51 Post Apocalyptic Breathtaking Desktops

http://www.presidiacreative.com/51-breathtaking-post-apocalypse-wallpapers/

Best U.S. Places to Survive the Apocalypse

This one was my favorite: Original Post

Silohome

During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government built hundreds of Atlas-F missile silos in preparation for a nuclear attack that never came. Most of these silos were abandoned, but Bruce Francisco and Gregory Gibbons acquired one in New York’s Adirondack State Park and transformed it into an underground haven.

 

Silohome sits atop a 1,350-foot mountain overlooking the Saranac River Valley and is surrounded by acres of untouched wilderness, which means it’s ideal for many of your post-apocalyptic duties: farming, hunting and fishing. On the surface it features a hangar, living room with fireplace and a wraparound porch, but the best stuff is below ground. In what was once the 2,300-square-foot launch control center there are now three bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, a living area and a kitchen.

 

Don’t feel safe enough? Well, there’s always the 20,000-square-foot silo that’s connected to the underground living quarters via a tunnel complete with “Star Wars doors.” It’s the perfect place to stockpile canned goods and ammunition, or you can give it a home makeover so you and the family can kick back and enjoy the nuclear winter in comfort. Buy it now for just $2.3 million — cash only.

Related Link

• Top 10 ways to prepare for the total breakdown of society without looking like a (complete) lunatic

Wyoming Considering So-Called “Doomsday Bill”

Thanks Technoccult!

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Klint Finley

State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States.

House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government.

The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

Casper Tribune: Wyoming House advances doomsday bill

This may sound like wingnut survivalist paranoia, but this is pretty interesting. Much of the state quite vulnerable to system shocks. Services ranging from food shipping to postal mail processing depend on out of state resources. The state is extremely petroleum dependent, so gas shortages would hit people hard. I’ve been told that although Wyoming produces huge amounts of coal, but is highly dependent on out of state resources for electricity (but I’m not sure that’s true).

Have any other states proposed official bills for state resilience?

See also: Resilient communities with Jeremy O’Leary – the Technoccult Interview

Post-Crash Fascism: Planning for the Apocalypse

STEVEN MEISEL / VOGUE ITALIA

Climate change is happening faster than initially predicted, and its impacts are already upon us in the form of more extreme weather events, desertification, ocean acidification, melting glaciers and incrementally rising sea levels.

The scientists who construct the computer models that analyze climate data believe that even if we stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, CO2 levels are already so high that we are locked into a significant increase in global temperatures. Disruptive climate change is a certainty even if we make the economic shift away from fossil fuels.

Incipient climate change is already starting to express itself in the realm of politics.

Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. I call this collision of political, economic and environmental disasters the catastrophic convergence. By catastrophic convergence, I do not merely mean that several disasters happen simultaneously, one atop another. Rather, I argue that problems compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through another.

Societies, like people, deal with new challenges in ways that are conditioned by the traumas of their past. Thus, damaged societies, like damaged people, often respond to new crises in ways that are irrational, shortsighted, and self-destructive. In the case of climate change, the prior traumas that set the stage for bad adaptation, the destructive social response, are Cold War–era militarism and the economic pathologies of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last 40 years, both of these forces have distorted the state’s relationship to society – removing and undermining the state’s collectivist, regulatory and redistributive functions, while overdeveloping its repressive and military capacities. This, I argue, inhibits society’s ability to avoid violent dislocations as climate change kicks in.

planning for apocalypse

A slew of government reports have discussed the social and military problems posed by climate change. In 2008. Congress mandated that the upcoming 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review – the policy document laying out the guiding principles of US military strategy and doctrine – consider the national-security impacts of climate change. The first of these investigations to make news, a 2004 Pentagon-commissioned study called “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” was authored by Peter Schwartz, a CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.The report was made at the behest of octogenarian military theorist cum imperial soothsayer Andrew Marshall. Known to his followers as Yoda, after the wrinkled, dwarflike puppet of Star Wars fame, Marshall got his start at the RAND Corporation in 1949 as a specialist on nuclear Armageddon and its alleged survivability. He moved from RAND to the Pentagon during Richard Nixon’s presidency and served every president since. (It is interesting to note the presence of atomic-era Cold Warrior physicists among both the climate-change denialists and the military adaptationists. In his book How to Cool the Planet, Jeff Goodell remarks on the same set’s infatuation with the high-tech solutions promised by geoengineering, in particular Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s Lowell Wood, a tie-dye wearing disciple of Edward Teller.)

Schwartz and Randall’s report correctly treats global warming as a potentially nonlinear process. And they forecast a new Dark Ages:

Nations without the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves … As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance … Europe will be struggling internally, large numbers of refugees washing up on its shores and Asia in serious crisis over food and water. Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life. Once again, warfare would define human life.

