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Feb. 21, 2021 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:21:40
Situation Update, Feb. 21, 2021 - Fifteen HARD lessons I just learned from the Texas grid collapse
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Alright, welcome to the Situation Update for Sunday, February 21st.
This is the post-mortem of the Texageddon week, the week that the power grid nearly suffered a catastrophic failure that would have lasted for months, according to several sources.
This has been written up in the Epoch Times and other places.
Yeah, we almost had a catastrophic total collapse of the grid instead of just rolling blackouts, but...
It was the week from hell and we all learned a lot of lessons.
In fact, today I've got a list of about 15 things for you here.
Which are lessons, hard lessons that I learned from going through the Texageddon scenario, kind of like living in a post-EMP collapse or near collapse scenario.
And it's not over yet.
It's still pretty bad.
Millions of people are still struggling to get food and water right now, even though the power grid is back on.
Gasoline is getting delivered.
Some groceries are getting delivered.
I was at a grocery store today.
Again, on my quest for organic bananas.
And so I walked in.
And by the way, I buy organic bananas and lots of avocados because I make avocado banana smoothies with cacao powder and coconut water and whey protein.
I really love those smoothies.
So I'm always trying to get good, fresh avocados and bananas.
So I went into a grocery store earlier today, and again, everything in the produce section wiped out with a few little smatterings of maybe some grapefruit, you know, the fruits and things that people don't want very much, you know, a little bit of grapefruit and some turnips, but most of the shelves were empty, completely bare.
And the banana section had one banana, literally one banana on the shelf.
No one would take it because everybody figured, must be something wrong with that banana.
I'm not going to buy that one.
Like, no one wants a standalone banana.
You buy them in a bunch.
It's a group.
They're safer in a group.
If there's one banana on the shelf, people are like, someone must have removed that banana for a reason.
I'm not going to risk it.
So, no one was buying that banana.
But then guess what they did have?
Guess what they had?
Two full trays of jumbo avocados.
So I politely purchased 15 avocados Which for me is enough to get by about a week.
So I left plenty of avocados for other people.
I didn't like hoard all the avocados.
So I bought 15 avocados, which is what I normally buy when I'm picking up avocados.
You know, a week at a time.
So anyway, the food is still in short supply.
People are still boiling water.
They're being told to boil water.
People are still short of water, even in Austin.
I was told by a friend that there was a mile-long line of people somewhere near the Austin International Airport lining up to get free bottled water.
I'm thinking, wow!
If I were the big Berkey company, I would set up a tent right there.
Hey, everybody.
All you people in line, check this out.
Non-electric water filter system.
You just pour water in the top and you get water out the bottom.
It's like apparently millions of people Don't have water filters.
I mean, well, we already knew that, but maybe that'll change after this.
I would imagine there's going to be a lot of people thinking about non-electric solutions, including a solution that I did a little research And I learned that there's something else that I need to add to my gear that's a non-electric heating solution, which is a kerosene heater, but you can also run it on diesel.
And I'll talk about that in a minute.
So I've got a lot of diesel that's stored because I've got like a big 500-gallon diesel tank That's pretty much full.
Because, you know, I have diesel equipment, as you know.
I've talked about it recently.
Diesel trucks and so on.
And if you can convert diesel into heat through a kerosene heater that's non-electric, that's pretty cool.
I could have used that in the barn with my animals.
Although, I don't know, maybe not so safe around all the straw.
I'll have to look into that.
What happens if it tips over, things like that.
You got to think about safety.
But nevertheless, the animals are fine.
Oh, and thank you for all the feedback for my story about my dog, my Great Pyrenees, that fell through the ice in my pond.
And then I rescued him with the excavator arm and bucket by breaking the ice.
I had a lot of people respond to that story.
And people were asking, well, what's your dog's name?
Because they noticed I never mentioned his name.
And actually, that's on purpose.
I jokingly say I'm protecting my dog's privacy by not making his name public.
But the truth is that, as you know, I'm very fond of animals.
I have a very empathetic relationship with animals.
My dogs and goats and chickens.
I very much care about animals.
And I do not want to publicize my dog's name because it's too personal.
It's like he's part of the family and you're just going to have to guess.
But you would be surprised if you heard the name.
It is a male name, but not normally associated with a dog.
It's not like Spot or Spike or anything like that, so you'll just have to guess.
All right, in any case, there are about 15 things that I learned.
I was writing down some notes today.
I've been thinking about this most of the day.
It's kind of a nice reprieve from thinking about politics and the rigged election and all that.
It's so depressing.
It was actually...
Kind of a mental vacation to focus on surviving rather than the despair of the downfall of America's political system.
I mean, think about that.
That's how bad the politics are.
Like, I'd rather be in a life and death scenario because it's a vacation compared to thinking about Joe Biden as president, right?
But anyway, there are 15 things roughly.
I may come up with more here as I'm mentioning them, but there's some very important lessons that I learned.
And just to set the context here, as I've admitted in recent podcasts, even though I'm people tell me I'm the most prepared person they know.
So even with that social status, let's say, I'm the guy that everybody's like, you're the prepper, you're the survivalist, you know how to make it through anything.
Even that, even so, a bunch of my stuff failed.
And I made mistakes, there's some things I failed to prep, some things I did wrong and I could do better.
And I wouldn't have known those mistakes without going through this hell week, this Texageddon scenario.
So in a sense, this was kind of a gift in the sense that it's a dry run or a little trial run for a much bigger collapse that I think is coming.
In fact, now I'm convinced of it more than ever, because look how fragile the entire infrastructure is.
I had no idea the whole thing could come tumbling down just because cold weather.
I mean, no one can doubt it now.
At least no one who lived through it.
And this was just basically five days.
What happens when the whole thing comes down for five years?
See, that's what we need to be prepared for.
So, in a sense, I'm thankful...
I'm not thankful that people suffered, and I don't seek suffering for myself, but I'm saying there's a silver lining, which is that we can learn from this to make our lives better for the next crisis.
So that's what this list is really about.
Here's what I learned, and I'm passing it along to you.
I know many of our listeners are in California or places that are a lot more comfortable than...
The Arctic freeze zone that just hit the Midwest and Texas.
So you didn't get to experience all this fun for yourself.
So I'll share the lessons with you.
Number one lesson is that survival is very, very physical.
I worked my butt off in so many ways, a lot of it was carrying water around.
And so harvesting water, moving water, and carrying water, I had to deliver water to all my animals, chickens and goats and dogs.
The donkeys fended for themselves.
They're fine.
I wasn't going to try to cart hundreds of gallons out to the donkeys.
They found puddles and maybe they licked snow or something, but they're fine, just like the deer.
They're fine.
Donkeys are stubborn creatures.
They find a way.
But anyway, it was very physical to carry a lot of water around.
And I also had to do things like repairing pipes with PEX crimping tools that require quite a bit of strength to use.
So it's really physical.
And then I was collecting firewood almost every day and chucking wood into the burner and And other things like that.
It was a very physical experience.
So I didn't do any extra working out during the entire week.
