SURVIVAL FICTION
I have covered survival, non-fiction books before. Now let’s talk about fiction. My critics, who it seems have been multiplying like roaches in the dark, or at least one guy is making multiple comment entries ( although thankfully more legibly without the horrid spelling ), will of course say I never write about anything new, that I am worthless and that no one should read my drivel. Even when I save them $400 by presenting a alternate James Washer they still complain. So they’ll claim I’ve done this before, or complain about something else. I can’t win with some people. But this will be for the rest of you, the vast majority who read me everyday, who like what I have to say and who will soon PayPal me 10% of their gross every payday out of gratitude. As there is very little in the way of great survivalist fiction to talk about, I’ll also include some of my own fiction. No where comparable to the published books out there, but certainly better than what I’ve done before.
*
Lucifer’s Hammer is of course the classic, as far as I’m concerned. You had other books on nuclear war survival published previously, certainly. And maybe its just that this is the book that helped me get started down this slippery slope. Between Clayton’s Doomsday and Lucifer’s Hammer I was off and running as a young lad thinking about survival. I should actually hate those bastards for forcing me into channeling all my energy into this. My whole vision in life is focused on Bad Things Happening To Good People ( namely me ). Perhaps I like this book so much because it is a bigger picture type of book. A grander scale. Not just one guy and a postal uniform ( with a real sucky ending- I thought the movie was much better ). Not just a small town in Florida. LH had scope, from the mountains to the valley. Cannibals and Black Panther type gangs and Boy Scouts and rich, unprepared guys. The mad chemist making nerve gas. The politician getting ready early, ripped of in a recent asteroid movie. Of course this is subjective. You may think another book much better, my pick more in the line of a mass market pulp fiction thriller. Like all that crap, The Survivalist, the Raines series, the Deathlands, the six or so series I can’t even remember, the earthquake making an island out of California, or the guys traveling around in armored vehicles from cache to cache battling bad guys. I would have no problem at all with pulp fiction series if they were on cheap paper at a greatly reduced price. Not full paperback prices.
*
Another plus with LH is you can get it at any library. Or any used book store. They are everywhere. The second book, Dies The Fire, is a bit rare cheap. But it is also nearly thirty years newer. No one I know or have read likes the mystical witch/wiccan crap in this book. But the rest is a pure wonder. A bit like a how-to manual on low tech survival after society fails. The book is so good you don’t even care about the improbability of firearms failing. Don’t get me wrong, I would have preferred guns to swords and bows. More realistic, less fanciful. Put there is never the perfect survival fiction book out there, the one you would like to see printed. We all have our own burning questions we want answered, our own special views on life after doomsday. S.M Stirling seems to hate guns and love edged weapons all to pieces. Fine, we can’t have everything. Some of us never progressed past D&D. Not a criticism per se. Not everyone can share my interests. Not that anyone will. The only reason I ever went beyond my fantasy phase was that I burned out on it. But I think everyone should still buy a new copy of DTF. It is great enough, despite its few weaknesses that we want to encourage more of this kind of behavior by financially rewarding those that feed our need.
*
The third book I am especially enamored with is Faraday’s Orphans by N. Lee Wood. Kind of a sleeper, doesn’t get a lot of press. I loved it mainly for its unique view of harsh, raw, urban survival after a severe collapse. The fight for turf by gangs and the use of fresh human manure as the only fertilizer possible was disturbing but different. Well done for the most part. These are not the only great books out there. Just the ones I really liked. Hard core, realistic. Not juvenile junk mental masturbators. Which, as I’ve said, are okay except the obscene price for what you are getting. Classics such as Wolf And Iron are great. Just not in my top favorite list, being more “survival lite” as canned good foraging keeps most folks alive. Books that use that are a cop out in my opinion so rate lower.
*
Survival fiction serves two purposes. One, they give us continual motivation to prepare. Kind of, gee, it could get that bad, I’d better buy more ammo. When the spouse is threatening an expensive divorce if we turn the rec room into a safe room, when all the news is happy, joy, info-tainment, when all your friends ( well, honestly, your only friend, and he ain’t no prize ) are making fun of your preps, a good and scary end-of-the-world read keeps us on tract. Two, they are full of ideas you wouldn’t find otherwise. Sure, it’s a few nuggets amongst a lot of entertaining fluff, but it’s enough. It gets the sluggish pasty lazy grey matter in thinking mode.
*
The following is my weak attempt at survival fiction. I haven’t tried this for years, but had the hankering to try again. I know it is far from perfect. It is only a first draft. I myself don’t like the end of chapter one, and I’m uncertain of chapter two entirely. I don’t even know if I like the character in two. And I doubt I will continue it. It was more of a “ trying to find the style” exercise. I like character #1’s style of narrative. I make no claim for being good in the plot department. It was just something busting to get out ( at least the first half ). It uses harsh vulgarity, not toned down slightly as in my blog. And it is very politically incorrect. Take it for what it is worth. A few paragraphs below, the link for the entire thing is on my web site, www.bisonpress.com
*
The end of the world was actually rather fun, as long as you were part of the population that wasn’t killed. Suddenly you didn’t have to worry about paying your insurance premiums anymore. And there were no more fat chicks. If you could forget about freezing in the winter or having to walk everywhere you wanted to go it was actually a good trade off. Of course it was quite lucky that Randy had survived. He had of course been aware of civilizations vulnerability and had made reasonable precautions. He had several years worth of wheat stockpiled and a few guns along with a good supply of ammunition for them. He lived away from town. But life is nothing if not chaotic chance of the cosmic dice being thrown about in flagrant disregard to most peoples wishes and the day of the collapse almost saw Randy carved up and served for BBQ. Randy liked to think that he would have been served up with a lightly spiced sauce with freshly sautéed garlic but deep down had a sinking feeling that the bare assed savages would have just charred his flesh hurriedly and been eaten black on the outside and underdone close to the bone.
*
Well, granted, the first day of civilization collapsing would not have necessarily meant that the practice of cannibalism would have been instantly reintroduced. But it could have been. Most suburbanites had less than two meals to go before they were forced to take their bright and shiny new SUV’s down to the supermarket ( not of course the market at Wal-Mart- they were too good for such a plebian establishment ) deli for restocking purposes. A few might have been smart enough to realize there was going to be no more five gallon containers of pre-made potato salad rolling on down the Interstate to help feed their bloated balding carcasses. It might have been time to get on down with a long pork luau. In either case Randy was understandable overjoyed that he had not gotten eaten ( and not in a good way ).
*
Randy was sitting on the sun beaten slightly sagging porch attached to his equally weather assaulted travel trailer, minding his own damn business as usual. Randy had in the past usually gotten quite worked up about politics and had strong tendencies towards strong individual liberty. Of course as time went on and Randy got older and the majority of his countrymen willingly sold out their Constitutional rights for an illusion of financial wealth he got a bit cynical and really stopped caring so much. There is little one man can do against the tides. Unless he was behind a dike and could take his thumb out of his ass and stick it in the breech. And even then it was a losing battle since eventually the idiot behind the wall needs to go relieve himself and sure as hell nobody in their right mind is going to take a dump next to a sea dike out in plain sight of God and everybody because in the end nobody remembers him for saving the town from the ocean but for taking a crap out in the middle of a field. So eventually that dike was going to go no matter what.
*
That was one page. Get the whole twenty-five pages at www.bisonpress.com/fiction.html
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Friday, June 29, 2007
go north
GO NORTH YOUNG MAN
I have already covered why one would want to head west. Stopping short of California of course. I was born and raised in California, so I feel qualified to trash talk it at every opportunity. It is just like being an American citizen. The powers that be took a perfectly good country and screwed it up beyond recognition. California is the same way. A great place to live until everyone discovered it was a great place to live. Everyone was so enamored with the perfect weather they were willing to put up with higher taxes also. The list is long and tragic, so let’s just say I’m glad I escaped and I won’t ever go back. Of course, California hoards cashed in on taxpayer paid defense industry money, bought cheap houses, sold at inflated prices and then preceded to also move out of the state and pollute the rest of the west with their willingness to inflate the local real estate market and their desire to be ruled as they migrated en masse and voted to turn perfectly good Libertarian leaning areas into Fascist crapholes. Sum-bitchen Californians.
*
Any location in the west ( outside of California and some states that are so-so ) is preferable to the East, at least in one aspect. A lot less population. The West has no water, no potential to produce anything other than ore and ranches. The lack of non-irrigation farming will make it even more inhospitable after a collapse. But if you fear massive swelling ugly idiotic hoards of screaming hungry welfare mobs, the west is preferable. Now there is a good reason not only to move west, but to head north also. A hundred years ago, the ten biggest cities in the US were 500 miles from the Canadian border. Today, seven of the ten biggest are 500 miles from the Mexican border. The northeast is still largely overpopulated, even if its cities are reduced by half or so as all factories employing over ten people ( and those are illegals ) are moved over to China. But now perfectly good areas that were once sparsely populated are filling up with worthless oxygen wasting morons. West is good, just not too far south.
*
As if our legions of impressively unintelligent population wasn’t bad enough, now you need to factor in the impact from their actions. I mean, just having stupid people walking around stumbling over their own asses is bad enough, but then look at the stupid things they accomplish by acting in concert. Their cities are literally sinking beneath them as they draw out the water at a rate more in line with a rain forest than a desert. We are more than likely entering into a prolonged drought and the idiots are not only draining their water reserves down but they are fighting with other jurisdictions so as to steal water from far away. These are the kind of idiots that make guys in secret smoke filled rooms decide to engineer a plague to wipe out all the useless population so they’ll stop using disappearing resources. And judging from the actions of large numbers of our population, they are only wrong from a moral standpoint, not from a logistical one ( not saying the elite don’t ruin the whole thing for the rest of us, just that collectively the majority make a bigger impact ).
*
Then of course you need to worry about the border area turning into a freefire zone as drug runners and coyotes ( human smuggler type, not the animal type that actually provide a useful service ) become more aggressive as the politicians tie the hands of the understaffed Border Patrol. It is no longer about Stan the Stoner smuggling a bale of weed into the country or Carlos the Coyote bringing in migrant produce pickers. Now you have Tony Montana wannabes bringing in cocaine and protecting it with squad automatic machineguns. And the coyotes are smuggling in prostitute-slaves and are working for a gang or syndicate. Not to mention Arabs blending into the immigration wave and smuggling in backpack nuclear weapons. The KGB teams most likely arrive by plane with forged ID, but perhaps the Spetsnaz teams are still infiltrating in the southern door. If I was Putin and wanted to protect my petroleum wealth, not only would I keep my nukes updated but I would keep up the Soviet tradition of sleeper agents awaiting orders to sabotage. The Russians can get the job done cheaply, unlike the Arabs awash with petrol cash or the Americans who forgot frugal was even a word. Remember the pencil for the cosmonauts verses the million dollar upside down ink pen for the Americans?
