How to START ‘Gathering In the Summer’

Here’s How to Become a Prepper

If the coronavirus has inspired you to become a prepper, you’re not alone. At long last, prepping has become mainstream due to runs on supplies, shortages, and stay-at-home orders throughout the country. More folks than ever before are seeing the wisdom of having extra food and household goods on hand. It can help you through not only disasters and pandemics, but also through personal financial problems.

But delve into most preparedness websites (including this one) and it can start to get overwhelming when you read articles about civil unrest, EMPs, and existential catastrophes. You’ll see articles about guns and outdoor survival and all sorts of things in which you have absolutely no interest.

And more than that, it’s kind of overwhelming. It can make you feel like, “Wow, I will never be able to have a bunker in Montana with 150,000 rounds of ammo. I don’t even know how to build a fire. Why even bother?”

Before we get started with the “how to’s” here are a few things you should know.

All of us started at the beginning.

It’s important to know that all of us started somewhere. We all had some event that awakened us to the need to be better prepared. (To learn how some readers were inspired to get started, go here.) We all had to learn the ins and outs, read the books, and acquire the stuff.

Most of us don’t have thousands of dollars to drop on buckets of food and secondary locations. We began by just getting a few extra things when we could.

It takes some time.

Getting well-prepared doesn’t happen overnight. Even if you have a budget that is relatively unlimited, you will find that it still takes time to figure out what you need, where to get it, and where to store it.

So if you can only afford a few extra things each week, that’s a fantastic place to start. Within a month, you may have an extra week’s food supply doing things that way. Within a year, you’ve got a 3-month supply.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was a prepper’s stockpile.

You don’t have to be of a particular political or religious belief to be a prepper.

A lot of folks think that most preppers are well-to-do white, right-wing Christians. While a lot of preppers do have that in common, there are a lot who do not. We don’t all live on an acreage in the boondocks and raise everything we eat.

If you feel like you don’t fit into the mold, don’t worry because let me tell you a secret: there really is no mold. We have readers of this website from all different kinds of political and religious backgrounds. We have city dwellers and suburbanites. We have folks who live off the land and folks who buy most of their food from the grocery store. We have rich readers and poor readers. We have people coming here from many different countries with many different belief systems. The thing that unites us is that we want to be prepared.

We have people who are involved in prepping for a huge variety of reasons and we, the writers and editors of this site, sincerely welcome anyone who wants to become better prepared for emergencies.

You don’t have to be a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to be a prepper.

A lot of folks have this mental image of some wild-eyed guy peering out of the bunker wearing a tinfoil helmet. I’ll grant you that a lot of preppers are mistrustful of the things we hear in the mainstream media. We don’t take things at face value.

But for every prepper who is certain that the New World Order is trying to take over and every event is a false flag, there are preppers who are extremely logical and scientific. There are preppers who are pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination and everything in between.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that we run the gamut. Don’t let the stereotypes scare you away.

Don’t stay someplace you’re treated badly.

In most of the preparedness world, you’ll be welcomed with open arms. But there are a few websites and forums where you find long-time preppers who are incredibly discouraging. If you run into this issue repeatedly, don’t continue hanging out there. Getting started on a big endeavor is overwhelming enough without people like that making you feel like crap.

Around here we like to help each other with advice and suggestions. Feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments section and you’ll probably get more than one answer from those who wish to share their knowledge.

We welcome you and we’re glad you’re here. Go here to sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss a thing.

Now, how do you get started prepping?

Pretty much all of us have recently had a crash course in preparedness with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people have been sheltering in place in their homes for over a month now and have seen holes in their purchases. Some folks had the unfortunate experience of going out to stock up a little too late, only to find that the shelves were bare of essentials.

An enormous factor that makes just about every disaster worse is panic. When you wait until the last minute, you’re out there with all the other folks who waited until the last minute. Tensions are high and supplies are low. This can create an unsafe situation and can leave people without the things they need to face the event that has them rushing to the store in the first place.

The goal of prepping is to avoid all that.

When you’re prepped, sure, you really want to make one last run to the grocery store or Target, but if it came right down to it and you couldn’t, you’d still be okay. You still have the things on hand that your family needs to survive an event that lasts for a few hours all the way to a few months or even a few years. (And remember what I said above? It takes a while to get to that point.) The information below contains lots of links to articles, PDF guides, and books for topics you may wish to learn more about.