No need to.
But I sure was glad that Previous to this, I typically work out with kettlebells, for example, and I have a pulley weight machine.
So I do shoulder presses and arm lifts and, of course, the classic push-ups and squats and things like that.
I'm just glad that I had the strength to do what was necessary.
So when you think about preparedness, It's not just about having gear.
It's also about making sure your body has the strength to do what needs to be done because you're going to be doing a lot of physical things.
And imagine if you have to grow your food.
Gardening is very, very physical.
Prepping the soil, planting the seeds, harvesting food, spraying for insects or whatever, like neem oil or whatever you have.
It's a lot of physical work.
So get ready for that because life, normally, it's very easy for all of us compared to what it is when infrastructure collapses, obviously.
All right, the second lesson learned is that culture matters.
Where are you when the collapse happens and what's the culture of the people around you?
So if you are in a place where...
People are Christian-oriented individuals, which is where I am in Central Texas.
What I found is that even when I was at the Home Depot scrambling with a bunch of other people all trying to buy parts, nobody was impolite.
People were very polite.
Even though everybody had a crisis, everybody had a water leak, everybody had water in the living room or something like that.
Everybody had a problem, a pretty serious problem.
That's why they were there looking for parts.
They're trying to fix the problem.
Well, there wasn't some crazy mad, like people weren't pushing and shoving and fighting with each other and arguing.
None of that.
None of that.
People were very, very polite.
Because I think Central Texas is a culture...
of more conservatism or principled people.
Now, I can't say this for sure, but I would imagine that a collapse in a location where there are no morals and no ethics would be a lot more chaotic.
So you wouldn't want to be in a collapse in, let's say, Chicago.
Basically any liberal city, which is anti-God, anti-Christian, mostly pro-Satanism and demonism, whatever, they really have no morals and no ethics.
And in a collapse, those individual traits of hatred toward morality...
I think that translates into chaos and suffering and more death and attacks and so on.
I mean, look at what happens every time the power goes out in a liberal city.
What happens?
Massive looting.
They just start burning down everything and stealing things.
And they get violent.
Why is that?
Because they have no morality.
So, where do you want to be in a collapse?
In a place that has churches.
Seriously, just think of it as a shortcut.
If you're going to live through a collapse, you want it to be basically Bible country because the people are going to be more polite and more helpful.
I had so many people contacting me, people that I know throughout the area, asking me if I was okay, asking me if I needed any help.
And I was able to help others, too.
I was able to provide some drinking water for some families.
Because I had repaired my water system before theirs.
I had some rainwater catchment and the Berkey filter system.
And I also have an inline UV filter that worked when the power came back on and so on.
So I was able to provide water to people.
So I was helping them and they were offering to help me.
I didn't need their help, but they were offering to help.
So it was just...
What I learned is that even though the power grid nearly failed in Texas...
What I learned is that Texas is the place I want to be.
With or without a collapse, this is where I want to be because the people are good people.
The people have morals.
And there are many other places across America where people have morals.
In fact, most of the areas hit by the cold weather are areas, red states, basically.
Ethical, moral people.
It's the northeast coast and the west coast where you have the total lack of ethics, plus Chicago, of course.
Total lack of ethics, immoral people.
Stay away from those areas, even in good times.
So pick where you want to be because it is all coming down.
Make sure you're in the right place.
All right, point number three.
I guess I need to move a little more quickly on these.
Point number three is that We all, in our minds when we're prepping, we tend to prep for, or we imagine one disaster at a time.
Like, what would I do if it flooded?
Or what would I do if there's a drought?
What would I do if there's a food wipeout?
What would I do if there's an earthquake?
Well, the worst disasters, it turns out, are the convergence of two or more catastrophes That wipe out some of your plans from different angles.
And so what I experienced, which I really hadn't thought of in enough detail before, was a power grid failure combined with extreme cold weather that burst pipes and gelled diesel fuel and stopped diesel engines from starting.
So those two events, either one separately, we could handle it.
Oh, the power grid goes out.
Normally, let's say in the summer or something, what do I do?
I crank up my tractor, and I plug in my generator, and I have backup power.
But you combine that with extreme cold weather, and I wasn't the only one that suffered from this aspect of it.
Suddenly, the tractors don't start.
The diesel engines don't start.
Now you have two problems to deal with that are intersecting.
And then there's a cascade of failures that stem from that, that ripple across the infrastructure of society.
So with the rolling blackouts and the extreme cold weather, that's what caused the nuclear power plants, or at least one of them in Texas, to suffer bursting of its own pipes.
And it took the entire nuclear plant offline because it wasn't weatherized.
And then gas stations lost the ability to pump gas.
And then government buildings and schools and other key infrastructure components, they suffered water pipe breaks and coolant circulation systems failing and breaking and so on.
And then another thing that happened was that in attempting to repair burst water lines, Repair crews were out with backhoes digging up natural gas lines and digging up power lines and so on.
So you know how I've always said that it would be so easy to disconnect Google and Facebook from Texas because everybody in Texas owns a backhoe or an excavator and they're always digging up lines accidentally.
It's true.
This happened all over the state.
People were digging up and trying to repair water lines and they would tear up other lines, which are always alongside the roads and highways.
So there are all kinds of lines getting torn up.
So there's this ripple effect of infrastructure failures that kept getting worse and worse throughout the week.
So we have to think about multiple layers of preparedness.
And that's actually point, well...
I skipped four.
I'll come back to it.
You're going to need multiple layers of preparedness because you may be hit with two or three scenarios at the same time that disable some of your preps from working.
Even though you're confident that you can handle one thing at a time, can you handle two?
Can you handle three?
What if there was, let's say, extreme cold weather, power grid failure, and a new Biological weapons strain had just been released.
And Chinese army invaded from Mexico or something, right?
Add one more thing to it.
Or what if there was...
I don't know, a giant asteroid that plunged into the Atlantic and sent a tidal wave onto the west or the east coast.
You know, just add one more disaster.
This is where things can get very, very deadly and dangerous.
And it's very difficult to plan for multiple disasters at the same time.
This is why we have to have multiple layers of fallback systems.
And this is what I learned, is I didn't have enough layers to Fortunately, I had a lot of things that absolutely worked, like gravity water filters and wood heat systems.
What else?
Well, my excavator did eventually start.
I was able to save my dog with the excavator.
A little lithium-ion battery booster worked.
What else works?
Fire works.
I was able to flush toilets because I could dump water into the toilets.
I had plenty of food.
That was never a problem, but I'm in the food business, so I have crazy amounts of stored food.
A lot of it expired.
Like I have, you know, 200 pounds of organic expired almonds that we couldn't sell anymore.
So they're sitting in my refrigerator.
So I could just live on almonds if I needed to.
Almond bread, almond milk, almond chews.
How many almonds can you eat?
But I wouldn't have starved.
You see what I mean?
I don't even think I ate any of those almonds, by the way.
I wish I could give them away.
They won't let you because they're expired.
We already tried that.
We're trying to give them to the food banks.
Remember how I said food banks don't know what food is?
