, grew up driving in the snow and the ice.
So I've been okay.
But a lot of people do not do that.
Even when I was out driving today, people were following me too closely behind me.
Like, hey, people, don't you realize your stopping distance is 10 times longer than normal now?
But people don't get that.
And that's how you end up with these 100 vehicle pileups on Interstate 35, which happened a few days ago.
And people died.
Massive rigs just slamming into passenger vehicles, tossing them into the air like tiddlywinks.
It was insane.
People just got crushed and died.
Again, it's because of the black ice situation.
And so this freezing rain, even when it melts during the day on the roads, and the roads get wet, but then in the evening...
The temperature drops again to like 15 degrees or 5 degrees.
And then it's ice.
And so you have all these accidents.
So emergency services are stressed to the limit.
And as a result of all these accidents then, the normal deliveries that would take place, such as fuel deliveries and grocery deliveries, are not happening.
In fact, UPS and FedEx are not running anything.
At least not in Central Texas.
Because in our case, you know, Health Ranger Store, we ship out packages every day.
Normally, we haven't been able to ship out anything because our drivers actually called us and said, guess what?
There's no service.
UPS has us all at home.
And even at home, they have no power.
So these rolling blackouts are continuing now into the fourth day across Texas.
And people are sleeping in their cars.
They're running their cars all night to have some heat because of the freezing to death in their homes.
And most of the homes in Texas are built for electric heat, and they don't anticipate these sustained cold temperatures that we're experiencing right now.
And so electric heat puts a strain on the grid like you can't believe.
Using electricity to generate heat is a...
Very inefficient and power-hungry concept or activity.
And so everybody's trying to heat their homes.
Boom!
All the power's gone.
So they're having rolling blackouts.
Energy prices have gone through the roof and so on.
In fact, when I was able to get online, I saw an article earlier today that based on current electricity prices in Texas, to charge electricity A Tesla electric car, just to charge it, a full charge, costs $900 worth of electricity.
$900 freaking dollars.
Boy, it's a good time to have a diesel truck, isn't it?
Because diesel's pretty darn affordable right now if you can get it, and that's why it's good to have a big diesel tank like I have, and I've always recommended that.
Store energy on your ranch if you can, or your country property.
Store energy!
Have a propane tank.
Have a diesel tank.
And then have a wood-burning stove.
Those are the things that are saving me right now, I gotta tell you.
Stored energy in the form of diesel and wood and propane.
I was able to take a hot shower for the first time in three days yesterday because of propane.
And I got my water system running again after the pipes had all burst.
But I'll get to that later.
But man, I never thought a hot shower would feel so amazing just to have hot water running over your body.
It's a blessing.
Don't take it for granted.
Because most people in Texas are not getting any kind of shower.
So they're living in their cars.
And they're using gasoline or diesel in their cars and if they haven't stored that fuel then they're running out because what I saw with my own eyes today is the gas stations are out.
Out of fuel.
At least in central Texas.
They're sold out.
There's no more gas because the delivery trucks can't navigate the roads because the roads are too treacherous.
And I was at the grocery store.
It's a long story of why I actually went there, but I thought I could double up on a couple of tasks and I wanted to see for myself what the situation was there.
And I also just, I needed some bananas too.
My banana supply is running a little bit low because I use bananas in my smoothies.
And so I wouldn't have made a trip just for the bananas, mind you, you know.
But I had to go for other reasons, so I decided I'm going to get some bananas.
I walked in.
There's no produce.
I mean, gone.
Gone like a giant vacuum from the sky came in and sucked up all the fresh produce.
There was not a banana to be seen anywhere.
There was no fruit, no vegetables, not a single avocado, nothing.
It was wiped out.
And it was pretty busy.
By the way, pretty busy store.
A lot of people in there buying food.
They were braving the roads as well.
This was midday.
This was during the hottest part of the day when the roads were not that treacherous.
That's the smart time to go out in these things.
So I decided to check out the whole store.
The meat section wiped out.
Only thing left was organic hot dogs.
Because they're very, very expensive.
So I bought a bunch of organic hot dogs.
You're going to kick me for this, but I bought them as treats from my dogs.
Because my dogs are cooped up in the barn, sleeping in straw all day.
I've got my dogs and my goats, and I've got two Chickens, well actually one rooster and one hen that have decided to hang out with the goats and they're all in this giant mound of straw.
I wish I could, maybe I should just take a picture.
It's really funny.
There's dogs and goats and chickens just in a giant like mountain of straw and I'm their servant because I'm bringing them food and water and I have to hand carry the water and everything.
And I have to feed them multiple times a day.
So I was trying to get these organic hot dogs for, you know, getting some dog treats here.
Since nobody else is buying them, I'll just buy them for dog treats.
Like healthy food for my dogs.
But all the other meat was just gone.
It was wiped out.
Totally wiped out.
And a lot of the frozen foods were wiped out.
There was still some sort of shelf-stable food on the shelf, like cereal and oatmeal and bags of chips and things like that.
But it looked like those were going to get wiped out pretty quickly.
But the produce was history.
It was gone.
And the meat section was mostly just wiped.
And I thought, wow, it's like this store has been ransacked by looters or something.
That's what it was like.
Just incredible.
