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bootleg-nessie · 1 year ago

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Things that will happen in the future (based on my own experiences with time travel):

***FAQs at the end***

*All of these observations are copied directly from my notes in roughly the order I took them in

*Don’t ask about the interchanging use of past/present/future tense, you know how that stuff is with time travel

Women just started all growing three boobs instead of two. Scientists baffled

Genetically engineered catboys (no literally)

The great pyramid of Giza has been converted into a Bass Pro Shop

The entire state of Rhode Island was bought by some rich tech CEO who promptly dug a 500 foot wide trench around the entire state so that it could in fact be an island. It was soon converted into the world’s largest parking lot

Pollution has gotten so bad that fresh oxygen is now delivered straight to most homes via a subscription service

Basic necessities such as food, water, and housing are now provided for free by the government, but only for the top 1% of wealth holders

Insulin now costs twice as much as rent. “Get fucked,” say pharma companies

92.6% of new electronic appliances now have smartphone integration and require a monthly subscription to use

Most billionaires have real estate on earth’s moon

As an ongoing film experiment, Taika Waititi successfully convinced a Nebraska man that he’s been raptured and is now in heaven. He actually got Truman Show’d and now millions of viewers tune in every week to watch God (played by John DiMaggio) manipulate Robert into confronting his own views, battle cognitive dissonance, and face the realization that he might not have been as good of a person on Earth as he thought he was

Carrots have gone extinct, as have highland cows

Species of extinct animals and plants now are being posthumously renamed after the billionaires and elites most directly responsible for killing then off

Researchers discovered a sentient colony of fungus off the coast of Chile, it prefers to go by Fleebo and appears to have a incredibly complex intelligence far greater than any other observed organic being

Nobody knows where Ireland went. It literally just disappeared off the face of the earth one day and nobody bothered to question it. The story couldn’t compete in the news cycle with the recent news about a company in China that made the first real life pokemon. An entire civilization of people gone and I’m the only one who seems to remember it or even care

Fleebo and its offspring have annexed Madagascar and are threatening any retaliation with nuclear warfare and “making The Last of Us a reality.” Nobody knows if Fleebo actually has the capabilities to do this, but after the Lovecraft incident we’re all TOO goddam scared to fuck around and find out

Large snails have replaced cats and dogs as the most common household pet. Snail culture has largely taken over the world, especially Japan

The president of the United States is now decided with an oiled up twerking competition. Most people were hesitant at first but this has produced vastly more competent leaders so now everyone just kinda goes along with it

With the cost of living crisis only worsening with time, selling tattoo space on your body to advertisers has become common as people struggle to afford rent and pay their bills

North and South Korea have reunited into “Korea 2.0”

Germany has split up into East and West Germany again

Belgium and France have been annexed by West Germany and renamed “Wester Germany” and “Westest Germany” respectively

The entirety of Florida is now underwater. Most of Kansas is too for some reason that scientists refuse to explain because they’ve “sworn an oath to the eldritch gods” and that “much worse things would happen” if they did

The melting ice caps in Antarctica unveiled a lost civilization of intelligent creatures descended from a species of lungfish, predating human civilization by millions of years. They planned on hibernating for another 10-15 million years to observe the course of evolution on Earth and are very very angry at humans for waking them up prematurely and ruining all of that with global warming

The politically correct term for lungfish people is “Dipnoid” but most people refer to them by a variety of slurs, such as “finwalker” and “kelp muncher” (not that they even eat kelp)

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has now increased to nearly half the size of what was formerly known as Canada and has been colonized entirely by pirates (the flag is actually pretty cool). The pirate nation has the 17th largest economy in the world and is projected to surpass the United States in GDP

Africa is about 2% smaller. Nobody knows why. Most people point to Fleebo, who denies having any involvement

All human-Dipnoid interaction was promptly banned by most world governments, except for the GPGPRP (Great Pacific Garbage Patch Republic of Pirates), whom the Dipnoids rely upon extensively for trade

Scientists have used DNA from fossils to recreate other species of humans. We now live alongside them like we did for thousands of years before everyone besides Homo sapiens went extinct. Racism is at an all time high

Class C and above robots are now legally recognized by most progressive countries as people

The United States government has been exposed for secretly funneling billions of dollars into the GPGPRP and using it to fund terrorist operations all over the world.

A new major religion revolving around Dave Grohl has skyrocketed in popularity. Grohilsm is now the world’s largest religion, second only to Fleeboism

Scientists discovered a new continent in the Pacific Ocean, and then promptly lost it again. Most people are convinced this was just an elaborate practical joke, but scientists “swear it definitely happened”

For a brief period of about 30 years, everything in George Orwell’s 1984 happened almost exactly as written in the book. Literally 1984

It was revealed that Jeff Epstein didn’t kill himself. He actually faked his death and spent the next few years in a drug-fueled episode of psychosis making sock puppets in a cave in Italy and then molesting said sock puppets until he died from a sock puppet related illness

Bigfoot was discovered off the coast of Georgia doing cocaine with a congregation of alligators. When questioned, he said he normally lives in Montana and was only there on vacation. He is now a celebrity, and has been featured in a number of tv shows and films, two of which he won an Oscar for. Last I checked, he was a washed up actor living in Hollywood with a reanimated Neanderthal woman

The GPGPRP raided most of England’s museums with the object of “doing exactly what they did for the last few centuries” England was understandably furious, but the rest of the world found it rather amusing

England declared war on the GPGPRP, which it promptly lost after hackers brought down the entire country’s military overnight. Much like in the 21st century, England is the world’s laughing stock

The entirety of Luxembourg relocated itself to the moon

Russia attempted to take over most of Eurasia. In retaliation to the full global effort to stop them, they launched nukes at the world’s 600 most populous cities outside of its current territory. Most of the warheads were stopped in time, but a few major metropolitan areas got hit pretty badly, including Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Chengdu, Mexico City, and Istanbul. Japan was understandably super pissed that Hiroshima and Nagasaki got nuked for a second time

In the wake of the nuclear holocaust, Canada assumed control over what was formerly Russia and assimilated many of its citizens and leaders into its own society and government. Under the new rule of formerly Russian leaders, Canada became a puppet state for the second coming of Russia. It annexed much of the United States, Mongolia, China, and a handful of other countries, becoming “the world’s first megacountry.” Crungolaska now controls a majority of the northern hemisphere

As part of a practical joke by Adam Sandler, Tom Hanks was actually marooned on a desert island like in Castaway. He lasted less than a week before he died. When I left this era of the future, Adam Sandler was serving a lifetime sentence in prison for murder

Fringe groups of crows with above-average intelligence have started popping up around the world. So far they have been observed forming small communities, crafting relatively complex tools, using rudimentary speech, performing rituals, and creating music

Aliens visited earth and had a formal meeting with many of our world leaders, but decided to leave us alone for a few thousand more years because humanity is “not yet mature enough to handle the responsibilities of interstellar travel.” They have incentivized us with a the blueprints for an Alcubierre Drive and a means to produce the exotic matter to fuel it once they deem us as being ready

The original colony of settlers on Mars has declared independence, officially becoming the first country not on Earth

We sent Tom Cruise back to space but this time we just left him there

The tether for the space elevator broke. The town known as Vatorville, famous for being the location of the takeoff point of the elevator shuttle on Earth, was completely decimated as tens of thousands of miles of steel cable came crashing back down. There were no survivors

Most people in first and second world countries have mandatory microchip implants that serve as a personal ID

Last Thursdayism has been largely denounced by quantum physicists. Current theories now revolve around “Next Thursdayism,” the belief that the entire universe was created in the future and that we all exist as a memory in the past

Synthetic organ farms for transplants and research have become a massive industry worth billions of dollars. However, there is still a huge black market for organically grown human organs, as they’re much cheaper to acquire and aren’t taxed at the exorbitant rates that lab-grown organs are

China dug a hole all the way to the center of the Earth. Turns out it’s hollow and there are people living inside. Who knew?

