The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS, Md. – Not since the King and the Duke fooled the townspeople along the Mississippi River in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have so many people been fooled into believing in a scam by a bunch of grifters.

I just had to laugh out loud on Saturday when the New York Times, now under attack from the left for a change, ran a serious news feature about a group of grifters profiting from right-wing End Times apocalyptic conspiracy theories.

“When it comes to surviving the apocalypse, you could do a lot worse than the West Virginia branch of Fortitude Ranch, a constellation of five survivalist compounds across the United States and one of a growing number of businesses aiming to seize on Americans’ deepening anxieties about the future,” the Times reports with not a hint of sarcasm. “Set on a rise above the lush valley cradling the Lost River in eastern West Virginia, about two hours from Washington, D.C., the 50-acre property backs up against the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests.”

Not a bad location by the way. I just wonder about the elevation.

“A handsome guesthouse, built of dark timber slats, anchors the property. Two large, boxy dormitories, also timber but more rustic, as well as a bare-bones bunker, are designed to house more than 100 members,” the story continues. “They are each expected to pay $2,000 to $20,000 (depending on the level of accommodation) to join Fortitude Ranch, and another $1,000 per year per person in dues to call this their ‘home fort,’ meaning they will head there when catastrophe strikes.”

Is There a Future in the Doomsday Economy?

It’s actually not a bad idea, as crazy ideas go. These are not just places to go to escape the Four Horses of the Apocalypse. In the meantime, they can be used as tourist vistas. What a concept.

But the whole thing just left me wondering: Why are all the so-called “Doomsday Preppers” always former military gun nuts and conservative Christian Republican nut jobs?

Where are the liberal survivalists?

Well, obviously they are hiding out in the mountain woods growing organic fruit and produce, living off the grid and staying to themselves. I guess they feel no need to “capitalize” on their alternative lifestyles.

But hey, why not?

We could have a chain of hippie communes out there, if the CIA would let us get away with it. Would that be such a threat to “Free Market” capitalism?

According to the Times, “most” preppers share a similarly dim view of what the future may bring. And they have no faith that government will keep ordinary people safe.

“The normal state of humanity is one of borderline starvation, disease, war, famine, all the horses of the apocalypse,” said Chad Myers, who decided to open a Fortitude Ranch franchise in Tennessee.

Don’t get me wrong.

There are reasons to fear that humanity and the United States of America are headed for trouble. The problem is, if you start trying to figure out a survival strategy based on a bunch of Hocus Pocus and science fiction, with a blatant political bias, you are bound to get it wrong. What happens when you invest your life in such a thing and we never need it? You look like a fool, and die like one.

How about an objective analysis from someone with a relevant education and experience?

Hey, one of things we studied in the Science Communications Ph.D. program in Tennessee was how to conduct a Risk Assessment. So you could take all the potential threats to democracy and the planet, or the town you live in, and plug them into a Super Computer and run an analysis. But after four years of trying to figure out how to program such an analysis, it dawned on me that the best super computer is the human brain.

There was no way to account for all the confounding variables to make a computerized analysis run perfectly. So why not just apply human knowledge and logic to figuring out what threats are most credible and try to do something to avoid the effects of them?

Sounds simple. So why did no one else think of it?

Oh, wait, the U.S. intelligence community has meetings on this and releases a report about it every year. You can find varouius versions of it out there in webland. But I chose to use this unclassified report from the Director of National Intelligence released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in February, 2024.

I wonder if any of these preppers have bothered to read it?

ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

“This assessment focuses on the most direct, serious threats to the United States primarily during the next year” Virginia Senator Mark Warner and Chairman of the committee writes in the introduction.

“During the next year, the United States faces an increasingly fragile global order strained by accelerating strategic competition among major powers, more intense and unpredictable transnational challenges, and multiple regional conflicts with far-reaching implications,” the report starts off in the forward. “An ambitious but anxious China. a confrontational Russia, some regional powers, such as Iran, and more capable non-state actors arc challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as U.S. primacy within it. Simultaneously. new technologies, fragilities in the public health sector, and environmental changes are more frequent. often have global impact and are harder to forecast.”

The three threats that stand out most to me include the long standing threat of climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation, and the “proliferation of emerging technology,” and by this it’s clear they mean the growing threat from Machine Learning, what advocates call “Artificial Intelligence.”

This is also a concern in the section on “cyber security,” with nefarious bad actors beginning to use AI in their own online disruptive tactics to create more chaos to exploit. Take note of the recent hacking of all AT&T accounts in the U.S. We still don’t know all the implications of that, for example.

It has to be a concern that 73 percent of all Internet traffic is generated by malicious, bad bots.

Welcome to Botville: An Uncertain Computerized Future

Unfortunately, doing anything to stop the growing threat from AI will be nearly impossible, since all the U.S. federal agencies are experimenting with it just like all the private tech giants, and efforts to attempt making AI safe have so far failed. This should be slowed down at the very least.

OpenAI promised to make its AI safe. Employees say it ‘failed’ its first test.

So until their power consumption crashes the power grid and creates a national crisis, this government and the next will be inept to deal with it, especially considering the lame leadership in the House.

I described this in more detail the other day.

What to do about the electric power demands of artificial intelligence data centers?

So, right off the bat, the preppers or survivalists have some real threats to consider.

The one I’ve focused on the longest is climate change, and I have used my brain and actually found one of the few places in the country where you might build a community to live well, while everyone else burns. Believe it? Or not. I’m pretty damn smart.

Be ignorant and scare yourself. Or consider joining us.

There Has to Be A Better Way: Let’s Find It Together

Don’t be fooled by this modern-day anti-christ.

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