*
Between the blossoming population in the southwest, the increasing crime on the border, the natural tendency of the region to experience historically prolonged drought periods, it is best to avoid the southern region adjacent to the border. The north is cold and will suck in the winter, but staying warm year round quickly loses its charm if you are surrounded by dangerous living conditions. Get out of paradise now. Wait too long and you will gleefully be turned back from the other surrounding areas with gunfire. I can’t wait, myself, when civilization collapses and it is going to be open season on any California license plate ( unless its occupants are cute ). Of course, I will also be enjoying open season on politicians, lawyers and bankers. If ammunition is a problem I will skip CEO’s. And don’t look at me funny. You should see how those idiots drive on this side of the border. Nine times out of ten, a car driving unsafe will turn out to have California plates. Maybe if we just blow up the Costco down here they will stop coming over from the lake to shop there. But seriously, you need to escape any area already experiencing these problems in “good times”. Imagine how much worse it is going to get.
END
www.bisonpress.com my stuff
I have already covered why one would want to head west. Stopping short of California of course. I was born and raised in California, so I feel qualified to trash talk it at every opportunity. It is just like being an American citizen. The powers that be took a perfectly good country and screwed it up beyond recognition. California is the same way. A great place to live until everyone discovered it was a great place to live. Everyone was so enamored with the perfect weather they were willing to put up with higher taxes also. The list is long and tragic, so let’s just say I’m glad I escaped and I won’t ever go back. Of course, California hoards cashed in on taxpayer paid defense industry money, bought cheap houses, sold at inflated prices and then preceded to also move out of the state and pollute the rest of the west with their willingness to inflate the local real estate market and their desire to be ruled as they migrated en masse and voted to turn perfectly good Libertarian leaning areas into Fascist crapholes. Sum-bitchen Californians.
*
Any location in the west ( outside of California and some states that are so-so ) is preferable to the East, at least in one aspect. A lot less population. The West has no water, no potential to produce anything other than ore and ranches. The lack of non-irrigation farming will make it even more inhospitable after a collapse. But if you fear massive swelling ugly idiotic hoards of screaming hungry welfare mobs, the west is preferable. Now there is a good reason not only to move west, but to head north also. A hundred years ago, the ten biggest cities in the US were 500 miles from the Canadian border. Today, seven of the ten biggest are 500 miles from the Mexican border. The northeast is still largely overpopulated, even if its cities are reduced by half or so as all factories employing over ten people ( and those are illegals ) are moved over to China. But now perfectly good areas that were once sparsely populated are filling up with worthless oxygen wasting morons. West is good, just not too far south.
*
As if our legions of impressively unintelligent population wasn’t bad enough, now you need to factor in the impact from their actions. I mean, just having stupid people walking around stumbling over their own asses is bad enough, but then look at the stupid things they accomplish by acting in concert. Their cities are literally sinking beneath them as they draw out the water at a rate more in line with a rain forest than a desert. We are more than likely entering into a prolonged drought and the idiots are not only draining their water reserves down but they are fighting with other jurisdictions so as to steal water from far away. These are the kind of idiots that make guys in secret smoke filled rooms decide to engineer a plague to wipe out all the useless population so they’ll stop using disappearing resources. And judging from the actions of large numbers of our population, they are only wrong from a moral standpoint, not from a logistical one ( not saying the elite don’t ruin the whole thing for the rest of us, just that collectively the majority make a bigger impact ).
*
Then of course you need to worry about the border area turning into a freefire zone as drug runners and coyotes ( human smuggler type, not the animal type that actually provide a useful service ) become more aggressive as the politicians tie the hands of the understaffed Border Patrol. It is no longer about Stan the Stoner smuggling a bale of weed into the country or Carlos the Coyote bringing in migrant produce pickers. Now you have Tony Montana wannabes bringing in cocaine and protecting it with squad automatic machineguns. And the coyotes are smuggling in prostitute-slaves and are working for a gang or syndicate. Not to mention Arabs blending into the immigration wave and smuggling in backpack nuclear weapons. The KGB teams most likely arrive by plane with forged ID, but perhaps the Spetsnaz teams are still infiltrating in the southern door. If I was Putin and wanted to protect my petroleum wealth, not only would I keep my nukes updated but I would keep up the Soviet tradition of sleeper agents awaiting orders to sabotage. The Russians can get the job done cheaply, unlike the Arabs awash with petrol cash or the Americans who forgot frugal was even a word. Remember the pencil for the cosmonauts verses the million dollar upside down ink pen for the Americans?
*
Between the blossoming population in the southwest, the increasing crime on the border, the natural tendency of the region to experience historically prolonged drought periods, it is best to avoid the southern region adjacent to the border. The north is cold and will suck in the winter, but staying warm year round quickly loses its charm if you are surrounded by dangerous living conditions. Get out of paradise now. Wait too long and you will gleefully be turned back from the other surrounding areas with gunfire. I can’t wait, myself, when civilization collapses and it is going to be open season on any California license plate ( unless its occupants are cute ). Of course, I will also be enjoying open season on politicians, lawyers and bankers. If ammunition is a problem I will skip CEO’s. And don’t look at me funny. You should see how those idiots drive on this side of the border. Nine times out of ten, a car driving unsafe will turn out to have California plates. Maybe if we just blow up the Costco down here they will stop coming over from the lake to shop there. But seriously, you need to escape any area already experiencing these problems in “good times”. Imagine how much worse it is going to get.
END
www.bisonpress.com my stuff
Thursday, June 28, 2007
light infantry
LIGHT INFANTRY
I really don’t have any idea at all what I was thinking. It has been something like five years since I covered this topic. Five whole years, at a minimum! My critics would be rolling over in mad rabid fits to find it has been this long since I covered traveling and fighting light. Oh the humanity. I apologize for the delay. Well, some time back a very generous reader, a loyal reader, a generous reader that was not content to merely read the pearls of wisdom that cascaded down my brow along with all the sweat that goes into presenting this kind of product, but was willing to take a few lone greenbacks that had escaped detection by both Uncle Sam and his wife and spend them on me, his mostest favorite author and send me a book by mail, Quartered Safe Out Here which is a WWII memoir not by some immoral heartless officer that’s first claim to fame was by trying to kill innocent peace marching veterans but just a regular guy who was fighting in the field. A young Brit, he wrote this book some time after the war, but did a rather decent job of it. He doesn’t go into big picture details but just how the war effected him and how his time in the Burma campaign went.
*
Now, one of the first things that we read in this book is that our young friend, in his fight against those devious Japanese, advocated traveling and fighting light. “…one of the most lightly armed and least encumbered foot soldiers since the introduction of firearms in war. It was gear designed for fast easy movements by the lightest of light infantry-and I wonder why it has gone out of fashion.” Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser, HarperCollins paperback edition 2000, page 33. Yes, people, an experienced combat soldier has validated my position. Oh, sure, you could perhaps scrape up some old crusty veteran high on methadone, his crotch stained by involuntary urination, one eye twitching and partially closed from an infection he picked up from a hooker on the street corner of Saigon, slurring words to the effect that his metal helmet having saved his life. Of course, you couldn’t ask anyone that was killed due to extreme weight slowing them down or a helmet blocking their peripheral vision. You couldn’t ask them how they liked the M16 either, but I won’t go there right now. I don’t doubt that there are types of warfare where being armored and heavily equipped is a good idea. I’m not much of a tactician. What I am saying is, not in irregular warfare, the only type a survivalist should think about. Less is better. And Mr. Pick-It-Apart, I know you think I never served in the military. Like I never experienced the weight of a normal combat load. Please spare us your comments. Heck, I’ll even send you a copy of my DD214 if you send me your address. Make it c/o your mom if you want to protect your identity. My address is at my web page.
*
The military takes normal lads and throws them through basic training. This partially brainwashes them and gets them into great shape. Then it throws at least fifty pounds on their back, and sends them out to go kill middle easterners with funny names. In this environment, with motor transport and readily available logistics support, this kind of fighting makes sense. You might be overburdened but you have overwhelming firepower on your side. Asymmetrical warfare practitioners must not use this same technique. You are not going to be the target of improvised demolitions. You are not going to have tanks and helicopters and artillery to back you up. Your tactics can’t include massive firepower. You must be stealthy and move fast. Mobility is your key to survival, not armor or firepower. Yes, you are risking worse injury without protection. But you are not just swapping lead with the other guys until one side gives up and you all go home. Even if you survive, if caught it is the firing squad anyway. Or, post-apocalypse, slavery until an early death. The risk of worse injury is offset by the ability to move quickly enough to get out of the way. When you are caught in an artillery barrage, you are either dead right away, or dead after the enemy drags your wounded carcass away.
*
Again, survivalists, freedom fighters, armed refugees are not military fighters. Don’t dress like them ( you become a target of friendly fire ), arm yourself like them, fight like them or armor yourself up like them. I always see serious discussions going on about bullet-proof vests and Kevlar helmets. I wouldn’t wish conventional military equipment or tactics on any civilian, not even militia members. You need to fight to stay alive, not fight to win. Time will deliver your victory, or not. Casualties won’t help anyone but the enemy in a state run military. Knowing military tactics is nice so as to anticipate your attackers moves. Do not emulate them. The results will not be in your favor. Minimize your equipment. Drastically. A rifle, fifty rounds ( it is a bolt action, right? ). A bayonet, a pocket knife, one on the belt. A good wide brimmed hat ( all around, not just an eye shade ). Boots. Minimal clothing for the weather. Food at the minimum, enough water to pose no dehydrating danger. In wet country, a small filter instead, if possible. Bandages. No lights, no tents, no sleeping bags. No pistols, no radios, etc. You should be able to supply yourself with a bandoleer and web gear with a fanny pack. That’s it. Anything else drags you down. It impairs your ability to move. You should only carry a minimum of food and water, eat heavily before you leave, and drink a lot of water. Assume the next village or cache will be compromised and have enough food and water to get to the one after that, and no more.
*
Not having a heavy helmet that impairs your vision and sits heavily on your head, causing extra sweat. Not wearing body armor that slows you down and bakes you like an oven. Not carrying a bunch of crap. You are now light and can move fast and can pay attention to what is happening around you rather than worrying about carrying half your body weight in gear the rest of the day. Use a rifle scope instead of binoculars. Walk constantly to stay warm instead of carrying rain gear. The same with staying warm at night. If it is so dark you can’t see anything, any light you have will alert the enemy. Download Night Moves from the web, a Japanese military manual on night fighting so you can learn how to fight at night rather than relying on night vision devices. No toys, just the bare minimum.
END
all your shopping needs at www.bisonpress.com
I really don’t have any idea at all what I was thinking. It has been something like five years since I covered this topic. Five whole years, at a minimum! My critics would be rolling over in mad rabid fits to find it has been this long since I covered traveling and fighting light. Oh the humanity. I apologize for the delay. Well, some time back a very generous reader, a loyal reader, a generous reader that was not content to merely read the pearls of wisdom that cascaded down my brow along with all the sweat that goes into presenting this kind of product, but was willing to take a few lone greenbacks that had escaped detection by both Uncle Sam and his wife and spend them on me, his mostest favorite author and send me a book by mail, Quartered Safe Out Here which is a WWII memoir not by some immoral heartless officer that’s first claim to fame was by trying to kill innocent peace marching veterans but just a regular guy who was fighting in the field. A young Brit, he wrote this book some time after the war, but did a rather decent job of it. He doesn’t go into big picture details but just how the war effected him and how his time in the Burma campaign went.
