Monthly Archives: October 2021

Those hideout,bugout,cabin, last ditch, barn guns

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Theres a false economy, of sorts, in preparedness regarding ‘backup’, ‘bugout’, or ‘last ditch’ gear and guns. For example, someone will have some cool Tier 1 guns and gear for ‘the boogaloo’, and then they’ll say that at their supersecret bugout location they’ve got a couple HiPoints, a few Mosin Nagants with cases of 7.62x54R, and a few Maverick 88 shotguns as their ‘backup’ in case they have to leave home with nothing but the clothes on their back and the gear in their vehicle.

Now, let’s examine that thought for a second. What is the circumstance under which you would be forced to use that ‘backup’ gear? Well, reasonably, that circumstance would be one where you needed your top tier gear but it was, for whatever reasons, unavailable. Makes sense, right? So here’s the likely scenario…[Big Event] occurs that you’ve been preparing for..but it happens when you’re away from your tricked out 1911, super razoo Wilson AR15, and you’re thunderous Benneli M4. But, ‘no problem’, you think. You were smart and cached some backup guns just in case. So, you trunlde off to HideyHole Mk.I and retrieve your Bersa, Mosin Nagant, and Stevens 311. Now you’re ready to take on the apocalypse!

See, here’s the problem – if you have hit the stage of life where you need your Tier 1 stuff and don’t have it, then your life is, by definition, at a point where your backups should be at least as good as your Tier 1. Or, put another way, if the stuff youre putting away ‘just in case’ isn’t good enough to be your everyday Tier 1 stuff, then when youre forced to use it you’re going into the apocalypse riding a Hyundai.

If a Mosin Nagant wasnt your first choice for the zombie apocalypse, why would you stash one away as your backup 2nd choice? Because, follow me on this, if you don’t have access to your first choice gun, then that 2nd choice gun becomes your new first choice gun. And a Mosin Nagant is no one’s first choice.

Me, mt ‘run out the door gun’ would be, in all likelihood, and AR and a Glock…just like 90% of survivalists and police across the country. And the stuff I stick away in a secondary location as backup? An AR and a Glock. And that remote, probably-never-need-it tertiary backup? AR and a Glock. Because when it’s some stormy, dark, wretched night and I’ve spent three hours driving back roads to the Beta Site hoping no one followed me, and I unpack the Pelican case under the floorboards, the level of comfort, reassurance, and confidence I’ll get from those guns will be several orders of magnitude greater than what it would be if that case contained an SMLE and a Makarov.

This isnt exclusive to guns, by the way. Your day to day “go to” flashlight might be a $175 SureFire or Streamlight, and then you tuck a $20 MagLite at your cabin. Or you buy a $100 Ka-bar or BK&T knife for your EDC bag and stash some Made In China crap in your ’emergency supplies’ that you keep at your uncles ranch.

It can be expensive. A reasonably reliable AR from a known manufactuer (not a ‘custom’ gun built in your kitchen from a ‘Vic’sPlumbing And AR” lower) is probably gonna be around $700. Figure that it’s a gun youre sticking away in the rafters in your shed, or hiding under a floorboard at Uncle Steve’s ranch, it can be kinda painful to just basically stick $700 in a hole and leave it there for possible perpetuity. But, if the day comes that you ever need it….you’re gonna be real glad you sucked it up and spent the money.

 

Albino brain chiggers

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In case you don’t get the reference.

It snowed, technically, yesterday. Just enough sleet and flakes to qualify as snow. But, like a positive test for Wuhan Flu that sends your school into pants-crapping panic mode, first snow sets into motion the winter stuuf that needs doing. Stuff gets put away, winter stuff gets taken out of storage, etc, etc….and on an emotional level we resign ourselves to the fact that, yes, the year is coming to a close.

For me, the biggest takeaway for this year is that it started under Trump and ended under Biden. I’ll let you figure out which one I think is going to go down as having caused more damage to the nation.

Time to get the Filson wool outta storage, dust off the boots, get the ECWCS underwear out, put the air conditioners away, put the winter module into the Bag O’ Tricks(tm) and get ready for the long, dark winter of my soul Montana.

Ah, fall…we hardly knew ye.

What with ‘supply chain disruption’ and various Wuhan Flu restrictions, this should be an entertaining holiday season. Fortunately, my resilience is at the point where supply chain disruptions mean very little to me…either I already have plenty or I have a way to deal without out. Hopefully, you are as equally resilient. We shall see, no?

Bring on winter. Let’s see who makes it to spring.

Dumbest AR ever

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I came across the worst AR in the world today and…almost bought it.