A university reconstructed the entire city of Rome as it was in its early days during the Roman Empire. It’s actually pretty historically accurate, except for the fact that there’s a lot less sex because it’s run by a bunch of sweaty history nerds

After Rome 2 resulted in the creation of a cult revolving around the Roman god of the dead that gained traction as a minor religion, Pluto was officially reinstated as a planet by NASA when cultists picketed their headquarters every day for nearly 3 years straight. “Fine, we’ll give these fucking virgins what they want so they’ll finally shut the hell up,” said NASA’s administrator in chief

In a display of the biotechnical prowess of Disney’s Imagineers, all the animatronics in Disney’s Hall of Presidents were replaced with clones of the originals, which went about exactly as well as you’d expect. After reports of the presidents hurling a series of racial slurs and other obscenities at the first black family to enter surfaced, the project was shut down almost immediately after it had opened. Minority admission to Magic Kingdom plummeted to 2.3% of its numbers from the previous year, making it the second whitest place on earth after a taylor swift concert

Plastic now makes up about 3% of every organism on earth by weight

Public officials are now required by law to take shrooms before running for office

Trees are considered a rare and highly sought after commodity, and are usually only owned by public institutions and the rich (the vast majority of oxygen farms use algae to produce oxygen)

FAQs:

FAQ: What time period(s) did you go to?

A: I have no fucking clue. The world stopped using the Gregorian calendar in 2063 after a gamma ray burst hit the sun. The GRB led to stellar ablation, which changed the length of a year on Earth. The sun would continue to lose mass at an accelerated rate for several more years, with the length of the year changing slightly from year to year. The world adopted a variety of different calendars which kept being updated frequently and were often super confusing and contradictory. I traveled to about a dozen different points in time, which based on my best estimates spanned within a few millennia of the current date.

FAQ: How did you obtain a time machine?

A: I think it was the 17th or 18th of June, 2055? That night, a large sci-fi looking box thingy roughly the size of a VW Bus appeared a few hundred yards away in the open field in front of my house. I tried to take a picture of the box, but for some reason the closer I got, the more the image on my camera started to become fuzzy, and by the time I got close enough to take a decent picture, the camera had stopped working altogether. I pulled open a door to reveal a corpse inside that was charred beyond recognition, who appeared to have suffocated and/or burned to death during a fire that damaged most of the interior. I also noticed a number of strange tumors and growths on the body. I pressed a random button on the remains of what I believed to be a control panel, expecting nothing to happen, but the door closed automatically and I suddenly lost consciousness. When I came to, I exited the box, expecting to still be in the field in front of my house, but instead found myself a ways outside of a small snowy village that based on my best estimates, was somewhere in northern Asia around 2-3 thousand years ago. The villagers started coming after me with spears, so I quickly ran back to the box and pressed another button, hoping it would return me to from whence I came. This time, the people I found (who were thankfully much nicer and spoke a dialect of English that I could mostly understand) told me that it was the year 506 of the PGRB-Δ4 calendar (the calendar that the United Territories was using at the time). I repeated this maybe a dozen more times trying to get home until I landed in 2023, which as far as I could tell, was the closest I had gotten back to my original time so far. It was at this point that I decided to stay and seek medical attention, as I was rather concerned about some nasty new growths on my arms and legs similar to that which I had seen on the corpse.

FAQ: Where is the time machine now?

A: No idea. It disappeared a few days after I landed in 2023. My best guess is that some poor sap found it and ended up sometime else.

(I never ask for likes/reblogs but I literally spent fucking WEEKS on this one so if you liked it pls show me some love <3)

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manorpunk · 1 month ago

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Teach Me, Maria-sensei! 6️⃣

Usonia is a supranational union of states, roughly akin to the European Union, located within the former contiguous United States (often called the ‘former 48’) as well as parts of Canada. It was formed as a joint effort between the major post-crisis states (New England, the Great Lakes Republic, Texaplex, the Chicago Daimyoate, Tripartite California, etc) in the hopes that a centralized authority would bring order to the vast and ungoverned Midwest Autonomous Zone, and because the respective heads of state all agreed that it should be someone else’s problem. It remains to be seen whether the election of Sunny Roosevelt as the first president of Usonia has thrown a wrench into those plans.

+++++

Maria: So here’s the thing. All of this didn’t have to spell the end for the federal government. Zombie Covid, the Yellowstone eruption, Florida sinking… These were all bad and killed lots of people, of course, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the government would collapse.

Sunny: Was it a straw that broke the camel’s back type of deal?

Maria: Partly, perhaps, but that’s not where I’m going with this. You see, at the time, the American aristocracy was storing a significant amount of their wealth in the form of real estate, for boring and complicated reasons. The destruction of the Polycrisis quite literally wiped a significant portion of their assets off the map. Property values plummeted across much of the nation, and hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth evaporated essentially overnight. This activated a panic amongst the billionaire class, who, fearing total societal breakdown and/or any repercussions at all for their actions, preëmptively retreated to their specially prepared underground bunkers, each containing their own small town of support staff, effectively immune from government intervention - though they were not immune to angry mobs, as they would learn in the forties.

Sunny: That’s the 2040s, because we’re in the future.

Maria: Have you seen the footage where [REDACTED] gets dragged out of his saferoom and publicly cannibalized?

Sunny: Omg my gosh, who hasn’t seen that? So bonkers.

Maria: It’s so good. But in any case, it was that withdrawal of support and psuedo-independence of the billionaire class, resulting from the destruction of property being used not for housing but as wealth storage, which ultimately broke the back of the federal government, or in other words… America died as a real estate scam.

Sunny: Callback!

Maria: In the immediate aftermath of the federal government’s collapse, the state governments attempted to pick up the slack. Results were mixed, in the sense that everyone failed at it but some people failed harder than others. The larger and more populous states had a better chance, but they were all dealing with their own problems - California was dealing with the Jefferson rebellion, Texas was caught up in the Norteño wars, and New York was being constantly harassed by the murine legions of Grunst the Rat-King.

Sunny: Didn’t Grunst run for lord-mayor of New York back in the fifties?

Maria: Indeed. Honestly he wouldn’t have even been in the bottom third of New York mayors.

Sunny: That’s the 2050s, because-

Maria: You did that joke already.

Sunny: It’s a good joke, Maria.

Maria: Anyway, the less populous states in the Midwest and Great Plains barely even managed an attempt at independent governance before any semblance of central government disappeared and the situation deteriorated into general banditry and warlordism.

Sunny: Okay, I get why all that happened, sorta, but how did it all happen so quickly?

Maria: There are two reasons. One, smaller states were more dependent on the federal government to provide funding for services like healthcare and education, and secondly… I’ll put it this way. If you had to choose who was in charge, and your choices were an ax-wielding Mad Max biker or, say, an average member of the Nebraska state government, which would you pick?

Sunny: …

Sunny: …ough, that’s grim.

#teach me maria sensei #sunny roosevelt #maria lorraine

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beardedmrbean · 10 months ago

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A Nebraska lawmaker whose north Omaha district has struggled for years with a housing shortage is pushing a bill that, if passed, could make Nebraska the first in the country to forbid out-of-state hedge funds and other corporate entities from buying up single-family properties.

Sen. Justin Wayne’s bill echoes legislative efforts in other states and in Congress to curtail corporate amassing of single-family homes, which critics say has helped cause the price of homes, rent and real estate taxes to soar in recent years. Wayne said that has been the case in his district, where an Ohio corporation has bought more than 150 single-family homes in recent years — often pushing out individual homebuyers with all-cash offers. The company then rents out the homes.

Experts say the scarcity of homes for purchase can be blamed on a multitude of factors, including sky-high mortgage interest rates and years of underbuilding modest homes.

RISING RENT PRICES PUSH RECORD NUMBER OF AMERICANS TOWARD HOUSING CRISIS, PROMPTING LEGISLATIVE ACTION

Wayne's bill offers few specifics. It consists of a single sentence that says a corporation, hedge fund or other business may not buy single-family housing in Nebraska unless it's located in and its principal members live in Nebraska.

"The aim of this is to preserve Nebraska's limited existing housing stock for Nebraskans," Wayne said this week at a committee hearing where he presented the bill. "If we did this, we would be the first state in the country to take this issue seriously and address the problem."