*
Now, one of the first things that we read in this book is that our young friend, in his fight against those devious Japanese, advocated traveling and fighting light. “…one of the most lightly armed and least encumbered foot soldiers since the introduction of firearms in war. It was gear designed for fast easy movements by the lightest of light infantry-and I wonder why it has gone out of fashion.” Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser, HarperCollins paperback edition 2000, page 33. Yes, people, an experienced combat soldier has validated my position. Oh, sure, you could perhaps scrape up some old crusty veteran high on methadone, his crotch stained by involuntary urination, one eye twitching and partially closed from an infection he picked up from a hooker on the street corner of Saigon, slurring words to the effect that his metal helmet having saved his life. Of course, you couldn’t ask anyone that was killed due to extreme weight slowing them down or a helmet blocking their peripheral vision. You couldn’t ask them how they liked the M16 either, but I won’t go there right now. I don’t doubt that there are types of warfare where being armored and heavily equipped is a good idea. I’m not much of a tactician. What I am saying is, not in irregular warfare, the only type a survivalist should think about. Less is better. And Mr. Pick-It-Apart, I know you think I never served in the military. Like I never experienced the weight of a normal combat load. Please spare us your comments. Heck, I’ll even send you a copy of my DD214 if you send me your address. Make it c/o your mom if you want to protect your identity. My address is at my web page.
*
The military takes normal lads and throws them through basic training. This partially brainwashes them and gets them into great shape. Then it throws at least fifty pounds on their back, and sends them out to go kill middle easterners with funny names. In this environment, with motor transport and readily available logistics support, this kind of fighting makes sense. You might be overburdened but you have overwhelming firepower on your side. Asymmetrical warfare practitioners must not use this same technique. You are not going to be the target of improvised demolitions. You are not going to have tanks and helicopters and artillery to back you up. Your tactics can’t include massive firepower. You must be stealthy and move fast. Mobility is your key to survival, not armor or firepower. Yes, you are risking worse injury without protection. But you are not just swapping lead with the other guys until one side gives up and you all go home. Even if you survive, if caught it is the firing squad anyway. Or, post-apocalypse, slavery until an early death. The risk of worse injury is offset by the ability to move quickly enough to get out of the way. When you are caught in an artillery barrage, you are either dead right away, or dead after the enemy drags your wounded carcass away.
*
Again, survivalists, freedom fighters, armed refugees are not military fighters. Don’t dress like them ( you become a target of friendly fire ), arm yourself like them, fight like them or armor yourself up like them. I always see serious discussions going on about bullet-proof vests and Kevlar helmets. I wouldn’t wish conventional military equipment or tactics on any civilian, not even militia members. You need to fight to stay alive, not fight to win. Time will deliver your victory, or not. Casualties won’t help anyone but the enemy in a state run military. Knowing military tactics is nice so as to anticipate your attackers moves. Do not emulate them. The results will not be in your favor. Minimize your equipment. Drastically. A rifle, fifty rounds ( it is a bolt action, right? ). A bayonet, a pocket knife, one on the belt. A good wide brimmed hat ( all around, not just an eye shade ). Boots. Minimal clothing for the weather. Food at the minimum, enough water to pose no dehydrating danger. In wet country, a small filter instead, if possible. Bandages. No lights, no tents, no sleeping bags. No pistols, no radios, etc. You should be able to supply yourself with a bandoleer and web gear with a fanny pack. That’s it. Anything else drags you down. It impairs your ability to move. You should only carry a minimum of food and water, eat heavily before you leave, and drink a lot of water. Assume the next village or cache will be compromised and have enough food and water to get to the one after that, and no more.
*
Not having a heavy helmet that impairs your vision and sits heavily on your head, causing extra sweat. Not wearing body armor that slows you down and bakes you like an oven. Not carrying a bunch of crap. You are now light and can move fast and can pay attention to what is happening around you rather than worrying about carrying half your body weight in gear the rest of the day. Use a rifle scope instead of binoculars. Walk constantly to stay warm instead of carrying rain gear. The same with staying warm at night. If it is so dark you can’t see anything, any light you have will alert the enemy. Download Night Moves from the web, a Japanese military manual on night fighting so you can learn how to fight at night rather than relying on night vision devices. No toys, just the bare minimum.
END
all your shopping needs at www.bisonpress.com
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
trade tobacco
TRADE TOBACCO
Tobacco has gotten a bad rap lately. A fat pasty guy smokes for sixty years, has a heart attack due to lack of any exercise the entire six decades, and his widow goes to the Yellow Pages and looks up a lawyer who will work on a contingency basis since he graduated last from his law school of five thousand and has an office in the ghetto and that is the only way he can get any clients. Of course the one thing he has going for him is the fact that he is street smart and so can smell greed on others, he senses a kindred spirit in the local state Attorney General and whispers sweet nothings into his ear about a huge multi-billion dollar payout from an unsuspecting tobacco company. In an effort to appear innocent of corporate bribes and outright ownership, politicians turn on the once lucrative industry and sacrifice them at the alter of political correctness. The widow gets a million dollars ( taxable income ) and several state governments divvy up the remaining $249,999,000,000 ( no taxes ). And to add insult to injury the tobacco companies must run educational ads trying to convince young punks that smoking just ain’t cool no more. But not to worry, over a billion Chinamen are ready to take up the habit as they toil twelve hours a day in polluted factories for three dollars, a pack of kools and a bowel of rice.
*
Smoking sure isn’t healthy for you. But some of us have the habit and have no plans to give it up. Some of us drink too much. Others impulsively buy consumer goods beyond storage capacity or financial ability. Planning to open a backyard still and selling hooch is most likely bound to end in financial failure. Every farmer out there will be doing the same with any surplus grain. If you must buy your grain, you can’t compete. So what kind of vice can you profit from? Sugar might become a luxury item once again, but given time its natural equivalent will be produced locally. Tobacco could be a great trade item. Or it might be a source for your own supply. Come the Brave New Post-Oil World, long distance transportation will once again render certain items very expensive. If you are far from conventional tobacco growing areas it might be profitable to use greenhouses to grow tobacco. Not only can you then feed your own need, but profit handsomely from local need. Come the end of civilization, once repentant souls will want to take up the demon weed once again. And the remaining population will more eagerly embrace its evil clutches.
*
It should be quite easy to get started, just a few seed packets and elementary research on the particular needs of the plant. The duct tape of transportation, junk vans could provide a primitive greenhouse. I would imagine the cost of primitive glass would prohibit any but the most profitable items, such as tobacco. And it should stay high outside of the South. The norm over a hundred years ago was restricted tobacco use, just small amounts. Perhaps a bowl of pipe tobacco each evening after supper. Few will be able to afford a pack a day. They will have to be content with just a cigarette a day. This is where your trade stockpile comes in handy. If you needed to stockpile twenty cigarettes a day per person, you couldn’t afford much of a stockpile. But one per person per day, that is a different story. If you shop carefully you can still buy tobacco for under a buck a pack.
*
Native American smoke shops are pretty much a rip off. They still charge $20 a carton for the vile crap. Costco and Wal-Mart are no help, charging over thirty a carton even for generics. Some states might not be so bad, but in general it is so friggin expensive to kill yourself through lung cancer anymore ( outside of snorting asbestos ) that now they are smuggling cigarettes down from Canada. How sad is that? We used to be a quasi-free economy and now the Socialist country next door taxes less than we do. Your only option for cheap smokes outside of incorporating yourself and buying by the semi-truck load is to buy roll-your-owns. And not the Bugler or other name brand loose tobacco. Those bastards are selling at Nike prices. Pure brand name charging. Find a tobacco shop in town, or find an Internet site. The tobacco needed to make a carton of cigs is about $8, the tubes another $2. That is for filtered cigarettes. For unfiltered, buy the tobacco with the flat papers included, for about $8 a carton.
*
There are two different cheap systems for making your own cigarettes. One is the small plastic “stuffer”. You open the top on a hinge. Stuff tobacco into the recessed slot, close, place a empty tube with filter attached to the front and slide the top of the machine back and forth. This stuffs the tobacco into the tube. Neat, with no saliva to close the paper. The problem is the cost of the tubes to a small degree. Not much, since us older smokers need a filter after awhile. There is something to say about forgoing filters as rumor has it they contain microscopic particles than attach to your lungs. But if this method is too strong for you, you need a filter ( well, strongly desire anyway ). The major problem is that this small plastic machine only works well with moist tobacco. If it dries, it is almost impossible to use the darn thing. The slide sticks and won’t cycle completely through.
*
The other machine is the traditional “roll and lick shut”. You stuff tobacco into a space between a vinyl sheet, close the machine, twirl with your thumbs until the tobacco is a uniform tube shape, stick in a paper, twirl until just the gummed part sticks up, lick, twirl again and you have a perfectly shaped non-filter cigarette. The drawback here, despite the lack of filter, is that the loop of vinyl cracks and breaks easy. It you place a strip of Scotch tape over the seam it will last a lot longer. Tears can also be repaired with the tape. But eventually it will be worthless, needing a replacement. Both machines are far from fragile, but they definitely have a limited life span. You must stock replacements. About three bucks each. I would get a new machine for every five cartons, minimum. That might be too conservative, but better to err on the side of caution.
*
You may wish to grow your own weed, so just plan on stockpiling the machines, seeds and papers. I have yet to find a source on cheap papers, for sale by themselves. Most retailers assume the papers are for pot smokers and charge outrageous fees. While smokers can use water bongs or pipes, paper should command a premium price. It is what they are used to and what they will want. Plan accordingly. And this is either a necessity for yourself, or a post-Apocalypse business plan. Don’t invest the money until all your personal preps are completed. As with any business, it could fail. So don’t bet your life on it.
END
e-books www.bisonpress.com
amazon books www.bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
gear www.bisonpress.com/amazonproducts.html
Tobacco has gotten a bad rap lately. A fat pasty guy smokes for sixty years, has a heart attack due to lack of any exercise the entire six decades, and his widow goes to the Yellow Pages and looks up a lawyer who will work on a contingency basis since he graduated last from his law school of five thousand and has an office in the ghetto and that is the only way he can get any clients. Of course the one thing he has going for him is the fact that he is street smart and so can smell greed on others, he senses a kindred spirit in the local state Attorney General and whispers sweet nothings into his ear about a huge multi-billion dollar payout from an unsuspecting tobacco company. In an effort to appear innocent of corporate bribes and outright ownership, politicians turn on the once lucrative industry and sacrifice them at the alter of political correctness. The widow gets a million dollars ( taxable income ) and several state governments divvy up the remaining $249,999,000,000 ( no taxes ). And to add insult to injury the tobacco companies must run educational ads trying to convince young punks that smoking just ain’t cool no more. But not to worry, over a billion Chinamen are ready to take up the habit as they toil twelve hours a day in polluted factories for three dollars, a pack of kools and a bowel of rice.
