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

It’s cold and blowing snow today, which the BioWeapon Mk. I finds to be fascinating and an excellent excuse for acting all hyper, so this seems a good time to point out some cool winter finds in this months Sportsmans Guide HQ catalog.

LXM-182323 – 10 Pair US mil. trigger finger mitten liners – I’ve got a couple dozen of these in the bunker, vacuum sealed for storage. The weave is tight enough to provide enough wind resistance that you could use them on their own when things arent to frigid, but they work best as a liner for some outerproof shell. I found some East German (or maybe it was Czech) vinyl mittens a few years ago for $1/pr and bought a couple dozen. The vinyl mitt makes a waterproof and windproof shell that goes well with these, although there are plenty of other shells out there that will work. This is a good price for genuine mil. surp mitts. 75/25 wool nylon. I keep an extra pair in my Cold Weather Module for LMI’s and friends who Im with who may get caught unprepared.

LXM-148992 – ECWS Sleeping Bag System. I just got a pair of these for $100 each from a couple vets. Took em out in the yard, set one up and spent the night in it at around freezing temps. I like them. They dont compact down as much as I’d like but for what I paid theyre an excellent bag. These ones are listed as new, and ar more expensive, but I’d take these genuine GI ones over the cheaper ‘mil spec’ ones that are also offered in the same catalog.

LXM-190570X – German Military Insulated Gloves – First time I’ve seen these offered. Not sure theyll do anything my current gloves/mitts won’t do but I do like the German flecktar patterned gear. I might have to get a pair but, really, $18 is way too much for a single pair of surplus gloves.

LXM-182900X – German Trigger Finger Mitts – On the other hand, these look like a serious bargain. In an XL they would probably work great with those US mitt liners.

Theres a few other niceties in there..military scarves, more mitts, etc, etc…but those are the high points that interested me most. Theres enough variety, and cheap enough ‘bulk’ prices, that a fella could put together their own Cold Weather Module at a very reasonable price (and, if he had a few LMI buddies he could bring the cost down considerably).

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

I normally refrain from using profanity in blog posts because with the huge amount of verbiage available to me in the English language there should be plenty, more descriptive, and more accurate terms available to get my point across.

But, to no ones surprise, discussing the TSA brings out the George Carlin in me.

I really dislike talking about it, but I once spent 6 hours with my hands cuffed behind my back in a jail cell because the TSA goons didnt know the difference between firearms packaged correctly for airline travel and those that werent. Since then, I put TSA employess in the same category as the guys in the death camp guard towers…dont tell me “its just a job”.

So, the goons at TSA are now saying that once you go into the inspection/detection process youre committed. If you refuse, you can be arrested and face about $10k in fines. Personally, Im not seeing where the TSA actually has the authority to physically detain anyone. However, if I have to go through this absurd and, to me, unconstitutional process I have no intention of making it easy. I’m gonna wear my Utilikilt, sans underwear of course, and if it looks like theyre gonna put on the gloves and start groping I am gonna close my eyes, concentrate on my favorite high-definition internet porn, and conjure up a massive erection so that when that waste of life starts groping under the kilt he finds a deadly weapon alright……

Ever hear the old expression about how “when the revolution gets here, the first ones up against the wall are gonna be….”? I , of course, dont mean it literally….really. But metaphorically, when the political revolution gets here I hope the first agency ‘up against the wall’ is the TSA and a few of the other goons at Fatherland Security.

TSA: Making America Safe One Strip-Searched Grandmother At A Time

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

I sleep much better when the room is cold. So, I usually keep the heating vents in the bedroom closed and never worry about putting in the storm windows. This morning, though, when I woke up I could tell it was colder than it should have been. When I left the cold bedroom the rest of the house wasnt nearly as warm as it should have been. Hmmmm. Checked the thermostat. “REP BATT”. Ok, batteries went out in the programmable thermostat. Swapped em out. “REP BATT”. Okay, now it isnt funny any more. Removed the unit from the wall, checked the contacts, double checked the operating instructions, checked for a reset switch.

“REP BATT”

*sigh* Ok, I guess I need to go pick up and install a new one. Then I noticed that one of the batteries I just put in has some dirt/grime on it. Hmmm. Maybe I just installed equally fail batteries? Trot down to the bunker and crack open a 36-pack of Duracells. Swap ‘em out.

“57* HEAT ON”

Much better. 57 degrees in the house. Coolish, but not critical.

Which, of course, got me to thinking what the scenario would have been had this been a more serious failure. After all, while I can tolerate the cold fairly well by hiding under a couple down comforters my water pipes would prefer to be kept above 32 degrees. Fortunately, we planned ahead. We have a couple electric space heaters, a small propane heater (w/ a goodly amount of propane), and two kerosene heaters with about 60 gallons of kero. Won’t keep the house at greenhouse temperatures but it’ll easily keep the overall house in the 60’s and can put one or two rooms into the 80’s if needed. (Although, honestly, 63-65 is where Im most comfortable and thats where I usually keep the thermostat in the winter.) I once rented a small bungalow that had, as its sole source of a heat, a gas space heater in the living room. all the other rooms were unheated. I remember throwing the covers back in the morning and seeing steam rise. That, mi amigos, is cold.