A 14-page bill dubbed the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act has been introduced in both chambers of Congress and would impose a 10-year deadline for hedge funds to sell off the single-family homes they own and, until they do, would saddle those investment trusts with hefty taxes. In turn, those tax penalties would be used to help people put down payments on the divested homes.

Democratic lawmakers in a number of other states have introduced similar bills, including in Minnesota, Indiana, North Carolina and Texas, but those bills have either stalled or failed.

The housing squeeze coming from out-of-state corporate interests isn't just an Omaha problem, said Wayne Mortensen, director of a Lincoln-based affordable housing developer called NeighborWorks Lincoln.

Mortensen said the recession of 2008 and, more recently, the economic downturn driven by the COVID-19 pandemic made single-family housing a more attractive corporate investment than bond markets.

"When that became the case, housing was commoditized and became just like trading any stock," he said. "Those outside investors are solely interested in how much value they can extract from the Lincoln housing market."

Those corporations often invest no upkeep in the homes, he said.

"And as a result of that, we're seeing incredible dilapidation and housing decline in many of our neighborhoods because of these absentee landlords that have no accountability to the local communities," Mortensen said.

Currently, about 13% of single-family homes in Lincoln are owned by out-of-state corporate firms, he said.

As in other states, Wayne's bill likely faces an uphill slog in the deep red state of Nebraska. At Monday's hearing before the Banking, Insurance and Commerce Committee, several Republican lawmakers acknowledged a statewide housing shortage, but they cast doubt on Wayne's solution.

"You know, you can set up shell companies, you set up different layers of ownership. You can move your domicile base. There's just a ton of workarounds here," Omaha Sen. Brad von Gillern said. "I also — as just as a pure capitalist — fundamentally oppose the idea."

#nunyas news

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lecadavre · 1 year ago

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Introducing YAEL BLUM. Word on the street is they are a MEDICAL EXAMINER, and despite what others might think, they remain NON-CORRUPT. Though they are RESTRAINED and RESENTFUL they can also be FERVENT and TENDER. In the chaos of New York City, they’re sure to fit right in.

BIOGRAPHY: Click here for access to her full biography!

PLAYLIST: Click here.

BASICS.

FULL NAME: Yael Emily Blum AGE & DATE OF BIRTH: Thirty-six, born on September 5th, 1987. GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis woman, using she/her/hers pronouns. SEXUALITY: Bisexual, Biromantic HOMETOWN: Valentine, Nebraska, USA AFFILIATION: Law Enforcement, non-corrupt JOB POSITION: Medical Examiner EDUCATION: Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Doctor of Medicine (M.D) from University of Nebraska College of Medicine, and did her Medical Residency in Pathology at University of Nebraska College of Medicine RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Separated CHILDREN: N/A POSITIVE TRAITS: Tender, Fervent, Dedicated, Alert, Resourceful NEGATIVE TRAITS: Envious, Restrained, Resentful, Subservient, Deadened

WANTED CONNECTIONS.

ROOMMATE: Yael's only been in New York now for around two/three years, and considering the absolutely nauseating real estate prices in the city and her finances being tied up in her non-divorce, she'll definitely need someone to split the burden of NYC rent with.

HER HUSBAND: This is probably more of a submittable to the main wanted connection but it would be fun to eventually have this drama because she did leave him out the blue and broke up with him over email... All the details about him in her bio can be discussed/changed, I'm willing to be super flexible about it so pretty much everything would be up to you.

FRIENDS: Yael has always been very codependent with her friends, she's lowkey clingy but somehow only in friendship? It'd be interesting to have a mix of genuine friends and ones that are perhaps using her for her misguided generosity and loyalty.

OTHER DOCTORS: People she met at medical conferences, communicated with about patients who've travelled between states, etc. Before her move to NYC she was a pathologist in Omaha, Nebraska. Though she technically works in law enforcement now, it'd be interesting to have colleagues in the medical field.

Literally anything else because I love a good brainstorm :)

#wb.intro #:-)

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maureen-corpse · 1 year ago

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Now suppose we ignore the flimsy real estate agent thing and the alive character is simply buying and moving into a very nice decently maintained historic house after its last owners move to, I don’t know, Nebraska. To live with their child and see their grandchildren.

Perhaps our ghost thought that with that move she would finally be alone and have her house to herself again, and this kicks off some of the classic haunting stuff: she wants the new resident out of her house so she can finally lounge on the chaise by her ghostly self (a chaise is always very important)

#more on this later #i’m thinking out loud

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msclaritea · 2 years ago

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The Incredible Shrinking World of Scientology

December 5, 2022

Quite a number of people have asked me in recent interviews whether scientology is growing. Of course, it is not. Information is deadly poison to cults and in this age of the internet, scientology is doomed.

But, scientology puts out an endless stream of propaganda to make it seem like they are expanding. They claim “massive growth” and “unprecedented demand” and various other catchphrases, statements unsupported by specifics or statistics.

Naturally, scientology doesn’t want to make information available that would disprove their claims of constant and unparalleled expansion, so it takes a bit of digging to disprove their lies. There are independent sources of information from which extrapolations can give an accurate picture.

First, all one need do is visit ANY scientology organization and the truth becomes clear — they are EMPTY and desperate to try to get anyone to come in. Sadly, each individual organization has been convinced it is ONLY their particular location that is struggling (because they are failing to apply Hubbard’s tech correctly) — everywhere else on earth is doing GREAT!

So it’s necessary to take a bigger view of the state of scientology orgs and missions. And in this instance, scientology’s own information is helpful.

Jefferson Hawkins recently posted a comment on this blog (emphasis added by me):

They claim “thousands” of Organizations (I think the latest claim was “8000 Organizations), yet if you check their own address lists, they tell a different story. They used to publish full lists of Org and Mission addresses in their books. A 1992 edition of their book “What is Scientology?” listed 148 Orgs and 343 Missions. If you go to their own website, they have a list of their Org and Mission addresses, and [today] they list 132 Orgs and 189 Missions. So in the last 30 years, they’ve lost a third of their centers!

Scientology claims their “massive growth” is proven by the “new churches that have opened” — this is a deception. They have purchased a lot of real estate. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars renovating these buildings. They have held “ribbon cuttings” with great fanfare for their “new churches” and they have then resumed their status as empty morgues, just in larger premises. You would imagine that if scientology in fact HAD opened all these “new churches” there would be scientology organizations all over the world by now.

Yet many of the most populous nations on earth do not have a single scientology organization: China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and the list could go on. Or even in the US (the home of scientology) the following states do not have a single scientology org: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Scientology has transitioned into a real estate holding company.

Unsurprisingly, scientology holds information about their membership very close to the vest — the one true count would be the number of active IAS Members. This was never greater than 50,000. But they have refused to make this information publicly available. Instead, they make grandiose (and false) claims about 10 million scientologists, or 14 million or 8 million or just “many millions” or these days, “millions.” The truth is that active scientologists number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most these days put it between 20 and 30,000.

In some countries, they have censuses that record religious affiliation. Information that is NOT colored by scientology propaganda (even the number of orgs and missions scientology claims is suspect, many of the missions open just a few hours a week in a room in someone’s home).

Tony Ortega recently reported:

In 2011, the census of England and Wales counted only 2,418 people who identified themselves as Scientologists.

In the 2021 count, and the number of Scientologists in the same area is down to 1,854.

That’s a 23-percent drop in ten years.

In that same time, England and Wales grew by 3.5 million people in overall population to 59.6 million people.

So that makes Scientology’s share .003 percent.

And remember, during these years Scientology has been unashamedly calling itself the “world’s fastest growing religion.”

Once again, real government data shows that our estimates of about 20,000 active Scientologists around the world as much closer to the truth than the “millions” that Scientology claims.

2021 England and Wales: 1,854

2021 Canada: 1,380

2018 New Zealand: 321

2016 Australia: 1,684

2016 Ireland: 87

The organization that proclaims itself to be spectacularly successful and in demand is in reality today a high-pressure fundraising machine sucking money out of a shriveling number of whales for fake “campaigns” that are all PR and no substance. They are investing their billions in properties which sit empty or are at best grossly underutilized.

There you have it; the incredible shrinking world of scientology.

