Watching the inauguration and Trump’s speech…Kamala Harris looks like she has mentally checked out and gone to her happy place as she stoically sits there staring into the distance. Love it.
You had me at “America First”
15
Author Archives: Commander Zero
ConSci twenty years on
As I may have mentioned before, I’ve been doing some major cleaning and re-organization in my basement. Since I’ve been squirreling away stuff down there for the last thirt years, there’s gonna be a rather interesting collection of stuff down there. And some of it is goes back those full thirty years. Thing is, things change over thirty years… Technology, manufacturing, etc, all changes to some degree. So, what artifact from the the pre-Y2K days do we have today? Why, it’s the ConSci Power Pack:
Very simply and succinctly, this is a manufactured version of the classic battery-in-a-box
The ConSci power pack is a 12v battery (and associated electronics) encased in a .50-cal ammo can to keep everything protected and water tight. It featured a pair of female 12v ‘cigarette lighter’ sockets to allow use of common 12v items of the era. Here’s what it looks like:
This thing has been sitting in my basement, plugged in and charging, for over twenty years. So, I decided to see how well it would work. Remember this lamp from my how-long-will-it-run experiment? The answer to the question of how long the ConSci would run the lamp is two-and-a-half-days of continuous use. Thats about a week of use if you used it for eight hours per day. This is less than what results were when I performed this experiment with the battery jump pack I purchased at CostCo.
The battery in the ConSci is smaller and less capacious than the one in the battery jump pack, so I suppose it isnt a truly fair comparison. And thats fine. What is important is that after twenty years this thing will still perform admirably for most emergencies.
The ConSci was discontinued a long time ago. But the whole battery-in-a-box concept has been done to death on the internet. There are all sorts of websites that give you an Amazin shopping list of everything you need to build your own version. Or, as I’ve done, pick up one (or two) of those battery jump packs and leave them plugged in and ready to go. The newer ones have built in inverters and USB ports. I’d take one of those over the ConSci for its capacity and greater versatility.
Nice to see, though, that this thing still work and the battery hasnt cooked itself after being left on the charger for twenty years.
MH – 25 years later
There used to be a gun/outdoor store in this town that did a ”sidewalk sale’ every year. They would set up tents in the parking lot, put tons of merchandise out there, and have a sale. Problem was, when the store closed at night you couldnt just leave all that stuff out in the parking lot unprotected. Thats where I came in. I would sit out there all night in a lawn chair keeping an eye on the stuff in exchange for store credit. I then took that store credit and cleaned them out of some of their leftover Y2K Mountain House inventory. Mind you, this was all around 2000-2001.
So, I have a bunch of MH in #10 cans that I have been sitting on for about 25 years. In the time I’ve added to my MH stash quite considerably, so it’s not a hardship to pull out one of those cans, crack it open, and see how it fared.
I am not the first guy to do that. Friend Of The Blog(tm) [And friend of Gun Jesus] Joel, over at his blog, cracked open some old MH and had mixed-but-generally-good experiences.
I’ve no doubt that this stuff is going to be just fine but I have a chance here to do a little empirical data-gathering so why not? Lets go!
The sales tag on it indicates that it was put out for sale sometime in 1999, which makes sense since it was part of that stores attempt to cash in on the Y2K thing. The date stamping on the bottom of the can confirms that, yes, this stuff is a quarter century old.
Grabbing a can opener and removing the lid shows….ghostly white pasta. The pasta, being larger than the other components of this meal, sit on the top of the can and the smaller components have migrated to the bottom.
So, lets dump the whole can into a bowl and stir it up.
The contents of the can appeared just fine and smelled unremarkable. The powdered cheese and tomatoe mix had caked a bit at the bottom of the can but it broke up easily.
The instructions call for 3/4 cup of boiling water to one cup of food, and then letting it sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Okay, lets do that.
The final result, after five minutes, was this. I really should have let it sit for ten minutes but I figured I’d follow the instructions at their minimum.
The big question: how was it? It was fine. It wasn’t as spicy as the modern spaghett-with-meat-sauce that MH has out these days. It had a very faint ‘tinny’ aftertaste but I think thats actually the normal flavor. Was it edible? Yeah, as best I can tell. I mean, I guess I’ll have to report back in 12 hours. The taste was about what I expected… pretty much on par with your average Chef Boyardee product. After a long day of hanging looters, manning the roadblocks, and digging out of the rubble, this would be a fine meal.
So, yeah, it seemed to hold up just fine. The can had sat on a shelf in my basement since Y2K. The temperature down there was fairly consistent…never getting below freezing in the winter, and never getting over 70 in the summer. It was, pretty much, kept in the classic “cool dark place”.
