Survivalist fortress proposed in Idaho

Published: Wednesday, February 6, 2013, 12:01 a.m. ST. MARIES, Idaho -- A group of survivalists wants to build a giant walled fortress in the woods of the Idaho Panhandle, a medieval-style city where residents would be required to own weapons and stand ready to defend the compound if society collapses.

The proposal is called the Citadel and has created a buzz among folks in this remote logging town 70 miles southeast of Spokane. The project would more than double the population of Benewah County, home to 9,000 souls.

Locals have many questions, but organizers so far are pointing only to a website billing the Citadel as "A Community of Liberty."

"There is no leader," Christian Kerodin, a convicted felon who is a promoter of the project, wrote in a brief email to The Associated Press. "There is a significant group of equals involved ... each bringing their own professional skills and life experiences to the group.

"It is very much a `grass-roots' endeavor," Kerodin wrote, declining to provide any additional details.

Such communities are hardly new, especially in northern Idaho, which has drawn those looking to shun mainstream society because of its isolation, wide-open spaces and lack of racial diversity. For three decades, the Aryan Nations operated a compound about an hour north of here before the group went bankrupt and the land was sold.

Then came another community known as "Almost Heaven," founded in 1994 by Green Beret-turned-"patriot" movement leader Bo Gritz for those wanting a refuge from urban ills and Y2K concerns. That project crumbled when large numbers of buyers failed to move to the development, located 100 miles to the south.

The number of so-called patriot groups has grown since President Barack Obama was first elected, and the renewed debate over gun control is further deepening resentment of the federal government among such factions, said Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC tracks such groups.

Nevertheless, Potok noted, plans for these sorts of communities rarely come to fruition.

"The people behind the Citadel are like 12-year-old boys talking about the tree house, or the secret underground city, they're going to build some day," he said.

The website shows drawings of a stone fortress with room inside for up to 7,000 families. The compound would include houses, schools, a hotel and a firearms factory and museum.

The gun factory, the website said, would manufacture semi-automatic pistols and AR-15 rifles -- which would be illegal if Congress reinstates the 1994 ban on assault weapons.

Applicants must pay a $208 fee, and the website claims several hundred people already have applied to live in the Citadel.

No construction has begun. Kerodin filed papers with the Idaho Secretary of State in November for a company called Citadel Land Development. III Arms LLC, which is the name of the proposed firearms company, also has purchased 20 acres of land in Benewah County, the county auditor said.

The Citadel website said those 20 acres would serve as an administrative site from which to build the entire 2,000- to 3,000-acre compound.

Kerodin was convicted in 2004 of federal extortion charges and illegal possession of a firearm in a case in which he posed as a counterterrorism expert and attempted to coerce shopping mall owners in the Washington, D.C., area to hire him to improve security, according to court documents.

He served 30 months in federal prison.

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PHOTOS: Survivalist group teaches 9-year-old girl how to shoot AK-47

REUTERS

Brianna, 9, of the North Florida Survival Group hands an AK-47 rifle to Jim Foster, 57, the group's leader, before heading out to conduct enemy contact drills during a field training exercise in Old Town, Florida.

If a catastrophic event like a natural disaster, terrorist attack or nuclear holocaust threatens the survival of the United States, one group says they will be ready.

Shocking photos out today show children as young as nine learning how to operate AK-47s and teach them how "to survive in order to protect and defend our Constitution against all enemy threats."

PHOTOS: FLORIDA PREPPERS TEACH KIDS SURVIVAL SKILLS

The group says they will train almost anyone who is interested including Brianna, 9, who is pictured holding a variety of guns.

With more than 200 members, the group is growing larger everyday according to its leader Jim Foster, 57, a retired police officer currently living in Gainesville, Florida.

The group, which does not charge its members, only requires volunteers to bring their own gear.

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Survival of the fittest - Newcastle Herald

Human race … running a marathon takes commitment. Photo: Craig Golding

'A plain old runner'' is how Pete Budnik, a 31-year-old Sydney teacher, describes himself in sporting terms. ''I don't have much technical ability, but I'm competitive,'' he says.

It is this competitive side that has spurred him on to seek ever-greater trials. He has run half and full marathons, and in 2012 he entered Sydney's first Tough Mudder event. The 18-kilometre military-style obstacle course had teams navigating flames, high walls, freezing water and, naturally, lots of mud. He plans to enter again this year.

The director of Vision Personal Training in North Sydney, Kiril Chevel, has seen an increase in people taking on these challenges. ''There is definitely a noticeable [number] of 'average Joes' entering extreme sports which I think is due to companies becoming a little more health conscious about their employees and entering these types of events,'' he says.