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cheapoldhousesunder50k · 11 days ago

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c.1925 Two Bedroom Affordable Nebraska Home $59K

$59,000 Here is a happy looking house for you. The two-bedroom, one-bath affordable Nebraska home is a sweet little place. It has a detached garage, partial basement and public water and sewer. Location is not ideal. Realtor Comments Home for sale! 2bed 1bath 976sqft 375acre lot Circa 1925 More Nebraska Properties 211 Third St, Crawford, NE 69339 $59,000 If interested in a property, please…

#1925 #affordable Nebraska home #circa #ne #ne real estate #Nebraska #Nebraska real estate #old houses under 50k

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datascraping001 · 2 years ago

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polarautismbomb · 4 months ago

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so before 1854, there was this huge swath of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (that had been part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and so fell under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, meaning any states carved out of it north of Missouri's southern border would not be slave states...except for Missouri itself) that was theoretically part of the US but in reality hadn't been grabbed from its indigenous inhabitants yet for the most part, and so hadn't been divided into states or even organized US territories (unlike, say, Oregon, there already was such a thing as the Oregon Territory, covering the same land as the present state and then some)

Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator for Illinois (who lived in Chicago, was originally from Vermont, and owned a plantation in Mississippi, where his wife was from), had invested heavily in Chicago real estate and had increased its value by using his position as a senator to get a railway built from Chicago to Mobile, Alabama; now he wanted to do the same with a railway from Chicago to the Gold Rush boomtown of San Francisco (where rapid population growth of white colonists and accelerating extermination of the indigenous inhabitants had recently led to California becoming a state in 1850)

such a railway would have to go through the vast expanse of the Louisiana Purchase that was still "unorganized US territory", so he introduced legislation to organize it, that is, establish a territorial government for it, start parceling out land to be grabbed from its indigenous inhabitants to be sold to white colonists and railway companies, etc. Since it was north of Missouri's southern border, slavery would be barred from it, so white southerners in Congress would oppose it (also because many wanted a more southerly route for the first transcontinental railway, building it westward from New Orleans instead), and he needed at least some of them on his side for it to pass

he turned to the F Street Mess, a set of four especially influential senators from slave states, Missouri senator David Rice Atchison, the president pro tem of the Senate and therefore next in line to the president under the rules of succession at the time, the vice president having died in office, and whose name may be familiar as "he was president for a day because Zachary Taylor postponed his inauguration", or as the guy Atchison, Kansas is named after; and three major committee chairs: Virginia senators James Murray Mason and Robert Hunter, who later were prominent Confederate politicians, the latter being Secretary of State briefly in the Jefferson Davis cabinet, the former being at the center of an incident that almost led to war between the US and UK during the civil war; and South Carolina senator Andrew Pickens Butler

they said they'd support Douglas's territorial legislation if it included a repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which he knew would hurt the Democratic Party in the north, but he really wanted that land grabbed and that railway built, and as a plantation owner he had no qualms about slavery anyway. To get a few more northerners in Congress to vote for it, the land was split into the Kansas Territory in the south and the Nebraska Territory in the north (both larger than the present states of those names), so that perhaps slavery would be barred from Nebraska but not Kansas

the president at the time was Franklin Pierce, previously a Democratic senator for New Hampshire, who worried about the impact this would have in the north on the Democratic Party, but he was all for Manifest Destiny, having fought in the recent war to conquer half of Mexico and having urged more expansion of US borders in his inaugural address (and having recently bought some more of Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase, named after the same family as the pwease no steppy flag, and around this time three of the ambassadors he appointed urged US conquest of Cuba, at the time a Spanish colony where slavery hadn't been abolished, to make sure it wouldn't become "another Haiti" less than 100 miles from slave state Florida, i.e. an example to the enslaved of a country where the slaveowners had been overthrown by the previously enslaved, the fear being that as a declining colonial power Spain would be too weak to prevent this from happening)

Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War in the Pierce cabinet, and he urged Pierce to sign the Kansas-Nebraska Act, so he did. Nebraska prohibited slavery (and to this day Omaha is the seat of a county named after Stephen Douglas), but in Kansas what ensued was called "Bleeding Kansas"

David Rice Atchison urged white Missourians to either move to Kansas and vote for slavery there, or to just go there and vote illegally as a non-resident, which many did. In response a movement arose urging white northerners to move there and vote against slavery; a major financial backer of this was the nephew of the textile magnate after whom Lawrence, Massachusetts is named, which is why there's a Lawrence, Kansas named after the nephew

so what happened was most of the white colonists in Kansas were northerners, but the recognized territorial government in Lecompton reflected the many votes of white Missourians who had immediately gone back home, and so slavery was authorized and it was illegal to publicly oppose slavery. Elections were held that established a rival government in Topeka, unrecognized by the federal government, that abolished slavery (but, for the first few years, also had a law making it illegal for black people to live in Kansas). The ensuing civil war in Kansas was the subject of a speech (titled the Crime Against Kansas) given by Charles Sumner, a senator for Massachusetts and a member of the newly formed Republican Party established in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act (prompting a sweeping party realignment in which most northern Whigs and many northen Democrats became Republicans, while most southern Whigs and some pro-slavery northern Whigs became Democrats, often passing from one the other via the Know-Nothing Party, founded in a reaction against the era's major influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland after the recent famine)

In this speech Sumner called the Border Ruffians (white Missourians supporting the pro-slavery Kansas government) "hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization", condemned the pro-slavery Kansas government disarming supporters of the anti-slavery government (stopping them from defending themselves against the pro-slavery government and from "defending themselves" against the indigenous inhabitants Kansas was being taken from), made fun of senator Butler of the F Street Mess for his speech impediment, referred to slavery as a "harlot" that Butler had married, and went on about how South Carolina fucking sucks (not his exact words) while (when going after the two Virginia senators in the F Street Mess) taking care to distinguish between Virginia as a slave state and Virginia as the home of (since they were and are revered by white northerners and southerners alike) Washington and Jefferson (never mind that they were slaveowners)

so Butler's cousin, congressman Preston Brooks, went up to Sumner's desk on the Senate floor and beat him with his cane, the beating going on with Sumner trapped under the bolted-to-the-floor desk until he wrenched it loose (he was then absent from the senate for the next few years, bedridden from getting beaten to the brink of death and then housebound with PTSD), an act widely praised in editorials written throughout the south. Brooks received many new canes from fellow white southerners labeled things like "hit him again" or "use knockdown arguments, and to this day Brooksville, Florida is named after him

The white-only elementary school in Topeka that Brown v. Board of Education was about was named after Sumner (even though he was against de jure segregation), and Tacoma is the seat of a county named after Franklin Pierce (who was president when the Washington Territory was carved out of the Oregon Territory; Seattle is the seat of King County, originally named after his vice president William Rufus King, but later "renamed" after Martin Luther King)

becoming a history buff will save your life for real bc every time someone says "this is crazy, politics didn't use to be like this! america didn't use to be like this!" you will know enough to say well. on the contrary,

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dankusner · 22 days ago

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The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War

“Did he say fight?” Drew Miller asked me.

It was July 13th, and we were in rural Colorado, near an outpost of Fortitude Ranch, a network of survivalist retreats that Miller has constructed in anticipation of civilizational collapse.

News of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—the first one—had just pinged:

a young man named Thomas Crooks had shot at Trump from a rooftop near a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, striking his right ear.

Trump had stood, with blood on his face, and shouted to his crowd, “Fight, fight, fight!”

The shooter’s motives were unknown, but Republicans were blaming Democrats.

“File charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” Representative Mike Collins posted on X.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused the “evil” Democratic Party of attempting “murder.”

Miller’s phone began to make the sound of a dog barking—his ringtone—as members and employees of the ranches sent texts and e-mails.

A salesperson in Nevada was seeing a sudden increase in requests to join:

“Member interest. I’m already getting previous leads texting me.”

A member in Colorado wondered if it was time to mobilize: “Should we do an alert?”

As the barking continued, I asked what Miller thought.

“This could stir things up,” he said, after a heavy pause. “Things could escalate.”

Miller, a fit and unnervingly analytical sixty-six-year-old, was wearing a Fortitude Ranch T-shirt and had a handgun holstered on his cargo pants.

