SEPTEMBER National Preparedness Month

The Power of Preparedness

Throughout September, CDC and more than 3000 organizations—national, regional, and local governments, as well as private and public organizations—will support emergency preparedness efforts and encourage Americans to take action. For Preparedness Month 2016, the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response plans to release Public Health Matters blog posts, social media messages, a Twitter chat, and graphics. Each week, we will focus our messaging and products on the following unique areas:

Week 1: Prepare globally. Diseases know no borders, which is why we need to work together to stop epidemics quickly and close to the source. Partners around the world are combining efforts to prevent, detect, and quickly respond to public health emergencies of international concern.

Week 2: Prepare to respond. A cornerstone of response, Emergency Operations Centers are where highly trained experts monitor information, prepare for known (and unknown) public health events, and gather to exchange information and make decisions in an emergency. No matter the size of a country’s EOC or the equipment they have available, trained experts who know what to do are the key to responding effectively and saving lives.

Week 3: Prepare locally. In the U.S., state and local health departments play a critical role in keeping people safe from public health threats. As Zika virus spread through the Americas, state and local officials began preparing for Zika virus in the U.S. The response suddenly became local when the first cases of local transmission of Zika virus were reported in a northwest Miami neighborhood.

Week 4: Prepare together. Research shows that close-knit neighborhoods are more resilient during a disaster. We can all volunteer to help our communities prepare and respond before, during, and after an emergency. The first people who respond to an emergency don’t have to wear a uniform or have a vehicle with a siren, but they all share one quality—they want to help others who are in trouble.

Week 5: Prepare yourself. One way you can prepare for emergencies is by having a kit ready to keep your family safe and healthy. It is important to have different types of kits for a variety of emergency situations: a kit for your home if you have to shelter in place, a kit with supplies for your car in case you have to evacuate, and a first aid kit in case someone is injured. If you live in a state or area with the mosquito that spreads Zika virus, you may also want to put together a Zika Prevention Kit that can help prevent mosquito bites.

PrepareAthon

Also in September, all federal agencies will come together to promote the fall PrepareAthon. The PrepareAthon is a nationwide, community-based campaign for action to increase emergency preparedness and resilience through hazard-specific drills, group discussions, and national-level exercises conducted each fall and spring. The month will culminate in the National Day of Action on September 30.

This fall, PrepareAthon messages will focus on specific hazards: winter weather, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, and flooding. For more information, visit www.ready.gov/prepare.

Connect

Follow us on social media (@CDCemergency on Twitter and CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response on Facebook), bookmark our Public Health Matters blog, and sign up for GovDelivery email updates.

If you would like to partner with us for Preparedness Month, or would like more information, please contact us at phprcommunications@cdc.gov.

Tentsiles: The Beauty of the Floating Treehouse

“We put them up in London,” architect Alex Shirley-Smith claimed as he tightened the ropes around a sturdy tree. He spoke with a reporter about his latest invention, Tentsiles, which is basically a portable tree house that can be assembled in any environment, whether it be city or country.

Inspired by the natural structure of spider webs, Tentsiles is a brilliant invention that relies on the physical element of tension, or tensile design. The goal, as Smith says, is to use as few materials as possible, making for a simple design as well as an eco-friendly experience for campers.

The tent also has a slue of other benefits that normal ground tents don’t have, including the comfort of a hammock as opposed to backbreaking sleep one gets from sleeping in the dirt. Tentsiles also lessen the chance of suffering from any nasty bug bites or animal intrusions by keeping its residents floating comfortably and safely in the air.

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The triangularly shaped tents are so easy to set-up, they only take ten minutes, which is perfect for those looking to travel far and light.

“It’s soft on all sides and it’s warm,” one of the reporters said as he hopped inside, lounging with two other adults. “You get sort of that peacefulness,” he added. At one point, one of the individuals in the tent stated that the tent felt like a hammock, but without the unstoppable swaying.

“It took several prototypes to get to this shape,” Alex said at the end of the interview, the reporter stating that the invention recently brought on the idea of small villages that can be made up of sky tents, one stacked above the other. Like the invention of Tentsiles, this thought is idyllic and dreamy, one that fits as perfect as your body does with the tent’s design.