What are you prepping for?

There are all sorts of events people prep for, one of which, obviously, is a massive pandemic and quarantine. Outside of your general supplies, consider prepping for power outages next. Here’s a PDF guide that will help you get ready for blackouts. and here’s an article with some guidelines.

But there are many more things and some will be unique to your area. The Prepper’s Workbook may be helpful in figuring out exactly what’s the most likely for you. Here are some more regional things to prepare for these events are common in your area:

Focus on the things most pertinent to your area. Think about those most likely events and what generally occurs with them: power outages, property damage, a requirement for special shelter, a secondary disaster (like a flood that follows a hurricane, for example).

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

דורינו שעשית לו כל הנסים הללו ולא אמר שירה לפניך – תעשה לו משיח?! – שיר חדש

שיר לישועת ה’

ביאור לשיר ● הכרה בישועות ה’ ● חשיבות השירה ● שיר הכרה בישועת השם [נכתב ע”י הרב החפץ בעילום שמו שליט”א]

22:14 (10/05/20) מכון בריתי יצחק ● הרב יצחק ברנד

המשך לקרוא…

מאתר בריתי יצחק – הרב ברנד שליט”אכאן.

Walter Williams on the Wacky ‘Wealth Tax’

Let’s Not Waste a Crisis

Former Barack Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel, during a recent interview, reminded us of his 2008 financial crisis quotation, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.” The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a wonderful opportunity for those of us who want greater control over our lives. Sadly, too many Americans have already taken the bait. We’ve allowed politicians and bureaucrats to dictate to us what’s an essential business and what isn’t, who has access to hospitals and who hasn’t, and a host of minor and major dictates.

Leftist politicians who want to get into our pocketbooks are beginning to argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is the best argument for a wealth tax. Let’s first define a wealth tax. A wealth tax is applicable to and levied on a variety of accumulated assets that include cash, money market funds, real property, trust funds, owner-occupied housing and other wealth accumulations. Assume a taxpayer earns $150,000 a year and falls in the 32% tax bracket. That individual’s income tax liability for the year will be 32% x $150,000 or $48,800. Say the taxpayer has a net worth of $500,000 consisting of a business or home and the government imposes a wealth tax of 32%, the person’s tax liability is $160,000.

The problem with most politicians is when they enact a law, they seldom ask, “Then what?” They assume a world of what economists call zero elasticity wherein people behave after a tax is imposed just as they behaved before the tax was imposed and the only difference is that more money comes into the government’s tax coffers. The long-term effect of a wealth tax is that people will try to avoid it by not accumulating as much wealth or concealing the wealth they accumulate.

A wealth tax has become increasingly attractive because it lends itself to demagoguery about the significant wealth disparity in the United States. The Federal Reserve reports that, in 2018, the wealthiest 10% of Americans owned 70% of the country’s wealth, and the richest 1% owned 32% of the wealth. That fact gave Democratic presidential contenders such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren incentives to propose a wealth tax as a part of their campaign rhetoric. Leftists lament that multibillionaires such as Charles Koch, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Sheldon Adelson have not made charitable efforts to address the coronavirus crisis.

My questions to these political leeches are: To whom does the billionaire’s wealth belong? And how did they accumulate such wealth?

Did they accumulate their great wealth by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man, as has been the case throughout most of human history? No, they accumulated great wealth by serving and pleasing their fellow man in the pursuit of profits. Unfortunately, demagoguery and lack of understanding has led to “profit” becoming a dirty word. Profit is a payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants in a way that economizes on society’s scarce resources.

Here’s a question for you. Which entities produce greater consumer satisfaction: for-profit enterprises such as supermarkets, computer makers and clothing stores, or nonprofit entities such as public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments? I’m guessing you’ll answer the former. Their survival depends on pleasing ordinary people. Public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments’ survival are not strictly tied to pleasing people but rather on politicians and the ability of government to impose taxes.

Some advocates of wealth taxes and other forms of taxation might argue that they are temporary measures to get us over the COVID-19 crisis. Do not buy that argument. The great Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman once said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program.” The telephone tax was levied on wealthy Americans with telephones in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War. That tax was repealed over 100 years later in 2006. One of the objectives of the World War II withholding tax was to bring faster revenues to fight the war. The withholding of taxes is still with us blinding Americans on the taxes they pay. Let us not allow a crisis to bamboozle us again.