So obviously, grocery stores are having problems supplying food.
And I had received reports from other people here that many grocery stores were closed.
So the fact that I found an open grocery store was something of a miracle, and it may not be open tomorrow.
Who knows?
But a lot of grocery stores have been closed, so people have been running out of food.
I've also heard from other people I know who know people in Houston and San Antonio and other cities where, yeah, they're having rolling blackouts, there's no water, and they have no food.
And they're...
They're rationing what little food that they had in their pantry and thinking probably, gosh, I wish I were a prepper.
Because let's face it, preppers are doing pretty darn good compared to most other people right now in this scenario.
And I'm a prepper, and I consider myself very fortunate compared to what's impacting a lot of other people.
That's why I didn't buy too many of the organic hot dogs.
I wanted to leave some for other people as well.
I didn't like wipe out the organic hot dog section, you know?
In fact, I didn't buy very much at all while I was there.
It was mostly like, wow, this is crazy just looking at it.
So I probably should be more angry than I am right now because of the incompetence of the morons who run the Texas Power Grid and Who decided that they would rather have things be efficient and really close margins instead of having an infrastructure that could serve the people if there's,
I don't know, if the temperature drops below freezing, for example.
This is not the first time that's happened here.
What are these people thinking?
Didn't they realize that weather is highly variable?
But Apparently, they didn't plan, and so here we are in this situation.
Now, a big part of the problem is the green energy sector.
It's not the whole problem.
There are also problems with pipelines freezing and fossil fuel plants going offline because they have suffered freezing problems and burst water pipes and things like that.
There are many problems, but the green energy is a disaster.
So the solar panels everywhere across Texas, they're all just covered with snow.
So obviously, they're not generating any solar energy because the sunlight doesn't go through the snow.
So you have useless solar panels.
The Green New Deal is a collapse, basically.
It's a disaster.
And then you have the wind turbines.
And wind is supposed to provide a very large amount of energy in Texas.
I don't know how many megawatts or anything, but it's been pushed very heavily for the last 10 years or so.
There's a lot of wind farms in Texas.
And the problem is the wind farms...
You know the blades of the turbines?
The blades have to have a certain shape and a certain balance in order to rotate when the wind hits them, right?
So they have a specific shape.
Well, then when there's freezing rain, the ice builds up on these blades and they no longer function.
In the same way that if you get ice on an airplane wing, then the wing no longer generates lift because you have deformed the curvature of the wing.
It's no longer a wing!
It's just like an ice brick in the sky.
That's why de-icing is very important on airplanes, obviously.
If you don't de-ice, you plummet into the ground.
So these wind turbines stopped turning.
And then once they stopped turning, more ice came down, freezing rain, basically, and then just froze the whole thing in place.
So now you have these giant towers...
They're like static statues of non-turning wind turbines that are doing nothing.
Nothing to generate electricity.
And remember, we were told that, well, the wind blows day and night, so this is better than solar because there's wind at night.
You're going to have power all night.
We don't have power all night.
We have blackouts because wind turbines suck.
And then I saw an article when I was able to get online.
It's talking about, well, maybe they should put heating elements in the wind turbines.
Yeah.
What's going to power the heating elements?
Coal.
It would be coal-created electricity.
That would actually require a huge amount of megawatt hours to heat wind turbines and melt the ice.
So wait a minute, you got to burn coal in order to run the wind turbines?
In order to generate electricity for 10 times the cost that it should be if you just burn the coal in the first place?
I mean, why do you need wind turbines?
Just burn the coal!
Just burn the coal and make it clean.
Just have good emissions controls.
You know, clean coal.
Problem solved.
You don't need wind turbines.
They're a net loss in these circumstances.
Same thing with solar panels.
Super dirty technology, super dirty.
They don't work when the grid goes down.
Everybody that's got solar panels right now has come and realized, hey, how come I don't have energy when the grid goes down?
Because your panels have a grid disconnect.
I mean, there's a disconnect switch.
When the grid goes down, your solar inverter is shut down too because it's not safe to send current up the line because of the linesmen that are working there.
You don't want to obviously zap them with your solar energy.
So there's an automatic cutoff.
So people who have solar energy, even if the snow isn't covering those panels, they still have no power when the grid goes down.
So it's pointless.
It's pointless.
And the best solution, frankly, is to burn fossil fuels of some kind.
Like I said, what's my solution?
I have a big John Deere tractor.
I have a PTO generator, a 50-kilowatt generator.
And normally, in normal times when I can actually start the tractor, I'm just burning diesel fuel, and I have a generator that's producing all the power I need.
Now, sadly, that plan was thwarted because it got so cold that my diesel tractor refused to start.
So I have a problem there.
I took a look at the batteries today on that tractor, and I think the batteries are old-ish.
If I had fresh batteries, I think that tractor would have started.
So I'm going to have to refresh those batteries.
There's six-volt batteries on John Deere tractors.
There's two of them, one on each side.
And then together, they're in series.
They create one big 12-volt system.
But anyway, I'm going to have to replace those batteries.
But if I would have been able to start the tractor, that plan would have worked beautifully, would have had power.
And that's, see, diesel and natural gas and coal, these are reliable energy storage systems.
They're reliable in most cases, I should say, except when your tractor doesn't start or when your pipes burst at the, you know, coal plant or whatever.
