Global catastrophe / SHTF "survivable locations"

[hpeer]

What would happens if Katrina hit newfoundland?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Igor

[Singularity]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

But why? What is it about some areas that make them more — humane? I suspect it has something to do with a sense of community; of being connected to your neighbours.

The dominant theory I'm familiar with is....whatever empathy and sympathy you were born with, it automatically gets cut off when you're in fight/flight (stressed) mode so as to enhance your chance of survival (every man for himself mode).* This cuts you off from your neighbors, and even family members. If you're distracted by empathy and sympathy in combat, your individual chance of survival goes down (because of distraction, or, your willingness to run through fire to save another gets you burned). Most people in modern life are in chronic stress mode, not recognizing it (i.e. frogs who have normalized living in a pan of hot water, oblivious to historic water temperatures).
*Depersonalization/derealization are the extreme clinical symptoms associated with this phenomenon. But other fight/flight symptoms of environmental stress include hoarding (buying crap), over-eating. Good business model for Amazon, Visa, and Pharma, sort of bad for people.

It’s not just population density, although I completely agree that resource stress is a prime driver of human misery and conflict.

The resource stress theory has been debunked (to some large degree in developed countries) as there is no rational resource stress...we live in societies of surplus. You can literally get a surplus of rations for a trivial cost. Calhoun's rat experiments perfectly modeled this...rats having a surplus of rations yet things fall apart in the behavioral sink. Why?

At least look closely at the behavioral sink model. Back when Calhoun's results came out in the 1950s and 60s, people focused on population density. More recently Dunbar's number theory came up, which holds that people ordinarily can only be expected to maintain ~150 human relationships before things fall apart (and that's in a non-stressed environment). So throw in the mix social media and people even in rural areas find themselves in the behavioral sink. Throw into the mix the effects of the finance system where 80% of people are living paycheck to paycheck (a phenomenon associated with a drop in IQ of over 10 points). Not a good thing to be a frog in hot water with a lower IQ and bills to pay, with a desire to purchase much more than basic housing, food, inexpensive recreation (and/or loss of appreciation of nature).

I'd otherwise keep in mind Freud's narcissism of small differences concept as being, perhaps, the greatest driver of conflict in a non-stressed state. It's widely held that the Athenians killed off Socrates because he induced divisiveness in a relatively harmonious communal society. ~Prior to Socrates, people just cohabited together naturally. The you get schmuck Socrates asking people to think about what makes each person unique...well then you have to invent social contract theory as a concept people subscribe to...where they used to do it naturally without thought.

And sure, when the last seats are being handed out in the ultimate lifeboat, the nicest people may turn ugly. But there’s a wide gulf between the Titanic sinking out from underneath people, and other broad community SHTF crisis.
Katrina is the major dark example that comes to mind. Contrast that to the more common story of people helping people in times of crisis. And not just Newfoundlanders, or Canadians . It happens everywhere, all the time. It’s the (more) common story of humanity.

Katrina was an environment with absolute basic resource (food, water) depletion, surrounded by an environment (the rest of the US) with surplus resources. If, for example, the power grid goes down broadly, then basic resources will depleted in days/weeks. Think global Katrina. People who are rural are insulated by distance. If I'm in Newfoundland with extra beans and I know there are tens of millions of people starving many hundreds of miles south of me...I'm probably not loading the boat for a mercy run.

But how do we get from Newfoundlanders to New Orleaners (to put it simply)? Access to resources for sure. Population density is a major factor, but lots of communities around the world live with resource stresses, in remote and isolated areas, and yet they do not all result in the Katrina stories.

The most stressed population I've seen first-hand was in refugee camps in Sudan. Those folks got by on extremely little food, but, frankly, while living atop one another, didn't realistically consume, in total, more than they consumed back in their home villages. I otherwise was in Louisiana from 2005-7. There is simply no comparing a population of people who are ordinarily self-sufficient in cultivating food/water with a population that has no such capacity. And this is before considering the surplus needs expectations of people in developed countries who are just convinced, from birth, that they need to compete for stuff...vs ordinarily being convinced from birth that they need to share (like Sudanese).