I’ll skip the backstory…lets jump to the point where the guy says “I have an AR I wanna sell”. And what an AR it was… Steiner DBAL up front, a Hera CQR stock, BAD Lever, QD sling, etc, etc. Very cool looking gun.

And, like the super hot looking chick who turns out to be a dud in the sack, that’s all this gun was…all sizzle, no steak.

First off, the Hera stock? Looks cool as hell. And..thats about it. My biggest gripe was that the detent and spring for the selector switch is held in the AR receiver, normally, by the pistol grip. On the Hera, you take the spring, tuck it into a little rubber sleeve, and stuff that sleeve into an open slot on the side of the gun. Seriously. Its held in place by friction. WTF?

Next up, that Steiner DBAL? Well, I had to look closer…it was some knockoff that had absolutely no IR value whatsoever. Just a flashlight and a green laser in a butch looking housing to make you look like a operationally operating operator.

Next up? Side charging AR upper. No lie. While you might think thats pretty cool, here’s why it isnt – the AR is a pretty well sealed receiver. Put a magazine in, close the dust cover, and crap pretty much has only one or two small ingress points. On a side charger, though, theres no dust cover and you have to have a long slot cut in the side of the receiver and thats gonna allow ingress of dirt and other stoppage fodder.

And the real death stroke to this whole deal…which I should have noticed Immediately…was that there was no serial number on the receiver. Or any other marking than SAFE and FIRE. Curious, I opend the receiver and beheld lots of chattered aluminum that had been milled away with an angry beaver. Yes, it was the dreaded 80% lower. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that except…while the feds are cool with you building your own gun, they are very uncool with you selling your own gun. You gotta stamp some names and numbers on that thing if youre gonna sell it.

Now, I have a bucket of Anderson $39 stripped lowers here so it might have been worth it to buy the thing, throw away the lower, and put on a Poverty Pony lower with a serial number and all the other fedgoon-required goodness…but I am not buying a kitchen table AR. With a gimmick stock. And an airsoft-grade laser/light.

But…from a distance and without looking closely, it looked sooooo sweet.

Moral of the story: much like hot chicks that are lacking in the boudoir, don’t fall in love with appearances. Check out that gun closely. Especially check to make sure its got a serial number.

The guy that has that thing is kinda stuck with it unless he gets a serial number stamped on it, or he finds someone who doesnt care about it’s status. Caveat emptor, kids.

Article – California law bans small off-road gas engines, including lawnmowers and chainsaws

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Ah, California….every time I think you’ve woke yourself into a new depth of stupidity, you one-down me.

The new law will ban the sale of all off-road, gas-powered engines, including generators, lawn equipment, pressure washers, chainsaws, weed trimmers, and even golf carts.

California, a state with a history of disaster due to being situated on the terrestrial equivalent of Jell-O, has decided that any new generator you buy can’t run on a gas engine. So, when ‘the big one’ finally hits you’re supposed to haul out your Newsom-approved generator that runs on unicorn flatus and .gov overreach.

As the article says, it bans the sale of new gas powered non-vehicles. Two things to note…’sale’ and ‘new’. So, expect Nevada to add generators to the big box of Pmags they keep by the door at the border gas stations. And, I’d expect that propane-powered generators will find a new market as well.

There’s gonna be a lot of Honda EU2000’s getting UPS’d into California from ‘private parties’ over the next few years, I’d imagine. Can’t wait to read about how the ‘reasonable’ and ‘common sense’ legislation to ban these terrible weapons of war climate change won’t aooly to ‘only ones’ like municipalities and their various agencies.

If I had the money, I’d buy a chunk of dirt right on the border with California and run a general store full of Pmags, generators, gender-specific toys, fireworks, and everything else California bans, and I’d probably make enough to retire in three years.

I wanna go hug my EU2000 right now.

Article – One man’s shopping trip turned scavenger hunt shows how the supply-chain crisis has created an ‘everything shortage’

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During an everyday errand run, The Atlantic’s staff writer Derek Thompson said he found that snarls in the global supply chain had created an “everything shortage.” Thompson said what should have been a quick errand run for an at-home COVID-19 test, some paper towels, and prescription drugs turned into a sort of multistore scavenger hunt.

The shopper went to a CVS, whose at-home COVID-19 tests and paper towels had sold out. Then, he went to a Walgreens that had run out of everyday prescription medications, as well as a Target, whose ransacked shelves were “alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall,” he said.

Pretty much everyone, at being told we were facing a pandemic, figured “Ok..pandemic…so load up on canned goods and avoid other people”. But very few folks seem to have sat down and thought out the downstream consequences…schools close so parents stay home with kids instead of going to their truck driving job, without a driver the materials don’t get to the factories on schedule, production schedules are wrecked, whatever does get manufactured can’t get distributed on schedule, etc, etc.