So yeah, we're dealing with black swan events right now that, yeah, none of us anticipated.
I get it.
But wind and solar absolutely suck right now, whereas I was able to start another diesel-powered piece of machinery here.
I was able to start that, and that worked great, and I was able to get some things done with that machine.
So I guess we just need better batteries, frankly, to get these things started.
In any case...
The problem in Texas is that we put, as a state, we put too much money into green energy and not enough money into weatherizing the fossil fuel systems that actually work reliably.
And I want to introduce a concept here that's very important.
When you have coal or diesel or propane gas or natural gas, these are stored energy.
And I know that point seems obvious, but hear me out here.
When you have a solar panel or a wind turbine, you don't have stored energy.
A solar panel harvests energy and delivers it in a split second.
And a wind turbine also harvests energy and delivers it in a split second.
So if you have solar panels on your house, you do not have stored energy on your house.
Whereas if you have a 500-gallon tank of diesel, you have stored energy.
That's stored work.
And you can put that to work as long as you can get your diesel engine to start, which with modern engines, that's easier to do.
See, part of my problem is I like to buy old John Deere's built in the 1970s because they're EMP-proof.
But they don't have good glow plugs for starting diesel.
So I guess you can't have everything.
They are EMP-proof, but they're not Arctic blast-proof, see?
So you can't have everything.
I guess I could buy a modern tractor that would start better in cold weather, but then it would get wiped out by an EMP because it has too much onboard circuitry.
In any case, back to the main comment here.
When you own solar panels or wind turbines, you put solar panels on your roof, you do not have stored energy.
But if you have a diesel tank in your yard, that's stored energy.
Or if you have a propane tank in your yard, that's stored energy.
And we need to think about storing energy locally so that you have some redundancy when the delivered energy, i.e.
the power grid, no longer functions, which is what we're all experiencing in Texas right now.
It's not working!
It's not working!
We were getting like 10 minutes of power every 30 minutes.
Ten minutes of power every 30 minutes.
Imagine a blackout every half an hour.
That's what we've been living here for four days.
And sometimes you would get nine minutes of power.
Sometimes you would get four minutes.
And then other times you get 20.
And so your life becomes, you have to start planning your life for the next power window.
What am I going to do when the power comes back on?
Oh my God.
I'm going to blend these smoothies.
There's something that I do.
So I have to get the smoothies ready, right?
And then blend them when the power comes on.
Or, oh, I need to run a quick wash cycle to wash these dishes because things are getting pretty bad in the kitchen right now after three days of no power.
So you're looking at your dishwasher.
What wash cycle runs in 12 minutes or 8 minutes?
Yeah, there are none.
There are none.
And then to wash clothes, you've got to have a super fast wash cycle.
And then to dry them, you've got to hit the dryer again every time the power comes back on.
And, you know, it takes three or four times to get your clothes dry.
So just getting through the day with basic stuff is very difficult.
You have to start planning your life around when is the power going to come on.
And this is the way people live in third world nations, by the way.
Because they never know when you're going to have power or when it's going to cut off.
So how do you really plan your day?
How do you get anything done?
Like, I can't even get anything done on a computer because booting Windows takes about, seems like, five minutes just to boot Windows.
And then, you know, I might only have three minutes of power, and then it just shuts off, which Windows doesn't like.
Just a power cut, you know, instead of a gentle shutdown.
And so the next time it comes back on, it's like, oh, something horrible happened.
Do you want to boot to safe mode?
No!
There's nothing safe happening here.
I just want to compute.
I just want to post some stories, but I can't do that in a freaking 11-minute window or whatever it happens to be this next time.
So society is being just destroyed in Texas right now by these rolling blackouts.
And the chain reaction of failures is getting very serious.
Like I already said, food supplies are dwindling.
Gasoline is wiped out in many areas.
And now let's talk about water systems, because Entire cities now have no water pressure.
And you know why they have no water pressure?
Because they have not enough electricity to refill the water towers.
So you know how water towers work.
You know, you pump water up into the tower and then the gravity provides the pressure.
But if more people are using water than you're able to compensate with from pumping water, then obviously you run out of water pressure in the pipes.
It's funny because there's water falling out of the sky.
There's ice, rain, and snow everywhere.
There's slush all over the roads, but nobody's got water, you see, that is pressurized water in the pipes.
So a couple of things are happening.
Number one, when you start to lose pressure in the pipes, Suddenly that water becomes unsafe to use for drinking, for example.
Not that anybody should be drinking city pipe water anyway, but some people do.
They don't know any better.
So when you lose pressure in those pipes, then you can have intrusions.
You can have contamination, basically, in the pipes because you don't have enough pressure pushing out and you can have problems with Some customers, maybe they still have pressure in their home or their business, and then it pushes their water back into the main pipeline.
It could actually suck, believe it or not, it can suck water back out of sprinkler systems and back into the main pipeline along with bacteria and so on.
So the water becomes unsafe because they're not maintaining the pressure.
But then more importantly, you just have no water pressure to do anything such as flushing toilets.
So all over Texas right now, millions of people can't flush toilets.
Now you and I know that if you need to do an emergency flush, you can grab some water from some source and get it in a bucket and then pour it into the back of the toilet and you can just flush it that way.