As a tangential point of trivia, the writer director of The Gods Must Be Crazy movie Jamie Uys was a math teacher who liked to spend time off the grid. His admiration for the bushpeople seems universal...

[Rumpi]

Gentlemen can someone point me to the pictures of the New Orleans civil unrest? I mean the ones with the rabid mobs looting and murdering. Maybe some with the National Guard shooting the mobs point blank with automatic weapons. At least some pictures with bodies stacked like cordwood on every major intersection and piles of loot nearby.
I ask because all I can find are reports about a walmart and some booze shops getting cleared, the National Guard removing poor preppers from their premises by force and a far to low body count.
Now I get that burning the city to the ground was not an option with everything beeing waterlogged and all, but there must be some pictures with all those reporters on the ground.
So either the gators had a feast on all the physical evidence or the government run the biggest cover op right in front of the medias running cameras.
What I see so far in Katrina is poor management of the crisis, but not the widespread collaps of society some seem to imply.

[Singularity]

Originally Posted by Rumpi

Gentlemen can someone point me to the pictures of the New Orleans civil unrest? I mean the ones with the rabid mobs looting and murdering...
...What I see so far in Katrina is poor management of the crisis, but not the widespread collapse of society some seem to imply.

Gretna
Mayor defends blockading bridge halting New Orleans evacuation - US news - Katrina, The Long Road Back - Hurricanes Archive | NBC News
Danziger Bridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danziger_Bridge_shootings
Looting vs survival mode
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...eading-reports

It was absolute collapse of society below the bridges. Can't blame the people, infrastructure was literally under water. The difference between Katrina and losing the power grid (really, the only potentially survivable insta-onset mass SHTF situation) is that in Katrina someone was coming to the rescue at some point. If the entire grid drops, there's nobody coming to the rescue anywhere. Everywhere ends up being Katrina.

[crankysailor]

Originally Posted by Rumpi

Gentlemen can someone point me to the pictures of the New Orleans civil unrest? I mean the ones with the rabid mobs looting and murdering. Maybe some with the National Guard shooting the mobs point blank with automatic weapons. At least some pictures with bodies stacked like cordwood on every major intersection and piles of loot nearby.
I ask because all I can find are reports about a walmart and some booze shops getting cleared, the National Guard removing poor preppers from their premises by force and a far to low body count.
Now I get that burning the city to the ground was not an option with everything beeing waterlogged and all, but there must be some pictures with all those reporters on the ground.
So either the gators had a feast on all the physical evidence or the government run the biggest cover op right in front of the medias running cameras.
What I see so far in Katrina is poor management of the crisis, but not the widespread collaps of society some seem to imply.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27racial.html

NEW ORLEANS — In the days after Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans in flooded ruins, the city was awash in tales of violence and bloodshed.

The narrative of those early, chaotic days — built largely on rumors and half-baked anecdotes — quickly hardened into a kind of ugly consensus: poor blacks and looters were murdering innocents and terrorizing whoever crossed their path in the dark, unprotected city.

....

Today, a clearer picture is emerging, and it is an equally ugly one, including white vigilante violence, police killings, official cover-ups and a suffering population far more brutalized than many were willing to believe. Several police officers and a white civilian accused of racially motivated violence have recently been indicted in various cases, and more incidents are coming to light as the Justice Department has started several investigations into civil rights violations after the storm.

...

but in unflooded Algiers Point, for instance, a mostly white enclave in a predominantly black neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi River, armed white militias cordoned off many of the streets.

They posted signs that boasted, “We shoot looters.” And the sound of gunfire peppered the hot days and nights like thunderclaps of a second storm.

...

