Ah, the nostalgia. There really were people who drained their 401k’s and bought cinder block houses in the middle of the desert to ride it all out. If you were a journalist of any stripe back then, you were finding the most freaked out people you could find and putting them on camera to talk about the ‘extremes’ that they were going through to prepare.
Good times, good times. That was twenty years ago this Tuesday. My how time flies. The most interesting thing to come out of it all? John Titor. Well, that and some really interesting garage sales for the next few years. That Y2k legacy of garage sales still rears its head once in a while.
If you’ve spent any time as a survivalist, you know that the Swiss are the closest thing to a country that has institutionalized preparedness (the Israelis probably get runner-up). Their ‘secret’ bunkers that litter the countryside are famous…as was their mandate about new home construction including shelter space. Add into the mix the long-standing (though that may be changing) access to military arms for its citizenry and you have a recipe for nation that could be said to have made preparedness a national platform.
And…apparently….coffee was part of that preparedness plan.
In just about every classic piece of survivalist fiction (“Alas Babylon” springs to mind) there is always a little section about how the lack of coffee is greatly lamented by survivors (with cigarettes and alcohol coming in a close second). The Swiss, apparently, hedged their bets and stockpiled some java to get everyone started when they wake up in the morning.
I don’t drink coffee, but I do keep some freeze dried coffee around. I am told by aficionados that although freeze dried coffee is regarded rather poorly, it is magnitudes of order better than no coffee at all.
My own personal addiction is CocaCola. I can go without if I have to, but I won’t be happy about it. I find that my cravings for the sugar and caffeine can be met with long-term-storage-friendly drink mixes such as powdered ice tea mix. However, for the folks that smoke or have a less-than-healthy relationship with alcohol, well, I don’t envy them.
Part of me is a bit disappointed that the Swiss are slowly dismantling the policies and practices that made them a beacon of preparedness. For a while they were a great example of ‘civil defense’ to point to when discussing national policies on the subject.
But, in the end, the only person responsible for your safety and security is you. It’s nice when governments make it easier with things like tax breaks, flexible building codes, and free ammo, but you always need to operate as if it’s going to be just whatever you can do for yourself… which is often how it actually goes.
I like how “…will get you killed.” is the punchline to every disagreed upon evaluation of a piece of gear…”that [AK/Baofong/Sleeping bag/knife/gas can] will get you killed”. That’s pretty much darn near becoming a trope.
The bit about the lack of AR ubiquity has a bit of truth to it. Back then it was pretty much an AR or AK world with the occasional Mini-14 or HK thrown in just to keep the diversity thing going. But if you had an AR it wasn’t nearly the exercise in ballistic Lego that it is now. Maybe you changed the sling around and found a carry-handle-mounted scope. Other than that, it was a stock A2 or CAR. So, yeah, that changed.
I wonder sometimes whatever happened to those people I saw on the news with the desert scrubland retreats that they bought and cavernous basements of 5-gallon buckets. Did they follow through and keep the lifestyle? Or did they pack it all up, ship it to Goodwill, and move on to a different cause célèbre?
I will say, my thinking has shifted a tiny bit since then. While it’s strongly about being prepared, there is a larger note of resiliency. I’ve come to realize, maybe a bit late, that the small End Of The Worlds will happen far more frequently and often than the big End Of The Worlds. Those small EOTW’s look like job layoffs, house fires, illnesses, car problems, etc, etc. And while five-gallon buckets of wheat will come in handy in Mad Max-ville, they aren’t going to do much to get a transmission repaired next week. So…smart spending, smart saving, smart lifestyle….and underneath all of that, the constant and steady incremental activity of getting things more prepared, more resilient, and more resistant to ‘problems’.
Anyway, its an interesting little article and, for those of us old enough to remember, a fun little poke at an interesting time in our shared collective survivalist past.
I am in no way a sports guy, so for me to link to an article from ESPN must be an indication that there is something interesting going o. And, indeed, there is…
The TL;DR version is this: even though chess is the least apparently physically taxing sport since competitive napping, the studies show that the stress, mental load, and related stresses cause your body to lose weight the same as if you were engaged in heavy sports.
What this means for survivalists is that the people who stress about long-term food being loaded with fat, salt, and calories that you don’t need when all you’re doing is sitting in a fallout shelter waiting for the rads to go down are missing a point. And in a crisis, the severe stress and mental taxation that you will be subject to will take a toll on yourbody even if you’re just sitting around a battery radio in the dark as the city crumbles around you.
Read the article and substitute ‘chess’ for ‘disasters’ and you’ll see how this affects you and I.
Grandmasterssurvivalists in competitiondisasters are subjected to a constant torrent of mental stress. That stress, in turn, causes their heart rates to increase, which, in turn, forces their bodies to produce more energy to, in turn, produce more oxygen. It is, according to Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and Philip Cryer, a metabolism expert at the school, a vicious, destructive cycle.