From LRC, here.

Corona: Prepper Says ‘Told Ya So!’

What I Learned During the COVID Crisis

The COVID-19 crisis has affected just about every family in the United States in some way or another. All of our situations are unique and everyone I’ve spoken to has learned some lessons about their levels of preparedness. Some of those lessons are unconventional but valuable nonetheless. There are a whole lot of things you can’t learn from a book or a blog.

Here are the things I’ve learned.

Trust your instincts.

I began writing about this virus back in January when it was announced that the entire city of Wuhan was being locked down and millions of people were under stay at home orders. With that many people under a mandatory lockdown, I was firmly convinced that this had potential global ramifications.

I had come back from Europe to attend a funeral in early January and was supposed to return on January 28th. After doing the research for the article mentioned above, I rescheduled my flight for March 28th and settled in with my youngest daughter at her apartment to help out with the bills. We immediately began stocking up.

A lot of folks at that time said I was crazy – a few here on my website but more so on other sites that republished my work. I’m no stranger to being called crazy – I’m in the preparedness industry and I like guns, so right there, the mainstream media sees me as a lunatic. It no longer bothers me and I was convinced that this was going to be a big deal.

Every day from January 23rd to the present, I’ve spent hours researching as this pandemic has unfolded. I sincerely wish that I had not been correct, but here we are, still in lockdown in many parts of the country.

You can prepare fast if you’re aware before other folks are.

I had sold or donated nearly everything that my daughters didn’t want before I took off on an open-ended trip to Europe last fall. The other items were divided up between my two girls. So while the daughter with whom I stayed still had a few things, like firearms, water filters, etc., the stockpile was pretty much gone.

By the end of January, I was pretty sure that we were going to see mandatory quarantines or lockdowns here and I began stocking up. It’s important to note that at this point, you could still buy anything you wanted or needed. I grabbed some extra masks and gloves but most of my focus was on food and other everyday supplies. By the end of February, I was pretty content with the amount of supplies we had. I had spent as little as possible on “right now food” and focused most of my budget on shelf-stable items like canned goods, pasta, and rice.

For about $600, we accumulated a supply that would see us through a minimum of 3 months without leaving the house. I figured, if it turned out that I had overreacted, my daughter would use the food anyway.

I also started a personal spending freeze at the end of January. If it wasn’t an item we needed to become better prepared, I didn’t spend a dime. I was able to put back a few months’ worth of expenses while still stocking up. It helped that my daughter was living thrifty in a less expensive apartment with utilities included. I was very concerned about things like cash flow and it turns out, this has been a huge problem for a lot of people.

You can’t always have the “ideal” situation.

There were a lot of things about my situation that were less than ideal. But that’s probably true in a lot of cases. You just have to adapt to the reality of your situation instead of endlessly wishing it was different or feeling that it’s hopeless. “Less than ideal” does not mean that all hope is lost.

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

You Don’t Choose Israel. Israel Chooses You…

The improbable Zionist

Growing up the son of the Nikolsburg Rebbe in Monsey, New York, Yiddy Lebovits could be forgiven for not being the world’s biggest Zionist.

By Rivkah Lambert Adler AUGUST 27, 2015

Growing up the son of the Nikolsburg Rebbe in Monsey, New York, Yiddy Lebovits could be forgiven for not being the world’s biggest Zionist.

As a young child in Williamsburg, New York, everything he knew about Israel came from the weekly Torah portion. He was surrounded by a community of people who had a lot of negativity, not toward the Land of Israel, but toward their ideas about Zionism. Until the arrival of the Messiah, making aliya wasn’t in the picture for anyone in his world.

When Lebovits was seven, his parents went to Israel for a visit and brought back a small booklet that had photographs of buildings in Israel. “At that age, Israel was a remote, far-off idea that belongs only in the Torah. To think that there were Hebrew letters on a building in Israel was something big, something very interesting to me,” he recollects.

Although his parents were European- born, Lebovits always felt very American.

Visiting the US military academy in West Point and Colonial Williamsburg were highlights of his younger years. “I was connected to the American past, to a history that was not mine.”