Watch This Video of Tentsile Tree Tents By Kirsten Dirksen

Is Your Car Ready to Bug Out?

When the time comes, do you plan to hunker down at home, or are you prepared to bug out? Staking out your home is a reasonable plan – it allows you to work your land, stockpile more supplies than you can fit in your car, and generally lends itself to a more complete prep. Unfortunately, the situation may require that you get out. That means you’re going to need a plan and, more importantly, a car.

You don’t need to have a high-end vehicle to bug out, but you do need to be confident that your car can at least give you a good start. That’s why it’s important to keep your car well maintained. Incorporate these strategies and you can be sure you’ll get the most miles out of your car when you need it most.

Is Your Car Ready to Bug Out?

Car Considerations

You’ve got a few options when choosing a car for your bug out vehicle, depending on what you already have on hand and how good you are with an engine. If you’re confident that you can keep an older engine in working order or you’re planning to dramatically alter your vehicle anyway – by installing a cool air intake system, for example – then your best bet is to have a low value vehicle as your primary means of bugging out.

By using an older vehicle and maintaining only basic liability coverage, you can keep low car insurance costs. If you’re driving your bug out vehicle semi-regularly, upgrade to comprehensive coverage so you’re more likely to get a payout if something happens to your car. That money can then help you get a new car if necessary. Using your vehicle infrequently for only low mileage travel can also lower your insurance premium.

Major Maintenance

Always keep an eye on critical car maintenance, making sure that your tires are properly inflated, regularly replacing your windshield wiper blades, and inspecting belts and hosing. Make a schedule and stick to it – you’ll want to be sure that you don’t have a cracked belt or leaking exhaust system when you try to take off.

It’s also worth keeping a few extras around if you have the room and the budget. Keep a spare battery, some headlight bulbs, and other similar supplies on hand and packed to take with you. Having a spare battery is especially valuable if you think you might want to power another tool with your engine.

What to Pack

Next to maintenance, packing your car is the most important aspect of bugging out. Of course, the foundation for your bug out supplies lies in your everyday carry (EDC). Your EDC is minimal – utility knife or multi-tool, flashlight, bandana – the things you keep on your person at all times. Now, add 72 hours or more of food and water, a first aid kit, and car maintenance supplies, and you have a good start.

From there, what you pack has a lot to do with your destination. If you live in a rural area and you’re trained to forage, you might pack less food than if you know you’re in a more barren area. Some community members have an established bug out location with food stocked in place, but limited clothing, so they might pack more seasonally appropriate items, like winter jackets. It all depends on your skills, your location, and your plan.

Don’t forget to pack a map. If the grid goes down, you won’t have Google maps. Even if you’ve practiced your bug out route, you may need to adjust your plan, hit the road a second time, or you may feel a bit disoriented under the pressure of bug out situation. Even if you don’t need the map, you’ve got a little extra fuel for your fire.

You know best what you and your family need to survive when it’s time to bug out, but it takes practice to hone these skills. Time how long it takes you to pack and try to improve the process. Pose different hypothetical situations and test whether you’re prepared for alternate scenarios.

Push your limits in your prep, because when disaster strikes, there are no limits.

Global central bankers, stuck at zero, unite in plea for help from governments

View photos

A picture illustration of crumpled kuna, Dollar and euro banknotes, taken in Zagreb January 18, 2011. REUTERS/Nikola Solic

By Howard Schneider

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. (Reuters) - Central bankers in charge of the vast bulk of the world's economy delved deep into the weeds of money markets and interest rates over a three-day conference here, and emerged with a common plea to their colleagues in the rest of government: please help.

Mired in a world of low growth, low inflation and low interest rates, officials from the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank said their efforts to bolster the economy through monetary policy may falter unless elected leaders stepped forward with bold measures. These would range from immigration reform in Japan to structural changes to boost productivity and growth in the U.S. and Europe.

