Merciful Crom….I knew the Middle Ages weren’t a walk in the park but, geez…
If the world really turns into a Stirling or Kunstler novel it may actually come to pulling arrows out of people. How did they do such things in years gone by? With an interesting array of horrific techniques:
Egads that looks horrible. And the guy leading the video looks more than a little creepily at home in this project. Someone go check that guys basement.
Realistically, I think that if anyone gets shot with a broadhead hunting arrow these days the odds are pretty good its gonna just punch right through. I’ve known more than a few elk hunters who tell me their arrows punch through both sides of an elk. Factor in a modern crossbow and, unless the point lodges in a bone, the bolt is just gonna whistle through.
This is an interesing video. It discusses how during WW2 ice cream played a big part in troop morale and he efforts by the military, esp in the far-flung hot Pacific regions, to provide ice cream to the troops.
What makes this interesting is that the military ice cream is made from shelf-stable powdered ingredients…most notable eggs and milk. Now, I loves me some ice cream and the notion of not having to ride out the apocalypse without ice cream has an attraction. That said…..:
Obviously you’re going to need a particular amount of electricity to cool things in your ice cream maker, but often times it’s a lot easier to produce electricity than it is to produce milk and eggs. And I rather like the idea that, once you have the basic ingredients in long-term form, you can whip up some homemade ice cream whenever you want.
And befoe anyone mentions Mountain House’s freeze-died ice cream…it’s not that great. I’ve had it before and its just a bit gummy.
I absolutely detest rap music, but this future perpetual-tax-audit-recipient does a nice job of laying out the case against Biden. If you’re offended by profanity, well…you need to grow up.
The poignant part was him pointing out that Biden’s policies armed the Taliban as he’s trying to disarm his own citizens.
I fully recognize that there have been , since WW2, advancements in design, materials, and manufacturing process. It is not unreasonable to believe that there would be a better designed, better made alternative to the NATO-style (or Euro-style) fuel cans. Certainly there are devotees of the Scepter cans, and I’m sure they have their strengths, but I’ve been using the metal NATO-style cans for 20+ years and I have a difficult time thinking that a plastic can, even a super heavy-duty one, like the Scepter is going to be as leak-proof and as durable.
These last few posts have been about fuel because, well, I’ve got it on the brain since I watched it jump almost twenty cents in a day. And watched what it did to my monthly fuel budget. (Man, I could sure go for some $2 gas and some mean tweets right now.)
Anyway, although I’ve posted about history of these types of cans before, I thought this video might be interesting for those of you out there who weren’t aware of the interesting history of these gems.
There has always been a need for compact forms of food that you could stuff in a pack for times when you were cut off from resupply and had to make do with only what you had on you, or what you could find locally. The Germans apparently approached this with erbswurst…a compressed ration of pea meal and other things that, when dissolved in a canteen cup full of hot water, allowed the user to make a soup. Personally, it seems rather unappealing to me but I suppose if your stuck in Stalingrad watching your comrades eat dead horses, it might not seem too bad.
Today, of course, we have MRE’s, freezedrieds, and even simple off-the-shelf soup products that are leaps and bounds ahead of the technology that brought us erbswurst. But… it’s an interesting concept. If a person had access to on of those consumer-grade freeze driers you could make some pretty impressive fare. Here are a couple videos on the subject:
It’s not too hard to imagine the plethora of items found in a modern supermarket that might lend themselves to this sort of thing. The trick is to keep the main principles as the fore: compactness, longevity, and nutrition.
This was actually addressed in a product that came out of WW2 …MPF…a fascinating product with a fascinating backstory: A nalgene bottle full of that stuff would probably duplicate (or exceed) the nutritional value of erbswurst and be a tad more versatile. That MPF, by the way, can be replicated at home.
For running out the door on your way to the boogaloo, a bag of a few days worth of freeze drieds takes virtually no weight and very little space. The more hidebound might go with a few tins of meat and that sort of thing. But wandering around a supermarket sometime, with a careful eye, might reveal some interesting choices for the ‘iron rations’ to keep in your gear. But…the Germans did it first, apparently.
The video is ten years old, so the numbers have changed…upwards…but the reasoning still seems relatable.
Unless there is a bout of hyperinflation, or another World War, it’s going to be mathematically impossible to pay off the national debt. Now, whether or not any level of national debt is a good or bad thing is something to mull over. But what irks me is how, even at the municipal level, the answer is always ‘raise taxes’ and never ‘cut spending’.