The tag on the can indicates that it was about $32 for this can back in ’99. I’m an MH dealer, so I can see that todays dealer price for this same product is currently $29.50 per can. Amazon shows it for about $53, which is pretty close the 100% markup on MSRP for Mountain House cans. If you want to amortize it, it comes out to about $1.28 per year to have it sit there all this time.
What was i expecting? Actually, pretty much this. I’ve read reports from people opening even older cans of MH and finding it just fine. It really does appear that the 30-year shelf life on these products is pretty much spot on.
I’ve added more recent production MH into my supplies over the last few years so I have no probem ‘wasting’ this, one of my oldest cans of food. Its quite worth it to me to confirm what I’ve believed all along about the longevity of the MH products.
So, there you go, guys. Buy the cans and you can be pretty certain of at least 25 years of life…although I have no doubt that it’d be just fine for at least another five or ten years on top of that.
Off the wagon
Dang it…almost made it two full weeks.
The year is 3.84~% done and…well….It had been __0__ days since I bought a gun.
Quitting purchasing guns isn’t hard…I’ve done it a dozen times.
Bag O’ Tricks(tm) – Wordage on cordage
I don’t think there’s anyone who could argue that paracord isn’t a handy item to have. People use it to replace their shoelaces, weave it into bracelets and belts, or just keep big hanks of it in their gear, in order to always have some handy.
True paracaord is made of multiple strands of smaller cordage, usually seven strands, and those strands are usuall made of three smaller strands. (Don’t quote me on those numbers.) The cheap Chinese knock off cordage is just a nylon sleeve with some sort of poly fiber core. Avoid that crap. Spend the money, get the good stuff. Take a deep breath, tense up your core, and pay the money for a giant spool of the stuff. There’s no point in doing things halfway and buying, say, 100′ of the stuff and thinking “that’ll do it.” There’s just so much to do with paracord.
For me, the reason I carry it in the Bag O’ Tricks is to tie doors open, tie doors shut, hoist things up to places, secure things closed, hold things open, create lanyards for gear, etc, etc. Dude, there are hundreds of reasons to have a generous amount of this stuff in your gear. But the problem is, how the heck do you store it neatly? I mean, you want it to be stored in such a manner that it doesn’t turn into a rats nest that leaves you standing there with a Gordian knot of paracord.
Originally, I simply rolled all my paracord into ball, like yarn, and then wrapped it in a couple cut-inner-tube-rubber-bands to keep it from unspooling itself. But, there were a couple problems… Most of the time it worked out just fine, but more than a few times the rough-n-tumble of tossing my bag around would sometimes overcome my efforts and things would get all tangle-y. The other problem was that for the amount of paracord I wanted to keep in my bag (the more, the better) the ball of cord was fairly substantial and not a very efficient use of space in my bag.
Originally, I figured the simple solution was to simply wind the cord around something to keep it one place. I tried several different ways of dong it but everything seemed to fall short. First, I chucked a length of dowel into a power drill and wound a bunch of cord on that. It worked, kinda, but still unwound itself at times. Then I tried something with a flatter profile… I cut a butterfly-shaped wedge of thick cardboard and wound it around that. That worked pretty well but eventually with all the banging around the cardboard got bent and lost its rigidity (hey, it happens to us all, right?)… back to square one.
Surely I can’t be the only person with this desire to have an organized way of carrying around a buncha paracord, right? What does the free market come up with? Handiest I found was this – a simple piece of plastic with a built in razor cutter and a pocket to hold the cigarette lighter used for melting the ends of the cord. To keep things even more organized, I keep it in a snug ziploc bag…this way if it does start to unravel (which, so far, it hasn’t) it all stays in one place.
One other item I found interesting was this geegaw. Its a belt-mountable dispenser that lets you pull off a length of cord and cut it – all one handed. Its 50′ worth of cord, which is useful, though I prefer to have a lot more than just 50′ worth. Where it shines is that this is about the size of a pair of tape measures side-by-side, keeps it self free from snagging and tangles, is refillable, and is just generally pretty well thought out. If you don’t mind it being only 50′ this is a pretty nice one-stop-shopping solution.
I really can’t overemphasize the utility of paracord. It really is one of those products that is ‘only limited by your imagination’.. But my experience has been that there are a lot of times, even without the world coming to an end, where having this stuff is amazingly useful. I really think you’d be foolish not to make this stuff a ‘must have’ in your emergency gear or everyday carry bag.
As an aside, it is also worth mentioning that this type of paracord is also available in a variety of colors….ODG for those military and subtle needs, and blaze orange for the ‘needs to be visible’ applications. And pretty much every color in between.
