When Andrew and Deborah Ku first heard about Hurricane Sandy, they worried that their ground-level bodega—located one block from the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens—would be swamped. They searched for sandbags and found none.

They made an impromptu barrier of faux-sandbags improvised from supplies at hand: cat litter and garbage bags.

The bodega weathered the storm without a drop of floodwater, enabling a reopening as one of the few surviving stores on the hard-hit peninsula.

An article I came across about the impromptu engineering that is spurred by necessity. As Rand said, “Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival.” Everything from Robinson Crusoe to Castaway to The Martian (esp. The Martian, actually) highlights that when you’re caught in a bad situation, it’s the clear-headed, creative, intelligent man who succeeds.

This is why the smart survivalist has a library that covers everything from small unit tactics to emergency medicine to electrical theory and accounting. We’re all familiar with Heinlein’s famous quote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”  I’m not sure specialization is necessarily a bad thing..when I need a triple bypass I’d very much like the guy working on me to be not only a specialist, but a very well trained one. However, specialization to the exclusion of things is definitely not a good idea.

Back in the old day, the best you could hope for was to slowly acquire the information you wanted by diligent trips to the library, and scouring new and used bookstores. Nowadays, literally the entire collected information of humanity is available to you on a small computer you carry in your pocket. And you don’t even need to actually read about it…you can see videos explaining whatever you want to learn.

While the information is out there, the desire to learn is not. That’s something you have to get from within. I am always stunned when I meet people so dogmatic that they won’t try new products, ideas, or methods, because “this is good enough”. What kind of person intentionally hamstrings themselves simply because they’re too lazy or narrow-minded to investigate and evaluate new ideas? I had a buddy who thought that his 1941 Johnson was the ultimate SHTF rifle…it was quick to reload (with five round stripper clips), fired a powerful .30 caliber bullet, and had a high-capacity (10 round) magazine. Never mind that it cost around $3000. Oh..and it didn’t do anything an AR-10, PTR-91, or even an M1A would do for half the money. But…facts had no bearing on his beliefs and he persisted in building his apocalyptic future around an outdated, obsolete, expensive, logistically-orphaned, and awkward weapons platform.

I suppose my point is, the linked article shows that when the chips are down, what’s between your ears can be more useful than whats in your pockets (or pack). But only if you’re able to think that way and not be hobbled by “this is how we’ve always done it.”

I remember something I read somewhere that said “Hating someone because of the color of their skin is just stupid. If you take the time to get to know someone…really get to know them…you can find a much better reason to dislike them.”

Don’t kid yourself…there’s been racial balkanization in this country for quite a while and now it’s becoming even more pronounced. I had a longer post about this but, quite honestly, there is virtually no way to make a long post about race (or sex, religion, abortion, guns, politics, class, and a few other topics) without it turning into a hellish commentfest where everything is picked apart and the original ideas are overlooked.

Unfortunately, the world we live in has moments, especially lately, where even if you’re the nicest person on the planet you can still wind up getting curbstomped because someone doesn’t like how much melanin you’ve been producing.

There’s a host of unlikely events that I actively keep in mind when I’m in preparedness mode. Economic hardship is usually at the top. ‘Race war’ is down there with the Rapture, Xenu’s return, Planet X, and zombie apocalypse. It’s a fascinating world we live in when I actually have to think “Hmm…could that happen here”. Unlikely. Here’s Montana’s racial breakdown (so to speak):

Racial composition     2010

• White          89.4%
• Native          6.3%
• Asian          0.6%
• Black          0.4%
• Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.1%
• Other race     0.6%
• Two or more races     2.5%

Yeah, you read that right…there are actually more Asians here than blacks. In fact, after white folks the next biggest group are Indians . After that, there’s virtually nothing else. Chance of race war in Montana? Same as everywhere else. Chance of it going on for very long? Nil. So…race war goes back on the back burner.

How do you even plan for something like that? I would imagine it’s the same as planning for any other form of civil unrest but with the assumption it’ll be a lot easier to tell which side is which.

I don’t think you’ll ever see something like a real race war in this country. I think the closest you’ll ever see is some of the things that happened in the 60’s and early 70’s, which were pretty nasty at times. But warfare-in-the-streets type of thing? Nope. I think the number  of people who would do that sort of thing are far outnumbered by those of us who don’t see race ( or gender, or class, etc) as being any more worthy of violent response than , say, left-handedness.

Well, it should be a busy day in the blogosphere today…

This is interesting:

Around 11pm, cops cornered a suspect at nearby El Centro College and attempted to negotiate with him, but four hours later the talks failed and a robot was brought in to detonate a bomb and kill the suspect.

I know most police departments have some explosives on hand, but this is the first time I have heard of them actually using them in an offensive tactic since the spectacular fail of the police at the MOVE shootout in ’85.

However, police do have a long history of burning people out of their positions….intentionally and unintentionally. Chris Dorner was burned out of his hiding place, and we all know what happened to those guys down in Waco.

It’s possible a bomb was brought in not to kill the suspect but to blow a hole in the wall or otherwise breach the place and the suspect happened to get caught in the blast. Or, that’ll be the story anyway :::wink wink nudge nudge:::

As an aside, this shooting incident in Texas was predictable given the media hype and coverage of these sorts of protests. There’ll be more, too…that’s virtually a certainty. I’m awaiting the usage of this event to further the gun-ban agenda. Stay tuned.

We don’t celebrate the ‘Fourth of July’. We celebrate Independence Day.