Between the propane space heater and the kerosene heaters we’d be able to keep one room as a ’safe room’ for warmth. The rest of the house would get bloody cold, and we’d have to drain the piped to keep them from freezing, but we wouldnt be freezing to death in our house like some folks have out in the plains states during monumental blizzards. Heck, at this point if the power went out for a few days I’d just throw the dog on the bed, put both down comforters and a couple wool blankets on top and just sleep through it. I could use the sleep.

So..the point of todays post…if youre heat went out today, and its 5 degrees out, and it looks like your not gonna get the heat back on until Monday, are you prepared to heat your house in another way to a point where your pipes dont burst and you dont freeze to death? Extra bonus points if you can do it without giving yourself CO poisoning (get a carbon monoxide detector [or three] if youre gonna play with propane/kero heating…cheap insurance.)

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

Frak! According to the Wikipedia entry for MGM, their bankruptcy has put the Red Dawn remake on the shelf.

MGM’s crisis has affected the production and release of its upcoming films. As a result of the sale, EON Productions’ Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli announced that production of a proposed 23rd James Bond film has been suspended “indefinitely”.[126] MGM has also shelved its remake of Red Dawn, as the studio has “no money to really finish the film, much less pay for a release”.[127] Other projects share the same situation; The Matarese Circle (based on Robert Ludlum’s novel, under the direction of David Cronenberg and contemplatively starring Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise), and the expected reboots to the RoboCop franchise, by screenwriter David Self and film director Darren Aronofsky and The Three Stooges franchise.[128]

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

I recently started using the internet at the shop again after a lull of several years. This means that my bookmarks are quite dated but as I was going through them I thought that, although many of them have been shared here before, that I would repost a few of them for those who have come in late.

This one is easily one of my favorites on food storage. I am especially enamored with the recipe section.

Some very nice sights to spruce up your milspec rifle.

A fix for the amazingly ugly, stupid and redundant crossbolt safety on the Marlin rifles.

The manual, in HTML and PDF, for those of you using the ALICE pack.

A source for ‘one-serving’ and ‘travel size’ products for your bug-out kits or what have you. Very handy for putting kits together.

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

BioWeapon Mk. I is experiencing snow for the first time in his short, fuzzy little life. He is…not sure what to make of it. It should be highly entertaining when we have 8″ or so fo the stuff on the ground.

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

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

The zombies are loose and getting more numerous.

Me, the missus and BioWeapon Mk. I are in the truck returning to the house. As we pull up at the curb I notice there is a bicycle, with a rake and some leaf bags attached to it, parked in the middle of the sidewalk in front of my neighbors house. Simple reasoning says that theres probably someone going door-to-door offering to rake leaves. Makes sense, given the evidence at hand, right? And I comment to the missus “I wonder where he is?”. And that shoulda been the red flag right there. Instead, I dismissed it, dropped of the missus and the Mk. I and headed on my way. As the missus approaches the back steps to the house a scruffy and rather homeless individual exits my house. My house.

Now, some quick backstory. The house I live in has an upstairs apartment and a downstairs apartment. Both of them share a hallway at the back of the house. You enter the back door of the house and you are confronted with a locked door for the downstairs apartment or a set of stairs that lead to a locked door for the upstairs apartment. End backstory.

The missus asks the fella what he’s doing there. (Keep in mind she knows the right questions to ask, and in what order, as she’s had this conversation many times with similar creatures in her earlier days on patrol.) He says he;s there to visit his friend. Whats the name of your friend, she asks. I dont know, he replies. You can see how this is going, right? He makes some lame excuse like “Lady, Im just trying to make a few bucks.” She tells him to beat feet and he leaves. She calls 911 and has a cop come out to find this guy and check him out.

Legitimate leaf-raking guy? Maybe? Homeless guy trying doorknobs at random hoping to get lucky? More likely.

Here’s the part that really pisses me off. (Other than my anger at myself for not going with my first instincts and checking out the house when I was wondering where the bicycle’s owner was.) Apparently, that back hallway or foyer is a common or public area and this guy being in there isnt necessarily trespassing or unlawful entry or anything else illegal that would give me the legal (if not moral) right to throw him down the stairs and out to the curb. Which is, of course, pretty much where things would have gone once the “Who is your friend? I dont know” exchange had confirmed that this guy had absolutely no business being there.

Lately, in the wee hours of the morning, when I have been taking the Mk. I for a walk, we’ll see some drunk or other useless waste of skin staggering down the street and I’ll comment to the dog “Ah, the things you see when you dont have a gun.” (Because, really, for the five or ten minutes we’re out standing in front of the house I dont feel like stuffing a Glock into my sweatpants [not that theyd support the weight of the Glock anyway]) But, as the missus pointed out, as the economy sours and things get tougher we should probably expect more zombie invasions and more security threats.