In 2007, there came more reports on climate and security. One, from the Pentagon-connected think tank CNA Corporation, convened an advisory board of high-ranking former military officers to examine the issues – among them General Gordon Sullivan, former chief of staff, US Army; Admiral Donald Pilling, former vice chief of naval operations; Admiral Joseph Prueher, former commander in chief of the US Pacific Command; and General Anthony Zinni, retired US Marine Corps and former commander in chief of US Central Command. That report envisioned permanent counterinsurgency on a global scale. Here is one salient excerpt:

Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability … Unlike most conventional security threats that involve a single entity acting in specific ways at different points in time, climate change has the potential to result in multiple chronic conditions, occurring globally within the same time frame. Economic and environmental conditions in these already fragile areas will further erode as food production declines, diseases increase, clean water becomes increasingly scarce, and populations migrate in search of resources. Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflict, extremism, and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies. The US may be drawn more frequently into these situations to help to provide relief, rescue, and logistics, or to stabilize conditions before conflicts arise.

Another section notes:

When a government can no longer deliver services to its people, ensure domestic order, and protect the nation’s borders from invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and terrorism to fill the vacuum … the greatest concern will be movement of asylum seekers and refugees who due to ecological devastation become settlers.

In closing the report notes, “Abrupt climate changes could make future adaptation extremely difficult, even for the most developed countries.”

Another report from 2007, the most scientifically literate of the lot, titled The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy National Security Implications of Global Climate Change, was produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. Its prominent authors included Kurt Campbell, former deputy assistant secretary of defense; Leon Fuerth, former national security advisor to Vice President Al Gore; John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton; and James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Age of Consequences laid out three plausible scenarios for climate change, each pertaining to different global average-temperature changes. The authors relied on the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but noted, “Recent observations indicate that projections from climate models have been too conservative; the effects of climate change are unfolding faster and more dramatically than expected.” The report conceives of future problems not in terms of interstate resource wars but as state collapse caused by “disease, uncontrolled migration, and crop failure, that … overwhelm the traditional instruments of national security (the military in particular) and other elements of state power and authority.” Green ex-spook James Woolsey authored the report’s final section laying out the worst-case scenario. He writes:

In a world that sees two meter sea level rise, with continued flooding ahead, it will take extraordinary effort for the United States, or indeed any country, to look beyond its own salvation. All of the ways in which human beings have dealt with natural disasters in the past … could come together in one conflagration: rage at government’s inability to deal with the abrupt and unpredictable crises; religious fervor, perhaps even a dramatic rise in millennial end-of-days cults; hostility and violence toward migrants and minority groups, at a time of demographic change and increased global migration; and intra- and interstate conflict over resources, particularly food and fresh water. Altruism and generosity would likely be blunted.

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Top 100 Utopian and Dystopian Novels

Here's the top 15 from GoodReads, check the link for the other 85, all of which can be obtained from Earthlight Books, Last Word Books & Press, or Last Earth Distro. If we don't have 'em in stock, we can easily obtain a copy for you. Read on, dear prepper, closet collapse critic, or apocalyptic bibliophile!

1		The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1) by Suzanne Collins   4.54 avg rating — 304,133 ratings score: 168,295, and 1,711 people voted
2		1984 by George Orwell   4.00 avg rating — 477,377 ratings score: 139,868, and 1,416 people voted
3		The Giver (The Giver, #1) by Lois Lowry   4.11 avg rating — 228,773 ratings score: 115,022, and 1,174 people voted
4		Brave New World by Aldous Huxley   3.85 avg rating — 298,593 ratings score: 91,890, and 937 people voted
5		Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury   3.87 avg rating — 295,966 ratings score: 89,855, and 923 people voted
6		The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author)   3.95 avg rating — 113,838 ratings score: 79,004, and 805 people voted
7		Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2) by Suzanne Collins   4.39 avg rating — 218,230 ratings score: 78,883, and 812 people voted
8		Animal Farm by George Orwell   3.68 avg rating — 550,359 ratings score: 66,506, and 687 people voted
9		Lord of the Flies by William Golding   3.56 avg rating — 535,295 ratings score: 52,492, and 546 people voted
10		Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3) by Suzanne Collins   4.07 avg rating — 185,309 ratings score: 48,916, and 513 people voted
11		The Road by Cormac McCarthy   3.93 avg rating — 127,997 ratings score: 42,609, and 441 people voted
12		A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess   3.92 avg rating — 66,352 ratings score: 40,795, and 422 people voted
13		A Wrinkle in Time (Time, #1) by Madeleine L'Engle   4.03 avg rating — 138,655 ratings score: 38,566, and 398 people voted
14		The Uglies Trilogy (Uglies, #1-3) by Scott Westerfeld   4.07 avg rating — 5,060 ratings score: 38,488, and 399 people voted
15		Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) by Orson Scott Card   4.17 avg rating — 195,836 ratings score: 37,321, and 389 people voted