Budnik was one of 25,000 Sydney Tough Mudder entrants, a record for the company that has run events in Britain and US since 2010. More than 100,000 entries are expected this year for the five events scheduled throughout Australia; the next one is in Sydney in April.

Sydney Marathon entries have also surged since the first race in 2001, which had 1550 runners. Until 2008, that number stayed at less than 2000; last year, 4000 people filled the run to capacity.

Budnik's motivation for entering is simple: ''I do it because I don't want to be sedentary.''

A team event like Tough Mudder also breaks up the monotony of training. ''This was something a bit more fun and social to do on the side; being part of a group that want to get out of bed early on a Saturday or Sunday and do this rather than going to the pub,'' he says.

Taking on an extreme sport is not an overnight decision, Chevel says. ''For someone who has never run before, to complete a marathon could take anywhere from three to six months to prepare,'' he says. ''You also need to take into account your weight, age and health background.''

He says preparing for any sport ''requires continuous progression on a weekly basis'' until the appropriate level of fitness is achieved. It takes commitment.

Budnik did regular sessions of cross-training to prepare for Tough Mudder. Although the Australian Tough Mudder ambassador, Lee Campbell, says anyone can sign up, some preparation is helpful. ''If you got stuck into a bit of basic training you'd be all right,'' Campbell says.

An ultra-marathon runner and the author of Running to Extremes, Lisa Tamati, has competed in extreme races for 16 years. She finds it boosts confidence. ''If you run 100 kilometres, you come out the other side thinking you're the bee's knees, and then you can deal with other stuff in life,'' she says.

Tamati took to long-distance races after breaking up with a daredevil boyfriend. ''I wasn't a very talented runner; I was more into doing adventurous things like climbing mountains and trekking,'' she says. ''But then I did an expedition across the Libyan desert in 1997. We went 350 kilometres without any outside help and only two litres of water a day - just me and three guys. One was my partner at the time.''

Although her relationship didn't make it through the expedition, Tamati wanted to tackle similar events, and two years later entered her first official ultra-marathon.

''I hadn't run a marathon or anything like that but I signed up and it was the most amazing adventure of my life,'' she says.

While she's ''hooked on the adrenalin'', she has seen the consequences when others have entered a race they weren't ready for. ''A lot of races I've been to were sold too easily,'' she says. ''In a recent race in Nepal it was the first time it had been run and we were quite shocked about how hard it was. A lot of people were under-prepared. There were three helicopter rescues and two people nearly died. Things can and do happen.''

Running an ultra-marathon is a long-term goal for Budnik, but he already has his next dare lined up.

''I hate swimming in open water, but I'm going to do the Bondi to Bronte ocean swim in December,'' he says. ''It's like being afraid of heights and needing to approach the edge of a cliff to look down.''

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Into the woods, alone for 4 days - Boston Globe

As the crow flies, Richard Cooper, an Arlington High School junior, was not all that far from his usual environs when he took the final exam in one of his courses during a long weekend early last month. Maybe 35 miles or so.

But alone in the forest and burrowed deep into the makeshift shelter he had built from sticks and leaves, with a foot of snow carpeting the bare woods around him and the temperature plunging to 5 degrees in the long winter night, he was certainly way outside his normal comfort zone.

Nothing brought home his situation more than the sounds to which he fell asleep on those three nights in Townsend State Forest, just below the New Hampshire border in north-central Massachusetts.

“Each night there were at least 20 coyotes screaming all night long, walking within 20 feet of where I was sleeping,” Cooper said. “Every morning I could see their tracks. It was like an army of coyotes.”

Samantha Cooper

Jacob Ballin, an Arlington High School student, crouches near the shelter he built in Townsend State Forest in north central Massachusetts as part of a wilderness survival experience in early January.

Many people may already have trouble remembering what they were doing on the days and nights of Jan. 5-8, but Cooper and 28 other Arlington High juniors and seniors may never forget. The students spent the time testing newly acquired outdoors skills — and their courage and fortitude — on a solo wilderness survival experience that was the culmination of a semester-long course at their school.

The students met twice a week starting in November, receiving training in basic winter survival skills (fire- and shelter-building, etc.), practicing what they learned in the town’s Menotomy Rocks Park.

 For their final exam, which was mandatory to pass the course, the students were taken to the forest in Townsend, given a 10-foot-square sheet of plastic, a cold-weather sleeping bag, six matches, and two bags of food, and ushered to a 2-acre area where they were required to stay — alone — for four days and three nights.