Without that, they said, it would be hard to convince markets and households that things will get better, and encourage the shift in mood many economists feel are needed to improve economic performance worldwide. During a Saturday session at the symposium, such a slump in expectations about inflation and about other aspects of the economy was cited as a central problem complicating central banks' efforts to reach inflation targets and dimming prospects in Japan and Europe.

ECB executive board member Benoit Coeure said the bank was working hard to prevent public expectations about inflation from becoming entrenched "on either side" - neither too high nor too low. But the slow pace of economic reform among European governments, he said, was damaging the effort.

"What we have seen since 2007 is half-baked and half-hearted structural reforms. That does not help supporting inflation expectations. That has helped entertain disinflationary expectations,” Coeure said.

Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda said he is in regular talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe about opening Japan to more immigration and other politically sensitive changes needed to improve potential growth, currently estimated at only around one percent annually.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen devoted the final page of her keynote talk on possible monetary policy reforms to a list of fiscal and structural policies she feels would help the economy.

Fiscal policy was not on the formal agenda for the conference, but it was a steady part of the dialogue as policymakers thought through policies for a post-crisis world. One of the central worries is that households and businesses have become so cautious and set in their outlooks - expecting little growth and little inflation - that they do not respond in expected ways to the efforts central banks have made.

That has included flooding the financial system with cash, and voicing a steady commitment to their inflation targets in an effort to make people believe they will be met.

Kuroda acknowledged that household expectations have not moved, and said the BOJ was prepared to continue its battle to figure out how to shift them. In modern monetary theory, households and business expectations are felt to play a defining role in spending and investment decisions, and thus in shaping inflation and growth.

"Japanese inflation dynamics remain vulnerable," Kuroda said. "It could be that long-term inflation expectations are yet to be anchored in Japan" at the bank's 2 percent target.

The concern about expectations is a paradox. The Fed for example fought a difficult battle with inflation in the 1970s, hiking interest rates to recession-provoking levels and eventually winning a war of credibility over its ability to rein in price increases.

Some central bankers remain fearful of clipping that cord.

But they also are hunting for ways to jolt the economy out of its doldrums, and a fiscal push is a possible tool.

In a lunch address by Princeton University economist Christopher Sims, policymakers were told that it may take a massive program, large enough even to shock taxpayers into a different, inflationary view of the future.

"Fiscal expansion can replace ineffective monetary policy at the zero lower bound," Sims said. "It requires deficits aimed at, and conditioned on, generating inflation. The deficits must be seen as financed by future inflation, not future taxes or spending cuts."

It was not clear whether such ideas will catch on. But there was a broad sense here that the other side of government may need to up its game.

The Reality of 2 Weeks of Food Storage

The thought of food storage can be very overwhelming, especially if you are new to being self sufficient. You have just realized the need for food-storage and the dangers of what is happening in the world. So now what are you going to do about it? You may find some very good answers in the video below.

The best answer that I have is research and lots of it. You Tuber ObessivePrepperAz shares her thoughts on an easy and affordable way to start off making sure you have two weeks’ worth of food. She walks you through how to calculate food storage for your family and points out some very helpful hints.

However, ObsessivePrepperAZ is just touching on the bare minimum you will need in her video, but by adding things like rice or noodles to some of your storage you can turn one can of soup into a pot of stew. Her tips and secrets are very helpful for a beginner prepper.

She focuses on how many cans of Campbell Chunky Soup you would need for one meal a day. One of her viewers suggested a very effective way to stretch those cans to feed four people 2 or 3 meals per day. That is a LOT more than one can of soup for one person.

“Tip: Double that food storage with one bag of rice, one bag of dried potatoes, and two packs of cubed bullion. Take two cans of that chunky soup, add I cup rice OR potatoes, and a bullion, add at least 3 cups water; make it into a large pot of stew. Feeds four, 2-3 meals per day. Stew is salvation.”

We hope you enjoy her suggestions and please feel free to comment some of your tips and advice to help the newbies!! We all have to help each other become reliant on ourselves.