*
Smoking sure isn’t healthy for you. But some of us have the habit and have no plans to give it up. Some of us drink too much. Others impulsively buy consumer goods beyond storage capacity or financial ability. Planning to open a backyard still and selling hooch is most likely bound to end in financial failure. Every farmer out there will be doing the same with any surplus grain. If you must buy your grain, you can’t compete. So what kind of vice can you profit from? Sugar might become a luxury item once again, but given time its natural equivalent will be produced locally. Tobacco could be a great trade item. Or it might be a source for your own supply. Come the Brave New Post-Oil World, long distance transportation will once again render certain items very expensive. If you are far from conventional tobacco growing areas it might be profitable to use greenhouses to grow tobacco. Not only can you then feed your own need, but profit handsomely from local need. Come the end of civilization, once repentant souls will want to take up the demon weed once again. And the remaining population will more eagerly embrace its evil clutches.
*
It should be quite easy to get started, just a few seed packets and elementary research on the particular needs of the plant. The duct tape of transportation, junk vans could provide a primitive greenhouse. I would imagine the cost of primitive glass would prohibit any but the most profitable items, such as tobacco. And it should stay high outside of the South. The norm over a hundred years ago was restricted tobacco use, just small amounts. Perhaps a bowl of pipe tobacco each evening after supper. Few will be able to afford a pack a day. They will have to be content with just a cigarette a day. This is where your trade stockpile comes in handy. If you needed to stockpile twenty cigarettes a day per person, you couldn’t afford much of a stockpile. But one per person per day, that is a different story. If you shop carefully you can still buy tobacco for under a buck a pack.
*
Native American smoke shops are pretty much a rip off. They still charge $20 a carton for the vile crap. Costco and Wal-Mart are no help, charging over thirty a carton even for generics. Some states might not be so bad, but in general it is so friggin expensive to kill yourself through lung cancer anymore ( outside of snorting asbestos ) that now they are smuggling cigarettes down from Canada. How sad is that? We used to be a quasi-free economy and now the Socialist country next door taxes less than we do. Your only option for cheap smokes outside of incorporating yourself and buying by the semi-truck load is to buy roll-your-owns. And not the Bugler or other name brand loose tobacco. Those bastards are selling at Nike prices. Pure brand name charging. Find a tobacco shop in town, or find an Internet site. The tobacco needed to make a carton of cigs is about $8, the tubes another $2. That is for filtered cigarettes. For unfiltered, buy the tobacco with the flat papers included, for about $8 a carton.
*
There are two different cheap systems for making your own cigarettes. One is the small plastic “stuffer”. You open the top on a hinge. Stuff tobacco into the recessed slot, close, place a empty tube with filter attached to the front and slide the top of the machine back and forth. This stuffs the tobacco into the tube. Neat, with no saliva to close the paper. The problem is the cost of the tubes to a small degree. Not much, since us older smokers need a filter after awhile. There is something to say about forgoing filters as rumor has it they contain microscopic particles than attach to your lungs. But if this method is too strong for you, you need a filter ( well, strongly desire anyway ). The major problem is that this small plastic machine only works well with moist tobacco. If it dries, it is almost impossible to use the darn thing. The slide sticks and won’t cycle completely through.
*
The other machine is the traditional “roll and lick shut”. You stuff tobacco into a space between a vinyl sheet, close the machine, twirl with your thumbs until the tobacco is a uniform tube shape, stick in a paper, twirl until just the gummed part sticks up, lick, twirl again and you have a perfectly shaped non-filter cigarette. The drawback here, despite the lack of filter, is that the loop of vinyl cracks and breaks easy. It you place a strip of Scotch tape over the seam it will last a lot longer. Tears can also be repaired with the tape. But eventually it will be worthless, needing a replacement. Both machines are far from fragile, but they definitely have a limited life span. You must stock replacements. About three bucks each. I would get a new machine for every five cartons, minimum. That might be too conservative, but better to err on the side of caution.
*
You may wish to grow your own weed, so just plan on stockpiling the machines, seeds and papers. I have yet to find a source on cheap papers, for sale by themselves. Most retailers assume the papers are for pot smokers and charge outrageous fees. While smokers can use water bongs or pipes, paper should command a premium price. It is what they are used to and what they will want. Plan accordingly. And this is either a necessity for yourself, or a post-Apocalypse business plan. Don’t invest the money until all your personal preps are completed. As with any business, it could fail. So don’t bet your life on it.
END
e-books www.bisonpress.com
amazon books www.bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html
gear www.bisonpress.com/amazonproducts.html
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
voluntary simplicity
VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY
Civilization collapse is a perversely fascinating topic with me. When one takes into account the millions that inevitably die after slow malnutrition and a bit quicker from civil unrest and wars of resource conquests, that is akin to the legions of fans who watch a particular sport such as hockey or car racing just to see the blood and destruction. Most likely this would thus be classified as a normal behavior. Species survival through scarce resource allotment through warfare. Blood sports being a thinly covered substitution. But, being oh so politically correct as I am, I call it historical research with no sick fascination of human suffering at all. Even if ninety percent of humanity is a worthless blob of oxygen wasting primates they don’t deserve to die slowly and horribly. Perhaps quickly is okay.
*
All civilizations collapse. All paper currencies become toilet paper. Nothing lasts forever. Forests will start slowly, attract different species, become enlarged and dominated by a group of species, then collapse due to lack of diversification to combat a new threat. Mother Nature likes to wipe the slate clean in her kingdom, and man is no different. Man starts out exploiting a newly discovered niche. The Agricultural Revolution being a prime example. For man to go from leisurely hunting and gathering to being chained down by a plot of land working twice as hard for the same food intake ( the surplus was to the warrior class to protect the crops and the ruling class to keep the irrigation waters flowing ) was due to necessity not by choice. We would still be stampeding herds off cliffs and running around without underwear if we had a choice.
*
Once man finds a profitable niche, he starts using it to increase the population. More food and/or energy equals the biological urge to procreate. More population means a chance to live into old age through your children’s welfare, an increase in the military to steal more resources and more taxes and booty to fatten the ruling treasury. Everybody wins at first. Then population starts to exceed resources, or a weather change or natural disaster wipe out crops and people start to go hungry. Since it is perfectly natural to harvest the easy and abundant resources first, in order to exploit additional supplies more energy is required to get the same output. The irrigation ditches must be enlarged, storage ponds built, fertilizer brought from further out. Our oil supply is typical. We took the easy stuff close to the surface first. That is mostly all gone. Now it takes more wells and more energy to get a lesser amount of oil of a lesser grade of purity. Same with farmland. Naturally fertilized soil is used to grow crops. After the ground is depleted of its nutrients more energy is needed to fertilize the soil. More crops must be used just to maintain the soil. More work is required to get less crops.
*
In order to coordinate the increased energy being used in the system, more complex government is formed. More tax collectors, more engineers for the water supply ditches and retaining ponds. More military to steal from neighbors ( the movie Apocalypto was a small scale illustration of this ) and to maintain order from a restless dissatisfied population. And yet for all this extra energy being put into the system in the form of human labor which must be paid for in food calories, even if output increases, the return per unit of energy decreases. When a farmer moves into a virgin valley, he gets, say, thirty bushels of grain per acre from rainfall and fertile soil. After rain patterns change and his soil is depleted of nutrients, he must put each acre over to half its production in animal feed to fertilize the field. Another quarter to pay taxes to the army and the national government for building an aqueduct. So he now only gets eight bushels of grain per acre, but he has to do a lot more work to get it.
*
This is how a system grows in complexity. After a certain point of increased energy inputs, production falls so much the land is abandoned for a time ( at least until the next cycle ). And oil is no different than food. We use oil to grow food, substituting it for less efficient animal fertilizer/animal labor. The whole field can go to mans consumption instead of feeding the animals that work it, or even paying the government to protect it. Oil runs the government and the military and so a field can go just for people feed. And oil grows a lot more of it. A wonderful arrangement, allowing six to ten times the population that could survive otherwise. But then, it must end. All complex systems are destroyed and must start over. I submit to you that we are in a very complex system at this point in time. Look at the levels of government needed to sustain our system ( the industry of stealing the oil we need takes into account the CIA, the military industrial complex, at a bare minimum ). And look at how for more and more effort we are getting less and less in return. Our oil output is requiring more and more energy yet yielding less and less. Our farmland is 100% oil input dependant. We need massive amounts of financial activity just to keep forward motion. Our wages decline in real terms as we work harder and harder. We build more and more military bases and spend more and more money and can barely hold everything together.
*
It should behoove you to embrace voluntary simplicity before it is forced on you by our complex society collapsing. I’m sure the usual argument is that you deserve to live the good life now and later you will adapt to changes. And if no collapse occurs you would be silly to sacrifice comfort and luxury. It all depends on what kind of survivalist you are. If you only see natural disasters impacting your life than minimal preparations are needed. A months supply of food, a water filter, extra shelter and supplies such as camping equipment. House insurance and money in the bank. A “Depression” survivalist has precious metal and a huge food production system ( and hopefully no mortgage to lose the farm to the bank ). But a “System Collapse” survivalist such as Peak Oilers need to realize that it is all going to come apart. It will all end and technology will regress. Mass die-offs will occur. Civilization will remake itself. Why devote resources to collecting equipment that can’t be maintained? A thirty year mortgage that requires a good job that can easily be sent overseas or replaced by technology. That same mortgage that requires both husband and wife to work, one that requires a job dependant on commuting. A motor vehicle that in most cases is close to the price of a house just a few decades ago. A motor vehicle that depends on a stable middle east to get its fuel.
*
I won’t get into items that depend on a functioning economy in an advanced industrial society such as modern smokeless ammunition. If survivalism depended on going totally Stone Age, none of us would even try. You will always be dependant somewhat on storage items that can’t be replaced. But what you can do now is reduce your dependence on items that are in a fragile state now. We all need a job, but try to at least make your recession proof. Budget below your income to weather the dips. Try to maneuver around needing to commute. Try to supplement fossil fuel use with cheap renewables ( passive solar rather than PV panels ). Explore your options out of the traditional mortgage arrangement. Move towards more primitive alternatives ( wear wool instead of synthetics ). Try to move towards needing less of what we are going to run out of. If you take minor steps now the shock will be less severe. And that can make all the difference in survival, if you are less stressed and more adaptable.
END
To answer the comment on the straight razor for sale through the Amazon page off of my web site, www.bisonpress.com, it is stainless steel, not the good stuff. I covered this some time ago, but basically a good blade costs $50. A crappy blade costs as low as $3. Well worth the trouble of sharpening it and keeping it that way.
*
Two frugal tips I saw on the TimeBomb 2000 web page. I am mad at myself for not thinking of them. An improvised solar cooker. Take an old tire, place it on a board or other insulation, place a black pot with lid in the middle and cover with glass ( the whole tire, not just the pot ). A use for soap scraps. Place several in a wash cloth, tie shut ( plastic security tie? ) and wet and use like a scrubber. I once saved three years worth of soap scraps and couldn’t think of a use for them. Now I can save again, as I hate wasting anything.
*
Creekmore is back for another try. Try to support his efforts, we need as many different views as possible out there ( as long as you realize mine is the correct one ). His information can vary from mine, giving you a better education on prepping and survival.
www.thesurvivalblog.blogspot.com
Civilization collapse is a perversely fascinating topic with me. When one takes into account the millions that inevitably die after slow malnutrition and a bit quicker from civil unrest and wars of resource conquests, that is akin to the legions of fans who watch a particular sport such as hockey or car racing just to see the blood and destruction. Most likely this would thus be classified as a normal behavior. Species survival through scarce resource allotment through warfare. Blood sports being a thinly covered substitution. But, being oh so politically correct as I am, I call it historical research with no sick fascination of human suffering at all. Even if ninety percent of humanity is a worthless blob of oxygen wasting primates they don’t deserve to die slowly and horribly. Perhaps quickly is okay.
