Of tomatoes and preppers! (Not peppers!)

Dear Readers:

There's one  thing about living in the big city ....., it never gets boring.

The cops in Toronto report that at about 8 p.m. last night officers received a call about a naked man who was seen in a residential backyard "soaping himself up" and washing off with a hose.

The garden intruder then took off with tomatoes from the backyard.

Toronto police say officers arrived at the home near Indian Grove and Dundas Street West, but the man had fled the scene.

A search was conducted in the neighbourhood, but police say the man could not be found.

No word on the tomatoes either.

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With colleges about to start classes after the summer break several chapters of 'College Republicans' are getting into heated debates about whether to support Donald Drumpf, or not!

Police report that several of these 'discussions' have ended up as mini riots!

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Many years ago I knew a girl from Coeur D' Alene Idaho who lived in what I thought was one of the most peaceful, middle-class communities I had ever seen.

Sure it was quiet and conservative, but it was also so normal looking that it seemed like the quintessential  small town America from the fifties.

My how things have changed up there!

Now all the conservatives from California who hate those "hippies, left wingers, non-Constitutionalists and anti-freedom people,” are moving up there and establishing themselves as 'survivalists!'

They are among the vanguard moving to an area of the Pacific Northwest known as the American Redoubt, a term coined in 2011 by survivalist author and blogger James Wesley, Rawles (the comma is deliberate) to describe a settlement of the God-fearing in a lightly populated territory that includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon.

 

 They live among like-minded conservative neighbors, host Monday night Bible study around their fire pit, hike in the mountains and fish from their boat. They melt lead to make their own bullets for sport shooting and hunting — or to defend themselves against marauders in a world-ending cataclysm.

 Those migrating to the Redoubt are some of the most motivated members of what is known as the prepper movement, which advocates readiness and self-reliance in man-made or natural disasters that could create instability for years. It’s scenario-planning that is gaining adherents and becoming mainstream in what Redoubt preppers described as an era of fear and uncertainty.

 

They are anxious about recent terrorist attacks from Paris to San Bernardino, Calif., to Orlando; pandemics such as Ebola in West Africa; potential nuclear attacks from increasingly provocative countries such as North Korea or Iran; and the growing political, economic and racial polarization in the United States that has deepened during the 2016 presidential election.

Nationally, dozens of online prepper suppliers report an increase in sales of items from water purifiers to hand-cranked radios to solar-powered washing machines. Harvest Right, a Utah company that invented a $3,000 portable freeze dryer to preserve food, has seen sales grow from about 80 a month two years ago to more than 900 a month now, said spokesman Stephanie Barlow.

Clyde Scott, owner of Rising S Bunkers, said pre-made, blast-proof underground steel bunkers are in big demand, including his most popular model, which sleeps six to eight people and sells for up to $150,000.

 

Some people worry about hurricanes, earthquakes or forest fires. Others fear a nuclear attack or solar flare that creates an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out the nation’s electric grid and all computers, sending the country into darkness and chaos — perhaps forever.

“The list is long; the concerns are many,” said Glenn Martin, who lives in north Idaho and runs Prepper Broadcasting Network, an online radio station. “Imagine a societal collapse and trying to buy a loaf of bread in Los Angeles or New York and stores are closed down.”

Martin’s programming emphasizes gardening, farming and how-to shows about sustainable living more than “doom and gloom,” he said, and his audience has grown from 50,000 listeners a month two years ago to about 250,000 a month now.

It is impossible to know exactly how many people have come over the past few years, but newcomers, real estate agents, local officials and others said it was in the thousands across all five states.

 

Here, they live in a pristine place of abundant water and fertile soil, far from urban crime, free from most natural disasters and populated predominantly by conservative, mostly Christian people with a live-and-let-live ethos and local governments with a light regulatory touch and friendly gun laws.

The hearty and adventurous, or those seeking an escape from modernity’s leading edge, have long made a new life for themselves in Idaho


The locals regard the newest transplants as benign if odd, several said in interviews.

“The mainstream folks kind of roll their eyes,” said state Sen. Shawn Keough, a 20-year veteran Republican legislator who represents north Idaho.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/wp/2016/08/27/2016/08/27/a-fortress-against-fear/