All you need is water in the tank.
So, then that leads you to realize, oh, you need a source of, you know, flushing water.
So, where do you get that?
Well, out in the country, not that difficult.
You know, a lot of people have a pond.
And normally, you can just grab pond water and you can put that in the toilet tank and flush it.
Except, what happens when the ponds are frozen over with six inches of ice?
Suddenly, you have another water shortage problem.
Well, fortunately...
For the last couple of days, I was gathering water as it was kind of being melted by the sun.
Just the sun energy was melting some on the roofs, even though it wasn't above freezing.
But with the sunlight, it was turning into water.
It was coming off the roofs.
And so my wife and I were gathering it off the roofs in buckets.
And barrels.
So I have barrels and drums and so on, like 55-gallon drums and 30-gallon drums.
This is something that I happen to have because it's an offshoot of the Health Ranger store operations.
We buy coconut oil, for example, in giant drums, and we buy...
I don't know, all kinds of different raw materials in drums and barrels and things.
We always end up with this incredible excess of barrels and drums.
Just to get them out of the warehouse, because they're taking up space, I often take them to the ranch.
This is just something that's unique to my situation.
I just happen to have lots of barrels and drums.
I was able to just collect water and start chucking it into the barrels.
And it didn't take long to get, what, now it looks like 100 gallons of roof water, which is distilled rainwater.
It's very clean compared to pond water.
So we were able to take that roof water and put it through the big Berkey gravity filter and then have filtered drinking water.
Again, off-grid, no electricity needed, just some manual labor.
But it is a bit of a messy job in the sense that you get wet.
Because the water coming off isn't exactly controlled in the way you'd like it to.
So you get wet, you get soggy, you know, your feet get wet, your clothing gets wet, your hat gets wet, and so on.
But nevertheless, that's how we had drinking water and water for making smoothies and brushing our teeth and so on.
But then toilet water doesn't have to be that clean.
So, you know, toilet flushing water, just get any water you want.
However, the reason I mention all this...
It's because people who live in the city, they don't have the ability to do everything I just described.
They don't have access to a rooftop and buckets and drums.
And I actually have drums on casters, on rolling platforms.
I can roll them around.
Kind of convenient when you're moving a lot of water.
But most people don't have that.
So if you're living in an apartment or you're living in a...
Some kind of a duplex or something.
You may not have access to pond water or roof water or anything like that.
You're entirely dependent on the city water.
And even then, I was shocked to learn that people, even though they knew the temperature was going to plummet, they knew a storm was coming, like last weekend.
They knew on Saturday, bad stuff's coming to Texas.
Because all the weather channels were warning about it.
Those people still did not stockpile water.
They didn't.
Even the people who had no backup system, they did not stockpile water.
I mean, if you have no backup water supply, how can you not have extra water stored in your apartment or your house or whatever?
How can you not?
You can fill your bathtub and have 100 gallons maybe right there.
But people did not stockpile water.
And so then when the water pressure fell, they were just totally out of water.
Just gone.
No water.
So what did they do?
They went to the store to buy bottled water.
And remember, there's snow on the ground right in front of them.
There's six inches of snow at their house, let's say.
They could have just put snow in a barrel and waited for it to melt, and they would have had distilled water, essentially.
But instead, they went to the store and bought bottled water, wiping out the bottled water supplies.
So now there's no bottled water available, even if the stores are open.
I mean, the water supplies are wiped out, as well as the fuel and so on.
So it's just stunning to me.
See, I keep wondering, at what point do non-prepper people finally realize that it's important to be a prepper?
Because a year ago, we went through COVID, the first wave of the lockdowns, and that lasted the whole year.
Remember the toilet paper purchasing panic of 2020?
And still after that, after a year of COVID, there are still people who don't prepare.
And then the Arctic freeze comes.
And it's hitting like 17 states.
It's not just Texas.
17 states.
Mostly red states, by the way.
Leading many people to think this must be some kind of crazy weather weapon.
Maybe it is.
I don't know.
Haven't looked into that.
I'm kind of busy moving water around here.
But even after the deep freeze...
People are still, they haven't yet realized that they should prepare for black swan events.
I mean, I keep wondering, what's it going to take?
And I guess some people will just never be preppers.
They're always just going to, you know, wait to the last minute and just whatever, man, you know, and end up freezing to death.
Oh, by the way, I'm already hearing stories of dead elderly people.
Being found in their cars and their homes.
Dead, they froze to death.
In their cars and in their homes.
There's a death toll that's starting to mount up.
I think the last number I saw out of one city, Houston, was something like 17, and that was maybe a day and a half ago.
I'm telling you, there are going to be thousands of people dead across the state of Texas.
By the time the thaw comes and they get to everybody and figure out, whoa, who's missing?
There's going to be thousands of people dead because they have no power.
And the roads are too dangerous to travel on.
The cell towers don't work.
Oh, I forgot to cover that, too.
Here's why the cell towers don't work.
You're listening to this, you might be thinking, well, gosh, don't cell towers have battery backup?
Yes, they do.
Yes, they do.
Designed to handle one outage for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, and then it takes as many as 12 hours to recharge those batteries, you see.
