My career path grew out of my military and correction background. However, even though they are separate, I find that my skills in one translate to the other even though the goals of the two are not always identical.
I would like to take a few moments and describe how you can take government emergency management doctrine and personalize it as well as scale it to your needs. Here is information on how to use emergency management principles for prepping.
The first thing I grabbed from my training manuals to apply to my personal emergency plan is the all hazards approach. I have seen people jump into panic mode over single issue events like Y2K, 2012, New Madrid, CME, or whatever is going to kill us all on exactly 12 pm Sunday whatever…. These people then run around and throw money at their fear, and then feel taken when whatever disaster failed to occur. But just like government evacuation orders – If they call for an evacuation, and people leave, but nothing happens, the next time nobody wants to evacuate. In the case of Y2K so many people that prepped for it, that once it did not happen they now have a bad taste in their mouths about prepping and won’t “fall for that again”. With an all hazards approach, rather than spend all your energy prepping for a specific event, you build capabilities that help with ANY event. As I tell my students, When your doing CPR on me, I don’t care if my heart stopped because I was electrocuted, was shot, or ate too many hamburgers with too little exercise – I just want you to keep pumping…
The next thing I took was the cyclical nature of disaster and the 5 phases of emergency management. You have a planning phase where perform a risk assessment and then make plans based upon your threats and hazards. Once you begin planning, you move into the preparedness phase where the planning takes shape – you take training to better prepare. The lists you wrote in the planning phase become deep larders and tangible goods. Along with preparedness and planning you need to worry about mitigation. What can you do to make the disaster either less likely or less disruptive? Personally I have to plan for the New Madrid Earthquake, so I make sure my water heater is strapped down, and my shelves of glass mason jars are secured so that the jars cannot fall off and break. Appropriate amounts of insurance are a mitigation step we all can get. When disaster strikes (We don’t know WHAT or WHEN it will happen, but rest assured you will have an emergency at some point in your life) you enter the response phase where you have to deal with your incident priorities of
1. Life Safety (Pull the people from the burning building)
2. Incident Stabilization (Keep the fire from getting worse and spreading)
3. Property Conservation (Put the fire out and save as much of the building as possible)
4. Environmental Conservation (Keep the runoff of water from polluting the creek)
Once the emergency phase is over, recovery mode begins. At some point you have to get back to normal. Even if it’s a catastrophic event that ends in TEOTWAWKI, you have to create a new normal. It’s critical to understand that these phases blend into each other and the lessons learned from one disaster turn into the planning phase to improve your plan. But keeping the cyclical nature in mind, as you create a plan of action based upon your most reasonable estimate of your hazards you need to test and refine, then retest and refine some more. The more you sweat now, the less you bleed later.
Mutual Aid Agreements and Memorandums of Understands is common among government jurisdictions and agencies. During a disaster everybody wants to help, but knowing who is responsible for what and what their capabilities are is very helpful. Its also important to spell out how damaged or used equipment gets replaced. Two weeks into a multi year grid down disaster is not the time to get into a fight with your neighbor over who gets to use the tractor first. Of course OPSEC is a priority, but no man is an island. The time to network is now.
Have a plan, but be willing to scrap the plan if it does not work. I tell my students that before you can think outside the box, you better understand everything about the box. The very act of planning helps with response. The more you think about your capabilities and what you would do in situations the better prepared your brain is to react flexibly to a situation. Your mind is a wonderful creation, but you have to program it to work. If you’re worried about disasters your program it by creating disaster response plans.
The last concept of emergency management I will share today is incident command. This system came out of the California wildfires in the 70’s. Military vets turned fire jumpers created a management system called fire scope to deal with the rapidly changing fire situations. After the attacks on 9/11 the lack of communication, coordination, and chain of command was identified as areas we needed improvement on. ICS was then adopted as the national standard and all responders in all disciplines were mandated to be trained to a basic level. Free training in the incident command system is available online at the FEMA training website. The ICS system is a flexible system geared toward emergency events. This flexibility is derived from a few essential concepts:
• There is only ONE overall commander.
• The incident commander is responsible for everything, but can delegate roles to qualified staff based upon incident complexity and size
• Span of control for optimal leadership is 5-7 individuals under a supervisor.
• Everybody reports to only one supervisor, and everyone knows who their supervisor is.