BUT….make sure you’re getting the multiple-strand stuff. Not the cheapo Made In China ‘mil-type’ crap. Lowering your gear from the rooftop of a flooded WalMart into a waiting rowboat is no time to discover that saving $15 by buying the ‘almost as good’ product was a bad idea. Don’t cheap out on gear that might turn out to be very mission-critical someday.
And while we’re on the subject, for Crom’s sake, learn to tie some knots. Without getting into boffin country, there are an amazing amount of knots out there that have qualities that make them very much worth knowing. Grab five feet of paracord, go jump on YouTube, and learn some useful knots. Seriously.
The year is 1.9% over and I still haven’t bought any guns.
I have gone __7__ days without buying a gun this year.
Steyr calling
Well, the year is approximately 0.8219% over and I haven’t bought a gun yet, so that’s progress.
However…..
My final gun of 2024 showed up today. The conversation at work went like this:
Me: Ok, I’m outta here for lunch. I need to go hunt down FedEx.
Boss: Picking up a gun?
Me: Yup. Want me to bring it by and show it off to you?
Boss: Absolutely!
And that how this monster wound up sitting on the table in the conference room.
It’s a Steyr HS50M1. A five-shot .50 BMG bolt action.
I suppose you’re asking “Hey Zed, don’t you already have a .50?” Yes I do. The Barrett is a long-recoil action, much like a Browning A5 shotgun or Rem Model 8/81 rifle…the whole barrel recoils back and forth with each shot. This is not a recipe for accuracy. But, for what the Barrett was designed for, anti-materiel, it’s just fine. You don’t need a huge degree of accuracy to hit a parked plane, a fuel bladder, a microwave dish, or pipeline manifold…the sort of targets anti-materiel guns are designed for. But if you do want precision in a .50, you’re probably going to have to lean towards a bolt action. My first choice was a Barrett M95 since I already had the 82A1, but finding one was a stretch. Plenty of M99’s out there for about $3500-4000, but I wanted a repeater.
I almost bought the first version of the HS50 when it was still a single-shot gun. Was about $3000 at the time and I just couldn’t swing the deal. Different story nowadays.
This is yet another five-foot gun thats gonna be expensive to top off with glass. But, if I can keep myself from buying any more guns for a while, maybe I can afford the glass something like this deserves…thats gonna be a research project all on its own.
And…I still have to buy the reloading gear.
Another smart question would be why get a .50 ‘long range’ rifle when the .338 Lapua will have similar range and be logistically easier to feed? Well, three reasons. The first is that I just like the idea of having something that .gov doesn’t like people having. Or, in other words, “Because I Can!”. Second, it’s just dang cool. And third, the .50 has something that the .338 does not – comparatively better availability of AP, API, APIT, Tracer, and Raufoss ammo. And while I will happily go to my grave without ever needing AP, API, APIT, Tracer, and Raufoss ammo, they are all a hoot to shoot at the range at steel. And you never know what the future will bring. When Skynet starts cranking out T-800’s, a little API could be handy.
I have gone __3__ days without buying a gun this year.
The closing of the year
Ah 2024….we hardly knew ye.
Well, 2024 in revue..lets hit it.
World didn’t come to an end. Didn’t have to use my AK. Or Glock. Thats a victory.
Election went better than I had hoped, but its just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. Still have a job and even snagged a little raise. The people I care about are doing well. Still have a house. Did well in the market this year, especially in November, so I’m positioned to buy property far better than I was positioned at the beginning of the year…just gotta keep my eyes open.
About the only thing I can really complain about is that I didn’t find the property I want yet. Other than that, I really have nothing to complain about.
Forecast for ’25: Ukraine winds up having to come to the table as war fatigue sets in. Inflation is above 2% but nothing like what it was under Biden. Bidenistas become the Japanese hold outs of the political world, staying behind in government to crap in Trumps punch bowl every chance they get. At least one more assassination attempt is made/thwarted. Gas prices drop to lowest prices in four years. Markets are shaky, but ultimately trend upward. Wall does not get built. China continues to be the biggest threat to…everything. Alec Baldwin does not move to France. Cubs don’t win Series.
I want to think 2025 will be a better time under a better administration, but with the level of political balkanization out there…well, even the most well-intentioned executive will have trouble getting meaningful things done. Years that are divisible by five have always been rough ones for me so I’m going into this new year with my eyes open.
But, 2024 leaves, 2025 arrives, and I’m still here. Calling that a win. Good luck.
Article – Trouble in ‘prepper’ paradise: Bunker residents raise financial, safety concerns
I have posted before about these ‘tactical timeshares’…the notion that you write a check and ‘reserve your room’ at some grandly appointed ‘safe location’. Perhaps they can be made to work, but I think it’s just a case of “if he didnt want them fleeced, he wouldn’t have made them sheep.”