The Reality of 2 Weeks of Food Storage

Building an Emergency Medical Bag

Building your own emergency medical kit is a huge priority and can be some what over whelming. Having first aid supplies for different types of emergencies is important as well. You will want these on hand at home, in you’re vehicle or in a bug out situation.

From a different perspective, most of us have already started our own kits with out even realizing it, especially if you have children. A lot of times it is simply scattered all over the house and needs to be brought together in one bag being easily accessible when it is needed.

You Tuber PreparedMind101 has prepared an updated video of the medical to-go bag he carries. As he puts it, his “Holy crap what just happened bag”. The bag is really nice and seems well constructed. He has invested around $200 into it so far with a few items left to go. (Voodoo Tactical Men’s Universal Medic Bag) He shares the items he has put in there and asks for comments on things he might of missed. (For a list of the items shown in the video, look under the video.)

Whether you are buying a pre made kit or building your own that is tailored for your family, it’s going to cost you a pretty penny. All I have to say about that is “You get what you pay for”.

Building an Emergency Medical Bag

Family Medical Bag With Nurse Amy Alton

We all generally have some sort of first aid kit or emergency supplies, especially if you have children. When preparing your medical bag, you try to think of everything you can add to it that would be beneficial in some way.

Preparing a medical bag you want to take with you in a grid down situation can be tricky as well. Nurse Amy Alton and Dr. Joseph Alton have found one of the best bags I have seen in a long while. In the video below Nurse Amy walks you through hundreds of items and what they can be used for.

According to the description on their website the total weight of the bag and everything in it is 19 lbs. including the military-grade padded and comfortable backpack made by Voodoo Tactical. After watching the video you can make that even less buy removing outer packaging of certain items like boxed medicines/items.

Their Stomp Plus Trauma Survival Bag is a little pricey but I believe with all the items you get PLUS that awesome bag it is worth it. Especially if you would rather buy a product first and add what you need. Although I doubt you could need anything after getting this.

To top that off, according to their website you will also get “The Survival Medicine Handbook“.  This is a must have book for any prepper. Their book is written as if the grid is down. It is in laymen terms for those of us not familiar with medical definitions which make this book very much sought after.

Family Medical Bag With Nurse Amy Alton

Grid Down: Heart & Blood Pressure Care

It is important to realize and understand that if we ever have a grid down situation or some sort of natural disaster that prevented us from getting our medication, a lot of people will die. Diabetics, epileptics, anyone with heart disease. You name it. So what can you learn and put into play that will help you with the disability that you have?

Well we can help with that! Below we have another cheerful video by ThePatriotNurse.  She talks about what sorts of herbal medicine will help with your heart health and in possible emergencies. She gives a brief crash course on how the heart works and all the vessels. Her description simplifies the basic way the heart works.

Neglect of the body over time can manifest into high blood pressure and different kinds of arrhythmia. So what happens if we no longer have pills and medicine to help us out? She talks about different herbs you can incorporate into your daily routine easily and store some for grid down. Cayenne, Garlic, Hawthorn Berries, and Ginger plus tons more than can help you all through life.

Patriot Nurse shares with us her four “must have” books. (Listed at the bottom of the page.) Reference books can always be helpful and beneficial in assisting you in an emergency.

We hope you enjoy watching ThePatriotNurse. Please feel free to comment and share your knowledge with fellow preppers

Grid Down: Heart & Blood Pressure Care

The Reality of 2 Weeks of Food Storage

The thought of food storage can be very overwhelming, especially if you are new to being self sufficient. You have just realized the need for food-storage and the dangers of what is happening in the world. So now what are you going to do about it? You may find some very good answers in the video below.

The best answer that I have is research and lots of it. You Tuber ObessivePrepperAz shares her thoughts on an easy and affordable way to start off making sure you have two weeks’ worth of food. She walks you through how to calculate food storage for your family and points out some very helpful hints.

However, ObsessivePrepperAZ is just touching on the bare minimum you will need in her video, but by adding things like rice or noodles to some of your storage you can turn one can of soup into a pot of stew. Her tips and secrets are very helpful for a beginner prepper.