Obviously there is more to the system, but it allows anyone trained in incident command to rapidly integrate themselves into the command structure because it has clear roles and responsibilities. Knowledge of this system is important because EVERY responder has been trained in this system and it will provide the basis of ANY response. It does not matter if your dealing with a volunteer fireman or a military civil support team, any agency with a role in emergency response has to have this training to receive federal funding. While I don’t agree with the mandate, I have seen this system work several times, and the disasters I have worked that were not as successful as others also deviated from the plan more than the others.
The more you understand about the ICS system the more you will know what to expect from the government. The other reason you should learn about this system is that it works if you apply the fundamentals. It does not matter if you’re working in a government agency, a local neighborhood preparedness group, or a family these concepts are timeless and reduce confusion.
Besides concepts and theory on emergency management FEMA has also created many courses in disaster preparedness. Many of these are geared to first responders, but at this time, most of them are available free of charge to civilians. If you visit the FEMA training website the Emergency Management Institute (EMI) has a distant study program, and has classes in Radiological Response, Hazardous Materials, Guides to Disaster Assistance, Active Shooters, Dam Failure – literally almost any aspect of interest to Federal emergency officials. I have personally taken several hundred hours worth of their courses and while distance education is not as good as hands on with a qualified instructor, the materials are a very handy and inexpensive resource to put back in your binder.
For neighborhood organization and home preparedness, don’t overlook the Citizens Emergency Response Teams. I wish this program would have caught on in more areas, but you can download the training materials for free without any sort of login or identification.
Knowledge is power, and by taking the concepts our federal government has spent billions developing and testing in real life incidents in both large and small scale will give you a head start in creating and employing your own personal preparedness plan.
I do not want us as a country or a species to stop being interconnected. That would make us lose the ability to make items like pencils (or computers, or cars). However, I do think that as a people we need to understand how fragile and interconnected we are. That way we might be more inclined to work together for the common good. Especially if we see how our little piece of the pie is tied to the whole banquet.
Be Self Reliant, But Also Work as A Team
I also don’t think it would hurt us much as a species to push back a little and become more self-reliant. No one can know or do everything, but we should be able to take care of ourselves.
This essay was originally published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman, and is written in the first-person from the perspective of a pencil, explaining its complexity and defending Adam Smith‘s concept of an invisible hand acting in free markets.
I am a lead pencil
The ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.[1]
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me. As if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”[2]
Who Holds a Pencil in Awe – You Should
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe. A claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone. If you can become aware of the miracle which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because. I can do this because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic. Doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U. S. A. each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.
What Goes Into Getting the Wood
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all thefoods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.
Look at the Millwork
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns. Into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!
Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation from California to Wilkes-Barre!
Complicated Machinery
Once in the pencil factory $4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine. Each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this “wood-clinched” sandwich.
My “lead” itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder—cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
What Makes up Lacquer
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all of the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That’s a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.
Look at the Eraser
Then there’s my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as “the plug,”. The part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called “factice” is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives “the plug” its color is cadium sulfide.
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
No One Knows
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation. No one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. The miner or the logger can not be removed. Neither can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field. Paraffin is a by product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me.
Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil. Nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.
Who Is the Mastermind
There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. A mastermind can not be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.
The Invisible Hand
By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain. . . . He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this? Isn’t it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!
A Pencil is a Combination of Miracles
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles. A tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configuring naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing. “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize,you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.”. For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand. That is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding. Then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free men. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
Government Has No Place in Miracles
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation’s mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of a faith in free men—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity. The individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental “master-minding.”
A Pencil Is a Testament to Free Men
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men can accomplish when free to try. Then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it’s all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things.
Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try. They deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second. We deliver an event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; gas from Texas is delivered to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—half-way around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!
Stay Creative
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men will respond to the Invisible Hand. Faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am. I offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.
Notes
- ↑ My official name is “Mongol 482.” My many ingredients are assembled, fabricated, and finished by Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
- ↑ G. K. Chesterton.
I came up with the lyrics, and Sarah did her thing to make it jive with the melody. She is a very talented artist. (Check her out on YouTube). Consequently, I owe her a lot. She has done a ton of work to help me out.
Furthermore, beside her musical abilities, Sarah has many talents. She is an author, and has illustrated a couple of my books. She manages a Tattoo Studio in Mississippi, and manages to bring culture to a small rural town in the deep south.
My idea is to use different verses to setup the various themes of a video. As an example, the badguys and zombies verse would work for any defense video, and the bees in the cities would work for livestock and gardening.
