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

I received some current 2008 pricing from some of my vendors on bullets and cartridge brass. Across the board everything went up by at least 10%. Let me give an example… Win. 55 gr. FMJ bullets jumped up by 16%. If you have any plans to produce large quantities of ammo and you need bullets/brass I recommend buying them now because the prices will continue to rise. Also, if you can, you may find some older inventory on your local gun shop shelves that has not been priced at the new higher prices. Might wanna snap that stuff up.

Speaking of purchasing, its worth repeating that with the election process well under way you might want to make those purchases of ammo, guns, mags, etc. that you’ve been putting off.

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I should like to mention that a few months back I bought a 3 D-cell MagLite that uses an LED bulb rather than the usual Krypton bulb. I have been extremely pleased with it. Its strong point is that it seems to throw a tighter beam and any impacts or jolts wont break the bulb. In fact, I dropped it on some concrete from about 6’ and it didn’t even flicker. Usually, dropping a flashlight on a hard surface is the kiss of death for most flashlight bulbs. Not an issue with LED. The LED version of the MagLite also comes with a spare incandescent bulb in the tail. Makes sense since the LED isn’t likely to ever need replacing unless something really terminal happens.

MagLite also sells LED conversions for your current MagLite. They work but the dedicated MagLite LED flashlight uses a completely different shaped reflector which I think accounts for a good bit of the flashlights fine performance. The ‘regular’ MagLite reflector is more ‘funnel’ shaped whereas the LED reflector is more…ovoid?…egg-shaped?..parabolic?

The LED MagLites do cost more upfront but I believe it to be worth the difference. All the other MagLite accessories (filters, cone wands, etc, etc) work with both versions.

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More and more articles, for better or worse, are turning up in the news saying that the new ‘conflict-causing resource’ will be food and/or water as opposed to oil. I can see this being somewhat true if you believe what the media says about unprecedented lengths of drought ravaging the US and other parts of the world. There is no argument that food prices certainly have gone up over the last year or so…more so than one might expect based on history. No one seems to be in agreement over the exact cause but as with many things in the media, no one cause is totally responsible, but many causes are partially. Blame has been laid on increased fuel prices (transport, farming equipment, fertilizers, etc), global warming and drought (reduced rainfall, increased irrigation costs), increased demand from developing countries, etc, etc. No single cause is probably the culprit but rather all of these things taken as a whole. In some parts of the world there are indeed shooting wars over water supplies and food supplies. In the less Third World regions, litigation replaces confrontation. Every year it seems some outfit takes the federal .gov (or the Corps of Engineers, or dam authority, or other water-controlling org.) to court of releasing/not releasing water from dams or rivers. Theres anecdotal pieces on the internet about wells drying up, water tables lowering, etc, etc.

People are dangerous critters when they are hungry. Miss a meal or two and folks get grumpy. Miss several days worth of meals and they get downright mean. When they then start watching their kids get hungry and skinny, then the gloves come off and you get Somalia-style anarchy. Much the same story for water. Im sure we’ve all seen footage of drought stricken regions of Africa where people line up at water tankers and someone cuts in line and things dissolve into raucous chaos.But…that’s Africa. Its always been like that.

How does this sort of thing affect those of us in the more civilized parts of the world? Well, the food items you buy will obviously go up in price. Availability, in my opinion, won’t change too much. I think you’ll always be able to find a can of Green Giant corn on the shelf, you just may wind up paying a bit more for it. But, obviously, a 10% increase in food costs means your only able to purchase about 90% of what you were able to purchase before with the same amount of cash. At least…until the price goes up another 10%. And again.

I can’t recall a time in this country when there was ever a nationwide food shortage. (A shortage is not the same thing as unavailability…food can be unavailable because you’re broke, but a shortage is the actual non-existence of the item.) There have always been regional shortages..hurricanes, blizzards and that sort of thing always empty supermarkets. But I cant recall a genuine nationwide food crisis. There have been times when a particular food was unavailable nationwide (food recalls spring to mind) but those events affected only a handful of items leaving the vast majority of the supermarket untouched. Classic preparedness literature like Tappan suggests that a nationwide truck or rail strike could cause a antionide shortage but that seems unlikely to me.However, no one I know is stocking up for a national (or global) food shortage…they stock up for a local food shortage. They stock up for when the Katrina-like storm floods their city, for when a blizzard makes travel impossible for two weeks, for when terrorist activity locks down their region for days at a time, etc.

But, having all those shelves full of food, the cases of MRE’s, the cases of freeze drieds, the drums of rice, etc. all make me feel a bit more secure when I read articles about projected food issues. That peace of mind is a nice thing to have even if none of those stored long-term food items ever get used. I guess the best I could hope for would be that my food supply outlasts me.