They won't accept anything that's actual food.
All they want is processed crap that's labeled Campbell's, you know?
But you try to take them real food, and they're like, no, we don't want that.
We don't know where that came from.
That's funny.
But anyway, you need fallback systems because a lot of your advanced preps are going to fail, or at least that's what I found out.
And so that's actually lesson four, is that your preps will fail.
Some element of your preps will fail.
And the thing is, you don't know which one in advance because you haven't actually gone through it.
You haven't used your preps.
For example, I remember a friend of mine one time was storing water in milk jugs.
You know, used, rinsed out milk jugs.
And he had all this water in a closet somewhere that he said, you know, he had plenty of water stored away because it's all in milk jugs.
And I said, you know, when was the last time you tried that water?
You know, is it good?
Are you rotating it?
You know, are you using it?
Are you just sticking it in the closet?
I'm just sticking it in the closet.
Forgot about it.
So we went in to his closet and pulled out the water.
And we tested it.
I took a sip.
I was like, dude, this tastes like fabric softener for your laundry.
What the heck?
Why does this water taste like fabric softener?
And it turns out that he had stored extra boxes of bounce or Donnie or whatever the fabric softens are, which are full of extremely crazy toxic chemicals, by the way.
He had stored those in the same closet.
And all those chemicals leached right through the milk jugs and into the water.
The water was undrinkable.
So here he was storing all this water that you couldn't drink without maybe vomiting.
And certainly you'd be drinking a lot of chemicals.
So you need to check on your preps.
And you need to plan on some of them failing so it's good to have different levels of redundant systems.
If you store water in your house, what happens if your house burns down in the middle of The pipe's freezing.
Add a house fire to that scenario.
Now you're in a world of hurt, too.
So maybe store some water in a shed or your shop building or a barn or whatever you have, or make sure you've got neighbors who have some stored water that they could share with you.
Now, as I mentioned up front, I learned that I should have been using kerosene heaters that are non-electric, And I think one of the brands is called Dyna-Glo.
Dyna-Glo.
I don't own one of these yet, but I just ordered one because, well, this is an obvious thing to get.
These produce a lot of heat by burning kerosene.
And you can burn diesel in them just by adding a little bit of isopropyl alcohol.
And so I already have quite a bit of isopropyl alcohol on hand for other reasons, first aid use, for example, such as even hydrogen peroxide and iodine and things like that.
So with a little bit of isopropyl alcohol, you can burn diesel in the kerosene heaters, and I've got hundreds of gallons of diesel.
So what I should have thought of, what I failed to think of, is that I could have heated my tractor to a starting temperature by using diesel in a kerosene heater.
That's non-electric.
But that would have required that I had my tractor completely isolated from any wind.
So the cold Arctic wind was blowing through from the north just constantly, and that was keeping the tractor's engine frozen.
But if I had thought ahead, I would have parked that tractor in a better place, just completely away from any wind, and then I would have put a kerosene heater under the engine, heated it up to maybe 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
Then I could have started it.
So there you go.
I just learned that.
And so now I've got a kerosene heater on the way, and I'm going to work with it with diesel.
I'm going to test it out and add that to my mix of things that work off-grid.
Okay, number six.
The lesson here is that don't count on anyone being able to come and help you.
You may have no help whatsoever.
So during most of this blackout, 911 services were basically unusable.
Everybody was busy.
The first responders were all responding to car accidents and stranded vehicles because people were trying to drive on black ice and so on.
They were hitting each other, going off the roads.
There was a lot of accidents.
There was one on I-35 that killed three people.
It was a hundred car pileup.
With some big trucks in there, too.
And I saw a big FedEx rig smash into the pile of cars and just send one car flying about 20 feet in the air.
And you know that person died.
And so the first responders were busy.
If you had an emergency, first of all, you probably couldn't even call 911 because the cell towers stopped working because they ran out of backup power.
So the cell towers didn't really have much backup.
They were designed to have backup just to cover little short outages, not long-term, you know, 20 minutes of outage every 30 minutes because we were on that cycle for a while, 10 minutes on, 20 minutes off of power.
Well, the cell towers can't recharge their batteries during the 10 minutes.
So the cell towers went off every time the power went off.
And since that schedule was quite unpredictable, there was a lot of variation in it, you never knew when you could even make a call, including an emergency call.
So just count on the fact that no one is coming to help you, especially when the roads were atrocious, the weather was crazy cold, the gas stations were out of gas, and a lot of diesel engines wouldn't start.
So, I mean, who's going to come rescue you?
I mean, most ambulances couldn't run.
Fire trucks were probably having trouble.
I mean, who's going to come help you?
You need to be able to say, no one's going to come help me.
It's up to, like, me and God.
You know what I mean?
It's between you and God.
You better pray, and you better listen for some guidance from God, because in a lot of these circumstances, there is no help available.
Okay, number seven.
Containers.
Containers like buckets and barrels turned out to be extremely important, more so than I had imagined.
Because I was moving around so much water and food.
You know, dog food, goat food, chicken food, and so on.
And even donkey food, too.
I did give them food.
They also had a giant round bale of hay that they were working on most of the week.
It's still there.
I mean, they still have some hay left.
And one of the reasons I had to keep carrying so much water is because the water that I had already put out would freeze because the temperature is so cold, right?
So I would take a bucket of water to the chickens and then I'd have to change that water again four hours later because it would be frozen solid.
And chickens actually do go through quite a bit of water, believe it or not.
So I had to keep carrying water around.
Needed some good buckets.
I had plenty of buckets, but boy, did I put them to a lot of use.
That's for sure.
And then catching rainwater off the roof, which is one of the things that I did.
You know, it's funny because I have something of a rainwater system in place normally, but when the pipes burst, I didn't have a way to really harvest the water in the rainwater system.
So I had to harvest new water off the roof.
Now, that required buckets and barrels and getting a little bit wet as water was dripping off the roof and so on.
But containers will save you.
And if there's one thing that I wish I would have done beforehand is I wish I would have just set aside a few hundred gallons of pre-filtered drinking water, you know, before the storm really hit.
That's what I should have done.
Now, as it turns out, I did have one 55-gallon drum that was full of drinking water, and I saved that the entire time as a backup, and I never had to use it because I was using water off the roof that I would run through the Berkey filter.
I just didn't want to touch my last-ditch supply, which was 55 gallons.
But I had it.
I just wish I would have had more.
So have more preps.
You almost can't have too much water around it.
Available for drinking.
I know a lot of people fill their bathtubs and then they use that water for flushing toilets.
And then some people would use Berkey's to filter that and so on.
And that was successful.
Or they'd use camping filters, the pump style, you know, like Katadyn or other brands.
And that worked for them, which is great.
But you almost can't have too much water around.
Especially if you live in an apartment or somewhere in the city where you don't have access to get water off of rooftops or ponds or places like that.
And by the way, roof water is really clean compared to pond water.
And pond water is clean compared to well water.
And nobody's wells worked because the power grid wasn't functioning and everybody's pipes had broken anyway.
