Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

L.A. dry run shows urban nuke attack ‘a survivable event’

“This is a survivable event,” says Brendan Applegate, of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Asymmetric Warfare, who helped design and carry out the exercise. “L.A. isn’t going to fall into the ocean and be gone forever. It will be a really bad day, but we need everyone to show up to work and save lives.”

Quite so. Even the bombings in Japan had survivors who were very close to the epicenters. In his remarkable book, Nuclear War Survival Skills (freely available on line), Kearny covers the amount of basic protection that would be needed to increase survivability by several magnitudes.

The notion that nuclear detonations are unsurvivable events seems to be untrue in the face of research and anecdotal evidence. In short, as long as youre not directly under the missle when it hits, and you can put several feet of earth or concrete between you and the blast, you’ll probably survive. (At this point the sheep start bleating “But who would want to survive after such a disaster!”..frankly, I would. Ignoring the motivational imperative to survive that is hardwired into our brain. I would want to survive just to be able to take part in the recovery and reformation of our civilization. A chance to start from a ‘clean slate’, as it were.)

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Man, bad enough thta scraping together the cash for Christmas gifts will be a challenge, one of these became available. Fella I know may sell it to me…he let me take it to the range to shoot and I was very pleased. I already have a CZ 550 in .308 so I know that CZ makes an excellent product. A buddy of mine has their youth model….a no-frills scaled down .22 meant for kids. For giggles we put a good piece of glass on it and, surprisingly, shot dime-sized groups all day. Hmmmm…if thats what the low-end kid gun does……..

So I took it to the range, tinkered with the sights and have decided that I must have this gun. I have several Ruger 10/22 guns and theyre good carbines for what they are, but I’ve wanted a quality, stylish .22 bolt gun for quite a while. I was originally thinking of something fairly high-end like an Anschutz but I think the CZ is going to be my choice. It’s purpose? Well, it would just be a nice rifle to have and with equal sights or equal glass I think it’ll be more accurate than the Ruger. It might make a nice Kwanzaa/Hanukah/Ramadan/Christmas/Solstice gift to myself.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Wow, this is a treasure trove of classic gun literature. Book are available online and as .pdf files for download. Some classic stuff in there…Mann’s book alone is a masterpiece worthy of the tremendous effort it must have taken to scan all those pages.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

What would YOU pay for a pair of Steiner 7×50 M22 binoculars with reticle and LPF?

I only ask because..well…there was a pair at the gun show.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

On top of the several inches of snow that accumulated last week, we now have…wait for it…rain. The potential for a weather-induced problem should be readily apparent. As this stuff freezes tonight the roads will turn into ice rinks. All it takes is frozen rain on the power lines to pull them down, or a car going outta control and slamming into a pole to knock out power to the area.

But, of course, I dont really care.

Why? because, mi amigos, we’re prepared for that sorta thing. Emergency lighting, emergency heating, emergency communications….we’re good to go. And, like some sort of talisman, because we’re ready for that sorta contingency that means it just won’t happen.

We actually had a tremendous ice storm here about, oh, ten or so years ago. It was amazingly dramatic. Ever hear when people say that the sounds of tree limbs snapping was like gunshots? Yeah, it was like that. The amount of deadfall was incredible. The local treeline is still full of gaps where there used to be nice old trees lining the streets. I went out for a walk that night to watch it happen and as I recall you could not walk more than ten or twenty feet before something would come falling outta the sky in front of or behind you. A rare event, but it does happen.

Id like to mention that for those times when the ground is slicker than a Clinton alibi and about as icy as Hillary’s soul I find that the Yak Trax are excellent performers. When not in use, they can be stuffed into a small package or clipped to a carabiner and attached to a pack. Excellent product that takes up little space in your gear. The missus got a pair a few years ago and after examining them I picked up a pair for myself. In typical fashion, I bought them only after I had taken some gymnastically spectacular falls on the ice one winter.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Im of a mixed mind on this WikiLeaks brouhaha. On the one hand, yeah it can be damaging. But, on the other hand, I think it shows (and confirms) that things really arent what we’ve come to believe they are. We really don’t have any allies, there really are nations that are doing things we see as a threat, and the people running the show arent the saintly personages they would have us think they are. This is news to some folks, but it isnt to many. Why would any nation subordinate its own interests to another? Why would we think for a minute that countries like Pakistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc, have anything but their own interests at the forefront of the decision making process? I suppose that, more than anything else, this dissemination of information underscores just who is and isnt our friends these days. And, unsurprisingly, it appears we have very few friends. I’d almost go so far as to say that we have only two categories to choose from – enemies and indifferent disinterested parties.
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One of the small joys in life. Recall this post. That deal has come to pass again. This means I can, in one fell swoop (whatever the hell a fell swoop is) rotate my entire stock of spaghetti sauce out. I’ll pick up a couple cases, put them in the bunker, and take whats in the bunker and move it to the high cabinets in the kitchen for normal usage. w00t for sales.
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I had, out of that box of goodies from SG, 31 pairs of gloves. 20 German mitts, 10 wool liners, and 1 pair of nice gloves. The German mitts were around $1 ea. The liners around $2 each. The nice gloves were $18. Of those 31 articles of clothing which one do you think the dog decided to turn into a chew toy? Yup. I am…annoyed. But..I have no one to blame but me. I suppose I shoulda put them somewhere outta his reach.
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This dog is steadily reinforcing my conviction that having kids is a baaaaaaad idea.