If you remember the fast-zombie movie, 28 Days Later, there was a scene where the survivors find a supermarket and load up. One of the interesting things in the scene was that the irradiated produce held up much better than the non-irradiated. On a side note, irradiated produce is far more common in Europe than it is in the US because, it seems, we in the US have a knee-jerk reaction to the word ‘irradiated’. If you knew how much stuff in this country is sterilized through irradiation (esp. in the medical industry) I think you’dbe quite surprised.
Anyway, its a trope of apocalypse fiction that survivors either a) find supermarkets that are looted and beyond salvage or b) spared from looting and are treasure trove of unimaginable stores. Which raises an interesting question: if you had a supermarket all to yourself, how long would you be able to survive? Well, someone did the math:
I very much like the fact that they address the issue of food spoilage for the dairy and deli counters. But I think that if you hit the home canning aisle, and then the housewares aisle, you could at least get enough gear to water-bath can some of the produce. If they had a pressure canner on the rack in the home canning aisle you’d be freakin’ golden.
Realistically, I doubt getting locked inside a supermarket is an actual apocalypse thing. Even in post-apocalyptic fiction you’d have to do some pretty deus ex machina to contrive a logical reason for people to be locked in a supermarket (Stephen King’s “The Mist” not withstanding). More likely, you’d have survivors ‘own’ the supermarket and guard it as an extremely high-value resource…assuming they don’t start methodically taking the contents back to their stronghold.
But, if you were forced to stay in a supermarket, how long would you be able to keep from starving? TL;DR = 63 years.
I can’t think of any disaster that would preclude me from being able to otherwise source food for 63 years but…good to know that if I hit the local Safeway as the sole survivor of..whatever…I can cross ‘food’ off my list for the rest of my life.
Came across this video about the accuracy potential of the G3 clones and was pretty impressed. 500 yards with open sights is not a cakewalk under any circumstance.
The G3 platform has two things going for it: rugged, brute reliability and the complete lack of a gas system. What it has going against it is literally everything else. SO, why do I have so many of them? Well, the choices for a .308 ‘battle rifle’ are mighty limited – M1A, FAL, AR-10, and this thing. Yes, there’s all sorts of boutique and niche guns like a Galil or a Saiga but we’re talking about guns that are common enough that you can find them (and their logistics) fairly easy. I went with the G3 platform because mags were a buck each. Even used FAL mags were ten bucks, M1A mags (if you could find a reputable aftermarket maker) were twice that, and AR-10 mags weren’t standardized so it was anyone’s guess what your gun took.
If I had to do it all over again, now that Magpul makes AR-10 mags, I’d go with the AR-10 for it’s best-in-class ergonomics. Do I like it enough to sell my PTR’s? Nope. But I wouldn’t turn down a nice AR-10 if one came my way. And it’s nice to see that with the basic iron sights this thing will still ring the bell at 500 yards…at least, for that guy it did. But he shoots way more than I do.
I mean, technically there is nothing funny about this video. But still….
You try to rob a class full of people who are taking a concealed firearms course, and then you try to get stabby with the po-po. Is there anyone…I mean anyone…who cannot imagine what happens next.
Here’s the interesting part. There are people out there walking the streets who think that trying to rob a roomful of gun-carrying people while only armed with a screwdriver is a perfectly reasonable plan. That level of stupidity, coupled with the disregard for personal safety and .. you know…the law….makes this Darwin winner a very dangerous animal. His victim selection model did the rest.
Broadlu speaking, there’s only three channels I follow on YouTube – Gun Jesus, InrangeTV (a collaborative project with Gun Jesus and one of his buddies), and the questionably entertaining but usually informative Nutnfancy. Someone posted a comment with a link to this persons channel and I thought some of it was worth watching, and, frankly, gunbunnies and survivalbabes are always interesting….so, I added this one to my list.
I’m the most optimistic survivalist you’ll ever meet….I don’t foresee a mandatory-attendance-nationwide-impromptu-3-gun-match (aka Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo) actually taking place (although I do love the memes). But whatever you stockpile to give you an edge in the big igloo will, by extension, be pretty darn in handy in 90% of every other flavor of apocalypse. So…vidoes like these have some merit.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything in this video…or any video, actually. But there’s always some wheat mixed in with the chaff and watching chicks who are on the same wavelength as us is always fun.