So the only real choices were getting water off the roof, getting water out of a pond, or, I don't know, getting it out of your bathtub if you had filled it.
But water really became an issue, and being able to move that water was key to survival.
Point number eight.
This is just an observation, and I'm not anti-cryptocurrency.
You know I advocate cryptocurrency because I love the fact that it's decentralized.
But I do want to point out that Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies, their value in a grid-down collapse, which is what we went through in Texas, their value was zero.
And I've always warned this about cryptocurrencies, that in a grid-down collapse, cryptocurrencies are worth nothing.
That was absolutely true in this case.
I could not have paid somebody if somebody was offering to sell me something, food or something, and I needed to pay them in crypto.
That would not have worked.
Whereas my physical silver coins that I have, and I know a lot of you do as well, physical silver did not collapse when the grid collapsed.
So the silver was obviously still silver and perfectly valuable.
Also, you know, cash for the moment, at least until the dollar collapses, cash works.
So I could have paid people in silver or gold or cash.
As it turns out, I didn't need to pay anybody anything.
I was mostly...
I mean, I was helping people with water and I really didn't need their help on anything.
No one had to help me.
No one had to come to my rescue, thank goodness.
So we didn't have a lot of private transactions going on like that.
But had I needed to do that, having silver on hand was the right thing to do.
Alright, point number nine, or lesson number nine.
You may experience injuries or mishaps because of the new physical demands and the new challenges that you're facing.
For example, in freezing weather, there's a lot of ice on the ground.
A lot of people slipped and fell.
People I know slipped and fell.
And just one fall, if you land wrong, you hit your hip on a rock or something, you could end up in the emergency room.
You could break a bone.
You could break your wrist or something.
And combined with the fact that you're now engaged in a lot more physical activity, such as harvesting water in buckets or moving water around or whatever you're doing, Maybe digging up pipes with a shovel because you have to repair a waterline break.
You're engaged in a lot of activity that could be injurious to you.
And these may be activities that you don't normally do.
So You need to really watch out and make safety a super high priority, but also have adequate first aid supplies and experience.
So what would you do if you cut yourself and you can't call 911?
How do you stop bleeding?
So we've talked about, in previous podcasts, we've talked about tourniquets.
We've talked about blood stop devices and having blood stop gauze.
Which is pretty common among those who are in the shooting or the soldier industry, you might say.
People who are involved in possible gunfights, SWAT team members and so on, police officers, they'll have blood stop gauze or sponges or chest seals or tourniquets, things like that.
You know, first responders, this is pretty common for them to have gear in this area.
But for people outside of those realms, they don't normally think about, hey, how do I stop the bleeding here?
Suppose you fall down wrong on a screwdriver that you're carrying and now you have a puncture wound.
What do you do?
How do you stop that bleeding?
What's the protocol?
How do you treat an open wound so that it doesn't get infected?
What's the protocol there?
Do you have antibacterial wounds?
Solutions to put on bandages or gauze.
I mean, I grow aloe vera, for example, and aloe vera gel is a very good antibacterial solution.
I also manufacture and sell a colloidal silver gel made from Texas rainwater, by the way, that is, I think, the best thing.
It's got eight essential oils in it, and it's got some xanthan gum, which forms kind of a bandage, and it's got colloidal silver.
That we make using Texas rainwater.
By the way, this isn't really a plug in the sense that we're sold out of that stuff.
We don't even have any right now.
We're still waiting for it to get back in stock.
But just make sure you have some.
I mean, povidone iodide, hydrogen peroxide.
Do you know how to treat wounds?
Do you know how to change bandages?
Do you know how to treat burns?
What if you're playing with your kerosene heater, let's say, and And you accidentally lay your hand on that sucker.
Now you've burned your hand.
You're going to be dealing with injuries that you might not normally experience.
And things can go catastrophically wrong.
As I witnessed when my dog fell through the ice in my pond, I was like, oh my god.
I will never forget looking at him.
I went out looking for him and found him.
And there he is with his paws on the ice.
And his head and shoulders just above the water, the rest of his body below the water, and he was looking at me, and he was totally silent.
He didn't even bark.
He's just looking at me.
I'm looking at him, and I'm going, I've never dealt with this situation before.
This is something totally new, and I've got to save my dog.
I did a whole podcast about that if you want to hear how that went down.
But yeah, he's okay.
He's doing great.
But that was not something that I thought I would experience in Texas, having my dog break through the ice, because there's never any ice on ponds in Texas.
It's not supposed to be.
So anyway, be prepared for...
All kinds of injuries and mishaps.
And this also reinforces the importance of your physical fitness and your flexibility.
So stretching.
And I've been someone who's engaged in a lot of stretching and rolling activity.
Rolling using the, what are they called?
Those foam rollers?
It's not really foam.
It's more hard than that.
I do rolling and stretching every evening.
And I roll the IT band of the side of my legs and I stretch my lower back and I stretch my hips.
I do it every night, almost without fail.
And I've done it that way for many, many years.
As a result, I can be mobile during the day and not have injuries.
I think if I wasn't stretching and rolling, I would have a lot more injuries.
And in a survival scenario, an injury can literally kill you just because it can take you out of the loop of getting things done.
I mean, if you're in bed for three days because you have a lower back injury, and I've been there before.
You know, I've had sports injuries.
That we're debilitating, where you were in bed for days.
I've been there too.
I know many of you have as well.
If that happens to you in a survival scenario, that could be death.
So keeping your fitness and your flexibility at its best level is really, really important.
All right.
Lesson number 10.
This is a simple one.
Have lots of spare parts for plumbing.
Yeah.
I had some spare parts, and they did come in handy, but I didn't have enough.
And in my ideal world, I would replicate the Home Depot plumbing aisle in my own garage, but sadly, that would take up too much space.
So focus on the parts.
Focus on certain pipe sizes.
For example, I've become a big fan of PEX pipes.
It's a polyethylene.
I think the X stands for cross-linked.
I'm not sure.
PEX pipes instead of PVC. And I use one-inch PEX pipes for most of my plumbing, but PEX is also available in half-inch and three-quarter-inch and so on.
But PEX pipes are very easy to work with.
They're more flexible.
They're polyethylene, so they don't leach into the water.
They don't have as many of the harsh chemicals as PVC, for example.
But PEX, you can get a crimper.
With the rings and you can crimp together pipes and do repairs yourself, you can also get compression fittings that you can undo.
So you can get tees or elbows or couplers, you know, unions that are reversible.
So normally with PVC, you're using cement, you know, like PVC glue.
And the only way to undo that is to just cut it with a saw and start over.
But with PEX, You can undo all the connections.
You can even get a little crimp cutter.
You can cut the crimping rings off and you can rework all your fittings.
So I found that stocking up on PEX, for me, it's a one-inch PEX. So I've got one-inch PEX valves.
And elbows and tees and crimping rings all in the one-inch size.
And then I just kind of standardize all my plumbing at the one-inch size.
And that way I can stockpile just that, like those accessories for the one-inch PEX pipe.