He grew up in Nebraska, and served as an intelligence officer in the Air Force for thirty years before retiring as a colonel, in 2010.

He has long maintained a fixation on disaster.

A “Unabomber-type person,” he told me, could release a bioengineered virus to kill off “mammalian weeds,” as one prominent scientist has called humans;

an electromagnetic-pulse attack could cause months-long blackouts.

After retiring, Miller had an idea that combined his interest in readiness for such events with an entrepreneurial streak: establishing a survival community that was both comfortable and armed to the teeth.

He reached out to real-estate agents in West Virginia.

“I just said I wanted a remote location with year-round water, off the beaten path, accessible in all kinds of weather,” he told me.

“The first one said, ‘Oh, you’re looking for a survival location.’”

After several more agents had the same response, Miller asked one how they knew what he was after.

The agent replied, “We have people from every three-letter agency in D.C. with little places out here.”

Miller told me, “She even showed me a few! I thought, God dang it, people, you shouldn’t do that!” In 2015, Miller opened the first Fortitude Ranch in the mountains a couple of hours outside D.C.

Its proximity to the capital was strategic.

“That’s the obvious big target,” Miller told me.

At the time, foreign terrorist attacks were at the top of people’s minds.

“Now, for many, it’s civil war,” he said.

According to an analysis of FEMA data, some twenty million Americans are actively preparing for cataclysm—roughly twice as many as in 2017.

Political violence, including the spectre of civil war, is one of the reasons.

A recent study conducted by researchers at U.C. Davis concluded that one in three adults in the U.S., including up to half of Republicans, feel that violence is “usually or always justified” to advance certain political objectives (say, returning Trump to the White House).

In May, Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, told the Financial Times that he believed there was about a thirty-five-per-cent chance of civil war breaking out in America.

“We are now on the brink,” Dalio said, noting that a modern civil war—though it might not involve muskets—would see the fracturing of states and widespread defiance of federal law.

In June, Dalio upped his estimate to “uncomfortably more than 50 percent,” predicting “an existential battle of the hard right against the hard left in which you will have to pick a side and fight for it, or keep your head down, or flee.”

Fortitude Ranch has more than a thousand members of all political persuasions, including doctors, engineers, restaurant workers, pilots, and entrepreneurs.

“I’m not some hard-core prepper survivalist,” George, a retired C.I.A. officer in Texas, who asked that I use only his first name, told me.

“I don’t want to live without running water or air-conditioning or run around in the woods for long. But it’s like the old saying goes: When trouble is on the horizon, a wise man takes precautions. Civil war is a definite possibility.”

A man named Pat, who works as a computer scientist in Colorado, agreed.

“The potential for violence across the country scares us,” he told me. “Fortitude Ranch is insurance.”

Where possible, ranches have farm animals, fishponds, fruit trees, edible bugs, and “survival crops,” including Jerusalem artichokes, which yield roughly sixty times more calories per acre than beef.

Miller’s goal is to open dozens of ranches around the country.

There are currently seven, which range in size from ten to a hundred and sixty acres.

Their precise whereabouts are officially secret, but all are strategically remote.

The Colorado ranch, I can confirm, is a few hours from the closest Home Depot.

On the drive in, Miller had stopped there to buy drywall for the ranch’s quonset hut—a three-story structure with a galvanized steel roof, bullet-resistant walls, and enough underground rooms to cozily house a hundred new neighbors.

We pulled into a clearing with a view of the ranch: a scattering of structures on a dozen acres of arid, rocky land beneath snow-dusted peaks.

There were some penned-up dogs and chickens, a greenhouse, a broken tractor.

Forty years ago, for a Ph.D. at Harvard, Miller wrote a dissertation on “underground nuclear defense shelters and field fortifications,” so I’d expected the ranch’s living quarters to look formidable, if not fancy.

But as I stepped inside the quonset hut, which Miller had dubbed the Viking Lodge, my first impression was of a hastily erected college dorm.

There were three dozen rooms, and half had been claimed.

Members had paid between four thousand and sixty thousand dollars to join—depending on time frame (five to fifty years), group size, and amenities (en-suite toilets cost extra)—plus annual dues of up to fifteen hundred dollars.

Inside the rooms, I saw bare mattresses, stacked furniture, a PlayStation, sacks of rice, pallets of canned tuna, boxes of Pop-Tarts, Costco emergency food buckets (potato potpie, vanilla pudding), packs of D batteries, pairs of snake boots, reams of toilet paper, some Dan Brown novels, and containers of coffee.

“My wife says my espresso is a religious experience,” Larry, the ranch’s assistant manager, told me, as we examined some coffee beans he’d stockpiled.

“I’ve got enough dark roast here to keep us all going for six months at five cups a day.”

Larry, who is sixty-nine, explained that his full-time job is with a “three-letter government agency” that deploys him to war zones.

Like most Fortitude Ranchers, Larry could foresee society breaking down in a number of ways:

a nuclear detonation,

another pandemic,

or rising political violence that could split the country into warring factions.

He drew a crude map of the U.S. on scrap paper.

Two squiggly lines partitioned off the east, the west, and the middle. “I can see three different Americas,” he said.

Miller had told me earlier that day that he thinks Texas, where he lives, will likely secede if Trump loses again.

If Trump wins, states such as Oregon and Colorado could break apart along political lines.

War might follow, even accidentally.

“Maybe someone shoots Governor Abbott and then other nuts start shooting at Fort Hood,” Miller said.

“The media misreports it and some militias form and fight. It would be irrational, but irrational wars are perfectly normal.”

So what then?

When disaster nears, Larry told me, an alert will go out to members via an app.

(If messages can’t be sent, “it’ll be pretty obvious you should go to the nearest ranch,” he added.)

Only paid-up members will be allowed in.

Pets are welcome, though they might be consumed in a pinch.

Each ranch, Larry explained, has a natural water source and a year’s worth of food per member.

But, because that food may run out, there are also—where possible—farm animals, fishponds, fruit trees, edible bugs, and “survival crops,” including Jerusalem artichokes, which yield roughly sixty times more calories per acre than beef. But the tuber, I learned, can also be hard to digest.

“Constipation in a SHTF ain’t going to be pretty,” one commenter, using prepper shorthand for “shit hits the fan,” posted on a Reddit thread about Fortitude Ranch.

Larry reassured me, “Coffee helps.”

After walking past a reading nook, Larry and I climbed a spiral staircase to a roof deck with a grill and solar panels.

During a collapse, ranch members would come here to survey for threats.

There were waist-high walls, which, Larry told me admiringly, “can sop up an AK round.”

He gestured out at the wilderness.

“A thousand-yard shot? I own you.”

Earlier, Miller had casually remarked that members would “shallow-bury dead marauders”—his preferred term for attackers—“to produce worms for our chickens.”

I’d seen the chickens, but I asked Larry where the weapons were.

He led me to a neighboring log cabin and opened a hidden door.

Shotguns, pistols, AR-15s, and boxes of ammo sat by a bunk bed, along with a crossbow.

“There’s enough here for at least a month of fighting off marauders,” Larry said.

One member of another ranch, he added, has cached nineteen guns and thirty thousand rounds just for himself.

Back at the Viking Lodge, I met Benjamin, a middle-aged restaurant manager, who was hanging around the ranch, as members sometimes do.

He was marinating lamb in a subterranean kitchen.

Lunchtime.

“You want to be a minimum of five miles off pavement,” Benjamin said. “We’re ten and a half.”

I asked about the possibility of marauders.

“We’ve got plans to contend with them from the time they get to the gate,” he said.

“There’s a lot of ambush spots.”

Military know-how distinguishes Fortitude from “your average prepper bugout setup,” Miller had told me.

“Solo preppers will mostly get wiped out.”

Most of the ranches have a few members with medical training, which will help, too.

“We don’t recruit for skills,” Miller said.

“But it’s nice when members are useful.”

Before I left, Larry had me do some target practice.

From various distances, I fired an AR-15 at a paper plate pinned to a tree.

Members would soon gather for preëlection firearm trainings of their own.

Larry and Miller have their quarrels—for example, over whether to raise tilapia in a cattle trough inside the hut.

(Larry thinks it would require too much energy; Miller wants fresh fish.)