Each student also brought along string, a whistle, a trowel, a survival knife, a candle, a pen and journal, and some other items. They were not allowed any electronic devices, even wristwatches or flashlights — anything that could detract from the wilderness experience.

The point of all this is “to build personal character, integrity, self-esteem, challenge — all the more valuable but less measurable things they can get out of high school,” said Bob Tremblay, who taught the class, which he believes is the only such course offered by a Massachusetts public school.

“This is a rite-of-passage, wilderness-challenge experience,” Tremblay said. “We’re talking about kids that are sleeping alone in a wilderness environment, hearing coyotes howl around them, and they talk about a sense of peace. The take-away is, ‘I’m braver than I thought I was.’ ”

Mary Villano, Arlington High’s principal, said the school is proud of the course and other such offerings, like hiking and backpacking skills, that “give students things they can use for the rest of their lives.

“It’s very unusual to have something like this in a high school,” she said. “The students face a difficult challenge and they come back really proud. It’s transforming for them.”

Preparing for the weekend required a lot of time and effort from Tremblay and his assistants, who helped monitor the students and keep them safe without diluting the sense of solitude that is essential to the experience. The aides — many of them Arlington High graduates who took the course in the 40 years that the school has offered it — marked the boundaries of each student’s 2-acre space, set up two base camps for emergency aid, and patrolled the forest day and night.

“Even though the students have the perception that they are all alone in the wilderness,” Tremblay wrote in an e-mail, “the reality is that there are 30 students in the area surrounding them, all collecting wood and burning fires, in addition to our 20 staff members walking the area every half hour for the entire four days. The perception to the animals is that a huge city has moved into the forest.”

Once the students were left at their sites, they faced the hard work of survival — starting a fire, cooking meals, building a shelter — on their own.

The first task was usually to build a bivouac, or bivy, sack from the sheet of plastic — “kind of like a big Hot Pocket,’’ said one student, Robert Harrelson, referring to a brand of microwavable sandwiches. Because plastic tears easily in the cold, the students learned how to bunch off part of the sheet into “buttons” that can be tied with string and seal the bivy sack’s seam. The sack’s “roof’’ was then suspended from the larger “debris hut’’ that each student built from fallen branches, leaves, and snow. The resulting shelter is just spacious enough to hold a student and a sleeping bag.

A lot can go wrong out in the woods, as many students can attest. Of Patrick McDonald-Meteer’s six matches, five wouldn’t light; when Casey Flaherty  made his debris hut, snow fell through the roof and crushed his bivy sack; Hannah Kleppner lost her knife; Kenzie Schoenthaler stepped on his water jug, creating a fountain that extinguished his fire.

Another challenge was figuring out just how to spend roughly 72 hours without the usual company of people, cellphones, and Facebook.

The long, dark nights made one strategy popular: “Survival is a great course for AP students because it is the most sleep you will get all year,” observed Harrelson, a senior.

Added Schoenthaler, a junior: “I counted mine, and I got 35 hours of sleep in three nights.”

But there were a lot of positives to take away from the experience, students said.

“I am an extremely social person,’’ said senior Charlotte Stobbe. “I love talking to people. I love singing. So I thought, ‘I’ll talk to myself and I’ll go insane.’ But I didn’t. It was just so quiet and peaceful, and I felt if I talked or sang, it would be like ruining the beautiful nature. So I just soaked in the nature, and it was really calming.’’

Alex Boucher, a junior, also appreciated the solitude. “You have a lot of time to sit down and think about stuff. I had a lot of time to reflect on past events and myself. You really go through a self-realization about who you are as a person.’’

Tristan Jantz, also a junior, read Thoreau’s “Walden’’ while he was in the woods, and it resonated with him.

“He talks about how unnecessary these big lavish houses are, and it’s really true: You can just have a little shelter and be out there in the woods and be happy,” Jantz said.

All of which makes Tremblay think, yeah, they get it.

“The whole camping-in-the-wilderness is kind of an alle­gory,’’ said Tremblay, 50, a resident of Templeton. 

“It’s preparing them for leaving the nest and moving to a strange city and living on their own, being their own resource, learning to do without. I see it as preparation for life after high school. What they get out of it is a sense that ‘Hey, I can really do something.’ ”

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'University Of Heroes' Will Teach Urban Survival Skills To Young Entrepreneurs - Business Insider

Going out and starting a business has become a somewhat glamorous alternative to college and a traditional career path. Increasingly, people are trying to capitalize on that, feeding into the demand for support and training for a career path and set of skills that are notoriously hard to teach. 