And that's just pick a size and go with it.
A lot of people would prefer a three-quarter inch PEX pipe.
I tend to kind of overdo everything.
So I go with a one-inch PEX. But it's easy to work with.
You can even...
By the way, you can make your own elbows manually with that just by having a...
You can heat the PEX pipe with like a propane torch and you can slowly bend it yourself.
You can even weld PEX. You can cut a diagonal into it and you can weld it back together to make your own elbow.
It takes a little practice, but...
You can do it with a mini blowtorch, by the way.
So you can literally fabricate your own parts out of PexPipe with some practice.
It's pretty cool.
All right, lesson number 11.
Investing in food is always a good investment.
I have never regretted having spent money on stored food.
Never.
I mean, I've never thought...
Oh, gosh, I have too much stored food.
Wish I didn't have as much of that.
No, that thought has never occurred to me.
In all these crises, even COVID last year and the lockdowns, and in hurricanes before that years ago, or the fires in Texas in 2011, I've always thought, I sure am glad I have this food.
And by the way, food prices have always gone up.
And guess what?
The Texas citrus crop just got wiped out, which is the third largest citrus producer in the country, by the way.
It's not just California and Florida.
Texas just got wiped out.
So citrus prices are all going to go up.
Yeah, and a lot of the crops in the Midwest got wiped out.
Winter wheat got wiped out.
So, yeah, prices are going to go up.
So any food that you buy today is probably going to be worth more six months from now or a year from now.
And you're never going to think, oh, I wish I had less food stored in the middle of a crisis when the grocery stores are wiped out.
Like, you know, I went to the grocery store a couple of times during the week and Mostly just to see what it was like, but also to try to find bananas because bananas you can't really store very well except freeze-dried.
I don't like freeze-dried bananas.
I like fresh.
So I'm always having to go out and get fresh bananas.
But every time I was at the store...
I felt very fortunate that I did not have to survive on whatever I could find remaining on the shelves because I knew that I could go home and I had, you know, ranger buckets and I had frozen bread and I could, you know, I'm sprouting and I could make my sprout sandwiches because I still have slices of cheese and mayonnaise and whatever else.
You know, I knew I could go home and I could live just fine.
And I knew even if I had to, if my neighbors were starving, I could share with them.
Help them out.
They never needed that because they're pretty self-reliant too.
But if I had to, I could have.
And that's a great feeling.
And it's also a good investment because, again, food is never going to get cheaper.
It doesn't seem like it.
From here forward, it's just going to get more and more expensive, more scarce.
I mean, I felt so fortunate that I could find avocados at the store today.
And one of these days soon I'm going to hit the banana jackpot and there's going to be a whole shelf of bananas and I'm going to buy like 20 bunches.
I'm going to have a banana festival.
I'm going to go totally bananas on purpose and then put them in the freezer.
I can't wait for banana abundance to return to the Health Ranger Ranch.
That's going to be great.
But until that day comes, you know, we're all going to experience some food scarcity at some level, so be prepared for that.
Okay, lesson number 12 is that you can't really count on any government or institution or any particular component of the infrastructure to help you out.
They may not be able to.
Even the governor of Texas, I know he must have been totally freaked out about what's going on.
It wasn't his fault that the Arctic weather came through.
It wasn't his fault that the ERCOT Texas power grid controllers are a bunch of evil globalists who want to see everybody die.
That's not the fault of Governor Abbott.
So he's doing his best.
He did a couple of things.
He signed an executive order that says everybody in the state that has red-dyed diesel, which is tax-free agricultural diesel, You know, to use on farms and such.
You can now use that in your truck driving down the road, which normally would get you heavily fined because you're supposed to buy retail diesel where you're paying state and federal taxes.
Well, now you can fill up your truck, your diesel truck, which I have one.
I'm going to fill up my truck with red dye diesel.
It's going to be awesome.
Thank you, Governor Abbott.
But, you know, that doesn't help much compared to the collapse situation that we're all dealing with.
But, you know, Governor Abbott's doing his best.
Again, he didn't create this nightmare.
He's just trying to help people live through it.
But don't think that you'll ever be able to count on any government to save you.
And if you find yourself in a line, I've said this before, if you find yourself in a line waiting for water handouts, then your planning has gone horribly wrong.
Seriously.
And I know my planning failed in some ways, too.
So I'm not judging just you.
I've failed in some ways.
But I never found myself in a line hoping for water.
That's a very bad situation.
You should never be there.
And frankly, you should never be in a bread line either.
If you're in a line waiting for food, then something has also gone horribly wrong with your food preps.
Because food is fairly easy to acquire before the emergencies.
You just have to plan ahead.
A lot of it is shelf-stable.
A lot of the food out there has many years of shelf life and so on.
I'm talking about even the storable food products and so on.
There's no excuse not to have some food.
There's no excuse not to have a gravity water filter.
I mean, just cover the basics, right?
And we all need to learn that we can't count on government.
Even this whole week, when I was dealing with my situation, there was never a moment where I thought, oh, when is the government going to come save me?
You know, that thought never occurred to me.
That's just an alien idea.
No, never occurred.
The only thoughts I had was like, hey, God, um...
What should I do right now to save my dog here?
Or what should be my priorities?
What's the most important thing I need to be doing right now to make it through the next 24 hours?
Keep the heat going.
Prepare food for us.
Keep the animals alive.
Protect more pipes from bursting and so on.
What do I need to be doing?
I never thought, I'm going to pick up the phone and ask the government to come save me because that's an impossible thing.
That's never going to happen.
If you're waiting on the government to come save you, you're going to be dead before that wait is over, sadly.
Okay, number 13.
This is a gear-related lesson, and I did not fail this lesson.
It's about the fact that you need to have really good flashlights and headlamps.
A wearable headlamp that is very functional and very good because you're going to be in the dark by definition during a blackout because, you know, there is such a thing as night.
You're going to have no lights.
You're going to need some serious flashlights and headlamps and so on.
And I forgot to mention this.
I did a gear review podcast a couple of days ago.
There is a headlamp that I recommend and it's made by Petzl, P-E-T-Z-L. And the headlamp is called the Nao Plus, N-A-O, Nao, I don't know why they call it that, N-A-O Plus.
And what's interesting about this headlamp is that it adjusts the intensity of the light based on what you're looking at, whether you're looking close or far.
Actually, I've owned these for many years.
This is the one that I normally wear around the ranch.
I'm actually wearing it right now just because I'm recording this late at night, and I always wear this at night.
What's great about it is, let's say you're looking at something close up.
You're working on your plumbing fix.
The light is automatically adjusted so that it's not blinding you with being too bright.
But then if you raise your head and look into the distance, Because maybe you hear coyotes or something.
You look into the distance, the light gets brighter to light up the distance.
But then if you push your head back down to look at the plumbing, the light quickly adjusts to reduce its intensity so you're not blinded.
And this light is doing that in real time all the time.
It's sensing how much...
Reflected light is coming back to itself and it's adjusting the light accordingly.
