 Now on the topic of disaster preparedness, our own Mike Hurst. I don't know how many people are coming, so I just made, I think, seven or eight copies, so if you could just kind of look through it and then pass it along to your neighbor. Doc emailed me last week just to gauge if I wanted to speak to you guys about general preparedness. It's a topic that we've been discussing since the inception of the Oath Keepers and what Stewart Rhodes has really been trying to push upon us that, you know, you can't be part of the community preservation without being prepared yourself. So there's a quote that Ben Franklin had that says, by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. So in essence, you got to get yourself started, figure out which is important to you, and then there's a couple basic topics that we have actually discussed multiple times. We've had some experts in the room go through individually some of these topics. I'm just going to kind of breeze over a lot. There's a lot of material that I've compiled into this outline. We could talk for hours about each individual subject, but this is just kind of to review what we've been discussing over the past year or so since I've been with those people. So we all know the big three is you can go three weeks without food, three days without water and three minutes without air. So if you start with the first one, right now the air is still clean enough to breathe. So we're kind of doing okay there. So the next most essential thing to survival would be water. So real question is how many of you have enough water in your house to sustain yourself in a natural disaster? We all talk about the economic collapse or government takeover. We're not happy with the way things are in the government today, but what about something that's a little bit more unexpected, a tornado that hit Bridget in a couple years ago or the tornado that hit Joplin? Are you really set up to be sustainable in the event that you have to sit and wait for someone to come get you out of a certain situation? So I think I haven't mentioned it here. We'll go through a little bit more what FEMA's recommendations are, but they're getting longer and longer. FEMA used to tell you to keep a day's worth of supplies, moved to three days, moved to a week. Now they're up to 90 days as an individual and they're giving SEMA, which is our state emergency management association, telling our state to be prepared for about a year. So there's a lot of changes that are happening within the general preparedness situation that we're all living and breathing every day. So from a water standpoint, as an individual, as a person, you need one gallon per day for general consumption and sanitation. So it's one gallon for yourself, for your wife, for your kids, so you have to figure out how many people are in your household and then start doing the math, how many gallons you need per day, per month, and per year. And the recommendation on every website or every book that I could find is a minimum of a year. So if you can figure out how to store water for a year, power to you, because that's a lot of damp water. What I've gone through and figured out is more from a purification standpoint. The means to get yourself water, the means to purify water, is a little bit more sustainable than trying to store hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. If you live by a close body of water or you have the ability to collect rainwater, you can purify the water, which gets a little bit more to the topics of the different methods, which is all in the outline too, but I'm passing around. But bleach is a method, fluorine is a method, iodine is a method. There's a number of different methods that are out there for purification of water. You just have to find what is the best situation for you and your individual situation that you're going to be in post-disaster. Everything is going to be post-disaster in terminology, because that's the easiest way. If you're preparing for a disaster, you're 90% of the way there for preparing for everything else that we've been discussing from the economy bottoms out, or if there's some type of martial law or unconstitutional orders given that we as the organization are trying to stand up against. One of the pretty large overlooked situations when you're preparing for a grid down scenario or post-disaster scenario is sanitation. It's one of the very much overlooked scenarios because you don't really think about it. We have running water today, water comes on the faucet and you're able to flush your waste and it goes off and you never see it. Well, if the plumbing is down or the electricity is down that's running those pump systems, what are you going to do with all the waste from yourself, from your family? How are you going to make sure that you have a clean environment? There's a good saying, you don't shit where you eat. Well, there's a lot of truth to that because of the coli and other bacteria you want to have make sure that you have a sanitary environment where you're consuming your food, which that's going to be the next topic. But two things that really want to make sure is before you consume anything, you keep your hands clean and you keep your face clean. Those are the two dirtiest areas that are going to be that you're going to be in contact with when you're you're out, you're going to be doing a lot of physical activity. You don't have electricity, so you're going to be moving around a lot. You don't have the same things that you've normally used to clean the house. So you want to make sure where your sanitation, your lavatory is, is far enough away from where you're consuming, you know, your breakfast lunch and dinner, wherever you're enjoying your purified water. You just want to make sure that the areas are far enough away from each other that the two don't cross contaminate each other. Moving into the food storage scenario, this is kind of, you know, the hardest, in my opinion, to figure out is, you know, collecting rainwater is one thing, growing a garden is one thing too, but how to, it's a pretty large garden to sustain a family of four for 12 months because then you have to figure out how to store the food that you're collecting from the garden because it's perishable items. So some of the questions that I am, where do you begin, it's financially hard to do. So I threw in some inexpensive ways that I've pretty much researched that could give you some type of satisfaction from calories and proteins and carbohydrates that at least could keep your body functioning. So there's two ways of looking at it. If you want to stay on the inexpensive side, go with rice, go with beans, go with pastas, you can go with something that's dry, you can store it depending on how you want to store it. There's different