But they agree that the period between now and the Presidential Inauguration is a time of especially high risk.

The morning after my visit, Miller sent out his monthly newsletter early.

“Trump assassination attempt moves us closer to Civil War,” he wrote.

“We are of course monitoring this situation, and will issue an alert if irrational violence erupts, bad people and looters exploit it, and law and order breaks down.”

The ranches would be prepared during Election Day and the uncertain period to follow.

Miller told me, “Trump is still dodging the question of whether he’ll accept the results. We’ll be ready.”

There has been a growing understanding, felt on a sensory level, of what the World Economic Forum recently referred to as the “polycrisis.”

A warming planet does not exist in a vacuum, separate from global pandemics and widening wealth gaps; crises amplify one another.

Still, some stand out.

A recent study found that half of Americans expect a second civil war to happen “in the next few years,” even if the specifics vary according to one’s politics and imagination.

A liberal writer in Los Angeles recently told me that he imagines “duelling militias, like the Lebanese civil war,” following a “fascist takeover” in January.

A family member of mine who supports Trump told me that she believes a more traditional civil war will begin, “if they kill Trump.”

She wasn’t clear who “they” are.

But she reminded me that, like many of her friends, she is well armed.

(I was aware; I’d once stumbled upon one of her guns hidden behind a toaster.)

A progressive lawyer I know in Atlanta, who is Jewish, bought an AR-15 after January 6th as a hedge against antisemitic and political violence.

“If Harris wins, tensions could escalate,” he said.

“The divisions in the country are so strong, and they’re not going to go away.”

Some politicians are even speaking about civil war publicly.

In July, after Trump selected J. D. Vance as his running mate, George Lang, a Republican state senator in Ohio, told a crowd at a campaign rally, “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country.”

He went on, “And if we come down to a civil war I’m glad we got people like . . . Bikers for Trump on our side.”

Lang later apologized for the incendiary remarks, but he is hardly alone in expressing such sentiment.

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, recently referred to a “second American revolution,” now under way, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The pro-Trump commentator Tim Pool has invoked “civil war” dozens of times on X, where he has more than two million followers.

Marjorie Taylor Greene prefers calling for “a national divorce.”

Trump increasingly refers to the “enemies within.”

It’s not just rhetoric.

A Reuters investigation identified more than two hundred cases of political violence between January 6, 2021, and August of last year, and noted that “America is grappling with the biggest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s.”

Each of Fortitude Ranch’s compounds has enough food and provisions to sustain members for a year.

Last year, Michael Haas, a former political-science professor at the University of Hawaii, published a book titled “Beyond Polarized American Democracy: From Mass Society to Coups and Civil War.”

Haas, who is now eighty-six and has retired to Los Angeles, told me that he, too, is more concerned than ever about the threat of civil war.

He thinks that it could begin with an armed attempt to stop the counting of electoral votes in December.

“They’ll start shooting,” Haas told me.

“And in the chaos they—these pro-Trump anarchists—become the party of power. That’s where Sinclair Lewis hit it right on the button.”

(Lewis’s novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” from 1935, imagines a fascist leader imposing totalitarian rule over the United States.)

“The reason they want anarchy is they will be in charge. They have the guns.”

I asked Haas what preparations he’s made for such a conflict.

He seemed to be relying mainly on topography.

“I live on a hill with a gate that’s usually closed,” he told me.

Barbara Walter, a professor at U.C. San Diego and an expert on civil war, recently detailed a worst-case election scenario. Trump loses, and protests of the result, inflamed by the former President, turn into riots.

What’s left of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys join in.

Assassinations first target Republicans deemed traitorous.

“The Adam Kinzingers and Liz Cheneys of the world,” Walter said.

The mob turns on minorities, immigrants, and other scapegoat communities.

Judges are shot.

The worst of this violence occurs in fairly diverse states—Georgia, Nevada, Arizona—as it did during Reconstruction in places where whites felt their privilege endangered, such as Birmingham and Memphis.

An economically powerful red state, perhaps Texas, attempts to secede.

Ignoring the lessons of Ruby Ridge and Waco, the Harris Administration uses disproportionate force to deter other states from following suit.

Innocent people die.

Everyday Americans are radicalized by the apparent validation of the extremists’ claim that federal power is the enemy.

Civil war is on its way.

Walter’s scenario gets foggy from there, but we know that economic growth declines during civil wars, as do health outcomes.

Travel is hard.

Most troubling to Walter, outside actors get involved.

“China, Russia, and Iran would want to help Texas militias,” Walter told me.

“Texas could become a dictatorship run by some crazy guy whose best friends are Putin and Xi Jinping.”

Such a chain of events still seems unlikely.

But Anna Maria Bounds, a sociology professor at Queens College, told me that people are already “taking sides and prepping for violence.”

Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly spent more than a hundred million dollars building what Wired called “an opulent techno-Xanadu” on a Hawaiian island, “complete with underground shelter and what appears to be a blast-resistant door.”

Average Americans are preparing in less costly ways.

Some are stocking up on toilet paper, or buying Taser guns or fish antibiotics.

(They’re cheaper than human antibiotics but lack F.D.A. approval.)

Others are getting Lasik, filling gas cans, or withdrawing “go money” from the bank.

A Utah company called Armormax has been bulletproofing vehicles for three decades.

Until recently, most customers were foreign dignitaries with fancy cars.

Now many Americans are armoring normal ones.

Protecting a vehicle’s glass from .44-calibre or 9-millimetre fire starts at around forty thousand dollars.

For twice that, an entire vehicle, including its tires, can be made AR-15- and M16-proof.

Domestic demand for these services is nearly seven times what it was in 2020.

“We’re selling as many as we can build,” Mark Burton, the C.E.O., told me. On the company’s blog, he recently wrote a post with a section called “How to Survive a Civil War.”

(Advice: “Make sure that the gas tank is full.”)

In late September, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled “The Most Surprising New Gun Owners Are U.S. Liberals.”

It noted the recent creation of gun groups marketed to Democrats, including one in Los Angeles called L.A. Progressive Shooters.

Nearly three in ten liberals now own guns, according to a University of Chicago survey; researchers at Johns Hopkins have determined that more than half of Democratic gun buyers since 2020 are first-time owners.

One of them is Bradley Garrett, a forty-three-year-old academic and the author of “Bunker,” an account of Americans planning for the end times.

This sort of prepping seems to have increased in the run-up to the election, he said.

“You can imagine infighting breaking out in pockets of the United States, and progressives would be at a severe disadvantage,” he told me.

“They don’t have the weapons or the preparation.”

Garrett, who lives in Southern California, bought a shotgun this spring:

“I’m on a five-acre ranch pretty far out. But, if things devolved in L.A. very quickly, I can imagine people fleeing to the desert and looking for a refuge—and that’s not gonna be at my house.”

Others are taking less militaristic measures.

A recent attendee of a Homesteaders of America event where participants preserved food told me that some were preparing provisions in case of political violence.

“They kept talking about being ready for when ‘they come,’ ” she recalled. “Just ‘they.’ ”

In May, I spoke on the phone with a man named John Ramey, who was vague about his location.

“I’m at the homestead of someone who hired me to help him choose where and how to build a home to deal with the full range of threats,” he said.

The panhandle of Idaho and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are both good places to weather the worst of climate change, he explained, “but, depending on your politics, you’re very clearly going to choose one over the other for the threat of civil war.”

Ramey has done as much as anyone to help the act of prepping trade its tinfoil hat for an Eagle Scout badge.

He worked as a Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur, and then as an “innovations adviser” in the Obama Administration.

In 2018, he launched a Web site called the Prepared, a resource for people interested in disaster packing lists, gear reviews, and emergency plans, offered in a refreshingly measured tone.

Readers can learn how to use two-way radios, safely store water, and obtain body armor.

Also, where to buy the best wet wipes.

When Ramey sold the site, in 2022, it had eight million annual readers.

“Preparedness is now part of modern adulting,” he said.

Today, Ramey is a disaster consultant who, among other services, helps clients build fortified homesteads in rural areas.

His own politics seem to lie in a no man’s land: he’s a supporter of both expansive gun rights and expanding the number of Justices on the Supreme Court.

