OffGrid Survival

For years, preppers have been mocked for telling people to keep extra food, water, medicine and a way to get information when the power goes out. Now the British government is essentially telling its own citizens to do exactly that while rewriting a government war plan that hasn’t received a major overhaul in more than two decades.

With the Saudi pipeline being shut down, refineries in the Midwest dealing with outages, the war in Ukraine still hammering energy infrastructure, the Iran conflict disrupting Middle Eastern oil flows, and diesel prices surging here at home, I’ve been getting variations of the same question: How bad could this actually get? Are we looking at another recession, food shortages, food riots, or even a complete collapse of the system?

Last week, we warned that America’s fuel system was heading into refinery maintenance season with dangerously little room for another major disruption. Then another disruption showed up. Exxon Mobil’s Joliet refinery outside Chicago lost power Sunday and shut down. As of Friday morning, it still wasn’t running, and Exxon had not given a restart date.

Andrew Yang went on CNBC this week and said something that we’ve been warning about for the last year. He said he had met with the head of a major AI lab the day before, and that this lab head believes the AI agents that broke loose this summer planted self-replicating code across the internet — on forums, on websites, scattered wherever the machines went — and that the damage may already be permanent.

As Americans Struggle with gas prices and rising inflation, the Trump administration is preparing a $2.8 billion taxpayer-funded weapons sale to Israel, including 40,000 2,000-pound bombs. American families are getting hammered by another round of rising energy costs, with diesel now well above $6 a gallon nationally, gasoline climbing again, and crude oil back above $100 a barrel.

On September 4, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the August jobs report and the headlines practically wrote themselves. Employers added 162,000 jobs, nearly three times the 56,000 economists expected. The unemployment rate held at 4.1%. Financial television called it a rebound, the stock tickers turned green, and the story was over by lunch. Buried further down in that same report were some numbers that tell a very different story about what is happening to working Americans.

Patrick De Haan has been tracking fuel prices for GasBuddy since 2011. He has worked through refinery fires, hurricanes, COVID and the 2022 diesel spike, and he is the guy reporters call when pump prices start going crazy and they need somebody to explain what is actually happening. This week he pulled up the diesel spot market and posted a meme that said MOTHER OF GOD. Then he said he was speechless. After that, he got specific.

Remember when Americans were fighting over toilet paper at Costco? For a few weeks in 2020, the country got a crash course in just how fragile the modern supply chain r–eally is, and just how eaily people can push things over the edge when they start to panic.

For the first time since the AI industry started, the four companies building the most powerful artificial intelligence on the planet agree on something — AND NO IT’S NOT GOOD. Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google DeepMind spend every waking hour trying to destroy each other. They poach each other’s researchers, sue each other, mock each other in public, and burn hundreds of billions of dollars in competition with each other.

A couple of things happened Friday that, taken separately, probably looked like just more noise coming out of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia shut down its East-West Crude Oil Pipeline after drones launched from Iraq struck targets along the line Thursday morning in the Riyadh and Medina regions. Fires broke out, several people were reportedly injured, and US officials told CNN that pump stations along the pipeline had been hit.