So, the battery backup for the cell tower equipment, it expends power much more rapidly than the pace at which it recharges itself, you see?
So, again, it might only last 10 minutes or 30 minutes to power the equipment, but then it might take 12 hours to recharge.
Well...
So that means that that equipment is designed to only handle an occasional outage, not rolling blackouts every 30 minutes, which is what we're experiencing, you see.
So imagine, as we've had, we've had 10 minutes of power on average every 30 minutes.
So that means the cell tower is on for 10 minutes.
So yeah, you can call 911 during that 10-minute window, or you can send texts during that 10-minute window.
But then, and during that 10-minute window, it barely recharges its own battery backup systems.
And then it's off for 20 minutes.
So the battery backup never got a chance to recharge.
So it might only last one minute.
And then it's dead again.
And the same thing repeats over and over and over again, day after day.
That's why the battery backup of the cell towers is not working.
Because it was never designed to handle rolling blackouts.
You know, repeated, multi-day blackouts.
That's what we're experiencing.
So I gotta say, we're experiencing a chain reaction of systemic, critical infrastructure failures that From a prepper standpoint, it's fascinating because this is almost exactly like a post-EMP apocalypse.
I mean, it's eerie because, you know, I've done many audiobooks and articles about survival and prepping, and I am a prepper.
That's why I'm not dead, frozen in a car or, you know, on the street right now, whatever.
I'm able to record this.
Because even though some of my preps failed, many other preps worked beautifully.
So, for example, my wood heat, I've been able to stay warm by burning wood.
I'll talk about that in a second here, too.
But the systemic infrastructure failures followed from the power failure.
So the power failure cascaded into gasoline station failures.
Because their electric pumps don't work.
And the power failures resulted in the water supply failures, which are taking out commercial operations, including our own health ranger store.
We have no water pressure there right now, so we don't know when we can resume manufacturing of our food products in the kitchen, because obviously you have to have water pressure.
Oh, and by the way, just as a side note on that, when we were...
Applying for organic certification and also the state of Texas.
We had proposed that we were going to do rainwater collection for the Health Ranger store so that we could have a reliable, redundant water system.
You know what they told us?
They said, oh, we can't certify you if you use rainwater because rainwater can be contaminated with bacteria.
You can only use city water.
Otherwise, you'll never be certified to be in operation.
So We could not use rainwater legally, so we didn't.
We didn't install that system at the Health Ranger store.
As a result, we now have no water.
So there you go.
That's the wisdom of the bureaucracy.
They hate it when you do something that's intelligent, like having a backup rainwater water supply with a UV light system to sterilize it and everything.
They said you can't do that.
You're not allowed.
It's just unreal.
And so here we are in the dark.
Not able to produce food at a time when people are starving to death all around us.
I mean, it's effing insane.
I'm not going to use profanity, but I feel like I should.
I mean, we have a food factory in the middle of a freaking blackout where people are starving to death, but we can't operate because the bureaucracy wouldn't let us Wash our hands with rainwater.
I mean, it's just, it's unreal.
It just smacks up the whole Green New Deal insanity, by the way.
Just bureaucrats.
All they do is destroy society.
It's just unreal.
But anyway, these cascading failures are just rippling through the system now, and I wonder how long this is going to go on.
Because a lot of these power generation stations that had their pipes burst, for example, are they going to be back online in a month?
Six months?
A year?
I don't know.
What happens the next time the temperature drops below 32 degrees Fahrenheit?
We're going to have blackouts now every time in Texas when it gets cold?
Really?
What about when people need air conditioning in the summer?
We're going to have air conditioning blackouts too?
You know, on the other hand, on the bright side of all this, the silver lining is this is good stuff for scaring weak people away from Texas.
I consider that a bonus.
Like I said, Texas should be, you know, for tough people, for preppers, people of courage, people who own guns, people who load their own ammo, tough people, not weak people.
If you're weak, get out, go back to California.
Yeah, get out of Texas.
If you find this to be too much, maybe you don't belong here because Texas is a rough country, okay?
It's rough even when the power grid is working.
It's brutally hot in the summer.
The conditions are pretty wild.
Fire ants crawling up your pants all the time.
Biting your balls.
Yeah, fire ants in your underwear.
That's no fun.
No.
Everything in the world is trying to eat your chickens.
You know, you got crazed raccoons out there, and you got owls, and you got rat snakes like crazy.
I caught, what, 45 snakes last spring just trying to protect the eggs.
Yeah, Texas is a rough country.
No joke.
So if you're not a prepper, maybe you don't belong in Texas.
There's a dose of truth that is not politically correct, but I'm not going to censor that.
It's just the hardcore truth.
Texas is for people who are hands-on, self-reliant, capable people.
And frankly, the power grid operators in Texas, they should be thanking me For burning wood.
And I want to talk about wood here for a second.
Because the way I'm staying warm is by burning wood.
And this is something that the Biden administration and AOC and the UN, they all want to ban wood burning stoves.
Too much pollution.
Too much pollution.
Well, guess what?
By me burning wood and heating my place with wood, I am not adding a burden of demand on the power grid.
If I were heating my house with electricity, I'd be adding, obviously, to the shortage that's causing all this problem.
I'm heating with wood, which means I'm saving the power grid.
You know, I mean, I'm doing my part.