She focuses on how many cans of Campbell Chunky Soup you would need for one meal a day. One of her viewers suggested a very effective way to stretch those cans to feed four people 2 or 3 meals per day. That is a LOT more than one can of soup for one person.

“Tip: Double that food storage with one bag of rice, one bag of dried potatoes, and two packs of cubed bullion. Take two cans of that chunky soup, add I cup rice OR potatoes, and a bullion, add at least 3 cups water; make it into a large pot of stew. Feeds four, 2-3 meals per day. Stew is salvation.”

We hope you enjoy her suggestions and please feel free to comment some of your tips and advice to help the newbies!! We all have to help each other become reliant on ourselves.

The Reality of 2 Weeks of Food Storage

Family Medical Bag With Nurse Amy Alton

We all generally have some sort of first aid kit or emergency supplies, especially if you have children. When preparing your medical bag, you try to think of everything you can add to it that would be beneficial in some way.

Preparing a medical bag you want to take with you in a grid down situation can be tricky as well. Nurse Amy Alton and Dr. Joseph Alton have found one of the best bags I have seen in a long while. In the video below Nurse Amy walks you through hundreds of items and what they can be used for.

According to the description on their website the total weight of the bag and everything in it is 19 lbs. including the military-grade padded and comfortable backpack made by Voodoo Tactical. After watching the video you can make that even less buy removing outer packaging of certain items like boxed medicines/items.

Their Stomp Plus Trauma Survival Bag is a little pricey but I believe with all the items you get PLUS that awesome bag it is worth it. Especially if you would rather buy a product first and add what you need. Although I doubt you could need anything after getting this.

To top that off, according to their website you will also get “The Survival Medicine Handbook“.  This is a must have book for any prepper. Their book is written as if the grid is down. It is in laymen terms for those of us not familiar with medical definitions which make this book very much sought after.

Family Medical Bag With Nurse Amy Alton

Shock: Americans’ Wages Dropping Fast in 2016

by NEIL MUNRO9 Aug 20162,01

Federal data released Aug. 9 shows that Americans’ wages are dropping again, seven years after President Barack Obama declared the economy had recovered from the property-bubble — and three months before the 2016 election.

The dramatic drop was buried in an Aug. 9 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that officials have radically revised their prior claim that wages grew 4.2 percent in the first quarter, from January to March.

“Real hourly compensation decreased 0.4 percent after revision, rather than the previously-published increase of 4.2 percent,” the BLS admitted. Compensation also fell another 1.4 percent in the second quarter, from April to June, the BLS admitted in the same report. That’s 2 percent drop in wages since December.

Pay shrank 0.3 percent in 2013, rose a mere 1.1 percent in 2014, but rose a promising 2.7 percent in 2015, according to the BLS.

The wage drop is a potential p.r. problem for Obama, who has been touting the apparent rise in wages since officials reported that wages grew 2.7 percent during 2015.

In June, Obama cited the mistaken 2016 wage-growth claim while arguing the economy was finally helping ordinary Americans. “Let’s get wages rising faster,” Obama declared in a speech at Concord Community High School, Elkhart, Indiana.

I also know that I’ve spent every single day of my presidency focused on what I can do to grow the middle class and increase jobs, and boost wages … Here’s the good news: Wages are actually growing at a rate of about 3 percent so far this year. That’s the good news. Working Americans are finally getting a little bigger piece of the pie. But we’ve got to accelerate that.

That speech was advertised as his first speech of the 2016 campaign, and he continued his wage-boosting theme during his July 27 speech at the Democratic Convention;

If you’re really concerned about pocketbook issues and seeing the economy grow, and creating more opportunity for everybody, then the choice isn’t even close. If you want someone with a lifelong track record of fighting for higher wages, and better benefits, and a fairer tax code, and a bigger voice for workers … you should vote for Hillary Clinton.

But Obama’s own political priorities have helped force wages down in the job market, even as he works to deliver more benefits via government offices to lower-paid Americans.

One huge cause of declining wages is the federal government’s decision to import roughly 2 million migrants and guest-workers each year. They compete for work against the four million young native-born Americans who begin looking for work each year. That one-for-two flood of extra labor creates a huge surplus of U.S. workers, which drives down wages.