By contrast, his connection to Israel didn’t begin until he was 22, married and a father. His wife, Ruchy, had visited Israel when she was a girl and wanted to return on vacation, but at that stage Lebovits preferred vacation spots like Epcot Center and Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida.

To encourage him to visit Israel despite his hesitation, Ruchy’s brother and sister-in-law helped make the arrangements.

The three surprised Yiddy with plane tickets for a 10-day trip over Succot.

It’s no exaggeration to say that trip changed everything for the Lebovits family.

“My connection to the Land of Israel started as soon as the plane started descending.

I have no clue what happened.

My soul just woke up. I don’t even know what happened. It was an unbelievable emotional reaction, like meeting a loved one after so many years.” Ruchy noticed the emotion in his eyes, even though, still on the plane, he had thus far witnessed only the shoreline of Tel Aviv.

“I was extremely excited to be in the Land of Israel. We went right away to the Ezrat Torah neighborhood of Jerusalem.”

The two couples spent time just walking around Ezrat Torah, Geula and surrounding neighborhoods. On that trip, they also visited Masada, Hebron, Tiberias and even did some sight-seeing on the Golan Heights. “All of a sudden, whatever you learn in the Bible, things come to life,” Yiddy recalled.

That first 10-day trip was incredibly meaningful, but “at that point, I wasn’t yet ready to make aliya.” Instead, he traded in his desire for theme parks in Orlando for annual visits to Israel over the next 15 years.

“Every time I came, the love got stronger,” he reminisces. “I started learning about what connects the Jew to the Land of Israel. I learned what makes Israel different from any other country.

Once I started loving the place and learning about it, everything became about Eretz Yisrael. Not a week goes by that you can’t connect to Eretz Yisrael.

Once it’s there, you just can’t cut the connection to this place.

“My soul was calling. Everything was about Eretz Yisrael. Every Shabbat, I bought food from Israel. I was obsessed. I was walking on air for weeks after each trip.”

Although his parents and siblings were supportive of his growing love for the land, he faced some negativity from friends in his community who believe that, until the Messiah comes, Israel is not a good place for a religious person to live. “Surprisingly a lot of Satmar [known to be a resolutely anti-Zionist hassidic group] were supportive.”

“Every time I came to Eretz Yisrael, I tried to meet with people who moved from any country. Everyone had stories of hardships and the first years were hard. It didn’t faze me that people had hardships. People I met were much more connected to the Above and not so connected to the material world, even in the hassidic world. I also liked the idea that most people in Eretz Yisrael have a pioneering excitement. It’s a new country and the attitude is that people want to start something, fix something.

Life in Eretz Yisrael is never mundane.

In America, every day will look exactly like the day before.”

As time went on, Lebovits’s desire to “see myself as an old Jew with a cane, walking in Eretz Yisrael,” became increasingly powerful. He and his wife had “the aliya conversation” on every trip, but it was very hard to leave family behind. In theory, Ruchy was willing to consider it but couldn’t be sure of the exact time.

Until… One Shabbat in synagogue, Yiddy got called to the Torah. The portion that week was Vayelech, which comes from chapter 31 of Deuteronomy. “I got an aliya [to the Torah], and the aliya was that God tells Moses to go up and not be afraid.” Walking home, his son asked if the family’s aliya [to Israel] was ever going to happen. But Yiddy knew he couldn’t demand it. He couldn’t tear his wife away from her family. After his nap that Shabbat afternoon, Ruchy suddenly turned to him and said, “Let’s do it!” Six months later, the family of eight was living in Israel. Today, Lebovits works as a graphic designer and artist. His Israel-inspired art can be seen on yiddylebovits.com. He also runs matanaboutique.com, selling made-in-Israel gifts.

The Lebovits family made aliya with six children, ranging in age from three to 18. “We used to have family meetings to discuss everyone’s concerns about aliya. They all adjusted well. I think it depends a lot on the parents. For kids to adjust, it has to be a home that finds the good in everything.

“It was the best decision I have ever made. No regrets whatsoever. The big difference is that in America I loved scenic rides and I used to drive in the Catskills. Driving here, the streets are my streets. It’s my place. My people.
My past. Many friends want to move to Eretz Yisrael, and every time someone does it, it strengthens others.

“My daughter says that she can’t understand how it’s possible that a Jew can live anywhere else.”

From The Jerusalem Post, here.