I'm heating with wood.
And wood is a natural store of energy.
Remember how I said, stores of energy.
You know, propane, diesel, natural gas, and so on.
Wood is another store of energy.
And so you just have a little wood-burning stove with a flat top so you can boil water, whatever.
You can cook a pot of chili on it while you're heating your house.
It's great.
You don't even need a fan.
It's just radiant heat.
You don't even need electricity.
It's an off-grid heater.
The best thing ever.
As long as you have some wood.
So I live on a big enough ranch that I can just harvest trees that have fallen over.
And the best trees to harvest are trees that fell over about a year ago.
Because you don't want green wood that just fell over because it's too wet.
It doesn't burn efficiently, obviously.
So what I do is I'm out all the time.
I'm watching the trees.
I know when a tree fell over, even though there are tens of thousands of trees, whatever, where I live.
But I still keep an eye on things, and I notice.
So I'll make a note.
Oh, that tree fell down in 2020, so I can harvest that next year.
For wood heat, you know?
So it's actually the greenest kind of energy imaginable.
I'm taking a tree that had already died and I'm turning it into heat to reduce the burden on the power grid.
But the UN wants to say I'm a bad person for doing that or AOC or the Green New Deal lunatics.
They want to say, oh, you're bad for burning wood.
Really?
Really?
Because I'm pretty sure that your Green New Deal system just cratered.
Your solar panels suck.
They're all covered with snow.
Your wind turbines are frozen up.
The only way I'm not dying from freezing to death here is because I'm burning wood.
I go out.
I pick it up.
I chuck it in the stove.
Well, I split it first.
A little wood splitter.
Get yourself a chainsaw if you want to cut some of the big pieces.
I have a little electric chainsaw as well, but then it has to be recharged from the power grid.
So it's good to have a gas chainsaw.
In any case, I'm burning wood, so I'm doing my part.
And yet, in the cities, wood stoves are not allowed in many places anymore because they don't want you to have emissions.
Oh, you're emitting carbon.
Yeah, you know how they're going to have zero carbon emissions?
They're going to shut down the entire power grid.
That's how they're actually doing it.
You're watching it right now.
Remember when they said that the COVID lockdowns were only going to be temporary?
Let's just do it for 28 days.
And then it became, ah, let's do it forever.
Forever.
Well, I'm starting to feel like that's what's going to happen with the power grid.
Right now it's like, yeah, you'll have 10 minutes of power every 30 minutes, but I get the feeling like a couple weeks down the road they're going to say, well, we decided you don't need power at all.
We're going to move to a zero carbon emissions economy, and that means basically no power grid.
How's that strike you?
And of course, that would cause a total collapse of society, mass starvation, famine, and death, and depopulation.
But that's their goal, you see.
That's the whole point.
They tried it with COVID. They couldn't kill us.
They tried.
They couldn't kill enough of us, not in Texas.
We were just like, ah, COVID, screw it.
I'm taking vitamin D. I'm not wearing a mask.
Let's just get back to work.
So now they're trying it with weather weapons, maybe.
Power grid failures.
We're going to get you one way or another, say the globalists.
We're going to freeze you to death.
We're going to shut down your power grid.
We're going to crush your economy.
We're going to steal your savings with a global financial reset.
They're trying to kill us six ways to Sunday, but they haven't killed us yet.
We are still here.
We are still here.
They haven't been able to kill us.
They're going to try, though.
That's for sure.
Oh, and they've also tried with the vaccines, too.
Like, oh, you have to get vaccinated in order to shop at the grocery store.
No, I don't.
So I'm not taking your stupid kill shot vaccine.
And I'm not going to freeze to death.
I'm going to burn wood and, you know, be a healthy, normal, self-reliant person as much as I can.
I just wonder what they're going to try next.
You know, it's like, we tried bioweapons.
We didn't kill the Texans.
We tried the weather weapons.
Couldn't kill them.
We tried shutting off the power grid.
Man, they're still surviving.
Most of them.
What are we going to do now, Bill Gates?
Let's throw giant meteors at them from space.
Something like that.
Start looking up.
Giant rocks coming out of the sky.
We're going to get you!
You Southerners!
You're going to give up your guns one way or another.
Fireballs coming out of the sky.
We're hard to kill.
I give you that.
We're Texans.
We're hard to kill.
And you know, the funny thing about all this is, even enduring all this, there's no other place that I'd rather live, by the way.
I kind of like the fact that it's hard to live in Texas.
I really do.
I've often said, this goes back to the book by, what was it, Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
And one of the takeaways from that outstanding book is that culture naturally follows your local environment and the demands that the environment places on people.
And successful people typically come out of environments that are very, very difficult because it automatically selects or prioritizes good planning and preparedness and self-reliance, whereas typically people who live in easy climates, such as temperate climates, year-round food supplies, and so on, those cultures aren't very good at planning.
They don't have much redundancy.
They're not well-managed societies.
And you can look at Haiti.
You can look at most of India.
You can look at parts of Central and South America and see good examples of that.
Whereas, who are the people in the world that are good at planning?
Like, who are the really long-term planners?
Oh, it's the Northern Chinese, the Russians, the Northern Europeans, and so on.
It's a natural extension of culture.