For those of you who might be curious, yeah we were both armed for this episode. She had her KelTec .32 and I had my G19 (and, on a rare day for me, a handful of spare magazines in an offside pouch.) However, neither Drastic Plastic made an appearance. The Bioweapon, by the way, was not terribly useful. Although the zombie asked if the dog was going to bite him the dog didnt do anything threatening other than express a desire to go over and lick him. The missus defends the dogs inaction by saying he hasnt been trained yet for the whole bark-n-lunge thing. I feel he should have instinctually sensed the vibe of the moment and gone into ‘defend the pack’ mode. Clearly, the training timetable may need to be adjusted.

The takeaways for this whole episode are:
Trust your instincts. If it looks suspicious, check it out.
Being armed is always handy.
I need to replace the back door of the house with something that locks securely.

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

Missile? Contrail? Who knows? Certainly theres going to be plenty of people who are not satisfied no matter what the explanation. If it was someone launching a missle off the coast of California to make a point they dont seem to have done a terribly good job. Even the DPRK, with its Flintstone-technology missile program, can manage to lob a rocket over Japan in a manner that leaves no doubt what it is, where it came from and who pulled the trigger on it.

Regardless, my interest in the event has waned. If it was a missile, it was harmless. If it wasnt a missile, who cares?
=-=-=-=-=-=
I recently ponied up for internet service at my shop. I havent had internet in the shop for several years now, just couldnt justify the expense. So when I started up the web browser all my links were from 2006 or so. Many of them were still good, most of the blogs I read were still there, so it was fun to catch up on stuff I hadnt been reading for quite a while. In doing so, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am probably the most optimistic (which may or may not translate into ‘most levelheaded/pragmatic’) survivalist out there.

How so? Well..I really dont believe the likelihood is very high of:

• Comets/asteroids hitting the earth and wiping us all out
• The Yellowstone supervolcano going off in my lifetime to the point that the PNW is turned into moonscape
• UN/Chinese troops invading
• Peak Oil (or Peak Rare Earths, or Peak Food, or Peak Freshwater)
• H1N1/T-Virus/Captain Trips or any other disease wiping out 90% of the population
• Buddha/Vishnu/Mohammed/Jesus/Xenu/The Easter Bunny ‘coming back’ and heralding the end of the world
• Armed nationwide uprising
• Rogue ex-Soviet madmen launching missiles
• Anything that reduces us to the standard of living, on a nationwide or planetwide scale, that resembles something from Mad Max

Maybe I’m wrong about those, but I dont think so. So what do I think is more likely? Hmmm.

• Economic issues on a global scale
• Terrorist events
• Incremental socialism/communism
• Localized disasters (earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, etc)

Im sure Im missing a few, but nothing that drops us into living a life like something out of Threads..at least not on a nationwide scale. Yeah, the Yellowstone supervolcano could go off tomorrow and put most of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming into a low earth orbit….but Id say the odds of it happening in my lifetime are far, far lower than the odds of, say, the economy limping along for another couple years of stagflation.

Of course, if the guys who think the Trilateral Bilderberger Illuminati Rothschild Lumber Cartel are coming are correct I’m going to look pretty foolish but I’d say the odds are good it’ll be Hurricane Hillary causing the lights to go out before it’s President Hillary causing it.

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

Watched the second episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ yesterday. If youre late to the party, its “Jericho” with zombies. Happily, like Jericho, Lennie James (“Hawkins”) is in it. Poor guy is gonna get typecast as the new Charlton Heston. (“If its the future and its bad, Charlton Heston is there!” [Soylent Green, Omega Man, Apes, etc])

What sets the series apart from other zombie themes is that, thus far, it hasnt become the gunfest many of us would think the apocalypse would be. It’s realistic in that you get a handful of surviviors, maybe five or six, and they have two handguns between them all. No Burt Gummer types running around (yet). I would not be surprised if the viewing demographic for “Dead” doesnt mimic the one for “Jericho”. Because, really, who can resist a post-apocalyptic series? Theyre just so damn entertaining.

As I am told, “Walking Dead” is based on a graphic novel so theres a bit of fan service and the material tries to follow the books…but at some point that source material will peter out and it’ll be uncharted territory.

As always, zombie invasions are excellent ’safe’ metaphors for planning for the apocalypse. (Even the guys in Afghanistan, when theyre bored, make up plans to defend their bases from zombies) Zombie Squad, of course, is the prime example of taking anti-zombie activities into real world actions. Interestingly enough, locally we have our own branch of zombie eliminators who are in the business of making sure your headchopper is a little more uptown than a WalMart $12.99 machete. ( I rather like their Para Bellum model.)

Of course, no one actually comes back from the dead and turns normal humans into followers (well, not in about 2000 years, anyway, according to some folks) but the useful thing about shows like these isnt so much the one-man-versus-the-hordes (although that is always entertaining) but rather that it gives you a chance to envision likely real-world infrastructure failures and how to work around them. (Fuel acquisition, for example, is the same regardless of whether its zombies stopping the deliveries or a hurricane…an empty gas tank is an empty gas tank.)

Hunt around a bit and you can find “Dead” on line for viewing. I’ve found it to be fun and about as ‘realistic’ as you could expect given the subject matter.