So it's the best light for getting things done in any kind of, especially a rural environment, if you're working with your hands, if you're looking for animals at night, which apparently is something I have to end up doing a lot.
Or if you're fixing things, you know, this light is, it's called adaptive lighting technology or something like that.
And it's really the best.
It's the best thing out there.
And I know there are kind of cheap headlamps that are 20 bucks on Amazon that are just, just like screaming light all the time.
No matter where you look, you're like, oh, I'm blinded, you know?
Those aren't very practical.
Get one of these Petzl Now Plus lights and it's super, super practical.
But in addition to that, one of the things that I've always done for many, many years, well over, what, 15, 20 years, is I've always carried a light in my front pocket.
And I wear these 511 tactical pants that have not just a normal front pocket, but then an extra front front pocket for gear.
And I've always carried a light there.
And I've gone from different brands, but what I'm carrying right now, gosh, this thing is beat up, is a Surefire.
And it's my backup light, but I carry it day and night.
So I always have a light in my pocket.
And then it uses a CR123 battery, and I carry a spare battery in one of my many, many pockets because...
These pants are full of pockets.
In fact, some of the pockets are designed to carry AR-15 magazines, it turns out.
Those are very, very handy pants.
I think they're called Stryker, S-T-R-Y-K-E-R, 5.11 Stryker pants.
Really very practical.
So anyway, even when I have a light on my head, I always have a spare light That's in my front, front pocket.
And that light, I have a spare battery.
And so one of the skills that I've intentionally practiced is changing the battery in the dark.
Yeah, because that's the situation that you might encounter one day.
And people who are survivalists or soldiers or first responders, they always know that, what do they say, two is one and one is none?
So if you have two of something, like two flashlights, that's really only equivalent to having one because one of them is probably going to fail on you.
And if you only have one of something, that's having none because that one's going to fail.
So two is one and one is none.
And I do practice that in what's called everyday carry, EDC, as a prepper.
I also carry...
By the way, two knives.
I'm not going to go into all the details of what I'm carrying because I don't want to ruin the surprise for the bad guys.
But I also carry a pistol.
I have the SIG P320 carry.
Let's see.
What is this?
Yeah, this is the carry edition.
It's not the full-size edition.
It's the concealed carry edition.
And...
I wish I could tell you what this holster is.
I really like this holster.
It's one of those soft holsters on the inside with the poly on the outside.
I love that holster.
I did a review of this holster at my prepping site called prepwithmike.com.
If you go there, prepwithmike.com, you'll see my holster reviews.
And I do mention this holster.
It's really great.
So anyway, I'm carrying quite a bit of gear.
Every day.
It's not just for the storm or the blackouts.
I mean, I have...
In fact, what is this?
This is one of those Leatherman multi-tools.
I've been carrying this for years.
It's got pliers and it's got a screwdriver and it's got a blade and everything.
And I carry that next to my Surefire flashlight there.
And then I carry a Karambit combat knife that I must use 10 times a day, opening boxes and Cutting paracord or whatever, cutting twine off of bales of hay and things like that.
I mean, I use it all the time.
So this is everyday carry for me, the stuff I'm talking about right now.
So I didn't have to change my routine at all for dealing with blackouts.
I'm just wearing the same stuff I'm always wearing, including the headlight.
I'm always wearing that at night anyway.
I just had to have more clothing on and more warm caps and scarves and such.
It's just more clothing.
But the bottom line here is practice carrying your gear.
Practice your everyday carry, your EDC. What do you have in your pockets and on your person every day?
Because that's what you're going to have in a crisis.
Because it has to be a habit.
There's not a day that I don't get up and put on my pistol.
I don't have days like, oh, it's Friday.
It's a pistol-free day.
I'm not going to wear my pistol on Friday.
No, that doesn't happen.
I wear my pistol every day, period, including Christmas Day, you name it.
I'm always putting on the pistol.
Why?
It's part of my everyday carry.
I have the pistol when I'm at Home Depot.
I have the pistol when shopping for groceries.
I have the pistol...
I'm picking up people at the airport in the luggage claim area because it's legal.
I wear the pistol when I walk into the Capitol building because it's legal to do so.
So, yeah, it's everyday carry.
Practice everyday carry and make sure you've got lights because you will need it.
All right, lesson number 14, kind of a segue from the guns and the pistol conversation.
Here's something interesting.
Guns and bullets are not needed in...
Certain survival situations.
So a lot of times we think about survival and prepping.
People are just like, well, I just need more 9mm or I need a bigger gun or I need more shotgun shells.
Well, I'll tell you what, during this power outage in Texas, I never fired a gun.
I never even pulled a gun out of the holster.
Not even once.
I didn't have to use a shotgun, didn't have to use a rifle, didn't have to use an AR, didn't have to use a An AR pistol.
Didn't have to use my.300 blackout.
Didn't have to use any firearm.
No, we're too busy carrying pails of water around.
There was no need for firearms.
And you know why in this case?
Because it's too damn cold to loot.
Even looters were like, ah, it's too damn cold.
We're staying home.
No looting tonight, honey.
We need to warm up.
We'll loot when the weather changes, you know?
That's what they were thinking.
I'm not saying there weren't looters anywhere.
I'm sure there were.
But in rural areas, where it's a long walk between houses and long driveways, you know, in 10 degree weather, people are not interested in Looting in the freezing cold and dodging bullets, so we didn't really need firearms.
So just think about your preps.
Are they lopsided?
Have you focused maybe too much on guns and ammo and not enough on, I don't know, like a kerosene heater or candles?
Or lighters, or flashlights, or all these other really practical things, or just buckets, just having buckets to carry water.
I mean, it's great to have a kick-ass AR-15.
You know, I'm sure that that's going to come in handy, no doubt about it.
But that rifle's not going to help you get water off your roof.
You're still going to need buckets.
You're still going to need the basics.
Might be good to have a funnel, too, by the way.
Might be good to have a good pair of gloves.
Might be good to have a good, reliable, waterproof pair of boots.
You know?
Cover the basics.
Because guns and ammo are getting pretty darn expensive right now.
Have you noticed that?
Nine millimeter rounds are now over a dollar each.
A year ago, we were buying them for 18 cents.
In fact, it's getting too expensive to practice now.
You know, I used to warm up with a couple hundred rounds.
You know, now that's like, I just blew a couple hundred dollars.
Like, no one's practicing now because it's too pricey.
So, balance your preps.
Sometimes you can spend money much more efficiently on other areas, perhaps food, for example, and wait for some of the ammo supply to come back in.
It might be a while with Biden in the White House for the moment, so we'll see.
We might never have an ammo supply that's abundant again, but you've got to be smart about where you spend your prepping money and spread it around instead of putting it all in one place.
Alright, moving on.
Lesson number 15.
This is the last lesson of today.
Is to keep in mind what are stores of energy.
Because when it comes to freezing cold weather or when it comes to living off-grid, a lot of it is about managing energy.
You need energy?
To function yourself, but you also need energy in other systems.
You need heat energy, you know, for your living quarters.