*
All civilizations collapse. All paper currencies become toilet paper. Nothing lasts forever. Forests will start slowly, attract different species, become enlarged and dominated by a group of species, then collapse due to lack of diversification to combat a new threat. Mother Nature likes to wipe the slate clean in her kingdom, and man is no different. Man starts out exploiting a newly discovered niche. The Agricultural Revolution being a prime example. For man to go from leisurely hunting and gathering to being chained down by a plot of land working twice as hard for the same food intake ( the surplus was to the warrior class to protect the crops and the ruling class to keep the irrigation waters flowing ) was due to necessity not by choice. We would still be stampeding herds off cliffs and running around without underwear if we had a choice.
*
Once man finds a profitable niche, he starts using it to increase the population. More food and/or energy equals the biological urge to procreate. More population means a chance to live into old age through your children’s welfare, an increase in the military to steal more resources and more taxes and booty to fatten the ruling treasury. Everybody wins at first. Then population starts to exceed resources, or a weather change or natural disaster wipe out crops and people start to go hungry. Since it is perfectly natural to harvest the easy and abundant resources first, in order to exploit additional supplies more energy is required to get the same output. The irrigation ditches must be enlarged, storage ponds built, fertilizer brought from further out. Our oil supply is typical. We took the easy stuff close to the surface first. That is mostly all gone. Now it takes more wells and more energy to get a lesser amount of oil of a lesser grade of purity. Same with farmland. Naturally fertilized soil is used to grow crops. After the ground is depleted of its nutrients more energy is needed to fertilize the soil. More crops must be used just to maintain the soil. More work is required to get less crops.
*
In order to coordinate the increased energy being used in the system, more complex government is formed. More tax collectors, more engineers for the water supply ditches and retaining ponds. More military to steal from neighbors ( the movie Apocalypto was a small scale illustration of this ) and to maintain order from a restless dissatisfied population. And yet for all this extra energy being put into the system in the form of human labor which must be paid for in food calories, even if output increases, the return per unit of energy decreases. When a farmer moves into a virgin valley, he gets, say, thirty bushels of grain per acre from rainfall and fertile soil. After rain patterns change and his soil is depleted of nutrients, he must put each acre over to half its production in animal feed to fertilize the field. Another quarter to pay taxes to the army and the national government for building an aqueduct. So he now only gets eight bushels of grain per acre, but he has to do a lot more work to get it.
*
This is how a system grows in complexity. After a certain point of increased energy inputs, production falls so much the land is abandoned for a time ( at least until the next cycle ). And oil is no different than food. We use oil to grow food, substituting it for less efficient animal fertilizer/animal labor. The whole field can go to mans consumption instead of feeding the animals that work it, or even paying the government to protect it. Oil runs the government and the military and so a field can go just for people feed. And oil grows a lot more of it. A wonderful arrangement, allowing six to ten times the population that could survive otherwise. But then, it must end. All complex systems are destroyed and must start over. I submit to you that we are in a very complex system at this point in time. Look at the levels of government needed to sustain our system ( the industry of stealing the oil we need takes into account the CIA, the military industrial complex, at a bare minimum ). And look at how for more and more effort we are getting less and less in return. Our oil output is requiring more and more energy yet yielding less and less. Our farmland is 100% oil input dependant. We need massive amounts of financial activity just to keep forward motion. Our wages decline in real terms as we work harder and harder. We build more and more military bases and spend more and more money and can barely hold everything together.
*
It should behoove you to embrace voluntary simplicity before it is forced on you by our complex society collapsing. I’m sure the usual argument is that you deserve to live the good life now and later you will adapt to changes. And if no collapse occurs you would be silly to sacrifice comfort and luxury. It all depends on what kind of survivalist you are. If you only see natural disasters impacting your life than minimal preparations are needed. A months supply of food, a water filter, extra shelter and supplies such as camping equipment. House insurance and money in the bank. A “Depression” survivalist has precious metal and a huge food production system ( and hopefully no mortgage to lose the farm to the bank ). But a “System Collapse” survivalist such as Peak Oilers need to realize that it is all going to come apart. It will all end and technology will regress. Mass die-offs will occur. Civilization will remake itself. Why devote resources to collecting equipment that can’t be maintained? A thirty year mortgage that requires a good job that can easily be sent overseas or replaced by technology. That same mortgage that requires both husband and wife to work, one that requires a job dependant on commuting. A motor vehicle that in most cases is close to the price of a house just a few decades ago. A motor vehicle that depends on a stable middle east to get its fuel.
*
I won’t get into items that depend on a functioning economy in an advanced industrial society such as modern smokeless ammunition. If survivalism depended on going totally Stone Age, none of us would even try. You will always be dependant somewhat on storage items that can’t be replaced. But what you can do now is reduce your dependence on items that are in a fragile state now. We all need a job, but try to at least make your recession proof. Budget below your income to weather the dips. Try to maneuver around needing to commute. Try to supplement fossil fuel use with cheap renewables ( passive solar rather than PV panels ). Explore your options out of the traditional mortgage arrangement. Move towards more primitive alternatives ( wear wool instead of synthetics ). Try to move towards needing less of what we are going to run out of. If you take minor steps now the shock will be less severe. And that can make all the difference in survival, if you are less stressed and more adaptable.
END
To answer the comment on the straight razor for sale through the Amazon page off of my web site, www.bisonpress.com, it is stainless steel, not the good stuff. I covered this some time ago, but basically a good blade costs $50. A crappy blade costs as low as $3. Well worth the trouble of sharpening it and keeping it that way.
*
Two frugal tips I saw on the TimeBomb 2000 web page. I am mad at myself for not thinking of them. An improvised solar cooker. Take an old tire, place it on a board or other insulation, place a black pot with lid in the middle and cover with glass ( the whole tire, not just the pot ). A use for soap scraps. Place several in a wash cloth, tie shut ( plastic security tie? ) and wet and use like a scrubber. I once saved three years worth of soap scraps and couldn’t think of a use for them. Now I can save again, as I hate wasting anything.
*
Creekmore is back for another try. Try to support his efforts, we need as many different views as possible out there ( as long as you realize mine is the correct one ). His information can vary from mine, giving you a better education on prepping and survival.
www.thesurvivalblog.blogspot.com
Monday, June 25, 2007
cash stash
CASH STASH
The problem with having your crystal ball at the repairman is that we have no idea what is going to happen. I called up my guy the other day and asked what the friggin holdup was, seeing as how the thing was supposed to be under warrantee and there has been no progress for several years. After it totally failed while predicting Y2K, I took it to the nearest factory authorized repair facility where I was given solid assurances that the problem would be fixed within several weeks. That was almost eight years ago. Apparently the model also failed to anticipate 9/11 and a recall was put into effect. So quite a backlog has occurred. Good thing I didn’t buy mine on credit, or I would still be paying interest on a worthless item.
*
So here I am, trying to warn everyone about any potential severe calamity that might happen. Which makes quite a list. And without the crystal ball we have no idea which event will be the one we need to worry about. Heck, what actually happens might not even be on the list. So here is another prep item to worry about. As if we need another. Cash. Normally my advice is to avoid cash like a wandering leper with bubonic plague. The US government has taken over so many sectors of the economy that it needs a lot of operating capital to keep things running. A private sector contractor will hire a crew of illegal aliens and slap up a building of uncured concrete, green wood, press board and watered paint in a matter of weeks. The house sells for a quarter of a million dollars. This has the desired effect of making the banker that instantly created the credit to buy the house when little Tabitha opened a passbook saving account for five dollars and thirty three cents a lot richer. Through the magic of near zero reserve requirements, a banker has a virtual printing press in the basement.
*
The private sector is too efficient for the government. First, you find someone rich that doesn’t contribute to either political party. Then you have the EPA investigate one of his businesses. After five years of hearings and court and lawyers fees, he goes bankrupt. Next you conduct three more years of environmental impact studies. After five major law firms have sent all their associates families through Harvard Law School, then the government can build something on the land it seized. Several engineers consult for six months over twenty three changes in the set of blueprints, hire the same contractor, stretch the three week building process out to eighteen months, and keep the same illegal crew employed long enough to qualify for citizenship. A Senior Center is erected, which promptly collapses in the next earthquake.
*
Multiply this by a few million instances, and you can see where a miniscule 50% tax on everyone’s income ( direct plus indirect taxes ) is simply not going to suffice. So besides borrowing ten percent of GDP from our enemies to be used as a financial blackmail tool against us, we also inflate the money supply yearly by at least ten percent, taking into account real accounting methods rather than the government supplied smoke and mirror numbers. Most of this is credit rather than cash, but in the end the effect is similar to Zimbabwean printing press inflation. Any paper bill you stuff under the mattress is daily losing value. Perhaps not by much. Compared to Zimbabwe inflating at a minimum of 5,000% a year ( or is it a month? ) or the Revolutionary War Continental massacre, or the Weimer Republic mass inflation where only one side of the bills were used to save ink, our inflation is pretty tame. It takes decades to lose real buying power instead of years or months. But there is no guarantee it will stay this tame. The recent uptick of Bush’s inflationary regime to its present two digit figure is nothing like the tame nineties inflation. We could get into monetary inflation, price inflation, push-pull, etc., but all you need concern yourself with is that every year each dollar buys less. Prices rise. Under Democrats it will only get worse as they love even more government spending than the Republicans ( as hard as that is to believe right now ).
*
So why save currency? A sucker bet. Well, several factors come into play to force you to play this losing game. One, you always need a rainy day fund. A credit card is no substitute as the interest you pay on it will always far exceed inflation. And in times of disaster a credit card can’t be used, even if the lack of cash saving didn’t penalize you until you used it. So, you need a cookie jar full of some cash. And those jugs of coins won’t help. What are you going to do, walk three miles for ice or gasoline with pockets full of quarters? And gold and silver are too far removed from the public awareness to serve any useful purpose. Oh, you need them for long term wealth preservation, but for daily trade they are at present unusable. 95% of the population has no idea what a real silver dime is, in comparison to a crap metal post-64 coin. They are used to paper currency only. In a crisis, a few smart cookies will take real money, but expect the norm to be paper currency.
*
So, in normal times, you need a cash stash to survive the unexpected. A few twenties tucked in the wallet in case your debit card doesn’t “take” at the store. A sudden spike in the cell phone bill. An emergency dental procedure. Even unexpected super bargains ( at the garage sale next door the idiot is selling his complete first ten years of Mother Earth News for ten bucks, or his twenty foot travel trailer for a grand ). In times of disaster, cash will buy gasoline and ice and bottled water. Or batteries. However, besides these common sense items, another great reason for stashing cash is a long term collapse. If your government fails totally, one relic they will leave behind is their paper currency. This will only increase in value.
