Hit & Run: The survivalist shopping list

<Note:> If you are looking for a list of survival items, well, the internet is full of lists.  The Big List, over at Survival-Center.com is a compilation of lists from various sources, such as FEMA and the SAS Survival Handbook.  </ Note:>

Here we have a somewhat witty (or is that snooty?) piece from the The Independent, which in turn led to to read the following piece on one of Russia’s first millionaires who gave up his life in business and finance to milk cows and chop wood…3 years ago.

As a result, I am reminded of reading of Barton Biggs and his book, Wealth, War and Wisdom , and wonder how many people of “substance” had seen our hard economic times coming and made preparations for it well in advance, as Biggs recommends.

Hit & Run: The survivalist shopping list

If your blithe assessment of the recession runs to a couple of years of belt-tightening and the sacrifice of your favoured pancetta in favour of bacon bits, Gene Lange has news for you. You’re screwed, and you’re probably going to get trampled to death in the street.

Not Gene, though. Gene’s going to be fine. Gene works at a hedge fund in New York and, made wary by the increasingly erratic behaviour of his colleagues as the credit crunch has worn on, he is battening down the hatches. He’s stacked his basement with canned food, bottled water, and a decent supply of washable nappies for his baby. He’s fixing his car up so it’ll run off-road – presumably, massed ranks of crazed bankrupts will have taken to the motorways – and he’s taking good care of his collection of guns.

Gene’s not saying a rabble of crazy stockbrokers is absolutely definitely going to come round to his house and try to bludgeon him to death with his own wind-up torch so they can get at his baked beans. He’s just saying, “I don’t think it necessarily makes a guy crazy to prepare for the potential worst-case scenario.” That’s why he plans to purchase an inflatable speedboat. Everyone needs an escape plan.

Well, that’s just crazy Americans, right? But over here, the crunch is making people a little bit tense, too. Consider Michelle Fitzsimmons, “a businesswoman from near Cardiff”, who has planted a hazelnut tree in her garden. “They are a low-maintenance, highly productive source of protein that is much cheaper than meat,” she explains, and thus great in a financial squeeze. Fitzsimmons is also considering the purchase of a pig.

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Source: Happiest peasant: a Russian tycoon: Mark Franchetti – Times Online

AFTER becoming one of post-communist Russia’s first millionaires at the age of 24, German Sterligov lost no time building a financial empire with offices in Wall Street and Mayfair. Now, at 39, he has tired of life in the fast lane.

He has given up the two private planes and the fleet of luxurious cars, the four-storey Moscow mansion and the Manhattan penthouse.

In their place he has acquired a horse and a tractor, and moved his wife and five children into a three-bedroomed wooden house with no electricity or gas on a patchwork of fields surrounded by forbidding forest. Sterligov the international whiz-kid has become a humble peasant.

Until recently he brokered lucrative deals and tended a fortune which, at its peak, stood at hundreds of millions of dollars. Last week he was looking after pigs and sheep.

The family bakes its own bread and instead of champagne, Sterligov and Lena, his wife of 17 years, drink milk from their own cows, and kvas, a brown alcoholic brew made with birch-tree juice.

In summer their small corner of countryside 100 miles south of Moscow is infested with mosquitoes and in winter, when temperatures can drop to
-45C, the house is heated by a wood-burning stove and lit with candles.

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Technorati Tags: Barton Biggs, German Sterligov

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