Meanwhile, playerssurvivalists also eat less during tournamentsdisasters, simply because they don’t have the time or the appetite. “The simple explanation is when they’re thinking about chess disasters, they’re not thinking about food,” says Ewan C. McNay, assistant professor of psychology in the behavioral neuroscience program at the University of Albany.
Stress also leads to altered — and disturbed — sleep patterns, which in turn cause more fatigue — and can lead to more weight loss. A brain operating on less sleep, even by just one hour, Kasimdzhanov notes, requires more energy to stay awake during the chess game. Some grandmasterssurvivalists report dreaming about chessdisasters, agonizing over what they could have done differently for hours in their sleep, and waking up exhausted.
Sound familiar?
Continue reading the article and read what these people do to maintain mental acuity under these conditions of heightened stress. Big exam coming up? Strategy session with your department chairs? Making long-range plans for your familys survival? You’ll need your brain in peak performance so you might want to read what these guys do to their diets, exercise patterns, the way they breathe, and even the way they sit in order to maximize brainpower for “the ultimate test of cerebral fitness.”
I’ve noticed that when I need stone-cold clear-headed maximum-brainpower I get best results if I exercise to get the blood flowing and don’t eat for several hours beforehand. The ability to think clearly and efficiently is probably the most useful talent for someone who plans on making their way through the crapstorm that life tends to hurl at us once in a while. Optimizing your body to allow you to ‘think better’ may be one of the better tricks you can have up your sleeve.
First of all, England is a nation of cucks who have gone from ruling an empire that was 1/4 of the planet to ruling an island the size of Michigan. Their opinions on anything ‘Murican really don’t matter. But….
I am flummoxed when some self-righteous moron, when told of someone stockpiling food or somesuch, loudly proclaims “I won’t live my life in fear!” Clearly, they don’t realize how stupid that sentence is. Let’s examine it:
They have homeowners insurance because they are scared of their house burning down
They have auto insurance because they are scared of being in an accident
They have health insurance because they are scared of getting sick
They have life insurance because they are scared of dying
They have retirement plans because they are scared of being old and poor
They have pepper spray on their keychain because they are scared of being mugged
So, really, they are already living a life of fear. However, if you point that out to them they will declare “That’s not living in fear! Thats taking reasonable precautions! Thats just commonsense!”
And they will never realize the irony of that statement.
So, you and I, in our food-laden, heavily-armed, well-fueled, economically-prepared homes are always going to be seen as the wierdos…right up until the quake happens, the riots start, the tornadoes hit, or the economy splatters…..then we’re going to be everyone’s brand-new best friend. (And, holy crap, are the unprepared in for a surprise when it turns out that the people they pointed at and made fun of turn out to not be terribly enthused about sharing their food and have the resources to make that “No” stick.)
Preparedness is not a uniquely American thing…to Europeans I’m sure it looks that way because preparedness is about the individual taking responsibility for themselves. And in pretty much every country that sort of individualistic character trait has been stamped out in favor of various forms of IngSoc-style thinking. But the desire to trake care of ones self and ones own is a rather universal trait, it’s just that we Americans aren’t terribly embarrassed about it and don’t really feel the need to apologize for it. At least, I don’t.
The next idiot that has to get hauled out of the woods horizontally because he blindly trusted his GPS, or worse, his celphone, will not be the last. Natural selection in action. There’s plenty of good books on the subject, but here’s some basics.
A fascinating article about someone who, admittedly a ‘hard luck case’, moves to ‘survivalist country’ and winds up in the sort of situation that has no good resolution.
The takeaway here, as I see it, is that while we like the idea of a place out in the middle of nowhere, that middle of nowhere also appeals to another subset of people that we may not particularly want to share oxygen with. In short, the ‘wide open spaces’ and ‘lack of oversight’ that make a place appealing to you and I also appeal to some less savory types who might be your neighbors. And, sometimes, it can turn ugly in a big way.
An interesting article about disease-laden Africa and how all the plagues and pestilence in any part of the world is just one Boeing away from becoming our problem.
Zombie are the new normal in EOTW fiction, but before then the big science fiction threat was some sort of superflu (“The Stand”, anyone?)
We’re kinda seeing it now in NYC with their measles episode. Heck, right here in my college town we’re having an outbreak of whooping cough. Not to get anyone’s tinfoil hat into a twist, but that whole “I don’t need to vaccinate my kid if everyone else is vaccinated” doesn’t seem to be working very well.