*
It is a long shot, it is a gamble. But if the government ceases to function the paper currency left behind will become more valuable, not less. Not in normal times, but in emergency situations. Once a government no longer can print more money, that which is left behind gains in value since it can no longer be devalued by printing more of it. It will be a desired trading tool until a better currency comes along. Money is a tool. You take that tool to trade your labor. In and of itself it is worthless, as a tool it facilitates trade. No one can trade a chicken for a stack of paper if the two tradesmen are a hundred miles apart. So money is used instead. Money is many times more useful than barter. Without government around to contaminate the money supply, the paper currency holds its value ( until a better tool is brought to market, then you lose your investment just like it was an old computer ). In the old days, an expired governments currency held out for awhile as a tool of choice for trade. The old Czarist currency after the Commies took over. The old Iraqi currency in the Kurd zone. Now that so much currency increase is done on computers, there is even less paper currency floating around.
*
Which means come a collapse, any paper currency will immediately gain in value. Since there is so little of it in use, it will take less to buy more. Without computer digits acting as money, our economy will drastically shrink. Let’s say we have a trillion in currency ( I’m guessing ). In a twelve to fifteen trillion dollar economy, paper currency alone running the economy means each bill will increase in value ten times at a minimum. Of course the economy will not retain that value in a calamity, my point is that we have ten times the electronic currency than paper. So you need not stash cash at today’s equivalent value. Just a tenth. Have small bills only. No 50’s or 100’s and few twenties. Mostly the three smaller denominations. And of course your jar of coins. It serves a purpose today and might also after a collapse. If not, it is just like all your other preps that were for naught. Good insurance, bad investment.
END
www.bisonpress.com
The problem with having your crystal ball at the repairman is that we have no idea what is going to happen. I called up my guy the other day and asked what the friggin holdup was, seeing as how the thing was supposed to be under warrantee and there has been no progress for several years. After it totally failed while predicting Y2K, I took it to the nearest factory authorized repair facility where I was given solid assurances that the problem would be fixed within several weeks. That was almost eight years ago. Apparently the model also failed to anticipate 9/11 and a recall was put into effect. So quite a backlog has occurred. Good thing I didn’t buy mine on credit, or I would still be paying interest on a worthless item.
*
So here I am, trying to warn everyone about any potential severe calamity that might happen. Which makes quite a list. And without the crystal ball we have no idea which event will be the one we need to worry about. Heck, what actually happens might not even be on the list. So here is another prep item to worry about. As if we need another. Cash. Normally my advice is to avoid cash like a wandering leper with bubonic plague. The US government has taken over so many sectors of the economy that it needs a lot of operating capital to keep things running. A private sector contractor will hire a crew of illegal aliens and slap up a building of uncured concrete, green wood, press board and watered paint in a matter of weeks. The house sells for a quarter of a million dollars. This has the desired effect of making the banker that instantly created the credit to buy the house when little Tabitha opened a passbook saving account for five dollars and thirty three cents a lot richer. Through the magic of near zero reserve requirements, a banker has a virtual printing press in the basement.
*
The private sector is too efficient for the government. First, you find someone rich that doesn’t contribute to either political party. Then you have the EPA investigate one of his businesses. After five years of hearings and court and lawyers fees, he goes bankrupt. Next you conduct three more years of environmental impact studies. After five major law firms have sent all their associates families through Harvard Law School, then the government can build something on the land it seized. Several engineers consult for six months over twenty three changes in the set of blueprints, hire the same contractor, stretch the three week building process out to eighteen months, and keep the same illegal crew employed long enough to qualify for citizenship. A Senior Center is erected, which promptly collapses in the next earthquake.
*
Multiply this by a few million instances, and you can see where a miniscule 50% tax on everyone’s income ( direct plus indirect taxes ) is simply not going to suffice. So besides borrowing ten percent of GDP from our enemies to be used as a financial blackmail tool against us, we also inflate the money supply yearly by at least ten percent, taking into account real accounting methods rather than the government supplied smoke and mirror numbers. Most of this is credit rather than cash, but in the end the effect is similar to Zimbabwean printing press inflation. Any paper bill you stuff under the mattress is daily losing value. Perhaps not by much. Compared to Zimbabwe inflating at a minimum of 5,000% a year ( or is it a month? ) or the Revolutionary War Continental massacre, or the Weimer Republic mass inflation where only one side of the bills were used to save ink, our inflation is pretty tame. It takes decades to lose real buying power instead of years or months. But there is no guarantee it will stay this tame. The recent uptick of Bush’s inflationary regime to its present two digit figure is nothing like the tame nineties inflation. We could get into monetary inflation, price inflation, push-pull, etc., but all you need concern yourself with is that every year each dollar buys less. Prices rise. Under Democrats it will only get worse as they love even more government spending than the Republicans ( as hard as that is to believe right now ).
*
So why save currency? A sucker bet. Well, several factors come into play to force you to play this losing game. One, you always need a rainy day fund. A credit card is no substitute as the interest you pay on it will always far exceed inflation. And in times of disaster a credit card can’t be used, even if the lack of cash saving didn’t penalize you until you used it. So, you need a cookie jar full of some cash. And those jugs of coins won’t help. What are you going to do, walk three miles for ice or gasoline with pockets full of quarters? And gold and silver are too far removed from the public awareness to serve any useful purpose. Oh, you need them for long term wealth preservation, but for daily trade they are at present unusable. 95% of the population has no idea what a real silver dime is, in comparison to a crap metal post-64 coin. They are used to paper currency only. In a crisis, a few smart cookies will take real money, but expect the norm to be paper currency.
*
So, in normal times, you need a cash stash to survive the unexpected. A few twenties tucked in the wallet in case your debit card doesn’t “take” at the store. A sudden spike in the cell phone bill. An emergency dental procedure. Even unexpected super bargains ( at the garage sale next door the idiot is selling his complete first ten years of Mother Earth News for ten bucks, or his twenty foot travel trailer for a grand ). In times of disaster, cash will buy gasoline and ice and bottled water. Or batteries. However, besides these common sense items, another great reason for stashing cash is a long term collapse. If your government fails totally, one relic they will leave behind is their paper currency. This will only increase in value.
*
It is a long shot, it is a gamble. But if the government ceases to function the paper currency left behind will become more valuable, not less. Not in normal times, but in emergency situations. Once a government no longer can print more money, that which is left behind gains in value since it can no longer be devalued by printing more of it. It will be a desired trading tool until a better currency comes along. Money is a tool. You take that tool to trade your labor. In and of itself it is worthless, as a tool it facilitates trade. No one can trade a chicken for a stack of paper if the two tradesmen are a hundred miles apart. So money is used instead. Money is many times more useful than barter. Without government around to contaminate the money supply, the paper currency holds its value ( until a better tool is brought to market, then you lose your investment just like it was an old computer ). In the old days, an expired governments currency held out for awhile as a tool of choice for trade. The old Czarist currency after the Commies took over. The old Iraqi currency in the Kurd zone. Now that so much currency increase is done on computers, there is even less paper currency floating around.
*
Which means come a collapse, any paper currency will immediately gain in value. Since there is so little of it in use, it will take less to buy more. Without computer digits acting as money, our economy will drastically shrink. Let’s say we have a trillion in currency ( I’m guessing ). In a twelve to fifteen trillion dollar economy, paper currency alone running the economy means each bill will increase in value ten times at a minimum. Of course the economy will not retain that value in a calamity, my point is that we have ten times the electronic currency than paper. So you need not stash cash at today’s equivalent value. Just a tenth. Have small bills only. No 50’s or 100’s and few twenties. Mostly the three smaller denominations. And of course your jar of coins. It serves a purpose today and might also after a collapse. If not, it is just like all your other preps that were for naught. Good insurance, bad investment.
END
www.bisonpress.com
Sunday, June 24, 2007
guest article
GUEST ARTICLE
Before we begin today’s guest submitted article, let’s pause briefly for a word from our sponsors. I’ve added items to the Amazon books page at my web site, www.bisonpress.com. You can go directly there at www.bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html . I have added, of course, The Frugal Survivalist, as well as three more magazine subscriptions. Guns & Ammo, Shotgun News, and Wilderness Way. The Dixie Gun catalog is there, and The ABC’s Of Reloading.
I have added more gear to the products page. Go to www.bisonpress.com/amazonproducts.html to see nifty items such as a cheap gas mask, its filter replacement, shotgun shell buttstock holder, rifle ammo buttstock holder, a mechanical alarm clock, a mechanical pocket watch, and about a half dozen Apocalypse type movies on DVD. The Trigger Effect, Red Dawn, The Postman, etc.
Please visit both pages and buy like your dollars will be worth less tomorrow. And remember to only buy from the links at my web page so I get credit from the sale. My commission will be used at Amazon to buy more books to do more research to present more Bison. Thanks. Now to the article.
MEDICAL MAGGOTRY
It is relatively easy (but not cheap) to acquire antibiotics now, but in a major survival situation, or after the Collapse, it ain't gonna be. Things like penicillin, terramycin, etc., have made our pampered lives so much easier for so long, we take them for granted. In a hard-core, die-any-minute survival scenario, stuff like this isn't going to be around when we shall need it most. Any little cut, burn or bullet wound is going to be a stomping ground for infection, and without antibiotics, infection becomes fatal.
*
Now, antibiotics are around: Of course hospitals, but I'm sure most small town doctor's offices, your average pharmacy, the vet clinic, and possibly even the nurse's station in schools have small quantities of antibiotics, but if you and I know where to find them while out scavenging after the Big C, then the improvident sheep and the dope addicts looking for drugs do, too. I imagine within the first two or three days after an absolute Crash, most hospitals and pharmacies will be all but torn down under the torrent of looters and supply-hunters, and any worthy drugs like antibiotics that aren't taken will likely be busted up and spilled in the madness.
*
So how to fight infection without antibiotics? Among other primitive methods, maggots are nature's own living, breathing infection fighters. Say while en route to sack the community 25 miles upriver, one of your strikers steps upon a broken beer bottle. Since he is only wearing flip-flops, his ankle is cut long and deep by a shard of filthy glass. (yes, the example came from the movie Children of Men, but it works) You clean the wound best as possible, but since you are on a timeline, all you can do for now is dress it neatly, and push on (for you need every trigger-finger available). The fight ensues, the village is taken, their three grain bins full of corn are yours; but your man's wound is worsening. After setting up a command center, you take a closer look. Yup. Highly infected. The town possessed no antibiotics, and you hate to lose a good fighter, what to do?
*
Take off the bandage, and leave the infected wound exposed to flies. Try not to let them light right on the wound, as flies are filthy and carry diseases, but keep them working on the intact flesh around the wound's perimeter. Maggots hatched soon after will find their way to the infected parts. One exposure to flies is most likely more than enough, so afterwards, cover the wound again. Check it daily for maggots; they should appear within a day or two. If not, let the flies try again. If the wound is full of maggots, as many as possible should be removed with forceps or washed out with sterile water. Only 50 to 100 of the little fellas should be allowed to stay in the wound.
*
Once our maggot farm is going full swing, the wound should be covered again, but looked upon each day. The maggots will produce a frothy looking fluid that should be sponged out, in order to better monitor the maggot activity. The amount of time for such debridement will vary, depending on the depth and extent of the wound, the number of maggots, and the body part affected, therefore, a certain time to remove the maggots cannot be given in hours or days. However, they should be removed at once when they have scarfed up all the dead, infected tissue and before they get settled in healthy flesh.
