http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/medvam/index.htm

Film suggestion for TEOTWAWKI fans: ‘Threads’, available on Google Video.

Mr. War Nerd, please don’t dash my hopes for a societal Mad Max. If I’m ever convinced that it’s not gonna happen I would have nothing to look forward to.

What is required is simply between 60 to 99% of the population dying off. Gary notes that this would occur in So Cal if the power/water was turned off. Such a civil collapse would probably also cause massive pandemics in the population, much like the ones that took out various indigenous populations, who had no immunity to white man diseases, when they first encountered Europeans. We have become a pampered people who would die in a New York minute if we had to drink the same quality of water they do in the Sudan without immediate 911 medical care available.

The Mad Max scenario is basically an existential narrative played out in a depopulated landscape. This occurred in parts of Europe several times, but most recently just after the Black Plague when whole regions were so depopulated that in some cases farmland returned to forests and formerly great manor houses were occupied by peasant survivors. The idea of lifetime shopping sprees in abandoned malls has real historical parallels.

The collapse of Roman civil society in places wasn’t a simple transition to barbarian rule. Just like a So Cal civil collapse would wipe out most of the clueless and pampered population without the need for an invasion, the collapse of Roman civil infrastructure led to the depopulation of many cities and rural outposts due to Malaria, starvation or simply because the aquifers and food trades no longer delivered.

Not every city or region the Mongols razed they occupied. Whole cities were massacred and plundered overnight and then the Mongols moved on. Surely, a few lucky? souls climbed out from beneath the piles of bodies to live on in the ruins…

Similar scenes occurred after the rapid collapse of the Mayan empire where great cities were wiped out almost overnight in an orgy of insane societal suicide of mass slaughter, starvation and disease. The few survivors who returned to the ruins of Tikal and other monumental cities lived to watch the jungle eventually swallow the dead civilization whole.

Then there is the mysterious Akkadian collapse circa 4000 ago. Little is known about this end of the world for Sumer, other than it happened in less than 5 years and almost nobody survived.

And there is Easter Island….heck, I could go on and on. But you get the idea. Apocalypse Later is always in the cards and for, say, one in a million, it would fucking rock…that is if you saved a girl and maybe a loyal dog.

Hope and change!

War Nerd, seems like you’ve done all your research using the space capsule survivalist sources. I’d humbly suggest you check out Jack Spirko’s http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com

For m’self, survivalism is a life style that keeps me from being dependent on our economic system that can be interrupted by natural disaster, civil disturbance, pandemic and etc. I’m not optimistic about our fiat & fractional reserve induced implosion, but I don’t see things going Mad Max, either. Having the skill sets that survivalist life style encourages will make this crappy economy a bit more bearable.
My threat matrix is:
1. Natural disaster or weather induced problems. I live up north, it is conceivable that a snow storm could shut down food delivery. I have enough grub & necessities on hand to make this a minor inconvenience.
2. Pandemic. Sooner or later, mother nature will bitch slap us with some sort of disease that could cause quarantine to be imposed. Again, I have enough stuff on hand to wait this out.
3. Civil disturbance. My main concern about this is to simply get home. My vehicle is road ready and I have alternative routes to get back to the hacienda.
4. The economy going down the toilet. We grow most of our own food, very good on our budget.
-10,000 on my threat matrix: I gotta git mah AR-15 out and shoot dem black helicopters and martians! I just don’t see this happening, too much fun for a redneck like m’self.

http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/Apocalypse_Never.html

http://jontycity.blogspot.com/2009/07/war-nerd-you-jerk.html

On the other hand, the apocaliptic scenatio is extremely unlike. Anglosaxon people are not like that. In the thousand year history of Anglosaxon people in Great Britain, public order never broke down. Wars, hunger, epidemies, revolutions, whatever. Anglo saxon people is genetically programmed to form ordered societies in no time. The Black Death killed half of the population in a few years, yet rents were paid, the government governed, agricultural production decreased only slightly. Italians left everything and orgied (Bocaccio), but Englishmen kept did nothing of the sort but kept paying their taxes. There never was a Kathrina like situation in any place populated by Anglosaxons. If deep down you feel that you it is dangerous to for you to lose your fatty bodily reserves, because you may starve, I assure you that you can safely lose weight as there will be no famine in Southern California, nor fighting for drinking water.

All of the problems in Shaun’s day-to-day life are neatly, well messily, solved by a zombie outbreak.

I guess that’s why Romero tends to favour the bleak endings, it’s a punishment for the narcissism of the apocalypse fantasy.

I suggest you go and read some REAL history BEFORE you make a comment as stupid and uninformed as this again……..

First of all, if water stops running entirely or they blow up the water supply in an unlikely scenario there is the lake that’s a few miles east and plenty more things to get going.

Having been in real survival situations I can tell you, it takes one to know one.

That being said if after the revolution this country looks remarkably different, and its still not over because Israel decides to start firing off nuclear bombs into other countries, including the USA, that will be the time I disappear into the Grand Canyon for a good while…..then hijack a plane ticket out of the country.

How they ask. I’ll let God guide me as usual, if such a thing was reality, because I know deep down God does really exist. He’s been there all through out my life, and that’s the one thing I’m truly sure of.

Even when others have decided he does not exist, the spirit lives on for me.

wehrmacht was the WHOLE german military machine, not just the land army.

that was knows as heer.