One of the odder entries in the field comes from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper. Bloomberg Businessweek's Ari Levi takes a look at the "Draper University of Heroes," an eight week course on entrepreneurship set to launch in April. Draper put $20 million of his own money into the program. It will cost students $7,500.

Some of the program is fairly standard, including lectures from speakers like Tony Hsieh, Elon Musk, and Ron Johnson, and classes on pitching, finance, and viral marketing.

Levi points out some more unconventional parts of the program as well, which, according to the website, will be "centered around superhero themes." The course will feature urban and other survival training, which will include learning how to suture, riflery, and other weapons training. The website also lists SWAT training, hydroponics, neurolinguistics, lie detection, and martial arts as components of the program. 

Still, despite these unconventional components, it's hard to argue with Draper's success as an investor. He bet early on companies like Skype, Tesla, and Baidu. 

It's also an opportunity for students to get ideas off the ground. Each student creates a company, with advice and mentorship from experts. They end the program with a two minute pitch to real investors, and Draper expects to invest his own company's money in the startup of one of the students who attended a pilot program last year. 

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Training tests survival plans - Dothan Eagle

Preparing for a life-or-death situation can be a grim truth, but installation officials said it’s a necessary reality that people need to face.

Organizations and offices on Fort Rucker participated in Tactical Tuesday to go over and implement hands-on training in a scenario Tuesday as if an active shooter had entered their building, and Deena Jones, plans, analysis and integration office director, said the training was beneficial and necessary for her office.

“What I wanted us to do was talk about some of the defensive measures and actions that we would take within our office,” she said. “This gives us an opportunity to get into a real situation of scenarios to see what we would do.”

Jones said that their office has had an emergency action plan for active shooter scenarios that has been revised since it moved to Bldg. 5700, but it has yet to have an opportunity to play the plans out.

“We want to validate that the emergency action plan will hit the high-level defensive measures that we need,” she said. “What’s paramount is safety and survival. We don’t like to talk about survival, but that’s the environment we could potentially be in.”

The office came together in the morning and began by first reviewing the materials and guidelines provided by the Directorate of Plans, Training, Mobilization and Security.

Russ English, plans specialist for PAIO, facilitated the training and began by going over a broad view of the scenario if the incident happened elsewhere on the installation. They talked about how they would be notified, what they would do and reviewed evacuation routes for their side of the building.

In the event the shooter was in their own building, English reviewed with the staff the three actions of how to respond: evacuate, hide out or attack.

English said the course of action to take was situation dependent, and in the event that his office needed to evacuate, he wanted to make sure that each member of the staff knew exactly where the exits were, which routes to take and where their specific rendezvous point is.

Jones said it was important for all members of her staff to meet at the specific rendezvous point to make sure they account for everyone.

One specific point that English made was that they were advised not to pull the fire alarm in the evacuation process. Pulling the fire alarm could potentially put more people in harms way and cause mass confusion, he said.

Evacuating would be the course of action to take if it was known that the shooter was in the building. If the shooter was closer to their location in the building, the correct action response would be to hide.

During the exercise, staff members looked for potential hiding spots within their offices that they could find shelter and hopefully avoid detection, and even practiced barricading themselves in a room against an intruder. They went over different steps to take while hiding, like turning off cell phone ringers, locking doors and turning off lights.

As a final course of action, they went over the last-case scenario, which would involve the shooter entering their office and the staff having to attack the shooter as a last resort.

English said they should use any type of improvised weapon that they can from letter openers and screwdrivers to pencils and hot coffee. They discussed that they should only attack the shooter, however, if they are in imminent danger, and emphasized that in that moment it would truly be a life-or-death situation and that people should fight for their lives.

The office also reviewed and discussed what to expect when law enforcement arrives on the scene and stressed that everyone should comply with officers’ demands.

“The first responders aren’t there to assist the injured,” said English. “They are there to get the aggressor.”

Kristina Davis, lead management and program analyst at PAIO, said walking through the plans made it easier to reinforce the lessons learned.

“I think in emergency situations people can recite the steps, but you really have to take the actions to do the steps,” she said. “ Actually getting up and walking around and practicing just helps put that in your mind, and you’d be able to draw on that during a real emergency.”

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Retail survival will require both consumer and product centricity - Retail Customer Experience (blog)

The term "consumer-centric" has been bandied about in retail a lot recently. What does it really mean to be a consumer centric retailer? Obviously, it means to be focused on a consumer's point of view and their interests. Yet, retail has historically focused on merchandising and selling products when consumers come to the store or website.

To survive, retailers must profitably sell products. But today, omni-channel is the new retail normal. It’s not a question of either/or. To be successful long term retailers must essentially become schizophrenic and master the art and science of both consumer and product centricity.