*
When a maggot starts chowin' on clean living tissue, the recipient will notice an increased level of pain, as the maggots come in contact with live nerves. Once established that they have finished the job, the maggots should be flushed from the wound with sterile water. Once maggot-free, the wound should be bandaged, and examined often just in case there are any old hangers-on ("I ain't goin', by god, I was born here!"). After all maggots are for sure cleansed away, the wound should be treated as any other wound and should heal normally.
*
Debridement using maggots has been done for thousands of years, and is no doubt still used in the more "backwards" parts of the world. Of course, maggots won't help much for internal infections like the common cold, only ouchies outside the body. The problem with fighting internal infections without store bought antibiotics is a completely different story, which I'll go into further if Jim allows. Take care.
Slinger
END
Before we begin today’s guest submitted article, let’s pause briefly for a word from our sponsors. I’ve added items to the Amazon books page at my web site, www.bisonpress.com. You can go directly there at www.bisonpress.com/affiliatebooks.html . I have added, of course, The Frugal Survivalist, as well as three more magazine subscriptions. Guns & Ammo, Shotgun News, and Wilderness Way. The Dixie Gun catalog is there, and The ABC’s Of Reloading.
I have added more gear to the products page. Go to www.bisonpress.com/amazonproducts.html to see nifty items such as a cheap gas mask, its filter replacement, shotgun shell buttstock holder, rifle ammo buttstock holder, a mechanical alarm clock, a mechanical pocket watch, and about a half dozen Apocalypse type movies on DVD. The Trigger Effect, Red Dawn, The Postman, etc.
Please visit both pages and buy like your dollars will be worth less tomorrow. And remember to only buy from the links at my web page so I get credit from the sale. My commission will be used at Amazon to buy more books to do more research to present more Bison. Thanks. Now to the article.
MEDICAL MAGGOTRY
It is relatively easy (but not cheap) to acquire antibiotics now, but in a major survival situation, or after the Collapse, it ain't gonna be. Things like penicillin, terramycin, etc., have made our pampered lives so much easier for so long, we take them for granted. In a hard-core, die-any-minute survival scenario, stuff like this isn't going to be around when we shall need it most. Any little cut, burn or bullet wound is going to be a stomping ground for infection, and without antibiotics, infection becomes fatal.
*
Now, antibiotics are around: Of course hospitals, but I'm sure most small town doctor's offices, your average pharmacy, the vet clinic, and possibly even the nurse's station in schools have small quantities of antibiotics, but if you and I know where to find them while out scavenging after the Big C, then the improvident sheep and the dope addicts looking for drugs do, too. I imagine within the first two or three days after an absolute Crash, most hospitals and pharmacies will be all but torn down under the torrent of looters and supply-hunters, and any worthy drugs like antibiotics that aren't taken will likely be busted up and spilled in the madness.
*
So how to fight infection without antibiotics? Among other primitive methods, maggots are nature's own living, breathing infection fighters. Say while en route to sack the community 25 miles upriver, one of your strikers steps upon a broken beer bottle. Since he is only wearing flip-flops, his ankle is cut long and deep by a shard of filthy glass. (yes, the example came from the movie Children of Men, but it works) You clean the wound best as possible, but since you are on a timeline, all you can do for now is dress it neatly, and push on (for you need every trigger-finger available). The fight ensues, the village is taken, their three grain bins full of corn are yours; but your man's wound is worsening. After setting up a command center, you take a closer look. Yup. Highly infected. The town possessed no antibiotics, and you hate to lose a good fighter, what to do?
*
Take off the bandage, and leave the infected wound exposed to flies. Try not to let them light right on the wound, as flies are filthy and carry diseases, but keep them working on the intact flesh around the wound's perimeter. Maggots hatched soon after will find their way to the infected parts. One exposure to flies is most likely more than enough, so afterwards, cover the wound again. Check it daily for maggots; they should appear within a day or two. If not, let the flies try again. If the wound is full of maggots, as many as possible should be removed with forceps or washed out with sterile water. Only 50 to 100 of the little fellas should be allowed to stay in the wound.
*
Once our maggot farm is going full swing, the wound should be covered again, but looked upon each day. The maggots will produce a frothy looking fluid that should be sponged out, in order to better monitor the maggot activity. The amount of time for such debridement will vary, depending on the depth and extent of the wound, the number of maggots, and the body part affected, therefore, a certain time to remove the maggots cannot be given in hours or days. However, they should be removed at once when they have scarfed up all the dead, infected tissue and before they get settled in healthy flesh.
*
When a maggot starts chowin' on clean living tissue, the recipient will notice an increased level of pain, as the maggots come in contact with live nerves. Once established that they have finished the job, the maggots should be flushed from the wound with sterile water. Once maggot-free, the wound should be bandaged, and examined often just in case there are any old hangers-on ("I ain't goin', by god, I was born here!"). After all maggots are for sure cleansed away, the wound should be treated as any other wound and should heal normally.
*
Debridement using maggots has been done for thousands of years, and is no doubt still used in the more "backwards" parts of the world. Of course, maggots won't help much for internal infections like the common cold, only ouchies outside the body. The problem with fighting internal infections without store bought antibiotics is a completely different story, which I'll go into further if Jim allows. Take care.
Slinger
END
Saturday, June 23, 2007
spray insulation
SPRAY INSULATION
As fun as dirt is to insulate with because of its great bargain price, some might well panic at the prospect of digging like a coolie or being crushed under tons of debris after an asteroid impacts on top of Ross Perots bunker where he is hiding from a Korean assassin team and the continent wide earthquakes effect your region. As the years zip by and the hazy mirage of my demise starts to get clearer, I myself am less and less thrilled at the prospect of hard physical labor. So as appealing as an underground lair might be, even a free one as discarded tires are filled with mud to form the walls, I might just go with a less insulated dwelling. One way, although by no means cheap, is using spray insulation. For one square foot of sprayed on insulation you get an inch thickness and pay about a dollar.
*
Going through the web sites on the companies that sell the disposable kits, plenty of R values and other information is given. These I pretty much ignored. You can do the research, but I look at it as, you get the insulation you can afford. And R values are about as accurate as mileage estimates. If I spray an entire structure with insulation, it is going to stop all air flow and so insulate pretty good anyway. Have an intake for some oxygen of course. The same principle was parking a trailer and surrounding it with an outside structure, such as a pipe frame with tarps completely enclosing it. The first structure keeps out the wind, the interior air is not as cold, and the trailer has its own insulation. The only drawback was the yearly tarp replacement cost. But then, these where usually on gold mine claims so it was temporary anyway.
*
People are always raving to me about those homes that use inflated forms, spayed expanding foam, then covered with a spay concrete. Yes, yes, super wonderful. As soon as my law firm wins a tobacco case against a major company ( we’re going with the argument that the smoke should have contained nano-particles that scrubbed clean the users lungs ) I will be able to afford such a home. Until then, I would have to do it myself. If I have a 18 foot trailer and I completely cover it with insulation, bottom, top and sides, I will spend about six hundred dollars. Not chump change, but given that I would spend over a $125 a month for minimal propane heat in the winter, I can’t imagine the pay back cost would last very long. Even if you use the same amount of propane, you will be a lot warmer. As I said before, you can survive in a trailer or cabin without much heat. But it won’t be much fun. Insulation is a one time expense that just keeps on giving. Less fuel to buy, more comfort. And if fuel supplies are interrupted, a life saver.
*
If you could sink your trailer down mostly belowground and just insulated the roof this might be marginally cheaper. The unit for three hundred square feet costs three hundred dollars. But that means hiring a backhoe or digging the hole yourself. And shoring up the walls and putting some kind of roof structure up. It would be warmer, earth sheltering plus double thick insulation on the roof. With the concrete ferro-cement covering needed to preserve the insulated foam, you will need to spend a few more bucks. It would be a shame to pay for the insulation and then not have it protected. Have some kind of anchor to protect from wind.
*
This is really only frugal compared to other insulation methods, buying fuel constantly or buying a similar material house the professionals build. If you have a long trailer, such as a 35 footer, expect to spend almost two grand. Far cheaper to use a small trailer or cabin. Total area sprayed under 600 square feet. Then ferro-cement covered and a sealant applied, should run under a grand in price. Again, not real cheap, but cheaper in the long run. Fuels will only increase in price, and even wood heat is dangerous to rely on as once petroleum fuels ( including gas ) start to increase in cost as a lot of people are going to turn to wood to stay alive. Supplies will decrease and prices will go up. In the “good old days” when everyone burned wood for heat the forests were a lot bigger and the population was a lot smaller. Insulation beats fuel any day. A safer bet. No competition if done in times of plenty.
*
The spray kits for sale ( just do a search under spray foam insulation ) are a couple of canisters and the hoses and spray nozzle. Everything you need ( buy goggles and respirator to be safe ). Clean your surface and apply, working carefully to avoid waste as this stuff ain’t cheap. When dry cover with wire and cover with something to protect it. Cement shell most likely. This isn’t rocket science. You research for the cheapest product at the highest insulation value with the best fire protection. Figure out a way to anchor the dwelling or shell to avoid high wind damage ( expand the wire into a dug ditch with a cement bottom to bury the end of the shell? ). Cover the insulation to protect it ( ever see the foam from a can left exposed, brittle and peeling? ). Have adequate air intake to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning, but not enough to cut the factor of insulation. In effect, a homemade version of the expensive contractor versions.
*
As with most frugal advice, if you keep things small and simple you will save plenty of money. Duplicating a regular size stick built home will only keep you indebted to the bankers. Go small and spend small.
END
The flame wars in the comments section are getting to be a bit much. Most likely my fault, calling our heckler My Bitch. I shouldn’t have done that. For the record, I want all comments. But I want them rational, thought out, logical comments. You ( heckler dude, Mr. Pick It Apart ) are just using emotionalism. When you say I am unpatriotic because I hate my government, you are saying to be patriotic, to love his country, a German national had to approve of Hitler and his killing the Jews. Think, don’t just react. Use your head for more than a hat rack. And the reason so many comments dig on your spelling is because it is so bad we can’t understand what you are trying to say. Really. We might say you are a knuckle dragging ignoramus, what we are trying to say is, What Did He Just Try To Tell Us? I have, once again, tried to be kind and rational to our rude comments dude. Trying to explain things. I hope my efforts are not wasted. If this was ink I wouldn’t have spent the money, but luckily digits are free. Let’s stop being so extremely vulgar ( a little vulgar is okay ) in the comments section. Twelve comments the other day, one said good job, one said something actually pertaining to the post, the other ten were “you’re a monkey molester” or “suck corn out of my butt” or even worse. Let’s try to stay focused here. Thank you.
A guest article on Sunday, don't miss it.
Buy my crap www.bisonpress.com
As fun as dirt is to insulate with because of its great bargain price, some might well panic at the prospect of digging like a coolie or being crushed under tons of debris after an asteroid impacts on top of Ross Perots bunker where he is hiding from a Korean assassin team and the continent wide earthquakes effect your region. As the years zip by and the hazy mirage of my demise starts to get clearer, I myself am less and less thrilled at the prospect of hard physical labor. So as appealing as an underground lair might be, even a free one as discarded tires are filled with mud to form the walls, I might just go with a less insulated dwelling. One way, although by no means cheap, is using spray insulation. For one square foot of sprayed on insulation you get an inch thickness and pay about a dollar.