It’s tough to avoid people, but I suppose if you live out in the desert where you can go quite a while between human contact you might wind up missing the whole pandemic. Or you might die alone drowning in your own fluid-filled lungs. :::shrug:::
The folks at Fatherland Homeland security used to tell us to keep duct tape and plastic sheeting around for this sort of thing. Remember that? (And remember that awesome color-coded alert system they introduced?)
I suppose the only thing you can really do to mitigate your chances of being a victim of some pandemic is avoid people, be prepared to stay indoors for a length of time, and bleach/sterilize/sanitize the hell out of everything. I know that I could lock the doors and not leave my house for a couple months. Thats no guarantee against catching Captain Trips but it seems that your chances of catching something from someone is greatly reduced when you avoid all contact with those someones.
The article linked above is pretty interesting. It just reinforces that the African continent is well and truly screwed.
A very interesting video from Ian McCollum (aka ‘Gun Jesus’) detailing the time a trip to the range put a chunk of shrapnel in his chest.
There’s a lot in here about the importance of medical training and equipment when you spend a bunch of time out in the desert shooting hundred year old machine guns. However, whats really interesting is something that is sort of oblique to the main issue – how do you direct help to your location when you’re “in the middle of nowhere”?
The range I shoot at is an established shooting range in the sense that if you called 911 and said “Im at the So-N-So Range” they would know where that is and how to get there. But, what about when you go off the beaten path? At that point, you’re going to have to try and meet folks halfway by getting your bleeding butt to some sort of common rally point that the medics actually can find.
While I try to maintain a pretty decent degree of situational awareness I am surprised to say that when I go hunting I never take a moment to notice what mile marker I’m parking at when I disembark and make my way into the timber. It occurs to me that I need to take note of the sort of information that would come in handy if I had to call for assistance if I got hurt out in the sticks. It would be nice to be able to tell the dispatcher “Yeah, its along Highway 200, just after mile marker 27 theres a logging road heading east. Im parked four miles up that road.”
Of course, I also usually carry a couple signalling devices (flare/smoke) so that “close” becomes “close enough”.
It’s always a good idea to have an exit strategy and to ‘begin with the end in mind’. Which means when heading out into the sticks I need to start thinking about “what if”. Obviously I carry a certain amount of gear in case things go sideways, but I need to start being more cognizant of where I am and how I would direct others to that location. While I know how to use UTM coords, I wonder if the 911 people would have a clue.
Regardless, an interesting video to watch and a reminder that shooting guns can sometimes turn dangerous and therefore it’s always a good idea to have some gear (and training) to stay on top of things in case someone gets a hole punched in them.
Speaking of Gun Jesus, have you guys seen his Kickstarter? The man wrote a book that he hoped might garner $25,000 in sales. He failed to take into account his internet notoriety and he leaped past the $25,000 to almost $270,000…and thats with three weeks still left on the kickstarter.
I’ve made no secret that I rather like the P95, but I like it for one very simple reason: for about $200 it’s the best gun you can buy. Thats not to say its the best gun out there, or that its even a ‘very good’ gun. Rather it means that if you have $200 in your pocket, unless you get extraordinarily lucky, the Ruger P95 will be the best gun you can afford.
But…there’s some other things to think about.
On the police trade-in market these days there are tons of Glock and S&W .40 caliber pistols. For about $250 you can have a S&W M&P or a Glock 22/23. And, honestly, both of those guns are better than the P95.
Why don’t I get a stack of those pistols if theyre better than the P95 and only a few bucks more? Well, first off, I already filled my need for some cheap disposable pistols…I already have a dozen of the P-series so there’s really nothing to be gained by picking up the other ones. Additionally, I’m not a .40 guy. I prefer the 9mm.
However, if you’re looking for something that is ‘affordable’ and far better than a HiPoint, Bersa, or Taurus, head over to Kings and check the used pistols. Or, you can cruise Gunbroker and try your luck at scoring some $200 P95’s. They don’t usually go that cheap, but there’s always plenty to bid on and if you bid often enough you’ll get one at that price.
Guns like these are not really my first choice for carrying around everyday (although you could), but rather they are ‘loaners’ or ‘expendable’ handguns. Guns that you don’t mind loaning or giving to a friend who needs a gun, that you can leave in a truck or cabin and not be heartbroken if it gets stolen, or that you can abuse by getting wet and banged up as you rough-n-tumble your way through some disaster. They are like Bic lighters…they work quite reliably but they are basically disposable and cheap enough that you can have several.
I’ve ordered up a few of the police trade-in M&Ps for a friend and I have to say, I really like the gun. We got a .45 ACP version with three magazines for, I believe, $270 which is a smoking deal for a .45 with spare mags. What amazed me was how narrow and comfortable the grip was for that double stack mag. Very impressive.
Anyway, I was perusing YouTube and saw that video and thought I’d pass it along since I’ve mentioned my penchant for cheap, uber-stout handguns more than a few times.