That wage-cutting labor surplus is hidden by federal unemployment numbers which suggests that only 1 out of 20 Americans are unemployed.  But the reality is that the many Americans and immigrants who do not have a full-time job are slyly discounted in the official reports.

“In addition to the [6.9 million recognized] unemployed, 28 percent (48.5 million) of working-age (16 to 65) natives were not in the labor force … This is much higher than the 25.3 percent rate (42.1 million) in the same quarter of 2007 and the 22.9 percent rate (35.7 million) in 2000,”  said a July study from Steve Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, “

Overall, “55.4 million working-age, native-born Americans [were] without jobs in the first quarter of 2016, compared to 41.1 million in the same quarter of 2000,” he wrote.

In contrast, when immigration is kept low, wages tend to rise during economic growth. For example, wages rose sharply in the low-immigration decades between 1925 and 1969. Blue-collar wages also climbed in 1998 and 1999 when the fast-growing economy ran out of workers. Also, in Arizona, wages and research into labor-saving technology rose once many illegals were sent home in the mid-2000s.

Currently, U.S. agriculture companies are complaining about rising wages because many of their illegal-immigrant workers are migrating away from the farms and towards the cities. “We’re probably experiencing the most critical labor shortage” since 2002, complained Tom Nassif, president and CEO of the Western Growers Association, a trade association of agricultural companies who want illegal-immigrant farm workers to get work permits, perhaps via an amnesty deal. “Wages are going up dramatically… [the labor shortage] encourage[s] people who are farmworkers to play musical chairs by going from farmer to farmer, seeking higher wages, and the farmers are competing with each other by raising those wages,” he complained. 

Growing wages are a huge headache for CEOs, partly because higher wages shrink profits and slash stock values on Wall Street. 

Obama tried and failed to get a wage-cutting amnesty deal in 2013 because he’s willing to let Americans’ workplace wages stall if he can increase the Democratic Party’s power to deliver benefits via government.

Obama made that political strategy clear in 2006, when he admitted  in his autobiography that large-scale migration hurts Americans wages. “This huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole… [but] it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans,” including blue-collar African-Americans, Obama wrote.

But those brown immigrants would help the Democratic Party, he wrote. “In my mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually intertwined, the cornerstone of a [Democratic] coalition that could help America live up to its [progressive] promise,” he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.”

Obama’s welcome for migrants is also rooted in his progressive views that Americans’ legal rights must be shared with all foreigners, regardless of their political beliefs, cultures or impact on the Americans’ wages.

In a November 2014 speech on immigration, for example, Obama told a Chicago audience that “there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks,’ even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.”

“Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently… that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration,” Obama said, shortly after he announced his Oval Office plan to award work-permits to roughly 4 million additional illegal immigrants.

Obama’s combination of progressive ideology and strategy is why he has allowed 400,000 unskilled Central American migrants into the country since 2010.

He’s also provided a quasi-amnesty to almost 800,000 illegal immigrants since 2012, tried to provide a quasi-amnesty to four million illegals in November 2014, is bringing in 65,000 unskilled Syrian migrants by October, and pushed for the 2013 immigration bill that would have added at least 33 million legal migrants to this nation of 310 million Americans by 2023. Obama has also expanded the annual inflow of temporary “guest workers” from 700,000 per year to roughly 800,000 per year.

In contrast, Donald Trump’s proposed immigration reform would reduce unemployment, drive up Americans’ wages and reducing housing costs, according to a recent Wall Street study that claimed to be critical of his policies.

101-Year-Old Man Tells Glenn Beck What He Remembers About the 1929 Stock Market Crash

James “Chippy” Qauresima, a 101-year-old New Yorker, was born in 1915, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was president. Today, very few remember what he experienced as a teenager when the stock market crashed in 1929, but what happened changed his life forever.

“The crash of 1929 formed my basis for the reasoning of how I spent the rest of my life,” Qauresima told Glenn Beck, who asked him to share his earliest recollections about the United States. “I say I was born in the heart of adversity.”