“There was no electricity, no police, no nothing,” said Mr. Bell, 41, sitting on his porch on a recent afternoon. “We were like sitting ducks. I slept with a butcher knife and a hatchet under my pillow.”

[Hardhead]

Originally Posted by Singularity

... The difference between Katrina and losing the power grid (really, the only potentially survivable insta-onset mass SHTF situation) is that in Katrina someone was coming to the rescue at some point. If the entire grid drops, there's nobody coming to the rescue anywhere. Everywhere ends up being Katrina.

I think that's a significant point - having the feeling that help is out there, and will get to you in 2 weeks or so, is something that most people can endure, physically and mentally.

If/when everywhere on a continent or hemisphere is SHTF, and there's 3 days supply of food on the shelves, and no electricity, no fuel, and no medications - I would expect it to go seriously downhill after about a week. Mental breakdowns, crazy behavior. Then guns, rationalizations, victimizations, and the joining of armed dictatorships. I would fear the most aggressive would ruin it for the most civilized, at least for a few weak generations. I hope not.

[Hardhead]

Originally Posted by Singularity

The dominant theory I'm familiar with is....whatever empathy and sympathy you were born with, it automatically gets cut off when you're in fight/flight (stressed) mode so as to enhance your chance of survival (every man for himself mode).* This cuts you off from your neighbors, and even family members. If you're distracted by empathy and sympathy in combat, your individual chance of survival goes down (because of distraction, or, your willingness to run through fire to save another gets you burned). Most people in modern life are in chronic stress mode, not recognizing it (i.e. frogs who have normalized living in a pan of hot water, oblivious to historic water temperatures).
*Depersonalization/derealization are the extreme clinical symptoms associated with this phenomenon. But other fight/flight symptoms of environmental stress include hoarding (buying crap), over-eating. Good business model for Amazon, Visa, and Pharma, sort of bad for people.
The resource stress theory has been debunked (to some large degree in developed countries) as there is no rational resource stress...we live in societies of surplus. You can literally get a surplus of rations for a trivial cost. Calhoun's rat experiments perfectly modeled this...rats having a surplus of rations yet things fall apart in the behavioral sink. Why?

At least look closely at the behavioral sink model. Back when Calhoun's results came out in the 1950s and 60s, people focused on population density. More recently Dunbar's number theory came up, which holds that people ordinarily can only be expected to maintain ~150 human relationships before things fall apart (and that's in a non-stressed environment). So throw in the mix social media and people even in rural areas find themselves in the behavioral sink. Throw into the mix the effects of the finance system where 80% of people are living paycheck to paycheck (a phenomenon associated with a drop in IQ of over 10 points). Not a good thing to be a frog in hot water with a lower IQ and bills to pay, with a desire to purchase much more than basic housing, food, inexpensive recreation (and/or loss of appreciation of nature).

I'd otherwise keep in mind Freud's narcissism of small differences concept as being, perhaps, the greatest driver of conflict in a non-stressed state. It's widely held that the Athenians killed off Socrates because he induced divisiveness in a relatively harmonious communal society. ~Prior to Socrates, people just cohabited together naturally. The you get schmuck Socrates asking people to think about what makes each person unique...well then you have to invent social contract theory as a concept people subscribe to...where they used to do it naturally without thought.
Katrina was an environment with absolute basic resource (food, water) depletion, surrounded by an environment (the rest of the US) with surplus resources. If, for example, the power grid goes down broadly, then basic resources will depleted in days/weeks. Think global Katrina. People who are rural are insulated by distance. If I'm in Newfoundland with extra beans and I know there are tens of millions of people starving many hundreds of miles south of me...I'm probably not loading the boat for a mercy run.The most stressed population I've seen first-hand was in refugee camps in Sudan. Those folks got by on extremely little food, but, frankly, while living atop one another, didn't realistically consume, in total, more than they consumed back in their home villages. I otherwise was in Louisiana from 2005-7. There is simply no comparing a population of people who are ordinarily self-sufficient in cultivating food/water with a population that has no such capacity. And this is before considering the surplus needs expectations of people in developed countries who are just convinced, from birth, that they need to compete for stuff...vs ordinarily being convinced from birth that they need to share (like Sudanese).