Hard climates breed cultures that engage in preparedness and planning.
And structured societies that are self-reliant and sustainable.
Again, that's the conclusion from that book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
And if you ever wonder, why are there cultures that live close to the equator in places like Africa and South America, for example, that are just always having trouble Learning how to farm or grow food or whatever.
The answer is kind of in that book.
It just tells you.
Or even certain Pacific islands, for example.
Why are they just not good at planning for things?
Well, read the book.
It'll tell you why.
It's a cultural thing.
So I kind of like the fact that Texas is a hard place to live.
I really do.
Because think about it.
When our founding fathers broke away from the British, came to America, you know one of the reasons why America started out being so great?
Because it was hard to get here.
You had to have some kind of special traits to get here and to survive, to make it, you know, to be a pioneer.
It was tough.
Now, it's not so tough just to have babies in America and have them grow up on welfare, food stamps and whatever.
That's not tough.
And that's what's contributing to the downfall of society.
I'd like to have Texas be a state that actually, you gotta kind of, you gotta raise the bar.
You gotta pass some tests to stay here.
We don't want Texas to be easy.
We want to scare away the weak, frankly.
Yeah, I'm not joking.
This is not sarcasm.
I'm serious.
If you're weak, go on back to the coast of California.
We don't need you here.
Because Texas is not only a rugged country, but also Texas is fiercely independent.
And that, it leads itself to the culture of entrepreneurism and creativity and determination and so on.
So even though I see, you know, right now Texas power grid is a nightmare failure.
And probably Texas is being mocked, especially by liberals all over the country.
Look at you, you can't even keep the lights on.
Well, Guess what?
In the long run, Texas just became a state with massive preparedness awareness.
So when the global debt collapse comes, guess who's going to be caught with their pants down totally unprepared?
Oh, it's going to be the people, the Democrats, the AOC people living on the coast, the easy life of the California coastline.
Or the easy weather of the coast of Oregon or Seattle, relatively easy weather compared to Texas.
People who don't prepare, don't plan.
Because, look, you think a black swan event is only going to come in the form of weather?
No.
Black swans also come in the form of finance.
Black swans...
Can hit you in your pocketbook.
There's going to be a black swan festival pretty soon when it comes to the global debt collapse.
And the people who are not going to be prepared are going to be the people mocking Texas right now.
Nah, nah, nah, nah, you weren't ready.
Well, they're keeping all their money and dollars in a bank.
It's going to vanish.
It's going to be a black swan-a-thon.
Everything they own is going to be gone.
They're going to, what happened?!
Meanwhile, the people in Texas are going to be like, we bought gold, bitches.
We're sitting on silver and ammo and guns.
Why?
Because life is hard here.
Life is hard and we like it that way.
I got nine millimeter rounds in the basement.
I got silver in the vault.
What do you got?
Flimsy paper money worth nothing.
Who's mocking who now?
See, that's what's coming.
So yeah, I don't expect life to be easy.
I don't want it to be easy.
If I wanted life to be easy, I wouldn't be doing podcasts, you know?
I wouldn't be publishing stories.
I wouldn't be provoking people to think.
No.
If I wanted life to be easy, I'd be laying in the straw with my goats right now, just snoozing.
Yeah, this is great.
Animals all around.
It's like a scene out of a Out of a Jesus Bible Christmas manger scene, whatever.
That's what it looks like in there.
I'd just be asleep.
And by the way, the other final thought here.
Guns work without electricity, turns out.
Imagine that.
Because gunpowder is stored energy.
So my AR-15 doesn't need a power grid.
Isn't that awesome?
And by the way, nobody's messing with rural Texas in the middle of this.
I haven't seen any looters or anything.
Or heard about them.
But maybe that's because people don't even have a choice about calling 911.
They're pretty much just going to pick up a rifle and go to town.
So guns work without electricity.
And firearms are part of the infrastructure of Texas, the infrastructure of self-defense.
And that's why Texans aren't going to give up their guns.
And by the way, the Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is quite a heroic person, kicking ass, telling Joe Biden, you're not going to destroy the Second Amendment in Texas, period.
Nope.
I mean, if we have to, we'll just declare Texas to be a Second Amendment sanctuary state.
Probably, I would imagine the AG and maybe the governor at some point will announce something like, we're just going to arrest feds if they start violating the Second Amendment in the state of Texas.
We'll arrest the federal officers, charge them with state crimes, because we have jurisdiction, because we're Texas.
You're not going to take away the guns from Texans, especially not with life being so hard here as it is, as I've been describing here.
There are times when you need your rifle.
Especially ranchers out here.
You're dealing with cattle.
You're dealing with predators.
Sometimes, I mean, just to be blunt and honest about it, sometimes you've got to put down a cow.
You know, if you're a rancher, you've got to shoot a cow every once in a while because it'll put out of its misery.
I had to shoot one of my chickens one time after it was torn up by a...
What was it?
Some kind of bird.
I think it was a falcon, actually.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was.
Falcon came down, tore up that hen, ripped its chest open.
I was like, man, I got to put this hen out of its misery.
So I did.
And I had a shot at the falcon, but I didn't take it because I'm also a conservationist and I realized that falcons are pretty rare around here and they're an important part of the ecosystem.
So I let that falcon fly away.
