Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Hideously off topic but I cannot resist….
Remember the picture from this post?
Well, not as cool but still pretty awesome: Flag-waving Teddy Roosevelt one-handing an M60 at a charging Bigfoot while standing in a raging forest fire.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Well, it’s been about 2 1/2 years since I last made a post about operating expenses. At that time folks were generous and ponied up enough to keep the lights on for a couple years.
Well, it’s that time again…time to pass the helmet around and give the speech about how it’s all voluntary, give what you can, every little bit helps, yadda, yadda, yadda.
If you can’t or don’t wanna throw in a buck or two, I’m not going to give you the slightest bit of grief about it. It’s a tough economy, and I’m not exactly Woodward and Bernstein over here. But, if you’ve got a few bucks laying around and you get a good chuckle from time to time, or even some useful information (hey, it happens!), I’d be grateful for whatever you can do. It all really does go to paying for hosting and domain registration and that sort of thing. There’s a ‘Donate’ button at the top of the right sidebar or you can use this one:
From an admin standpoint, here’s some points of interest:
This blog has been running for over nine years, which puts it a little over two years older than ,Rawles’ Survivlablog, and makes it one of the oldest preparedness blogs still active. There’s about 1360 posts which averages out to about one post every 2.5 days. There are almost 5900 comments which comes out to an average of each post generating about 4.3 comments. Approximately 50% (+/- 5%) of all visits are return visits…meaning half of you reading this have been here before. Metrics are a bit fuzzy, but on average it’s about a thousand hits a day…unless ,Rawles or Tam links to me, in which case those numbers usually double or triple.
On a personal note, as long as I’m standing here with my hat in my hand, my birthday is coming up August 7th and my wish list can be found here.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Here’s something a little interesting. Five guys stand out in the desert while a 2KT nuclear bomb goes off 10,000 feet overhead.
Here’s what I find interesting – there is a tape recorder, and a movie camera, running throughout the test and it’s immediate aftermath. We know these guys are directly under the explosion. The explosion is approximately two miles overhead. Nuke goes off and…the cameras keep going, the tape recorder keeps going. I thought, according to all the hype of the last couple of years, that EMP would have knocked those devices out. What gives? Not a big enough yield?
(Sidenote: the guys in the test apparently lived into their late sixties and mid-eighties.)
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Mass shooting + election year + “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” = long lines at Cabela’s and Sportsman’s Warehouse this week.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
This sort of thing doesn’t surprise me.
Not every homeless guy is some drunken idiot who has whiskey for breakfast and looks like he brushed his teeth with a hammer. There are some clever folks out there. Next time youre off in the woods caching gear or visiting your top-secret BOL you never know who mightbe out there as well watching.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Ah. its stories like these, with accompanying video (very much worth watching), that warms my heart and makes me smile. There is nothing more rewarding than watching a senior citizen justifiably getting all “Gran Torino” on a couple kids who think civilization doesn’t apply to them.
It’s always been a dangerous world out there, and it’s even more dangerous today. Why wouldn’t you take precautions?
Pertinence towards preparedness? This guy was ready, bided his time ’till the bad guy’s back was turned, and once he started the bullet-party he didn’t stop. Two-hand stance needs work, but got the job done. He was prepared and he was thinking….two main ingredients to a successful outcome of any endeavour.
ETA: Read this for the robbers point-of-view.
“I was down, and I’m not going to continue to shoot you,” he said.
I love how the one kid says that they weren’t going to hurt anyone because their gun was empty and rusty. Like it was just good clean fun. They’re lucky the old man was only carrying a.380 and not as accurate as he could have been.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Last year’s birthday ‘cake’ – Prosciutto and stew beef. A traditinal dog birthday favorite.
Eighty pounds, jaws of steel, and tougher than Chinese arithmetic……the Bioweapon Mk I is two years old as of yesterday.