Newspapers are seen for sale at a newsstand September 16, 2008 in New York City. U.S. stocks were mixed following yesterday’s Dow Jones Industrial Average plunge of 4.4% or 504 points, being the worst single day loss since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Today the Federal Reserve is scheduled to announce the target interest rates for the federal funds. It’s not clear how the central bank will respond to recent turmoil in the world’s financial markets. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The 101-year-old man described the incredible “imprint it put on my life” and “the values that it set” when the market crashed. He told Beck that those who have never experienced or understood austerity “only know half of life.”

Qauresima was only 15 years old when the market crashed on Oct. 29, 1929, but he remembers that infamous “Black Tuesday” well. Earlier in the 1920s, the market expanded feverishly. But after reaching its peak in August 1929, production was on the decline and unemployment was on the rise.

Because of the rapid downturn, stocks lost their value. The devastating crash came as investors traded around 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange all in one day. Ultimately, billions of dollars were lost. Weathering the economic nightmare gave a young Qauresima a different way of seeing life, a perspective he feels today’s millennials just don’t — or even won’t — understand.

“Unfortunately today, I hate to say it, but young people think everything is OK — it isn’t,” he said. “Austerity is the basis of understanding that there’s other things in life, and you have to work for them.”

Famed Investor Jim Rogers: ‘Brexit Was Nothing Compared to What’s Coming’

As dire as things currently look around the world, noted investor and author Jim Rogers is warning that things are going to get a lot worse in the coming years.

American investor and financial commentator Jim Rogers speaks during the China Hi-Tech Forum 2011 at Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center on November 17, 2011 in Shenzhen, China. The six-day China Hi-Tech Forum 2011 opened on Wednesday. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

In a column posted on The Daily Reckoning, Rogers painted a scary picture of the current state of the European Union, recalling recent terror attacks, cop killings, Britain leaving the EU and the Deutsche Bank nearly collapsing. But that’s “nothing compared to what’s coming,” according to Rogers.

“But over the next couple of years, it’s going to get a whole lot worse,” he wrote. “As economies worsen, there will be more social unrest, more angry people, and crazier politicians. Somebody will try to come along on a white horse to save us all, but she usually makes it worse.”

The investing titan said there are “a lot of similarities between the 1920s and ‘30s” when communism and fascism surged around the world. Today, many of the same issues are emerging once again, he added.

People queue to buy basic food and household items outside a supermarket in the poor neighbourhood of Lidice, in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 31, 2016. (Photo: RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

More from Rogers’ column:

Brexit could be a triggering moment. This is another step in an ongoing deterioration of events. It’s also an important turning point because it now means the central banks are going to print even more money. That may prop the markets up in the short term.

We have a strange economy. Markets look like they’re fine. But underneath the surface, most stocks are not doing well. Most stocks around the world are down. Most stocks in the United States are down. In 2015, when the market averages were flat, twice as many stocks were down on the New York stock exchange as were up. And in the last nine months, earnings are down in the United States. A recession is starting, it is already in place. But if you look at the averages and the bond market, they still go up.

I’m very worried because what we’re facing now can get worse than anything most of us have seen in our lifetimes. The world may be overdue for a crisis of that magnitude. Throughout history, we’ve had periods of severe crisis. I don’t mean 1968 or 2008, for instance. I mean a serious crisis with widespread bankruptcies, massive unemployment, the emergence of dictators, and war.

Societies around the world are already falling apart, or nearly so. Look at all the recent terrorist attacks and mass shooting incidents in America and Europe. And look at what’s happening in Venezuela right now. People are literally starving. Even the most basic necessities of life are impossible to find in stores. Hundreds of thousands of people are trying to get into Colombia to buy food.

Government only makes the problems worse because they don’t know what they are doing, according to Rogers.

Rogers left his readers with some not-so-optimistic advice: “Learn history” and “be prepared.”

“If you’re prepared, you will be one of those who survives whatever happens,” he added. “Because what’s coming is going to be a mess.”