Found Another Goldmine Online Resource ..

Van Schendel was a Belgian artist of Dutch origin, a painter of portraits and genre pictures, most notably nocturnes in the Romanticist style. He was also an inventor and father of fifteen children. Van Schendel was born in 1806 and lived until age 64.

The dark and dangerous times following a catastrophic collapse are often imagined as violence without direction or purpose, save momentary advantage and survival. For most it serves well as a working assumption when norms, violated more than observed, cease to be norms. But like anything else, chaos comes in grades and flavors. There is survival value in knowing what they've been in the past.

Roaming refugees. These are the locusts that swarm after a collapse, able to strip a community by weight of numbers. Typically hungry, desperate, leaderless and abandoned by leadership material, they're drifters and opportunists. Small communities are overrun and looted in the manner of a flash mob. Bug-in preppers are the bon bons of preference for the more capable among them. Well sited survival communities are unlikely to be in the path of roaming refugees.

Gangs. Existing gangs are specialists dependent on a functioning urban environment. Once the cities and suburbs are stripped, "street smarts" are useless and they become parasites without a host. Surviving famine and scarcity takes a different set of skills, and the learning curve is steep. Ethnocentric gangs are most likely to remain intact, but most likely to attack each other. Pointlessly aggressive and impatient by nature, they're a more dangerous subset of roaming refugees. The more ambitious gangs are marauders in the making. A survival community should overestimate their capabilities.

Marauders. In war, marauders are bands of military adventurers that strike at unexpected targets from an unexpected direction in unexpected ways. Unlike commandos deployed against high value targets, the marauder has a general mandate best described as "extreme cost effectiveness". Seasoned marauders are inventive, patient, and have an almost otherworldly ability to sniff out opportunity. The safer a survival community believes itself to be, the more vulnerable it is to marauders.

Partisans. At the outset these will be existing militia, typically modelled as light infantry except without recourse to heavy weapons support, self-armed and trained primarily as skirmishers. Their first task is likely to be defending their home community from roaming refugees and gangs. As the emergency devolves other partisans will arise, some as patriotic resistance outfits, some as mercenaries for war lords with territorial ambitions, some warranting response in kind and some qualifying as candidates for an alliance. Partisans see a survival community as a source of supplies and recruits, either theirs or their enemy's.

Government and quasi-government. Drastic downsizing will pressure fiefdoms with overlapping authority to battle for supremacy. Even within government no one will be sure who is king and who is not king. Subjugating and exploiting the productive territories that sustain them will be government's only real job. The classic morphing of government will accelerate—every bureaucracy wants to be a police force, every police force wants to be an army. Martial law is a given, there will be no civil liberties. A survival community careless enough to draw their attention will have some hard times ahead.

Yes, we are all in for a bad day .. and here we sit behind our computers with the US government logging our every keystoke .. for "evidence" later of treason no doubt. That is how they work. SMH

The above is from Ol' Remus ... guess I will be looking at his 500+ reports going back to 2004