How to Survive the Apocalypse

How to Survive the Apocalypse
Prepper bibles like “100 Deadly Skills,” by Clint Emerson, a former Navy SEAL, are filled with improvised alternative weapons, like a collapsible umbrella lined with wrenches, which is “not illegal to possess,” a New York City Police Department spokesman said,
but “would be considered a weapon if you used it on someone.”
Sure, you could master jiu-jitsu.
Should law and order on the streets break down after, say, a massive hurricane or nuclear-reactor meltdown,
that condom slingshot might come in handy in New York, where possession of the most fundamental survivalist self-defense staple — the gun — is highly restricted by law.
To balance legality with lethality in a bug-out bag, he said, “you have to go simpler — hammers, hatchets, certain heavy tools.”
That roll of old silver quarters might come in handy, too.
Hard-core doomers need not drain their airplane-liquor-bottle stash to envision the potential: Imagine New York after, say, an electromagnetic pulse attack
that wipes out the power grid (like the kind North Korea recently threatened).
Liquor, too — particularly in easy-to-swap airline bottles — would likely prove a hot commodity, since it not only deadens the pain of surviving in a post-apocalyptic
wasteland, but, as a blogger named Survival Mom points out, also provides useful off-label functions as a disinfectant or an ingredient in herbal remedy tinctures.
“If we look at examples of systematic social breakdowns, like Argentina in 2001, or the war in the Balkans, goods
that people understood on an intrinsic level clearly carried the most value when trading — cans of food, gas, batteries, cheap Bic lighters,” he said.