The vast majority of those waiting in mile-long long food lines, rummaging through the trash, and criticizing their government officials for a slow and insufficient response have no one to blame but themselves. This may be harsh – but it’s true.

Without any way to heat their homes due to power outages, no food in their pantries and water supplies potentially tainted with polluted flood waters, those who failed to prepare are now at the mercy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s crisis safety net.

Your survival could one day depend on your 12 year-old’s ability to build a fire in the wood stove and keep it going…

The popular assumption is that if you have sizable food storage and can shoot straight, you are ready to rock-and-roll. Reality has some harsh lessons for those with this mindset.

Feeling alone or that you’re the only one who “gets it” is not uncommon for us Preppers…

We have seen them all before… But the next time we are visited by widespread, large-scale urban riots, a dangerous new escalation may be triggered by a fresh vulnerability: It’s estimated that the average American home has less than two weeks of food on hand…

These riots will soon be making their way across the Atlantic ocean to our shores…We can fully expect a total breakdown of law and order, especially in America’s major metropolitan areas.

What is the threat? As a prepper hunkered down at your home, with food stores, the most likely threat will be from looters and marauders…The worst case is some sort of organized paramilitary style force with heavy equipment bent on forced redistribution…

We have been programmed for a long time now (since the inception of TV) to go only for the brass ring and not to bother enjoying the ride. We’ve been programmed to place our self-worth in the hands of consumerism. And that means our personal value derives from an accounting of our money. What if there is no more money? Will you have any value without it?

Chaos reigns in the streets, medical treatment is no longer available, and a silent coup has placed a dangerous group of men at the helm of a false government.

There are two main things that you have to achieve in order to survive in the long term…

Every person will face an ugly new reality when life as we know it vanishes. It’s coming. Soon. It might be a slow crawl decline or a rapid descent into nightmarish conditions. Various scenarios now flit threateningly across the horizon. If we’re brave enough to peer into the abyss, we can see some of these events bordering on fruition. Most are unnerving; some will be paralyzing. Regardless of the fright factor, we must examine individually how to handle these looming crises. When they strike, people without a plan in place, will die.

As an educator, administrator, preacher and prepper, Todd Sepulveda sets the stage for a preparedness aspect that simply cannot be ignored. If it all does come crashing down, will we let all of our knowledge die with us? Will the math, the science, the history, the novels, the art, the study of human nature, religion and our spirituality go the way of the Library of Alexandria, to be forever lost in a pile of ash and rubble?

Each of us has specific needs for inner and outer perimeter defense depending on our location, population density and the expected threats we may face. As such, the following is a general list of guidelines and firearm recommendations to follow…

We may be about to enter a much more turbulent and dangerous era of power politics and international competition.

As we invade their perfect world with the dreadful facts of life, their subconscious reflex is to regard us as a tangible threat. The first reaction is always to laugh. Ridicule without substance is the primary defense of the ignorant. But, what if you don’t go away? What if your arguments are too precise? What if there is too much clarity to your position? What if you have a whole movement of people behind you?

The next wave of the economic crisis is fast approaching and people need to get prepared. So what do I mean by that? Well, “preparation” is going to look different for each family, but there are some general principles that apply to almost everyone…

He drew his weapon almost instantly and met violence head-on with a hail of bullets, leaving one suspect near death and two others scrambling for their lives.

The expectation that the economy may or will deteriorate beyond a typical recession is gaining wider acceptance every week. Let me explain why I am confident that this situation will become unmistakable within the next six to eighteen months…

Alaska’s Governor understands the fragility of modern just-in-time supply lines, and rather than leaving his state completely unprepared for a disaster as Louisiana did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he is taking steps to have at least the bare necessities on hand in the event of a worst-case scenario.

Nothing propels society into chaos like seeing children starve and wanting basic necessities. Furthermore, what faces Americans has never been experienced, not by this generation.

This is possibly the most serious threat the United States faces right now, because we are so utterly unprepared for it…

Perhaps countless lives could have been saved and the onset of radiation diseases prevented had the Japanese been given access to similar preparedness information…

The truth is that no two people are facing the exact same set of circumstances, so preparation is going to look different for each individual. But there are certain core principles that we can all benefit from.

There are a number of detrimental weakness to the survivalist movement and considerable holes in prepper knowledge that must be addressed now while we have the time and relative safety to do so. The greatest threat to the common survivalist is not economic collapse, roving bandits, Blackwater mercenaries, or predator drones; those dangers are a piece of cake compared to the threat of an overblown ego, which will get a man killed faster than the most sophisticated smart bomb.