So you see...
Just because you have a gun doesn't mean you want to shoot everything in sight.
You shoot in order to stop suffering or to stop violence.
But sometimes you've got to let certain animals, like falcons and so on, predators, you've got to let them do their thing.
Part of the ecosystem.
Anyway, I didn't mean to get dark into that story.
I'm just saying you can't take away firearms from Texans because it's a tool that you use responsibly.
To get things done.
That need to get done.
You know?
Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up.
We're coming up on an hour and I just want to share these thoughts with you and let you know what's happening here from an eyewitness point of view.
And I'm doing my best here.
I'm also thinking about at the community level what can we do To help make our community more resilient.
Do we need to be donating to food banks in the coming days as the roads get better and maybe we can open back up?
I'm going to be talking to my staff about that.
What we can do.
We donated a lot of food years ago during one of the big hurricanes.
Lots of food to the food banks.
And maybe that's something that we need to do here shortly.
But part of the problem with that we ran into last time is that people who go to food banks don't know what superfood is.
I'm not even joking.
They don't know what superfood is.
You go to a food bank with cases of spirulina and they just look at you like, what?
You want us to eat green algae?
What are you talking about?
This is Texas.
Bring us some steak and potatoes or barbecue or something.
We don't need algae around here.
See?
That's the problem we've run into.
Like, here, have some chia seeds.
They're like, what the heck is chia?
Is it that pet from the TV ads?
You know?
How about Indian gooseberries?
They're like, what are gooseberries?
So, the community at large here in Central Texas...
It has no idea what we are selling, actually.
It's like, what are these things that you speak of?
These nutritional products, these superfoods, per se.
What are these things?
You know, because your average food bank is just like, give us Campbell's soup!
Just bring us cans!
We just want pasta!
I'm not trying to mock the food.
Well, maybe I am mocking the food banks, but it's just maybe I should start like a superfood bank, you know, for people who are hungry but also want to be healthy.
That would be the first in the state of Texas.
Yeah, that would be a great idea.
The Health Ranger Store, superfood bank for people who want, you know, calories and nutrition at the same time.
That would be fun.
Let me play with that idea.
Let me know what you think of that.
Because we don't sell the processed junk food that food banks want.
We don't have the preservatives and the sodium nitrite and the bleached wheat flour with the long shelf life, you know?
We even went to a food bank one time with a bunch of our fresh farm eggs, you know?
I'm not even joking.
We're like, here we've got like five dozen fresh farm eggs from our farm.
They would not accept them.
Because they said, we can't take, what was it, like unlabeled eggs?
It's like, what do you mean, unlabeled?
Well, it has to be from a, you know, like a commercial egg factory, you know, where they abuse the chickens.
Like, no, no, these are from our farm.
These are fresh farm eggs.
From just a few miles down the road.
These are the best eggs ever.
This is what your hungry members should want to eat.
This is real food here.
They're like, no, no, no, we don't do that.
We just bring us some canned soup or some boxes of oatmeal or whatever.
Or some factory eggs, that's it.
So food banks don't know what food is.
This is my point.
Food banks, they have no clue what is food.
And by the way, this is a good time for me to remind you.
I did a full audiobook.
It's called Survival Nutrition.
And you can bet I'm using those principles right now.
You can download the whole thing for free.
Download the MP3 files.
You can listen to the audiobook.
And there's a PDF that you can print.
It's all free.
Just go to survivalnutrition.com.
Download the whole thing.
Check it out for yourself.
We talk about all this stuff for hours.
It's amusing.
But seriously, food banks don't know what food is.
So maybe we need a superfood bank.
We'll see.
But anyway, that's the podcast for today.
I'll do my best to bring you more.
We're still offline.
We have no bandwidth.
It's hard for me to get these files uploaded.
We have the rolling blackouts.
We have, you know, all kinds of community problems still happening.
But whatever.
It's fine.
It's Texas.
It's supposed to be hard.
So I'm doing my best, and I thank you for your support.
Our Health Ranger store is maybe opening on Friday to start processing the shipping of packages.
We're not manufacturing anything yet until the water comes back, but we're going to be able to start shipping the stuff that we already have in stock.
So if you place an order with us, healthrangerstore.com, thank you for your patience.
I'm sorry we've had delays for all the reasons I've talked about here.
And we're going to get packages out as quickly as we can.
And if you place an order now, give it a couple of extra days because things are a little wild in Texas right now.
We're doing the best we can.
And I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
Happy to be here.
And thank you for your support.
I'm Mike Adams here, HealthRanger, naturalnews.com.
Survival Nutrition is our new free audiobook that you can download right now from survivalnutrition.com.
In this nearly eight-hour audiobook, you will learn life-saving secrets of how to use food, nutrients, plant molecules, trace minerals, and chemical compounds to save your life, even in a total collapse scenario.
I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and I'm the author of Survival Nutrition.
I founded and run a multi-million dollar food science laboratory, and I'm the author of the best-selling science book, Food Forensics.
I'm also a prepper, a patriot, and a survivalist.
I can teach you how to survive what's coming by growing your own food, medicine, and antibiotics that can help keep you healthy and alive even during the worst of times.
At survivalnutrition.com, you'll be able to instantly download the full free audiobook as MP3 files.
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