I guess it’s no surprise that this sort of thing is going on. And, by and large, I’m about as prepared for it as can be, but it’s rather annoying to see the US slide into the sort of stereotpyes we used to have about the Soviets standing in line for toilet paper.

What’s worse is that some idiot somewhere is braying “Government should do something…” about these ‘shortages’ and, Crom help us, .gov might actually do just that. And if you think that having .gov manage a sector of industry is a good idea, you clearly don’t mail a lot of packages or get your paycheck by mail.

‘Tis interesting times we live in. We will all get through it, of course, but they are interesting nonetheless.

 

Also: Why the Supply Chain Is Tangled Up in Knots

 

Its the Zimbab-way

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So the notion being pointed out is that, rather than raise the debt ceiling by a trillion dollars, why dont we just avoid the whole mess and mint a trillion-dollar coin instead?

Or, in other words (mostly Robert Mugabe’s), why don’t we just print the money we need?

And then some wag at the Mint says:
“Voila, we’d have bought ourselves the equivalent of a trillion-dollar increase in the debt limit, without any impact on inflation,” says Diehl.

Without any impact on inflation? Isn’t the textbook definition of inflation that you increase the money supply you cause the currency to lose value? Am I missing something here?

The future is going to be either a) horrors born of economic malfeasance or b) horrors born of the steps taken to mitigate the economic malfeasance. Either way, it’s a lot of canned goods and bargain-store shopping in your future.

Video – Debt ceiling explained

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The video is ten years old, so the numbers have changed…upwards…but the reasoning still seems relatable.

Unless there is a bout of hyperinflation, or another World War, it’s going to be mathematically impossible to pay off the national debt. Now, whether or not any level of national debt is a good or bad thing is something to mull over. But what irks me is how, even at the municipal level, the answer is always ‘raise taxes’ and never ‘cut spending’.

Signs of the times

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Someone I know was recently doing a bunch of canning and needed some supplies. No problem, sez I, I’m running some errands today. Let’s go hit the stores.

So, we did. And noticed some interesting things. First, the local hardware store had a whole aisle of canning jars. There we’re Anchor Hocking, Ball, Kerr, and some made-in-China brand. The Ball were gone, the Kerr was getting picked over hard, and virtually no one touched the Chinese jars. Interesting.

Second thing: no lids. None. So we hit another venue. Again, jar’s hit hard but still on the shelf. No lids. Now I’m curious. Later in the day I hit a few other venues. Same story. No lids.

The natives, it seems, are restless. Or it’s that nebulous ‘logistics issue’ that seems to be the catch-all for when we see an empty shelf these days.

The local restaurant supply store, I thought, carried some canning supplies and when I went there I noticed the rice aisle was hit fairly hard too.

I guess the big question is are these empty shelves the result of panic buying or the result of simple resupply issues? :::shrug::: May not matter since the result is the same either way.

Cynic I am, I’m going with “harbinger”.

Water cans

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So right around Paratus, these arrived in the mail:

I’m not an expert on fire extinguishers, but I know that, once in a while, the solution to something burning is to simply douche it with a lot of water. Yeah, yeah, it’s a different story for electric, chemical, and oil fires, but for the candle-left-too-close-to-drapes sort of conflagration some H20 is just fine.

What I did not know is that these types of fire extinguishers have a bit of DIY features in that they are reusable and rechargeable by any idiot with an air compressor. And, as it turns out, this idiot has an air compressor.

All these things are are giant pressurized super (duper) soakers. You unscrew the top, fill with liquid of your choice (more on that later), seal it up, and hook up a pump to the valve and pressurize. Easy peasy.

What this means is that you can re-use these things and refill/recharge them yourself. So, if like me you have a curious mind, you can play with one and see what kind of range and output you can expect and then just refill/reharge it to it’s ready state.

Now, of course you are supposed to fill this thing with water. (Or, as I read somewhere, water and a tiny bit of dish soap to increase the ‘wetness’ of the water). But…what if you’ve a more creative bent? Can I fill this thing with kerosene and use it to quickly prep a place for immolation? Or as an impromptu flamethrower? Can I fill it with water and food coloring and write hurriedly nasty messages in the snow on City Hall’s lawn? Can I fill it with urine and quickly run the hose into the vent of the car of someone I don’t like and make a statement? There is…potential.

In actuality though, these will get filled and charged, and then relegated to strategic locations around the house ‘just in case’. What makes them postworthy is that, naive fool I am, I had no idea they were rechargeable by the user. For a surivivalist who may need to use one of these someday its a handy thing to be able to reuse it by just filling it with tap water and charging it with a bicycle pump.

So, there you have it…the ultimate water gun.

ETA: Very useful link from the comments