We rely on electronics way too much to ignore the potential of these events, and although even the experts aren’t always in agreement where details are concerned, it makes sense to have a plan to protect important electronics in either event.

Homes nearby are being looted and undesirables are now common in your neighborhood. You have a weapon, but the occupants of your home include you, your wife, and your two small children. You have a front door, a backdoor, and the garage door. How do you cover all three much less the first floor windows?

The worst case scenario that we’re preparing for is a total collapse of the economy. There will be problems with food, electricity, water supply… so, I want to make sure we can wait out this time when money will be worthless…

Having a generator for back-up power is great – unless you don’t have the fuel to run the generator. The irony of the portable back-up generator – most of them, at least – is that they run on gas. And what’s the item that’s usually hard to get when the power’s down?

The simple moral to this story is something most survival orientated people already know – that you must have self defense or you will lose what you have when someone decides to take it…

One of the biggest excuses that people make for not prepping is that they can’t afford it. “I can’t even afford the groceries we eat every week as it is!” they complain when urged to start buying extra food…

In the event that your storage of food, water, medical, and other resources remains unmoved out of necessity, then count yourself fortunate. This is what we hope for, although we’d be willfully ignorant to discredit the vulnerabilities of our current environments, local and global!

One key takeaway from the experience of nouveau farmers is that being skilled in land management, gardening, micro-farming, irrigation, raising livestock, and sustainability are fields of expertise that can be worth more than gold. Experts in these fields, or entrepreneurs that can manufacture tools and equipment, or operate (or rent) farm machinery (or beasts of burden), will find that they can build successful businesses from this rapidly developing trend.

One day there may come a time when a pandemic, civil unrest or terrorist event may precipitate a situation where the miracle of modern medicine may be unavailable. Indeed, not only unavailable, but even to the point that the potential for access to modern facilities no longer exists. We refer to this type of scenario as a collapse…

When you are caught in a disaster, either natural or economical, supplies can be in short demand. Bartering is a great skill to have to be able to trade your unique goods and services in order to help you and your family during an emergency.

Even if someone in Washington could snap their magical fingers and all of those evil guns in America suddenly disappear, it would only take a few days for individuals to have another gun in their hands. A well motivated person with a few hand tools and a pile of scrap metal can make a gun in a week or two…

The collapse that many say will never happen, that others are waiting for as some event that will occur in the future, is happening right here and now.

I love my family and want what is best for them. The best way I know to do that is to help them become more aware of the need to prepare. My goal is to foster a sense of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, and to help mentor them through the beginning steps of basic preparedness.

We live in a dynamic world with rapidly changing threats to our lives and livelihoods. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

It saddens me to no end that today, in these United States of America, the land of the free and home of the brave, that they would probably be labeled as suspected terrorists according to recent descriptions of what the government considers key indicators in a recently published document on what to look for when on the lookout for terrorists….

A failure to plan for the post crisis reality will leave the new limits to be discovered by trial and error and lead to a chaotic transformation rather than a smooth one.

Then again, this is America, and we have a centrally planned economy, so there is no way this is going to happen.

When the economy of a nation collapses, almost everything changes. Unfortunately, most people have never been through anything like that, so it can be difficult to know how to prepare.

Choosing a retreat can be easy, or so difficult it explodes your brain depending on how you approach it.

Those who question how authorities would know where to confiscate unregistered guns under martial law can expect their neighbors to rat them out and quite possibly accompany law enforcement to their homes.

The following list of A to Z survival items and survival related concepts details what one may have simply forgotten because there’s so much to prepare for.

What this report highlights is that if you talk about your preps with anyone but those who will join you at your survival retreat, you are asking for trouble. Let’s say it together… The first rule of Prep Club is…

Most people just assume things will always somehow get better or that they will somehow be immune to whatever calamities are heading our way. Most people always seem to have a “good excuse” for why they do not need to prepare…

It’s just mathematically impossible, if not socially impossible, to even envision the logisitics of trying to disarm the American citizenry…

If you’ve turned the corner, or been ‘awakened’ as we like to say in alternative media, then the notion that the system as we have come to know it could fall apart around us without warning can be very overwhelming at first. So, too, is the daunting task of determining what steps to take next and how to go about creating your own personal preparedness plan to shield you from whatever may befall us…