But, like Drew Miller, he doesn’t particularly care who hires him.

“There’s the guy quoting a bullshit Newsmaxy thing about how ‘eight hundred thousand illegals have a voter I.D.,’ ” he told me of his customers.

“Then, there’s a Silicon Valley leader, a blue-hearted liberal, who’ll point to what the Supreme Court is doing with Roe. They’ve both concluded the system is broken.”

Twice during our recent conversations, Ramey quoted a grim Thomas Jefferson line:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

He told me, “It’s proven in human history that you create an institution, you create rules, and they’ll eventually reach their endgame. Things become unrepairable. The only answer is to build a new house.”

He meant this both metaphorically and literally.

“A client worked for an elections bureau in a blue state during the last cycle and the MAGAs wanted to kill him,” he said.

“So he sold his house and left.”

(Such threats have since become commonplace. In Georgia, election officials have started keeping Narcan beside voting tabulators, after receiving a spate of fentanyl-laced letters. In Pennsylvania, a building that houses an elections office is now encircled by a barricade of protective boulders.)

In early August, I met Ramey in the mountains of central Colorado.

He is a tall, languid man in his late thirties who sometimes lapses into tech-bro speak, as when referring to his “founder” pals.

A few weeks earlier, a federal judge had dismissed Jack Smith’s classified-documents case against Trump, in a move that many considered partisan.

“Our society put a lot of effort into building systems for redress, like the justice system,” Ramey told me.

“But when they fail—as they are now—we go back to the only tool available: violence.”

He showed me around the remote mountain home of one of his family members, for whom he had created an elaborate prepping setup.

Cisterns held three thousand gallons of water;

solar panels and batteries stored three weeks of power;

dehydrated food was stacked high in a barn.

“The people talking about civil war are not pariahs anymore,” he said.

We sat down on a porch with a friend of Ramey’s, Chris Ellis, who’d just come from a cold swim in a nearby alpine lake.

In the course of a decade, Ellis conducted military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo and then earned a Ph.D. in political science from Cornell.

In 2023, he became the chief of future operations for the United States Northern Command, which is in charge of assessing disaster threats to the U.S.

“We look at everything from fentanyl to nuclear threats and wildfires,” he said.

“The only conversation I have not had is zombie apocalypse.”

(Ellis spoke to me as a private individual, not on behalf of the Department of Defense.)

Ellis and Ramey diverge on the likelihood of civil war.

“Are there concerning things happening? Yes,” Ellis said.

“But I don’t like ‘civil war’ being thrown around.”

Still, he acknowledged a real fraying of the social fabric.

Most people, Ellis and Ramey concede, can’t afford a worst-case homestead.

But they can make their current homes more resilient by tightening the screws on the front door, adding window bars, securing a backup power source, and getting to know their neighbors.

“The people around you are often your best protection,” Ellis said.

“Say hello.”

And, if all else fails, drive.

Ramey took me out to his Ford F-350.

“I’ll show you my bag in the back seat,” he said.

Bugout bags are an essential prepper accessory, subject to endless dissection and debate.

Dion Coleman, who goes by Marine X on his YouTube channel, recommends packing pepper gel in anticipation of political unrest, to “disengage the enemy and get away,” as he put it to me recently.

Coleman said that a Bic lighter offers a cheap combat hack:

“Hold it in your fist and you’re less likely to break fingers when you throw a punch.”

Bugout stashes are ultimately idiosyncratic.

“I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force,” Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has said.

The writer Walter Kirn recently told his hundred and seventy thousand followers on X that, along with Oreo cookies and a multi-tool, his car’s bugout kit has “an emergency library of essential world literature,” including “The Arabian Nights” and “old copies of Norton Anthologies.”

These, he explained, are to “restart civilization.”

Reached by phone, Kirn noted a number of other books in the trunk—“Moby-Dick,” Sherlock Holmes, and a compendium of Oxford philosophy—and joked that, using the contents of his car, he could “probably found Christ Church college again.”

He went on, “In a real breakdown, I might be able to trade them or teach. Prepping is really a meditation on what you value.”

Ramey pulled a first-aid kit from his bugout bag.

“If you get shot in the lung, I can save you,” he said.

Next, he took out a portable solar panel for charging devices.

He withdrew charging cables, laminated maps, a compass (“ ‘Death by G.P.S.’ is a term in the search-and-rescue community”), duct tape, a multi-tool, a battery bank, a ham radio, a USB drive containing vital personal documents, food that wouldn’t cause thirst or require cooking (“compressed bricks of carbs held together by coconut”), a butane stove, a lightweight sleeping bag, a set of clothes, a water filter, two water bottles (“Two is one, and one is none”), a waterproof deck of cards (“mental health”), a wad of cash, and—without comment—a 9-millimetre pistol.

Ramey asked how I was feeling.

I was, to use a phrase he likes, somewhere near “the bottom of the ladder in the pit of despair.”

He nodded.

Time to climb out.

Start by stockpiling two weeks of food, water, and power, he advised, calling this “turtle mode.”

He also suggested learning new skills.

Knowing how to use a gun is good, he said, but so is being able to make a fire and read a map.

Ramey repeated a prepper truism: “The more you know, the less you need.”

I called up some survival schools, which are now catering to a new clientele.

“It used to be mostly soldier-of-fortune and doomsday-prepper guys who took the courses,” Shane Hobel, who runs Mountain Scout, in East Fishkill, New York, told me recently.

“Now it’s women. Even Democrats. People who used to make fun of my school.”

He said that he’s noticed a “quiet desperation building into a slow hum: people concerned about political unrest, the dollar dropping.”

He teaches how to improvise rustic shelter, use tools and weapons, rely on camouflage, and administer first aid.

Dave Canterbury, the founder of the Pathfinder school, in Ohio, and the author of the popular Bushcraft book series, told me that his courses are gaining popularity, too, though most of his students aren’t specific about why they’ve come.

“They probably don’t want to end up on watch lists,” he said. “And, anyway, it’s nobody’s business.”

Anamaria Teodorescu, who immigrated to the U.S. from Romania twenty-two years ago and now lives in New Jersey, decided to pursue survival education last year because, she told me, “America is dying.”

She sees food shortages and election malfeasance on the horizon.

“I lived through it in Romania,” she said.

“Hungry people won’t ask for bread—they’ll kill for it.”

She’s taken ten of Hobel’s courses, bringing her six-year-old daughter along.

“She learned camouflage a couple of weeks ago,” Teodorescu said.

Hobel shared other stories.

The parents of a group of homeschoolers had signed up because, they said, the government can’t be trusted.

An elderly Jewish couple in Greenwich Village had learned how to repurpose sidewalk detritus (cardboard can be used for warmth; scraps of clothing can filter water or mark trails), but “they wanted more,” Hobel said.

He helped them plan an escape route from their home.

Among Hobel’s special offerings is a course on the “art of invisibility”—also helpful, he said, in times of unrest.

“Never walk down the street with your viewpoint,” he told me.

“Always walk with the viewpoint of the person who wants to attack you. When he turns around to look at you, you’ll already be behind the dumpster.” I tried this while walking my dog.

Miller at Fortitude Ranch’s compound in Texas. “Solo preppers will mostly get wiped out,” he said.

At Fieldcraft Survival, a training outfit in Provo, Utah, students study jujitsu and firearms.

The school recently débuted Program 62—a reference to the Homestead Act of 1862, which was designed to grant land to Americans who hadn’t fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War—in which online students create personal preparedness plans and learn about things like ballistic sunglasses, conflict code words, canning, and sealing chest wounds (cost: eight hundred and fifty dollars).

Greg Lapin, an instructor at Fieldcraft, told me that most clients “can’t do ten burpees in a row or run up two flights of stairs” and will be “dead within the first five minutes of a gunfight.”

He added, “What you should be doing now to prepare is get a gym membership.”

I already had one.

So, in September, I visited Sarcraft, a survival school closer to my home, in Atlanta.

Alex Bryant, a thirty-three-year-old Eagle Scout, started it in 2017.

For the first few years, his students mostly were white outdoor enthusiasts and military types, but lately he’s had an influx of newcomers “who’ve never hunted, fished, or started a fire,” he told me.