Feel free to give me any ideas for other verses.
Here are the Lyrics:
If it ain’t one thing then its another,
That’s why I prepare like no other
You don’t have to be scared if you’re prepared
Tornadoes, Wildfires, floods and earthquakes,
Think of all the plans you need to make
You don’t have to be scared if you’re prepared
Badmen, boogy men, zombies too,
We all know what they want to do,
I bought a rifle to help me through
You don’t have to be scared if you’re prepared
Lying politicians and economic disaster,
They all make me prep a little faster
You don’t have to be scared if you’re prepared
Boxes of beans, bullets and bandaids
It feels good to have a full pantry to raid
You don’t have to be scared if you’re prepared
Raising rabbits, chickens and bees
You can even do it the big cities
You don’t have to be scared if you’re prepared
I have a plan that fits my point of view,
I’m getting ready, so how ‘bough you,
You don’t have to be scared if you’re prepare
*Update
Finally, after a few hundred videos, I decided that I just don’t care about YouTube video Intro music. Consequently, I have begun making much shorter videos.
Similarly, I decided to just get into shooting the video and getting on with the projects. Certainly, I find it interesting how things change and adapt as time goes by. That should not surprise anyone, as this entire website grew from my desire to stop reading and start doing the things I was reading about. Above all, it seems like I should be thankful I was reading books on survival and not serial killers….
Certainly, It is not easy for hourly individuals that deal in tens and hundreds to visualize spending billions and trillions.
Consequently, so I quickly did some math to break it down and give some perspective on National Debt
Here is our problem:
$113,000,000,000,000 Unfunded Liabilities
$14,000,000,000,000 National Debt
That is:
$1,000,000 Unfunded Liabilities per Taxpayer
$128,000 National Debt per Taxpayer
Our government has to pay that with:
$2,000,000,000,000 Annual Tax Revenue
Loans cost money, so we pay:
$3,500,000,000,000 Annually on Interest
Which is $1,500,000,000,000 more than our Countries annual tax receipts, so we have to borrow that each year to pay interest (Which increases our debt, which increases our interest, which increases how much we have to borrow to pay interest)
Even Dropping off 6 Zeros Still show as heck of a problem.
$113,000,000 Unfunded Liabilities
$14,000,000 National Debt
That is:
$1 Unfunded Liabilities per Taxpayer
0.19 National Debt per Taxpayer
Our government has to pay that with:
$2,000,000 Annual Tax Revenue
Loans cost money, so we pay:
$3,500,000 Annually on Interest
Which is $1,500,000 more than our Countries annual tax receipts, so we have to borrow that each year to pay interest (Which increases our debt, which increases our interest, which increases how much we have to borrow to pay interest)
For Perspective
If a two income family brought home $80,000 a year, and the Government took the entire amount, it would take 25 Million families to equal the total amount of tax revenues that the US Federal Government receives in taxes….
However, it would take 42 Million, 750 thousand such $80,000 Families taxed at 100% just to pay the interest on the 14 trillion dollar debt.
It would take 175 Million Families with an income of $80,000,000 to pay off the debt, (or 350 million individuals with a $40,000 dollar a year income. That is 50 million more individuals than the total US population.)
A families share of those mandates is 1 billion, 412 million, and 500 thousand dollars with a $80,000 a year income as a family. If you made $80,000 a year, and owed over 1,412,500,000 and had to borrow money just to pay the interest, what kind of promises would you have to make to get someone to give you more money?
Add in Unfunded Mandates
Say you think its unfair to add in unfunded mandates (say you don’t want to pay for Granny’s medicare, or Mom’s social insecurity) We can just look at the national debt.
Similarly, for a family with an $80,000 a year income you would have to owe 175 Million dollars to owe the same ratio as what the US Federal Government owes in relationship to its income…
Finally, the Fed says the combined housing market value is 10 Trillion, since we owe 14 Trillion in National Dept and another 100 Trillion in unfunded mandates, it seems like I am not the only one upside down on my mortgage. The difference is, I like what I spent my money on, and no one forced me to take out my mortgage.
I DO NOT like what my tax dollars are being spent on, and I have long begged them to stop mortgaging my future.
The music is about to stop on our Countries game of hot potato, and those in Washington still refuse to stop playing games…
Note:
This is a low estimate, as the numbers keep growing as Congress keeps spends, and the President keeps starting wars….
Source US Census, and the US National Debt Clock