methods of storage in here. Again, you have to figure out what works best for you, your home. I have a basement, some people don't have a basement, so I have flexibility on storage. If you have a slab home or you live in a mobile home or you live in an apartment, you may not have the same type of storage facility. So you have to come up with what is best for the situation that you're in. But when rice and beans are two of the key items, even from an experienced prepper, if you will, to somebody who's just getting into it, there's a chemical reaction between rice and beans when the two are cooked together. It creates the essential nine amino acids. So when those two bodies are cooked together, it's a sustainable, fully, it's called a complete protein. It's a fully sustainable meal that will give you the necessary carbohydrates and proteins that you need to keep functioning. It'll help your brain function so you're not misjudging certain things. Now, again, I don't know about you, but I really don't want to be eating rice and beans three meals a day, seven days a week. So you're going to have to start holding in other fibrous content. You want some vegetable intake, you want some fruit intake to help give you that complete diet. Again, you're going to have to figure out what that solution is for yourself. If it's canned tomatoes, if it's dehydrated apricots, you're going to have to figure out what is the best situation that you're in. To store a lot of it, some of the research that I've done is for the dry products, the five-gallon buckets, you can get fruit-grade buckets or you can get, you know, the five-dollar buckets from Home Depot with Mylar bags also serves as the same properties that you're storing, or roughly about 25 pounds of a dry product. And those buckets, they can sit out of the way, stackable storage. You can't go wide or you go taller, so you're going to have to figure out the dimensions of where your storage facility is to store whatever food you feel. Again, the recommendation for food storage is the same as water recommended for one year. So you have your water set up for one year. Next thing that you're going to need to determine is how are you going to have food set up for one year to take care of yourself and your family. So I think I've put the math on here. So for a family of four, three meals a day for a 30-day month, you know, not July, not December, just an average month, that's 360 meals. So when you start putting that math together and you're talking over 4,000 meals over the course of a year for a family of four, so when you put it on an annual scale, it seems like a very large number. So I would start at the opposite end. What do you need to start for three days? What do you need to start for seven days? Start buying food that you're going to eat. If you don't like corn, why would you buy 20 cases of corn for when the disaster hits? Because then not only are you not going to eat it, you probably will eat it, then you're going to be really pissed that you're eating it. So you want to find something that you're going to eat that your family's going to enjoy and then again start. You want to avoid food fatigue, which is consuming the same meal over and over and over again. Your body's going to start rejecting it. Your body's going to tell your brain that you're not hungry because you're eating the same product over and over again. So you want to start mixing up your meals, figuring out what you think is going to be best for your family. I put in here advanced food storage. This is a little bit more of the expensive side of the world and I know we've had some presentations on where to get some of these dehydrated and freeze-dried products, certain catalogs, certain websites, but that's really, you know, that's probably the best long-term solution. It avoids the human error if you were to try and preserve something yourself or dehydrate or can't something yourself. Typically, the shelf lives when you're doing it yourself is anywhere from one year to five years if you're really good at it. If it's professionally done, which is, again, I called it advanced because it's really financially advanced because these products are expensive because of the shelf lives that they carry and, you know, they're taking these products and they're flash freezing them to preserve a lot of the nutrients, which is something that, you know, as an individual it's much harder to do than when it's factory produced. MREs are also good long-term stores. They're expensive as well. They are high protein, high carbohydrate, high calorie to keep your body functioning at a very accelerated rate. It's not something that I want to continue past maybe seven days or so before your body will start to figure out that it is too much to handle and it's going to do one of two things. It's going to stop your bowel movements or it's going to hyper accelerate them. So they're a very good short-term solution. If you need something, again, tornado comes through and you need a couple meals until you know that the red cross is coming and they're going to be able to take care of everybody else. You know, MREs are a great solution. Be clear. You'll be alert. You'll be sustained. Outside of that window, though, they're one of those things where it's really your personal preference and how you choose to to deal with it. Gardening, I also put in advance because it's not as easy as just planting a couple seeds and, you know, you have to garden for a year. This is my fourth year doing a garden. Still learning new things every year. Time to plant, what not to plant next to each other. The amount of water, the hydration presentation that we did a couple weeks ago gave me some ideas on gravity-fed systems that I haven't tried before. So we'll try it this year, see if it does, you know, produces a lot more fruits for me. But we'll see how it goes. But it's not a skill that you pick up overnight. And a lot of the blogs that I read are these survival gardens, a combative can, you know, one acre crisis gardens. If you get that can and toss it in your storage and you never, never attempt to try it, chances are the first season or two seasons you're going to fail because you don't know the time of the year that you need to plant the seeds, how to cultivate the seeds, how to start them, how to sprout them and then how to transfer them. There's a lot that goes into it versus just buying a can, setting it on your shelf and, you know, tornado comes through and, you know, let's say that we don't have any government assistance for a year. Chances are you're probably not going to get a very healthy crop if you're just busting those seeds out for the first time. So if you can buy an extra one, I think they're like 28 bucks for one of those cans, buy two, practice. All I can say is just