I’m too tired to rewrite my own words, so I’m just gonna crib them right from the post:
Here’s something to think about – if you’re going to be a member of a ‘survival group’ or organization, membership should be based on something other than money – race, religion, political leaning, ethnicity, familial relation, shared history, etc, etc. If the only membership requirement to get in is to write a check, then in my opinion you are making a mistake.
Whether you know it or not, you’re probably already part of a very informal survival group. You, your spouse, your neighbor who you go shooting with, the guy at work you share books about prepping with, the brother in law who splits a beef with you once a year….shutdown the power grid, roll those people together, and you’ve pretty much got your own ad-hoc ‘survival group’ that would probably be a lot more cohesive than a half dozen families whose only common denominator was the ability to write a check.
Should you have a fortified bunker somewhere? Sure, why not? Should it be in a compound with a hundred other bunkers, each one housing people who are total strangers to you? I don’t think so.
When the situation gets downright horrific, humans turn tribal. And tribe is founded on certain common traits…race, religion, family, etc…. that tribe will be stronger and more cohesive than one that is just ten strangers you met in an elevator.
Im sure that the people who signed up for Vivos’ tactical timeshare thought they were doing something smart. Unless I am missing something , though, I think that they would have been far better off spending that money on either hardening and fortifying their present location, or getting together with other trusted people (family, etc.) and buying a piece of dirt somewhere and building their own retreat environment.
Vivos pops up from time to time on my radar with articles about their business and the people who utilize it. I have said from the beginning that these kinds of places (and there are several others out there) just seem like projects that are doomed to collapse under their own mismanagement, infighting, lack of cohesion, and unworkability.
I’ll drop the money, buy a chink of dirt, build my retreat, and populate it with my own tribe, if they want to join me, and I think it would be more successful, long term, than these snake-oily-sounding project. How did Ignatius Piazza not get into this business?
h/t the thoughtful reader who sent me an email pointing this article out to me.
Last one for 2024
I thought I was done buying guns for 2024…then Ruger dropped their RXM, a vendor had like-new cop trade-in G17’s for $300 ea, and then I decided to promise myself only One. More. Gun. for 2024. It’ll be here late next week.
Self-discipline is so very not my strong point.
Article – Armed for survival: How Oct 7 Hamas massacre transformed gun culture in Israel
Interesting piece about the change in ‘gun culture’ in Israel.
First, welcome to the party.
This article is interesting because, while you and I might support the idea of the more people discreetly arming themselves against unforeseen violence, there’s a cultural difference clearly in evidence here that is worth noting.
Gozlan is unnerved by what he sees as inadequate oversight in the licensing process. “At the range, I saw people who had never held a gun in their life, barely hitting their targets. It’s frightening to think these people are now walking around with firearms.”
Catch that “inadequate oversight in the licensing process”? The article continues with concerns that, while no one is saying that the citizens shouldn’t be able to have guns, the possibility that they are ‘untrained’ or lacking in skill poses a, to them, legitimate concern.
This almost feels like a setup for a testing scheme. In this country, broadly speaking, if where you live requires a license you’re application is mostly theoretical…few places require you to go to the range and shoot a particular score to qualify. Some do, yes, but most do not. A right, predicated on a test, is not a right. And that’s the crux of what I’m getting at.
‘Reaonable” and ‘common sense’ regulations that support this sort of testing are backdoor schemes to restrict access and ownership. Let’s say a municipality or state wants to restrict firearms ownership and access. First thing you do is create a licensing scheme with requirements. Now, make it impossible to meet those requirements. For example, you may need eight hours of classroom time with a qualified instructor….and then you make the classrooms unavailable, set the qualifications for instructor to be unobtainable, and you have, by default, created a roadblock even though on paper you have a clearly instructed process to follow.
You can add all sorts of roadblocks…the licensing office is only open on every other Thursday for two hours, you have to apply in person, you need to bring documents that are awkward or difficult to obtain, funding reductions reduce staff available for processing forms, etc, etc. This isn’t just theory….in places like California and New York it’s business as usual.
I bring this up because people will read the article above and nod their heads sagely that, yes, everyone should have the right to own a gun but…there needs to be training an competency standards. And those standards, naturally, are set by people who have a keen interest in people not owning guns.
So, before anyone asks how you could possibly be against a “safety measure” like competency and handling exams, remember that these mechanisms are easily jiggered to promote making ownership of guns so onerous as to be impossible.
Should you have competency and skill in handling your boomtoys? Absolutely. You should regularly practice for safety and accuracy. Should it be a requirement administered by .gov, under .gov guidelines and rules, as a condition of ownership? Absolutely not.
Hopefully the Israelis will not fall for that trick.