You need sunlight energy to grow plants if you're growing some of your own food.
You need energy to power vehicles that are multipliers of human labor.
And what are stores of energy?
So wood stores energy, you know, diesel, gasoline, propane, kerosene, and so on.
Those are all stores of energy.
But remember that solar panels and wind turbines are not stores of energy, and those failed big time.
That was, in fact, the leading cause of the collapse of the Texas power grid was the wind turbines failing because they froze.
They froze up, the freezing rain.
Well, they don't store any energy.
Sadly, you can't burn wind turbines to power the grid.
I wish we could.
We should burn them all, as far as I'm concerned, if they would power the grid.
But sadly, they do not, because they contain no energy themselves.
All they do is transfer energy from the kinetic action of the wind, obviously, into current in real time, which is delivered and consumed in milliseconds or microseconds.
So if you're going to survive hard times or some kind of a collapse, you need to surround yourself with stores of energy and understand the concept of energy density.
So wood has very low energy density compared to, let's say, diesel fuel or gasoline.
But wood still has energy, and it is stored in the wood, and it can be released in the form of heat, obviously.
But a gallon of diesel or a gallon of gasoline or a gallon of kerosene will produce a lot more heat than the same mass of a piece of wood.
So energy density really matters.
And think about water, too.
Water freezing versus thawing.
When water is dropping in temperature and it's approaching freezing, There's a phase transition that happens there that, in order for ice to form, it requires a large amount of heat energy to be removed from the system for water to freeze.
It doesn't transition smoothly from liquid into a solid.
Actually, it pauses there, and then there's a whole lot of energy that leaves the system before the ice forms.
And what that means is that if you're trying to thaw things, let's say you're trying to melt snow in your bathtub.
And I heard that some people were doing this because they didn't have stored water.
So they went outside and they gathered snow and they threw the snow in their bathtub.
They figured out, I've got a bathtub full of snow.
Pretty soon I'll have a bathtub full of water.
Guess what?
It takes a lot of heat energy to melt snow, it turns out.
Snow melts very, very slowly in a bathtub, even if your house is warm, and most homes were not warm.
So it's a misunderstanding of the specific heat of water and the phase transition from ice into liquid water that makes people think that melting snow is easier than it really is.
It actually takes a tremendous amount of heat Which is sucking the heat out of your home in order to melt the snow in order to make water.
And it's slow, and you end up with a very tiny amount of water compared to all the snow that you had in there.
By the way, people are like, that's it?
That's all the water that's in here?
This thing was full of snow.
Where did it all go?
Well, you know, snow is pretty fluffy, mostly air.
So in other words, it's important to think about energy and storing energy around you, and then how do you convert that energy into the things you need?
So how do you convert stored energy into heat?
The answers would be a wood-burning stove or a kerosene heater, or maybe a little alcohol stove of some kind.
Or how do you convert stored energy into meals?
Well, by boiling water.
So you need a little stove of some kind.
Maybe you have a rocket stove or a camping stove or a little portable pocket stove.
All kinds of stoves.
Maybe you have stored energy in the form of butane or little propane canisters.
Maybe you have a little propane stove, a little camping stove of some kind.
Maybe you have a rocket stove that runs on pine cones and pine needles and leaves and branches.
Whatever.
These are all forms of energy.
You can convert those then into boiling water.
To have your favorite meal of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
I say jokingly because that's the definition of fake food.
It's so funny.
But whatever.
Think about, you know, how do you convert energy into then work?
If you need to move water around, if you need to go gather wood, if you need to deliver something, well, then that's energy in the form of fuel that goes in maybe a little vehicle that you have.
I've got a little ranch vehicle, a little Kubota, also a truck.
You know, you probably have a vehicle of some kind as well.
But As you move through all these scenarios in your mind, really focus on what are stores of energy and how can you safely store energy, which is really concentrated work.
If you think about it, all these fuels, like diesel fuel, it's a form of concentrated labor, concentrated work.
And an engine is simply a device that converts diesel fuel into physical work.
And that physical work could be plowing fields.
It could be moving buckets.
It could be dragging a tree out of the way that fell over across your road.
It could be using the PTO to run a generator that gives you electricity.
All kinds of things can come from physical work.
But the work is only possible because of the stored energy.
So if you can, wherever you live, If you can store hundreds of gallons of diesel, which is very common in agricultural communities where people have tractors and so on, it's very common to have a big diesel fuel tank on your own ranch.
I have one.
I also have a propane tank, and I think this is one of the best stores of energy for emergency use.
It's so concentrated, and the fuel can last you for so long, and frankly, at least until recently, until Biden, Got into the White House.
Diesel fuel was dirt cheap.
Now it's going up.
But it's probably going to go up even more because some of the refineries went offline during all this.
So right now might be a good time to buy diesel before it goes up even more.
I don't know.
But also think of batteries, small batteries, as concentrated light.
So what is a flashlight?
A flashlight is a device that transforms concentrated battery energy into visible light in the same way that a diesel engine is a device that converts concentrated diesel energy into physical work.
So it's a good idea to have long-term storable batteries like the lithium-ion AA Energizer batteries, for example, or the CR123 batteries, or what I mentioned the other day, Nightcore branded, what are these, the 18650 batteries.
And even to some extent, the gel batteries, the lead-acid batteries in your vehicles, you know, 12-volt batteries, they're a store of energy as well.
And yeah, with a solar panel, you can do a slow trickle charge to recharge those batteries as long as you have the proper charge controller and so on.
So you can harvest sunlight to gather energy, but it's not much.
It's not much power that comes through a typical solar panel.
It takes a lot of sunlight to accomplish much work compared to, let's say, a gallon of diesel, which does a tremendous amount of work.
So the more you understand about stored energy, also think about gravity.
So when you're using a gravity filter, you're pouring the water, the unfiltered water in at the top.
That actually has stored kinetic energy in the form of higher elevation of mass that is then pulled by gravity through the filtration system to end up in the bottom of the filter.
Well, could you, let's say if you lived in the countryside somewhere and maybe you lived on a hillside.
could you have rainwater collection at a higher elevation and then have a water tank higher to the point where you have gravity flow water pressure to your home that requires no pumps?
So that, for example, in a grid-down emergency, you could still have some amount of water flowing Some small pressure, you know, maybe one-tenth the normal amount of water that you get, but it's still something.
It's enough to rinse dishes.
It's enough to fill a bucket slowly and so on.
Could you do that?
Or if you live in a building, is there rainwater collection maybe on the roof that would fill a tank on the roof and provide some amount of water to the levels beneath the roof?
So think about gravity and height as also a store of energy.
Survival is, a lot of it is about managing energy.
In fact, my friend Bob Griswold was telling me this today about gardening too.
He was saying gardening is all about managing energy.
Sunlight energy and fertilizer energy and then the labor to harvest food and so on.
He's the founder of Ready-Made Resources.
He's a great guy.
And he's right on with that concept.
It really is about energy management.
Same thing about survival.
And especially in the bitter cold weather.
You need heat energy or you're going to die.
And you need caloric energy or you're going to die.