As a tangential point of trivia, the writer director of The Gods Must Be Crazy movie Jamie Uys was a math teacher who liked to spend time off the grid. His admiration for the bushpeople seems universal...

Very interesting post. I've read underlying aspects of some points discussed relative to a model of a "corn god" vs. a "debt god," in comparison. It's really a fundamental major difference - in all aspects of human existence on earth. Something of an eye opener. Historical precedent.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by Hardhead

...If/when everywhere on a continent or hemisphere is SHTF, and there's 3 days supply of food on the shelves, and no electricity, no fuel, and no medications - I would expect it to go seriously downhill after about a week. Mental breakdowns, crazy behavior. Then guns, rationalizations, victimizations, and the joining of armed dictatorships. I would fear the most aggressive would ruin it for the most civilized, at least for a few weak generations. I hope not.

Which is why you need to be in a place that can manage without stores and electricity and fuel. They exist, but not in large urban areas. This is why I said earlier that cities are death traps in a serious SHTF scenarios.

[ArmyDaveNY]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

But why? What is it about some areas that make them more — humane? I suspect it has something to do with a sense of community; of being connected to your neighbours.

Katrina is the major dark example that comes to mind. Contrast that to the more common story of people helping people in times of crisis. And not just Newfoundlanders, or Canadians . It happens everywhere, all the time. It’s the (more) common story of humanity.

I’ll have to get the old recipes out .

Mike always asks good questions and has good comments. I am particularly interested in these recipes!!

First, I think we should address hurricane Katrina as a dark example; it is a dark example, but it is also an example of good. We must remember that we are talking about one even, but two areas. Katrina did hit New Orleans hard, but it also hit many other neighboring communities at least as hard, and in some ways worse. Certain wards in New Orleans showed us the negative side of people. On the other hand, many of the surrounding areas that were hit just as hard and often harder, were examples of the positive side of people.

Most of the surrounding areas were self sufficient for three or four weeks. People were out cutting trees for themselves and clearing roads. There is even a famous video of a nun using a chain saw to clear roads so outside help could get to her orphanage/facility. Thousands of others were doing similar things.

As Mike says, a sense of community is a part of this. Communities that are high in crime tend not to trust people and so often work as individuals. Communities that trust each other more tend to work together. We saw this in Katrina. While not a tale of two cities, it was a tale of two different types of communities.

Back to the thread, how we respond to SHTF events is situational, but the first step is always to be prepared. The second step is quite often to get out of Dodge. As yachtsmen and women, if we are prepared, we should be able to survive for some time as we figure out what we will do next.

[Rumpi]

Thanks, but still, where is the collaps of society in Katrina? Statisticly all the crimes are not relevant. Some guys looted, some killed the pesky guy next door, some got scared and waved guns. That is normal and happens every day in US metropolitan areas.

If you can learn something from Katrina as a prepper it is that the safest place to be is in the middle of the afected area. Everyone is leaving as soon as he can leaving you with a wealth of resources.
After all everybody knows that the food is out there in the fields and the woods.

[Singularity]

Originally Posted by Hardhead

...I've read underlying aspects of some points discussed relative to a model of a "corn god" vs. a "debt god," in comparison. It's really a fundamental major difference - in all aspects of human existence on earth. Something of an eye opener. Historical precedent.

Corn vs debt god.
I'm not religious, but I do see the old/new testaments as books of logic parables based on history. We live in an era where we're enamored by big data, but in ancient days, people actually looked at stuff with their eyes and had plenty of time to think about the relationship between things and write them down. Logic is logic. What happens at the smaller scale is seen on the larger scale, and both can be seen repeated through history. Why they wrote the parables in the first place. There's nothing new under the sun...

