James Wesley Rawles was born in Livermore, California in 1960. He received a BA degree from San Jose State University. He served in the U. S. Army as an intelligence officer from 1984 to 1993. He worked as an associate editor and regional editor with Defense Electronics magazine and was the managing editor of The International Countermeasures Handbook. He also worked as a technical writer through most of the 1990s with a variety of electronics and software companies. In 2005, he began full-time blogging and is the editor of SurvivalBlog.com. He has written several books including How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse,… Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse, Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse and Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse.