Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Well, the local Kmart closes for good this weekend. I figured I’d head over there and check to see if there was anything left I couldn’t live without. As it turns out, whatever was left was knocked down to 50-60% off, but the things I was after..first aid supplies…were long gone and all that remained were made-in-China medical supplies that I was in no way going to acquire.

I figured that the good stuff would be gone before this point so Im glad I stocked up when it was 37% off.

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As some folks pointed out to me, not all the digital camo was an uninspired flop. Apparently the Army digital camo is the one just about everyone agrees doesnt quite hold water. The other branches’ patterns seem to be meeting with different results.

For those of you who have an interest in camo and it’s development around the world, here’s a link to a resource you might like: kamouflage.net

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QE3? The .gov is promising to spend $40 billion a month to by mortgage-backed securities in order to decrease unemployment. Did I read that right? I’m no economist but I’m having a tough time seeing the relationship between underperforming mortgage-backed securities and unemployment. Are jobs somehow not being created because banks and other institutions are holding a security that is underperformng? I’m not sure exactly how that works. As I see it, the only way banks affect unemployment is by affecting the availability of capital for use by businesses. Since the Fed has kept interests rates so low that banks can borrow money at virtually no cost, how can any bank not have the capital to provide to businesses to create jobs?

And while I may not understand where the correlation is between mortgage-backed securities and unemployment, I can understand that .gov is going to be getting that $40 billion to spend every month from…where? Oh, thats right….they have a printing press.

I wonder if this explains gold and silvers interesting price changes as of late.

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

You never read about cats doing this sort of thing…….

Loyal dog ran away from home to find his dead master’s grave – and has stayed by its side for six years

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

You guys remember this post about charging the smartphone off the solar panel using the USB battery as a regulator of sorts? So that was about two weeks ago and I’ve been charging the phone that way exclusively since then. No problems, no hiccups, and no lack of charge. So, based on my two weeks of charging the phone this way, I say that this is indeed a viable method of keeping the phone going in a situation where there might not be another method of charging available. Of course, this is summer when sunlight is plentiful. We’ll have to run this little experiment again around January when it’s cold and overcast all the time. But..so far..seems to work just fine.

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I was chitchatting with someone the other day and the conversation turned to preparedness, which isnt that surprising, but then we went deeper into what flavor of apocalypse was this person preparing against i found that his concerns mirror mine pretty closely. Me, I’m not the kinda guy who buys the notion that we’re all gonna be shooting at UN troops marching down main street while dying of Bird Flu as comets and asteroids slam into the planet exacerbating a pole shift and creating Peak Oil as the rapture occurs. I’m more of a ‘gradual decline into Third World / Soviet-era lifestyle’..you know – lines for toilet paper, rolling brownouts, chronic unemployment, understocked stores, etc, etc….sort of a nationwide Detroit. (Hmm..I may have to start using ‘Detroit’ as a verb and an adjective. “Hey, did you see that earthquake Detroited Haiti?” or “It’s been seven years since Katrina and parts of New Orleans are still Detroity”.) Anyway, the discussion reinforced that I officially know no one locally who is not, in some way or another, gearing up against the uncertain future…this includes friends, customers, police, vendors, and pretty much anyone I say more than ten words to on a normal basis.

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Went out shooting the other day and I’ve been playing with the Uzi since I mounted the vertical foregrip and I gotta say it makes a huge difference. It’s a heavy gun, and 9mm isn’t exactly a recoil powerhouse, so bringing the thing up to the shoulder and doing fast double taps at multiple targets is easy. Which reminds me, I need to get one of those BattleComp muzzle devices on the AR and see how easy the same courses of fire are in terms of fast target-to-target hits. As I said, my interpretation of the apocalypse doesn’t really anticipate running gun battles and multiple-target scenarios but…if I’m wrong..well…better to be prepared on all fronts, no?

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Really? Overthrow the .gov? Couldn’t they at least wait until after November to see how it shook out?

LUDOWICI, Ga. (AP) — Four Army soldiers based in southeast Georgia killed a former comrade and his girlfriend to protect an anarchist militia group they formed that stockpiled assault weapons and plotted a range of anti-government attacks, prosecutors told a judge Monday.

Prosecutors in rural Long County, near the sprawling Army post Fort Stewart, said the militia group composed of active duty and former U.S. military members spent at least $87,000 buying guns and bomb components and was serious enough to kill two people — former soldier Michael Roark and his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany York — by shooting them in the woods last December in order to keep its plans secret.

Well, they turned out to be more serious than 99% of the self-appointed ‘militia’s out there…they actually killed someone.

You know, I live in the heart of ‘anti-government extremist’ country. I’ve met the guys at the Militia Of Montana, I’ve met Randy Weaver, and I’ve met a lot of people who have the most fascinating basements and garages you will ever see, and I’ve read the literature, seen the movies and heard the speeches. My conclusion? These guys were not going to achieve their goals with $87,000 worth of ‘assault rifles’ and training camp. They would have had a better chance, several orders of magnitude better, if they had taken that $87k and bought themselves an election. Pick a personable, likeable, photogenic, squeaky clean guy who is on the same wavelength as they are and run him for political office. Then, once he’s in, work on getting him higher and higher up the food chain. It’s low risk, high reward.

Now I’m not saying you can’t change the direction of a national government through attrition…most countries in Africa hold their elections to the sound of gunfire and screaming…but when you get into First World countries the whole ‘we are here to liberate this country in the name of the people…’ nonsense just won’t fly. It’s hard finding a hundred guys who believe in something so strongly that they’ll give up everything they’ve built, including their lives, to storm the halls of power at gunpoint. But you can easily find a hundred thousand people who will fork over ten bucks to achieve a similar end result (the end result being change of government). Even way back during the American Revolution, if you look closely, you’ll see that money was a big, big part of making it a success.

I think you’re far more likely to achieve your political aims through greenbacks rather than black rifles, but thats’s just me. Sure, maybe someday it’ll come to that…but I doubt it very highly.

And, as the saying goes, ‘three can keep a secret if two of them is dead’. Forming your own super-secret armed ‘committe of freedom’ is just not going to work in an age when no one can keep their mouth shut. Oh, you may think to yourself “Ha, you’re wrong! Me and my cadre have been active for several years and we’ve never had a problem!” Fair enough. But when you and your buddies move on to actually, you know, doing stuff and one of you gets caught…well, I’m pretty sure group cohesiveness will plummet as everyone scrambles to be the first to take the deal the .gov will be offering to the first one to turn on his ‘comrades’.

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Here’s something a little interesting. Five guys stand out in the desert while a 2KT nuclear bomb goes off 10,000 feet overhead.

Here’s what I find interesting – there is a tape recorder, and a movie camera, running throughout the test and it’s immediate aftermath. We know these guys are directly under the explosion. The explosion is approximately two miles overhead. Nuke goes off and…the cameras keep going, the tape recorder keeps going. I thought, according to all the hype of the last couple of years, that EMP would have knocked those devices out. What gives? Not a big enough yield?

(Sidenote: the guys in the test apparently lived into their late sixties and mid-eighties.)

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Stopped by to visit with a fella the other day and saw a little project of his sitting on his workbench. He had a light fixture hooked up to a 12v battery, just sitting there. I asked him what he was doing. He said that he’d found a place selling 12v bulbs that worked in regular light bulb sockets, so he was seeing how long a charged battery would run the light. As he went about his day he would make a note on the hang tag that was attached to the light noting the time and how much time had elapsed. I commented that I really liked his approach but that it might be better served with an LED light to increase run time, and a light meter so he could monitor the actual decrease of light as time went by. He said he didn’t like the light LED bulbs gave off so he was sticking with the incandescent (which, I gotta say, would not be my first choice if Im counting on running on battery power) and that while I was probably right about getting a metric using a light meter, he just went with what his eyeballs told him was ‘usable light’.

Gotta admire someone that goes past the theory and grabs at a little empirical data for their own edification. I need to do more stuff like that.