“They realize that we have the markers of a very tumultuous time.”

He will soon begin teaching a course related to civil unrest, in which students pack “get home” bags.

In the meantime, they continue to learn the essentials: shelter, fire, foraging.

A wealth-management adviser who lives in an Atlanta suburb told me that he took Sarcraft’s introductory navigation course this summer to prepare for “some militant right-wing nutjobs pulling off acts of violence around the election.”

He added, “Some people just buy guns. I wanted to know how to get home, too.”

Another Sarcraft navigation seminar recently took place in the hills of northern Georgia.

Eight of us sat on wooden benches in an open-air shelter, including Ray and Rachel, a father and daughter from Braselton, who had just stocked up on emergency food from 4patriots.com; a young woman named Valerie, from Sharpsburg, who works in finance at a Fortune 500 company and had recently taken up archery; and a middle-aged scientist from Atlanta who was considering buying a gun.

Our instructor was a stout, silver-haired veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division named Buck Freitag.

“Nobody is shooting at us yet,” Freitag deadpanned, when an acorn smacked the metal roof.

“If it’s gunfire, I’ll tell everyone to get down.”

The second assassination attempt on Trump in a little more than two months had taken place only a few days earlier.

A man named Ryan Routh had allegedly set up an SKS-style rifle in the bushes lining the Mar-a-Lago golf course.

The Secret Service spotted his weapon before he could fire.

“I tried my best,” a note that he’d reportedly left behind read.

“It is up to you now to finish the job.”

He offered a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to anyone who did so.

At the navigation course, a tattooed mechanic named Mark, sitting next to me with his notebook open, shook his head.

“Now they’re going to start talking about taking our guns again,” he told me.

“That could start a civil war.”

Miller shows some of the munitions stockpiled at one of his compounds.

Shaun, a bearded fifty-nine-year-old insurance-claims adjuster and a Sarcraft graduate, who was assisting Freitag, nodded.

“We’re heading for a societal upset,” he said.

“I look at what Scripture says about what’s coming, and I believe it.”

Moments later, Mark showed me his Glock, tucked in his belt.

“It’s already happened,” he said.

“Revolutionary War. Civil War. No society lasts. We’re on the edge again.”

When society collapses, the biggest threat, he figures, will be “the ex-Navy seal that’s come out of retirement.

The government is paying him.

All this guy knows is blood.

He’s Rambo.

And if he’s got a killing itinerary and they’re paying the bill, that��s all he cares about.”

Mark had seen something about this on YouTube.

At the moment, he felt reasonably prepared.

He can shoot, ride a motorcycle, and administer first aid.

He has a bugout bag in his truck.

But he wanted to know how to “read the squiggly lines on a map.”

Freitag passed out compasses and demonstrated how to plot a precise path.

We split into groups, each with a handful of navigation targets: metal posts with buckets on them, labelled with a letter indicated on our map.

I was partnered with Mark, who decided to pretend that we were fleeing government troops.

“Federales,” Mark exclaimed.

“We’re trying to get free from federales!”

We reached the first target, a bucket marked “Q”—for “Quebec,” Mark determined, a safe haven from the authorities coming for our guns.

After pausing for a moment, we headed to the next target and stumbled off course into someone’s yard.

A Confederate flag was visible on the porch.

“See, that wasn’t so long ago,” Mark said.

Most experts think that another full-scale American civil war is highly unlikely in the near term.

Ellis, the future-operations director, explained that it would take leadership, funding, and a singularly explosive disagreement to start such a conflict.

“The eighteen-sixties had slavery,” he said.

“You may despise your uncle at Thanksgiving. But do you disagree about something enough to get in a gray coat, he gets in a blue coat, and you meet on a field of battle to shoot at each other?”

And if so, he said, who are the opposing generals?

Could Erik Prince—the founder of Blackwater, who recently said,

“Maybe it’s worth going to war over defining what a gender is”—command a MAGA army? Would an Antifa member lead a coalition of the left? America has periodic eruptions of political unrest, Ellis argued, but none has come close to a civil war.

“It’s not Black Lives Matter protests, or January 6th, or Thomas Crooks,” he said.

Even the hypothetical secession of Texas might fall short of provoking civil war.

“President Harris would have a decision,” Ellis theorized.

“Am I going to commit federal forces to bring a rebellious state to heel through war? Or am I just going to send in the military and treat it more like a civil criminal action and arrest Governor Abbott and the legislature that voted for this to happen?”

Garrett, the author of “Bunker,” thinks that there is still too much fellow-feeling in America for a civil war—a conclusion he reached while witnessing surprising moments of coöperation and camaraderie between militaristic MAGA types and back-to-the-land hippies at bunker communities that he has visited in recent years.

Some recent research can be read optimistically, too: only three per cent of U.S. adults—around eight million people—are “very or completely willing to threaten, injure, or kill to advance a political aim,” according to the U.C. Davis study.

Sarah Kreps, a professor of government at Cornell, pointed me to another reason for hope.

“I’ve heard about the ‘cyber 9/11’ or the ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ for at least two decades,” she said, referring to the possibility of a large-scale hack that causes national paralysis.

“Nothing remotely of that magnitude has happened. So it’s this question of whether these were just fearmongers, or whether that prediction of an apocalyptic scenario was, in fact, a reason why it didn’t happen.”

The more we discuss threats, Kreps said, “the more we guard against them.”

In this way, the civil-war talk of late has, counterintuitively, given her reason for optimism.

“As these scenarios get gamed out, the political space has more capacity to anticipate and guard against them,” she told me.

Still, our deepening obsession with civil war points to something real.

“It’s not 1861,” Bounds, the sociology professor, said. “But there’s a hostility growing in this country.”

Members of Fortitude Ranch pay thousands of dollars to join, plus annual dues.

For those who remain concerned about civil war but can’t leave the couch, there are apps.

Earlier this year, Drew Miller, of Fortitude Ranch, released one called Collapse Survivor, whose full suite of features costs ten dollars a year.

In addition to helping users assemble survival supplies, and alerting them to impending disasters “before the government will,” the app allows users to play out a number of disaster scenarios, including “AI Uranium Enrichment Terrorist Nuclear Attacks,” “Grid Down, Cyber,” and “End of Earth Asteroid.”

(Pro tip: gather bugs.)

This summer, I spent an hour going through one of Miller’s civil-war scenarios.

It had several precipitating events, according to the troubling text that filled my smartphone’s screen:

killings at Democratic events and offices;

attacks on judges and courthouses;

a proposed AR-15 ban.

A Democratic congresswoman announced, “This is a civil war, and if we don’t start fighting fire with fire, we will lose.”

There was widespread looting and home invasions.

Police quit.

Prison inmates escaped.

A neglected nuclear reactor released tons of radiation.

Members of Greenpeace killed climate deniers, and police shot curfew breakers.

Millions of residents fled New York and other cities after they were suddenly seized by gangs.

Militias spread.

Food dwindled.

Biden died of a stroke after winning a close election—this was before he dropped out—and Kamala Harris was sworn in, prompting Trump to announce, “If she stays on as an unelected President you’re really going to see violence, this country truly ripped apart.”

I was prompted with questions as the crisis worsened.

If there was a ten-per-cent chance of being shot or severely injured at a voting precinct, would you vote?

A private militia is forming in your neighborhood—will you join?

Where is a safe location to bug out?

Some of the questions, I noticed, seemed to point to the wisdom of joining Fortitude Ranch.

For most of them, I had no answer.

At the end of the simulation, Texas seceded in what was dubbed Texit, and various counties in Oregon and Colorado did the same, creating “American Oregon” and “Real Colorado.”

The narration concluded, “The POTUS election collapse is over, but the U.S. breakup and civil war has just begun.”

Suddenly thirsty, I went to the sink.

A post-simulation summary appeared on my screen:

I was among the survivors.

I plugged the phone into an outlet and went for a long walk.

It was a late summer day in America.

I smiled at my neighbors and wondered what plans they’d made.

I considered the lay of the land more closely now, and noted what was edible, and what would be edible soon, in the parks and the public spaces I passed.

When I got home, I did something I’d been putting off:

I began to pack a bag.

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