it's all a trial and error. I look at it, I mean, we're an organization that embraces the Second Amendment. It's just like firearms. You wouldn't buy a gun, use it once and then throw it in your storage and never look at it again. You train with it, you learn how to operate it, you learn how to handle malfunctions, you learn how to clean it. I don't think it should be any different for any of the other skills that you're trying to learn, whether it's food preservation, it's water storage, energy. I know we had a meeting on energy figuring out what is best for your scenario. And then the next thing that I found on the post-disaster scenario would be medical supplies. It's very easy to run down to Walgreens and pick up some ibuprofen, pick up some pseudo-fed allergy medicine. You know why you're there? Grab a couple extra boxes. Typically the medicine will last several years. And you have to be careful. You have to do your research on it. Don't use me as an expert. I don't have a PhD, not a pharmacist, but I do understand a little bit about how the dosage works on medication to where even if it's past its expiration, you just need to figure out the correct dosage and the life cycle of that dosage to where you could double up doses on expired medication to get a similar dose because it just loses potency after time. And this is not the case for all medication, but for a lot of the over-the-counter medication, especially your painkillers, your allergy relief, one of the big killers in third-world countries is diarrhea. I highly recommend looking into any anti-diarrhea medication. It would be a matter of days if you get stuck with a case of diarrhea, which you will probably not make it. So they have inexpensive medication that's over-the-counter that lasts 24 to 36 months. This is something that you could keep in storage. If you need to rotate it every couple of years, you can do so. Luckily we live in a society that we're very fortunate that you can run down to the store and buy a lot of this medication today. But I did have a presentation that went along with this that showed what the store looks like today, what it looks like after Hurricane Katrina, after one of the snowstorms on the east coast, how empty the stores become in a matter of four to six hours. So if that happens, again, a tornado comes through, you can't make it to the store, or you do make it to the store and you're left with, you know, the four or five things up down the shelf. The EBT thing that just happened last year, how quick those shelves were cleared off the Walmart because we had free EBT cards running around. So soon as something like that happens, people's mindsets change. They actually go into what we're trying to do slowly. They go into mass preservation mode. It's a psychological thing that they have to go out and they have to buy everything that they can get their hands on in order to take care of themselves. We're trying to do it today, so we don't have to be one of the masses out there fighting over that last case of bottled water. And that's kind of a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about over the course of a year or so. So there's some other other items. I don't think that they're in the outline, but it's smaller things like communication. Both Cooper started up a ham club because we want to make sure that we can have the means to communicate with each other or with anybody else in the scenario. If there's no cell phone signal, we still have some type of communication between each other or other people who may be able to help us. Thread cross, they have ham frequencies that they can reach out to. So if you know where to locate these frequencies, everything is out on the internet today. It's a great resource if you're using it the correct way. You have to be careful because there are some interesting things out there. Some stuff you're going to have to take with a grain of salt because there's good and bad to the internet. People can post whatever they want. So you're going to have to find some reputable sources. A lot of the FEMA, we all look as the federal government is really not in the state that we want it, but they have programs out there right now. I don't look at why do we need to recreate the wheel. Just use what they're using. They're teaching their people about it so why can't we just take you back off and learn the same thing that they're doing today. So again, I put in there that they're telling our state emergency management association or agency rather that be prepared for a year before you get federal assistance. They're telling them to buy masses amounts of supplies to sustain their states. I don't think that we should be any different. We are the government. That's the beauty of America. It's we the people. It's not a couple of guys at the top commanding what's going on down here. So that information is out there. We should be all over it. If you're not already into doing something like this or getting started, I highly recommend today is a good day to start. Training I think is a big deal. So kind of as I discussed knowing your firearms, knowing how to garden, you know, take a first aid class. Take something that will benefit you knowledge. I mean they can they can take away our money. They can't take away what's in our heads. So let's go ahead and you know be a little bit more proactive instead of reactive. Let's get ourselves a little bit more knowledgeable about as much as we can. We don't have to be an expert at everything, but you know let's have a general understanding of what we're trying to accomplish as a group. Fuel source. That's a you know we can have as many number 10 cans in the world, but if you don't have fuel source, oil, water, or to cook it, you're gonna it's not gonna be a very pleasant meal. So I'm gonna figure out what that fuel source is, what you want to utilize to help cook your meals or heat your home in the winter, or whatever that whatever that purpose is that you need some of that energy. Figure out what it is. Test it out. You know if it's a generator, test it out three or four times a year. Make sure you have stabilized fuel for it. Solar is a huge hot market for it. I've looked into it. It's an extremely expensive market to get into, but it's renewable energy. So it's definitely on my agenda to continue to research and see what the best option is. And at the end of the day, you know you want to make sure you have the ability to protect what's yours. You know we work very hard for what we do and you know you've taken the time out to get your family taken care of, to get yourself taken care of, and you want to make sure that you have the ability to protect it. So on that that's what I have to say. Hope you guys enjoyed. You want to take a few questions? Yeah, love to take some questions.