Lemme get the commercial stuff out of the way and then we’ll continue with our regularly scheduled post….

Okay, more AR mags on the way. My vendor will be out of them at current pricing within the next two weeks so once theyre gone, theyre gone…at a reasonable price. After hat we get into unreasonable pricing. These are very nice magazines and I am certain that around this time next year you’ll be very happy you bought them. I’ve restored the ordering page so its about as easy to get these things as I can make it. Im sure everyone who has received their magazines from this last batch are pleased….right? Right?

Still have some #10 cans of Mountain House, as well as plenty of the vacuum-packed pouches on hand. Email for list.

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Bridge collapse in Minnesota brings up the old bugaboo about having multiple routes of travel in case something just like this happens. Despite my disdain for many of Ragnar Bensens books, one thing I did take away from them was his ‘Survivalists Rule of Three’ which basically said that anything worth doing is worth doing with a secondary and tertiary alternative. That is to say three different ways of heating your house, three different routes of escape, three different means of emergency lighting, three alternative safe locations, etc, etc. I’m paranoid so I go for four levels…the Primary, Auxillary, Contingency, Extra (PACE) plan. In some things (canteens, for example) its not a financial burden, on others (guns, radios, for example) it can add up. However, the levels of redundancy are kinda comforting. Plus, when it comes to preparedness, ‘too much’ is always preferable to ‘not enough’.

Anyway, the moral of the bridge collapse episode is that you need to have, beforehand, alternate routing information available. Yes, there really is a ‘Plan B’.

Of course, a bridge doesn’t have to collapse to render a route unpassable. Roadblocks (official and unofficial), flooding, construction, accidents, etc. can all cause your primary route to be unavailable. This was shown on September 11 when NYC closed its tunnels and left the bridges open to only foot traffic. Additionally, weather conditions routinely close many roads in this country. Heck, right now there are probably some roads closed not far from here due to forest fires.

So, summing it all up: have a Plan B (and more) in case your first avenue of travel becomes unavailable.

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Everyone following the exploits of Zimbabwe’s economic self-destruction? Hyperinflation with a few twists. The most jaw-dropping amazingly insane edict to be issued by the government there has been price caps on the sale of consumer goods. In short, it may cost you 10x to buy the product but you cant sell it for more than x. The result? Predictably people went to stores that were having these price controls enforced, emptied the shelves, and probably resold a lot of the goodies for ‘real prices’. Let me put it into context. Right now gas is about $3.00 a gallon, right? Imagine .gov saying that no gas can be sold for more than fifty cents a gallon. Never mind that its costing the gas station two bucks and change per gallon just to get the stuff. So what happens? Everyone runs down to the Exxon and tanks up at fifty cents, the gas station is out of gas and the owner refuse to restock (since he’ll lose his shirt), and the people who bought all the gas turn around and sell it on the black market for $3 a gallon…because, surprise, all the gas stations are out of gas.

There are various blogs out there following this misadventure and I recommend reading them. Not necessarily for the example of how incredible ignorance can bring a country to ruin, but rather for the real-world lesson of what happens to infrastructure and personal wealth in a prolonged economic disaster. The folks who can produce their own food, produce their own electricity, have a hard currency, or can otherwise fend for themselves will make it through…the rest? Well, someone’s gotta make up those lines that stretch around the block.

This is why Im always left at a loss when people say that having gold or silver is a waste because ‘you cant eat it or shoot it’. This is true but only if TEOTWAWKI is a near-instantaneous overnight disaster. But many disasters are slow, creeping things…there’ll be a time in Zimbabwe where money will be useless because there’ll be no products to buy but until that time comes there’ll be months (maybe years) where having a globally recognized form of currency (such as gold or even, in this case, foreign currency) will be just as useful, if not moreso, than a pantry full of freeze drieds.

Societies and civilizations very rarely become Mad Max city-states overnight. Theres usually years of descent into that level of anarchy. When you hit the bottom of that slide, sure, its gonna be bullets and beef jerky as the national currency but that’s a long slide to the bottom and during that slide is when alternatives to the rapidly devaluing regional currency have

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Anniversary of nuking Japan is nigh. When someone tells you that nuclear war is unsurvivable and the living will envy the dead keep in mind that some survivors of Hiroshima were evacuated…to Nagaskai..and nuked again. So there are not only survivors of the atomic bomb, there are survivors of the atomic bombs. Survivors of the atomic bombings, by the way, are called hibakusha and they apparently are discriminated against in that noble, civilized and elegant Japanese culture.

First hand accounts by survivors can be found here. Interesting reading.