Speaking of…nothing can possibly more Murican than this:

A bald eagle was freed from a tree by a patriotic Army veteran, who spent 90 minutes firing 150 shots into three branches ahead of the Fourth of July holiday.

Jason Galvin, who did two tours in Afghanistan, was on a bait run on Thursday when he spotted the eagle dangling upside down from a rope it got tangled in, according to KARE 11. 

Galvin estimated the bird was hanging from the tree about 75 feet off the ground. It had been there for more than two days.

I did  a post several years back on solar charging of cell phones, and the technology has changed a tiny but in those intervening years. I have a Goal0 Nomad panel and decided to test it out the other day. I took an old dead iPhone, USB cable, and the Nomad7 and set them out in the yard directly in the sun to charge.

A couple things you have to keep in mind – first, take the device you’re charging and protect it from the sun and heat. If you don’t, they’ll go into thermal shutdown mode. I usually put the phone under the panel but off the conductive ground. Secondly, and this is really important, higher end electronics like cellphones are very fussy about charging irregularities. If the voltage fluctuates, as it might when the sun goes behind a cloud, that change in electrical input may cause your device to go out of charge mode or something. The solution is to use the panel to charge a battery pack and then use the battery pack to charge the phone. Goal0 is now selling a package that does exactly that – GOAL ZERO 42020 Venture 30 Solar Recharging Kit. 

This is pretty much your one-stop solution to this:

Maybe your neighbor will let the neighborhood charge their phones at their generator. Maybe.

No doubt someone will opine that in a blackout condition the cell towers will mostly be dead too, so why worry about your cellphone? If you think that, then you really are too short-sighted to be a survivalist. Turn in your camo and freeze-drieds and take up another hoby..like model railroads or something.

Even in a world with cell towers down, your phone takes pictures, takes video, does math functions, accesses files from local networks, acts as a flashlight, provides entertainment, tracks supplies, etc, etc. In short, it’s a very useful tool even when it’s not being used as a communication device. (And, yes, you can even use them, to a degree, for communication using devices such as Go tenna.)

Anyway, I plugged in the dead iPhone, set it under the panel, and came back a few hours later and…100% charged.

Moral of the story is that although having a generator is nice, it’s a bit overkill for just charging phones in a power-failure situation. So…these panels (with the battery) are excellent alternatives.

I am both amused and entertained by this article.

According to a 2015 simulation at Cornell University, the safest place to be during the apocalypse is the Northern Rockies. That’s exactly where one finds the 37,000-acre Resort at Paws Up. Its nearest metropolis, and airport, is the college town of Missoula, pop. 69,000. Researchers agree zombies will first attack the most densely-populated urban areas. For that reason, Big Sky Country is one of the best places to retreat to. Paws Up allows the well-to-do among us to familiarize themselves with things in nature—like stars, trees, and silence—they may encounter when they flee their penthouse apartments and suburban mansions.

Paws Up is out past Potomac, and is, literally, across the highway from where I hunt. I have heard stories about overzealous Paws Up employees chasing hunters away even though the hunters weren’t trespassing on PU land. I’ve never had that happen, but then again most folks don’t want to annoy someone strolling through the woods with an HK-91 (clone, actually) hanging off them.

Paws Up has a bit of mixed feelings about it amongst the locals. They had a major screaming match with the state over some water quality issues back when they got started, and I was rooting for them in a David v. Goliath kind of way. Then I heard about their folks getting all goon-like and shooing hunters away from the place. Hey, it’s one thing if someone is trespassing but intimidating them and driving them away when they aren’t trespassing? Bad juju.

Interesting article on the Strategic National Stockpile. I wonder if they have one of these somewhere for ammo. (“Yes! And its called ‘my basement’!”)

 

When Greg Burel tells people he’s in charge of some secret government warehouses, he often gets asked if they’re like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant gets packed away in a crate and hidden forever.

“Well, no, not really,” says Burel, director of a program called the Strategic National Stockpile at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thousands of lives might someday depend on this stockpile, which holds all kinds of medical supplies that the officials would need in the wake of a terrorist attack with a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon.

The location of these warehouses is secret. How many there are is secret. (Although a former government official recently said at a public meeting that there are six.) And exactly what’s in them is secret.

“If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can’t fix,” says Burel. “And we just don’t want that to happen.”

What he will reveal is how much the stockpile is worth: “We currently value the inventory at a little over $7 billion.”

Check out 0:23 to 1:20.

“Granddad loved people…but he didn’t trust them very much.”

Funny thing is, people say “Oh, it’s the world we live in today. It wasn’t like this when I was a kid.” or “It wasn’t like this when my grandparents were alive”. You’re right, it wasn’t. It was actually worse. The world has never been a pleasant or safe place. What’s changed is that we’ve gotten so good atinsulating ourselves from it, and keeping it’s ugliness at a distance, that when we really do get a glimpse of what the real world is like, we can’t believe that it’s really been that way all along. It must be a recent thing. Nope, it’s not. It’s the real world…it’s here every day.

There have always been people willing to crack your head open for whats in your pockets, there have always been people starving, there has always been someone who wants to control you, and there have always been people who want what you have and are willing to take it when the opportunity arises. Just because you don’t see it, or even recognize it, doesn’t diminish that this is an objective truth.

So, yes, love your neighbors, be nice to people, help when you can, and try not to be a dick, But…don’t forget that you can only trust your fellow man so far. Trust, but verify.