New testament: Matthew 6:24
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other,Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Word has it that anti-bankers 2,000 years ago around Jerusalem could find themselves in a bad position.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by ArmyDaveNY

...First, I think we should address hurricane Katrina as a dark example; it is a dark example, but it is also an example of good. We must remember that we are talking about one even, but two areas. Katrina did hit New Orleans hard, but it also hit many other neighboring communities at least as hard, and in some ways worse. Certain wards in New Orleans showed us the negative side of people. On the other hand, many of the surrounding areas that were hit just as hard and often harder, were examples of the positive side of people.

Most of the surrounding areas were self sufficient for three or four weeks. People were out cutting trees for themselves and clearing roads. There is even a famous video of a nun using a chain saw to clear roads so outside help could get to her orphanage/facility. Thousands of others were doing similar things.

As Mike says, a sense of community is a part of this. Communities that are high in crime tend not to trust people and so often work as individuals. Communities that trust each other more tend to work together. We saw this in Katrina. While not a tale of two cities, it was a tale of two different types of communities.

I think this is a really good point Dave, and really important to emphasize. Yes, we saw some of the dark side of humanity emerge in the wake of Katrina. But we also saw lots of examples of people coming together to help those in greater need, and to support their communities. I don’t know of any way to positively prove this point, but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the time it is our better angels which emerge in times of crisis.

I’m not as well versed in the psychological theory of crisis as you are Singularity, but if I understand your analysis it seems more focused on immediate crisis type of Shyte. Active shooter, earthquake, terrorist attack. In these moments our fight-or-flight response will tend to overwhelm other neural functions such as empathy or love. But this is a short-term, immediate response. Humans can’t exist forever in this heightened state. When the ground stops shaking or the bullets stop flying, most people will start to come together to help and rebuild.

I’ve read some literature on the theory that too many of us in modern urban life live in a constant state of fight-or-flight. I tend to agree. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why some communities are more resilient than others. People in constant high-stress (constant fight-or-flight) may simply be less able to act together as a community.

And community is what one needs in a true SHTF scenario.

[Ghostrider421]

Originally Posted by hpeer

What would happens if Katrina hit newfoundland?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Igor

If Igor had struck NOLA - the same result would occur. NOLA is below sea level. Nfld is NOT.


And, contrary to opinion ***** did not hit the fan on 9/11 in Nfld. It was the Newfies banding together to help out whenever and wherever they could. I know, because I was living there at the time.

[Hardhead]

Originally Posted by Singularity

Corn vs debt god.
I'm not religious, but I do see the old/new testaments as books of logic parables based on history. We live in an era where we're enamored by big data, but in ancient days, people actually looked at stuff with their eyes and had plenty of time to think about the relationship between things and write them down. Logic is logic. What happens at the smaller scale is seen on the larger scale, and both can be seen repeated through history. Why they wrote the parables in the first place. There's nothing new under the sun...

New testament: Matthew 6:24
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other,Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Word has it that anti-bankers 2,000 years ago around Jerusalem could find themselves in a bad position.

For a strict academic perspective, crossing disciplines, you should really read some of the research by Dr. Joseph P. Farrell. Strictly cited, and eye opening. If you google the name, you'll also find a lot of podcasts discussing various aspects of history. Another member here mentioned him to me, and it's been extremely interesting. I should add, don't be turned off by the titles. It makes more sense after they've been read.

[hpeer]

I keep going back to it is all too complicated to predict. A lot has to deal with how efficient fight is at moving food around. And in the longer term how they compensate farmers.

In theory the USA and Canada should be relatively secure, both food exporters. If that is not handled well the outcome could be very different.

Places like the Mid East will be a hot mess.

I read a book, Taste of War, looking at WWII from a food perspective. It changed my thinking on risks. Taking its message and looking forward things don’t look good for China or India. It’s still sometime in the future . The