So a lot of this really is energy management.
And that's a great framework through which to think about all of these things.
We talk about preparing and survival.
It's very easy to get focused on gear.
It's like, oh, do you have the right knife?
Do you have the right gun?
Do you have the right flashlight?
But we really need to think about energy as well because energy is what powers all the gear.
You know, what good is your flashlight without batteries?
What good is your kerosene heater without kerosene or diesel fuel?
What good is your truck without fuel?
What good is your water without a pump to move it unless you have a gravity-fed system?
Think about energy and how you can store and leverage energy.
And, of course, you have human-powered energy.
The problem is, you know how they say, a horsepower is the power of a horse.
Well, a person power isn't very much.
It's like 150 watts.
That's about it.
I mean, if you get on a bicycle and start pedaling, You'd be lucky to generate 150 watts.
And you probably couldn't keep it up for very long.
You couldn't do it all day, right?
So, I mean, yeah, you're a source of energy, but it's not that much.
You're going to need leverage.
And that's where all these other things come into play.
Leverage in the form of engines or motors or wood stoves or things like that.
And as I've talked about before, of course...
In low-tech societies, which are very resilient and redundant, they use animals as forms of energy, especially when it comes to farming and food production.
They use animals to plow the field.
Or animals, even like a horse-drawn hay-cutting operation.
That existed in America's history.
Nobody's doing it now, but I'm sure similar things are being done elsewhere around the world.
The thing is, today, no one really has working animals in America unless it's part of some kind of history demonstration or something.
And I've got donkeys, but I'm pretty sure if I somehow manage to catch them and strap a plow to one of them, they just run crazy through the forest until they destroy whatever was hanging off of them.
They have no interest in doing any work.
They're welfare recipients.
All they do is whine and complain and want me to feed them more grain.
I'm like, I point to the grass.
There's grass right there.
Just eat that.
They don't want to bend down that far because they've been turned into welfare queens, sadly.
They do complain quite a lot.
They're so picky, too.
They eat bales of hay like they're Oreo cookies.
They eat the center first.
I'll put a giant round bale, like a five foot round bale, in the feeding area for them and they'll just ignore it for a couple of days.
I'm like, eh.
We don't want that yet.
And then when they do start eating it, they'll just eat the middle out.
I guess that's the good hay or something.
They'll eat the middle out, again, like Oreo cookies.
And then the bale will collapse, and sometimes they won't even eat the outer part.
They'll just throw it around.
So I'm pretty sure I can't turn my donkeys into work animals.
They're not interested in work at all.
They're just party animals, basically.
It's like Animal House.
It's like a fraternity.
In any case, so those are my 15, give or take, lessons that I learned in the last week of Surviving Hell Week in Texas, Texageddon.
And it was, yeah, this was the most challenging week that I've experienced in my adult life, no question about it.
Growing up in the 1970s, we didn't have power blackouts.
And that was the 1970s, you know?
People think, oh, that was way back then.
That was before the internet.
How did you guys survive?
We had a power grid that worked.
I tell you what, we had people who could change tires.
Yeah, we didn't have the internet.
We had something called the yellow pages.
We called on a phone that had a cord on it.
We dialed on a phone that did clickety-clickety-click when you dial it.
You know, a rotary dialer.
Yeah.
When we talked to our friends on the phone, we had to stay within cord range.
That's why we had these long, like, squiggly cords where you could try to walk 30 feet away in the house and still stay on the phone.
But it was always connected.
And guess what?
Guess what?
You know, we didn't have 5G electro pollution.
We also didn't have internationally rigged electronic voting machines in the 70s.
Yeah, 70s was actually way better than 2021, as far as I'm concerned.
Wouldn't mind going back.
Bring back disco!
I'm sure those polyester pants do awesome in the frigid weather.
Yeah, I know, I know.
I long for the day when Bill Cosby was just a really friendly, funny comedian.
And when it was okay to say Fat Albert without being canceled by the culture wars.
Yep.
Those were the days.
1970s.
But obviously, the 70s aren't coming back.
However, we may go back to the 1800s sometime soon because of the total collapse of modern society, which is coming.
I'm convinced now more than ever.
So part of what I'm going to do here is really focus on more preparedness skills.
I am working on something.
I'm working on some real low-tech sustainability systems.
I'm looking at something right now called Earth Tubes, which is a semi-passive cooling system that requires no compressors and no machinery with any complex parts.
And one of my concerns about moving forward is that if there's anything in your life that requires complex machinery with parts, like you're going to need a lot of spare parts, such as for a heating and cooling system, because those parts seem to break all the time.
Oh, a circuit board went out, you know?
If it relies on complex parts, it's not going to work.
It's going to fail.
So I'm really looking into very low-tech, self-reliant systems.
And I'm going to be bringing you a lot more information on that throughout this year because I am absolutely convinced, especially after going through this week and seeing what happened to the Texas power grid, I'm convinced that our whole system is teetering on the edge of a catastrophic collapse that would make the Texas situation just look like a walk in the park.
And I think that most people are not ready for the degree of collapse that's coming.
And I think that the globalists are actively working on ways to, well, mass murder billions of people.
And it turns out it's not that hard.
All they have to do is turn off the power grid for long enough and stop the food deliveries.
Pretty much that gives them the Bill Gates milestone right there.
It's not that hard for them to do.
Most people aren't prepared.
So if they want to kill 95% of the population, that's easy.
95% have no stored food.
This is like...
The math is pretty simple.
Even the...
What's it called?
The ethnomathematics teachers might be able to figure that one out.
And they don't even know that 1 plus 1 equals 2.
Go figure.
So anyway, that's my report for today.
Thank you for your time and attention.
I hope this has been valuable.
Thank you for your support.
Oh, I should mention our Health Ranger store is up and running again, and we are actively shipping packages and our kitchen's up and running again.
We're manufacturing products again, thanks to the fact that the water supply is working and the power grid is working.
So you can help support us at healthrangerstore.com.
We're a little bit behind on shipments going out, but I think we'll be caught up by Tuesday, So we're not that far behind.
But thank you for your support.
And I'll keep bringing you more situation updates here each day.
But a lot of my focus is going to be on preparedness and prepping.
I don't intend to do a lot of focus on the Biden situation because it's just a pointless nightmare.
I think we need to be ready for the total collapse that's coming under Biden.
Yeah.
And the economic collapse is going to be a big part of it.
And a lot of bubbles are going to burst.
I think we're going to see the real estate bubble burst, the bond bubble, the fiat currency bubble, the crypto bubble in some cases.
There's going to be a lot of bubbles bursting.
So we'll be talking about that in the days ahead.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams here.
Sorry to make this so long, but I hope you found it to be valuable.
I'll touch base with you again tomorrow.
And yes, my dog, Well, multiple dogs, but the one that fell through the ice, he's doing great.
He's doing fine.
He's awesome.
He's staying away from the pond for some reason.
He doesn't want to go that close to...
He's doing fine.
Thank you for your prayers and your support, and we'll talk to you again tomorrow.
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