Sometimes you are just "gob smacked" with a breakthrough idea

While traveling Europe this past week, I once again ran into the term "gob smacked." It is not a common expression in the West or in Asia. But, there is no better term to describe something that literally stops you in your tracks and makes you take notice. In writing this post I was reminded of a past blog where I used the term "gob smacked" in relation to getting people's attention through visualization.

When I ran across Don Peppers visualization of critical success factors to compete successfully, well, I was completely gob smacked by his elegant simplicity! So many retailers and vendors are fixated on just category management and SKU profitability. Yet consumer studies show that the world is quickly changing to the empowered consumer and the need to establish relationship with them. Peppers artfully argues that successful companies need to do both simultaneously.

Peppers Model explaining the duplicity of consumer + product centricity

Central to Peppers model is the juxtaposition of consumer and product dimensions:

"So first we should visualize a "marketing space" defined by the customer needs a business can satisfy (the vertical dimension) and by the number of customers it has (the horizontal dimension). Then we can map customer centricity and product centricity on the same diagram."

The value of this approach is that it inherently defines the core competencies of strategically competing in today's omni-channel world. Success is not choosing one over the other; it is being able to both manage and measure product sales and consumer relationships.

Don Peppers Model for explaining the synergy of consumer and product centricity

Product centricity … essentials and pitfalls

In my work with retailers and consumer product manufacturers, I experience many clinging exclusively to product centric marketing of the past. You can see it in the typical metrics used to measure the business and success criteria. Product centricity is reflected in scorecards focused on:

Unit sales volumes

Product mix sold

Customers reached and markets penetrated

Year over year growth of product sales revenue

Market share by category

There is nothing inherently wrong with a product centric focus. In optimizing their business, retailers need to analyze the profitability generated by each product (GMROII). They also need to analyze assortment mix and category management to optimize the total revenue and profit per sq. meter of space. Whether it be a bricks and mortar store or ecommerce, the retailer must be selling the right mix of products or the consumer simply has no reason to come. And, the most successful retailers are constantly engaged in product and assortment analytics to improve both the offering and the profit of selling through to consumers coming to make a purchase.

Consumer centricity … what share of a consumer's life are you participating in?

Unlike products and merchandising, consumers are experiential. They have memories about their experience in physical and virtual stores. Through social media they share their experiences with everyone they know!

Simply put, consumer centricity is about "share of wallet," not market share. Successful retailers today are focused on "life time value" – how many needs they can satisfy for each consumer, especially the most loyal ones Product centricity is about acquiring market share through the sum of product purchases. Success in consumer centricity is achieved by acquiring consumer relationships and optimizing them over time. It is not about "market basket" just today, but share of household value and use over time.

In the sage words of Don Peppers …

A product-centric competitor focuses on one product at a time and tries to sell that product to as many customers as possible.

A customer-centric competitor focuses on one customer at a time and tries to sell that customer as many products as possible.

It's not a matter of either/or, but how to do both well simultaneously

The results of Amazon and other successful e-tailers are not a fluke. They have done a masterful job of taking market share through optimizing their "long tail" assortment of millions of SKUs. They are the epitome of how to sell more things to consumers. Yet, at the same time, Amazon has created a superior experience focused on the consumer relationship. In addition to making it very easy to buy today, Amazon is a master in the art of following up and appealing to consumer needs and passions. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a core strategy and competency.

Many of the big box retailers were born in a bricks and mortar heritage of product centric selling. Some of the biggest retailers in financial trouble continue to execute category management strategies of rearranging products, assortments and fixtures almost like "deck chairs on the Titanic". The absolute telling metric is declining footfall traffic indicating that many consumers are not returning. If retailers only focus on selling products profitably, today they are missing opportunities to create and fulfill solutions and selling to the same customers tomorrow.

Consumer centric will be a success factor for omni-channel retailing

Inherently, bricks and mortar retailers have been steeped in a tradition of product centric retailing. For that matter, most consumer products companies have built their business on selling products to the masses. If market share or volume drops, the classic response has been to run more promotions and/or reduce price. In many categories this race to the bottom on price has climaxed with barely acceptable margins to break even.

In the new normal of omni-channel, survival will be highly dependent upon:

Making an acceptable profit on the products you sell today

Maximizing relationships to draw back consumers again and again to purchase

Don Peppers perhaps summarizes the duality required for success in his visual metaphors:

Tracking a customer relationship is like watching a movie in progress, while tracking your product sales involves taking snapshots of the business situation at different times.

The successful omni-channel retailers do both simultaneously extremely well!

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