“… Don’t expect anything of value to you from authorities and don’t expect timely information of value to you from the media. Expect government to oppose your escape with threats or force, after all, you’re a paying customer attempting to leave the mall. Others may follow. Their interest is in maintaining order, their order, not in passing out valuable resources for free. You’ll recall “maintaining order” meant instructing people in the twin towers to stay put and await a professionally supervised evacuation. We know this from people who acted on their own judgment and fled.
Also recall during Katrina how police, those who hadn’t joined the looters or decamped to more pleasant venues, forcibly disarmed honest citizens in their own homes with assistance from the National Guard, then cherry-picked the loot for themselves. Assume at the outset your local statists will use a disaster to betray their oath and you…
We’ve come to rely on the media to misrepresent facts they don’t merely withhold. Surely you’ve noticed crime stories suppress full and reliable descriptions when their favored felons are the miscreants of record. It would be comforting to think the press won’t cover up decisive, actionable facts during a major calamity as well, but the truth lies elsewhere. You can expect the mainstream press to lie early and often in such a case. Big news media is pretty much a holding pen for the irretrievably unprincipled, journalists being the deployable euphemism, some even “award-winning”. Say the word ethics to a “journalist” and they’ll assume it’s the name of someone’s yacht, someone they’d really like to know.
Perilous events are Darwinian by nature. Hindsight suggests the casualties often selected themselves, perfect knowledge would probably prove it. The survivors informed themselves of what was actually happening, then extrapolated what may happen, then refined it to what was likely to happen. Survival begins and ends with applied good judgment. Think back in your own life to those little things you did or didn’t do, those seemingly trivial stitches in time that kept you from a bad end. It wasn’t all luck or happenstance. Now that the storm is upon us, now that ever-larger catastrophes are entraining and we’re being pelted with debris, a bug-out bag is evidence of good judgement in itself. Good judgement well applied is the one indispensible survival tool and likely the oldest. Be sure to take yours with you.
The Grey Enigma 