It’s pretty much a standard in most preparedness literature that, at some point, a well-trained dog should be acquired as a bit of a force-multiplier. (We’re still working on the ‘well-trained’ part). One idea is that, since you have to go to sleep sometime, the dog provides an early-warning system if someone or something creeps too close to your slumbering form. There is some merit to this…Nuke obviously has better hearing than me and, since he’s usually laying on the floor or otherwise in close contact with it, can sense the vibrations of people coming to the door. He is more useful at night when we’re out walking. He may stop and stare intently off into the distance and let me know that there’s someone (or something) wandering around the street that I didn’t see.
Unfortunately, he can also be caught unawares….and his lack of situational awareness in some cases leads to him being caught by surprise when someone walks along the sidewalk and comes up behind us. At this point, to validate his existence, he starts lunging and barking. Always an exciting moment. But he’s getting better at that sort of thing.Still need to get him acclimated to little kids. He hasn’t quite figured out if they are simply miniature humans or prey.
Is he an asset, from a preparedness standpoint? I’d say it’s pretty neutral. There’s nothing he does that cannot be replicated through technology or gear…early warning, seismic intrusion, intimidation, night vision, etc. On the other hand, he does provide all these features into a fairly compact form that requires only moderate upkeep. The major drawback, of course, is the unreliable nature of his willingness to do what he’s told. Again…a work in progress. So far we’ve pretty much got a handle on sit, go (as in ‘you can range ahead of us if you want’), stay, come, down, and up (either stand up or jump up onto an object). All commands come with matching hand motions. What I should have done when I started this was incorporating whistles into the commands as well so I’d have three options – voice, hands and whistles.
Probably his most useful function is as an early warning detection system against visitors. That may not sound terribly exciting or dramatic, but it is probably the most practical and useful feature he offers. I can take a nap with the doors unlocked and the windows open and not worry about waking up to find some stranger standing over me with a baseball bat.Passively, he probably promotes people keeping their distance from us when we’re out and about.
So today he is two years old. We’ll go pick him up a big bunch of meat scraps and give him a nice dinner. No gifts, though…he’s spoiled enough already.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
It appears Hollywood isn’t ready to give up on the post-apocalyptic/dystopic genre just quite yet. Mind you that Jericho and Sarah Connor Chronicles both bit it after two seasons, and the new series, ‘Revolution’, looks like it might not break that streak. So, let’s shift the apocalypse from a nuclear war to a global pandemic and we get this:
Michael bay, of Transformers fame, is set to direct a TNT pilot of “The Last Ship”.
I read the book, The Last Ship, a few years back and thought it was about average for a post-apocalyptic novel. The short version: after a nuclear war, the crew of a Navy destroyer are left wandering the seas in search of a habitable home. Over time they deal with mutiny, food shortages, radiation, other surviviors, and their own new society.
It wasn’t a bad book, just nothing really groundbreaking. Good entertainment though and I would recommend it as an entertaining read. Those with naval experience will probably get more out of it. The potential, certainly, is there for a series if they can make it stick. Right now it looks like The Walking Dead is setting the television record for longevity of a post-apocalyptic series as it shambles into it’s third season.
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Someday, I’ll have enough money that when my buddy sends me a link like this one I’ll be able to act on it.
Doesn’t that look like the foundation for an uber-BOV? Someday, man……….
Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
Well, this is about as interesting as things can get.
New Ravalli County commissioner appointed after questioning about survivalist blog
HAMILTON – Jeff Burrows is Ravalli County’s newest commissioner.
His appointment Wednesday didn’t come without controversy.
I met one of those guys a little while back. Seemed like a nice enough guy. I visited their website and while there’s a lot of interesting information (although there isn’t as much activity as I’d expect) there is also a large quotient of (IMHO) tinfoil-hattery as well. I suppose it’s possible that I’m the one who is wrong and they’re the ones who are right but …some of that stuff is kinda out there. Here’s a link, you can check ‘em out for yourself.