*
Going through the web sites on the companies that sell the disposable kits, plenty of R values and other information is given. These I pretty much ignored. You can do the research, but I look at it as, you get the insulation you can afford. And R values are about as accurate as mileage estimates. If I spray an entire structure with insulation, it is going to stop all air flow and so insulate pretty good anyway. Have an intake for some oxygen of course. The same principle was parking a trailer and surrounding it with an outside structure, such as a pipe frame with tarps completely enclosing it. The first structure keeps out the wind, the interior air is not as cold, and the trailer has its own insulation. The only drawback was the yearly tarp replacement cost. But then, these where usually on gold mine claims so it was temporary anyway.
*
People are always raving to me about those homes that use inflated forms, spayed expanding foam, then covered with a spay concrete. Yes, yes, super wonderful. As soon as my law firm wins a tobacco case against a major company ( we’re going with the argument that the smoke should have contained nano-particles that scrubbed clean the users lungs ) I will be able to afford such a home. Until then, I would have to do it myself. If I have a 18 foot trailer and I completely cover it with insulation, bottom, top and sides, I will spend about six hundred dollars. Not chump change, but given that I would spend over a $125 a month for minimal propane heat in the winter, I can’t imagine the pay back cost would last very long. Even if you use the same amount of propane, you will be a lot warmer. As I said before, you can survive in a trailer or cabin without much heat. But it won’t be much fun. Insulation is a one time expense that just keeps on giving. Less fuel to buy, more comfort. And if fuel supplies are interrupted, a life saver.
*
If you could sink your trailer down mostly belowground and just insulated the roof this might be marginally cheaper. The unit for three hundred square feet costs three hundred dollars. But that means hiring a backhoe or digging the hole yourself. And shoring up the walls and putting some kind of roof structure up. It would be warmer, earth sheltering plus double thick insulation on the roof. With the concrete ferro-cement covering needed to preserve the insulated foam, you will need to spend a few more bucks. It would be a shame to pay for the insulation and then not have it protected. Have some kind of anchor to protect from wind.
*
This is really only frugal compared to other insulation methods, buying fuel constantly or buying a similar material house the professionals build. If you have a long trailer, such as a 35 footer, expect to spend almost two grand. Far cheaper to use a small trailer or cabin. Total area sprayed under 600 square feet. Then ferro-cement covered and a sealant applied, should run under a grand in price. Again, not real cheap, but cheaper in the long run. Fuels will only increase in price, and even wood heat is dangerous to rely on as once petroleum fuels ( including gas ) start to increase in cost as a lot of people are going to turn to wood to stay alive. Supplies will decrease and prices will go up. In the “good old days” when everyone burned wood for heat the forests were a lot bigger and the population was a lot smaller. Insulation beats fuel any day. A safer bet. No competition if done in times of plenty.
*
The spray kits for sale ( just do a search under spray foam insulation ) are a couple of canisters and the hoses and spray nozzle. Everything you need ( buy goggles and respirator to be safe ). Clean your surface and apply, working carefully to avoid waste as this stuff ain’t cheap. When dry cover with wire and cover with something to protect it. Cement shell most likely. This isn’t rocket science. You research for the cheapest product at the highest insulation value with the best fire protection. Figure out a way to anchor the dwelling or shell to avoid high wind damage ( expand the wire into a dug ditch with a cement bottom to bury the end of the shell? ). Cover the insulation to protect it ( ever see the foam from a can left exposed, brittle and peeling? ). Have adequate air intake to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning, but not enough to cut the factor of insulation. In effect, a homemade version of the expensive contractor versions.
*
As with most frugal advice, if you keep things small and simple you will save plenty of money. Duplicating a regular size stick built home will only keep you indebted to the bankers. Go small and spend small.
END
The flame wars in the comments section are getting to be a bit much. Most likely my fault, calling our heckler My Bitch. I shouldn’t have done that. For the record, I want all comments. But I want them rational, thought out, logical comments. You ( heckler dude, Mr. Pick It Apart ) are just using emotionalism. When you say I am unpatriotic because I hate my government, you are saying to be patriotic, to love his country, a German national had to approve of Hitler and his killing the Jews. Think, don’t just react. Use your head for more than a hat rack. And the reason so many comments dig on your spelling is because it is so bad we can’t understand what you are trying to say. Really. We might say you are a knuckle dragging ignoramus, what we are trying to say is, What Did He Just Try To Tell Us? I have, once again, tried to be kind and rational to our rude comments dude. Trying to explain things. I hope my efforts are not wasted. If this was ink I wouldn’t have spent the money, but luckily digits are free. Let’s stop being so extremely vulgar ( a little vulgar is okay ) in the comments section. Twelve comments the other day, one said good job, one said something actually pertaining to the post, the other ten were “you’re a monkey molester” or “suck corn out of my butt” or even worse. Let’s try to stay focused here. Thank you.
A guest article on Sunday, don't miss it.
Buy my crap www.bisonpress.com
Friday, June 22, 2007
baghdad battery
THE BAGHDAD BATTERY
Those of you that actually paid attention in high school science class instead of rereading for the sixth time the last issue of SWAT or Guns & Ammo like I did because this ancient fossil of a teacher droning on and on like a complete reject from the Catholic Church’s school of science ( with the denial of gravity Lesson One ) and had to be the least interesting human being alive and who gave a crap if I got a good grade since you still got credit for taking the required course if you passed the year with a D- which was kind of nice since if you put some effort into the first semester and got a grade of D that meant you could sleep the last semester and fail it, you will find the following elementary and unnecessary. However, I thought it was kind of cool and this is my blog so I’ll write about it and you’ll like it and sing my praises or I will rain down curses upon your head and frogs will rain from the sky or something weird like that and you might get all sad that you didn’t listen to me in the first place. Before the Roman Empire got going good and proper with the wayward population crucified all over the place, some foreign guys in what is now Iraq were using chemical batteries to ( it is presumed ) electroplate metal.
*
A clay pot about seven inches high held a copper cylinder. The copper tube was sealed on both ends with an asphalt seal. Resting on the bottom seal but sticking up through the top seal was an iron rod. If you filled the copper tube with acid before sealing it on the top you got a primitive battery. The acid could be vinegar or wine or citric acid. Topped off with the acid, a test model recently produced a current at one half volt for eighteen day. This might be just what the doctor ordered for long after the Petroleum Age collapse. You might need to hook up several batteries to get enough current for much more than a LED lantern power source, but it’s nice to know there is a partial answer to how one would get a battery after the last salvaged auto battery died. Of course, once the last LED died you would need to go back to animal or vegetable oil lamps. Ahh, the fun of century long collapse ( if not longer, there is no more coal or oil to rescue us from an agricultural existence the next time ).
*
Now on to reader submitted ideas. Keep them coming. I may not be able to get a complete article out of it but I can pass it on in some form or another. Wasp spray as a substitute for pepper spray. If you are unfortunate to be living in a Totally Socialist Nanny State, be it England or California, which proclaims it unacceptable to defend yourself against thugs, you will be denied access to any weapon, even pepper spray. However, if you lay a can of wasp spray, the kind that shoots ten feet, on the car seat next to you it might serve as a defensive spray during a car jacking or other event. I would also place a receipt next to it. It might not help at all, but it might look like you bought it recently to combat a newly discovered nest. It might be three months old ( my wife bought a can, I was meaning to return this for a refund ) and pass as a plausible excuse. Just don’t try one three years old. It might not be as effective as pepper spray but it should disorientate the guy long enough to escape or get your tire iron out and brain him.
*
Another reader idea. Rabbit crap tea as fertilizer. Take your rabbit pellets and place in water. Allow to sit for a few days. Water the garden with it. The addition to water composts the turds and in just two or three days it will not burn the plants when used. One fertilizer I have read about is human urine diluted for nitrogen fertilizer. The body produces a clean, filtered urine. I have heard both ten to one and five to one. I don’t know which ratio of dilution is correct. Try it strong, then you can cut it back if needed. Big stuff, like trees, I imagine you could just give an instant shower without diluting it. Kind of hard to get a lot of benefit from this if you have a lot of crops, but it should work great for a household size garden.
*
I see Survival Blog has arrived at the idea of bikes for survival. I hope the movers and shakers that write for Rawles are reading me first. The thought of being a trailbreaker leaves me all tingly and warm. The article posted Thursday was mostly bug out only and omitted long term survival information, but all in all a good first start.
*
Creekmore has a new website. It is not on survival but gun rights. Check it out at http://thewaronguns.blogspot.com
*
I don’t know if someone sent me the article or if I ran across it. But I need a link to it if anyone has it. An instruction guide to replace Berden primers with Boxer in surplus ammo. It wouldn’t do any good for the steel cased cases, but would be great for taking Berden primed brass case surplus and making it usable again. I myself have almost two thousand rounds of 303 surplus that is Berden primed. If I could reload it with Boxer I could reuse instead of throwing them away after one use. So please send me the link and I’ll write up an article on it. I can’t believe I didn’t save the thing. What an idiot. I must have been having a bad hair day.
*
Government idiocy on “green” issues is amazing. We all know about the ethanol fiasco, forcing corn prices to rise and thus causing meat and dairy prices up. If we haven’t already reached that point, we will soon have more ethanol plants than we have gasoline refineries ( their age being one reason for high gas prices ). The Feds give so much in subsidies to corn growers, a lot of other crops won’t be planted. The soil will lose nutrients even faster and mostly huge corporations will benefit. Well, now we can add two more stupid ideas. Bio-waste, the dried corn stalks, old vegetation, dead trees and such. Collect them and burn them to generate electricity. Financially they are a net loser once salaries are factored in ( officials ignore that ) but energy wise they are no better. Just collecting the waste and transporting it wastes a lot of petroleum. Another tax payer boondoggle. Lastly, the government buying hybrid vehicles for its own use. A forty thousand dollar, specialty produced SUV being a hybrid still gets less gas mileage than a twelve thousand dollar Suzuki or Toyota ( you know, the cute little ones that would be crushed by almost all other vehicles out there ). Friggin idiots.
*
Here is an idea I had. It may or may not turn out to be feasible, but it is free and takes little storage room. The way I see it, most people, if they own a rifle sling at all, just have one. But most of us own more than one rifle. Come trading time, affordable rifle slings might be a good item to have. When I go dumpster diving, I keep the strap from otherwise trashed gym bags or other carrying bags. It is ugly and some are real crap with plastic clips on each end, but others with metal clips should serve quite well as improvised rifle slings. Something to think on.
END
amazon books, prep items, bison books www.bisonpress.com
Those of you that actually paid attention in high school science class instead of rereading for the sixth time the last issue of SWAT or Guns & Ammo like I did because this ancient fossil of a teacher droning on and on like a complete reject from the Catholic Church’s school of science ( with the denial of gravity Lesson One ) and had to be the least interesting human being alive and who gave a crap if I got a good grade since you still got credit for taking the required course if you passed the year with a D- which was kind of nice since if you put some effort into the first semester and got a grade of D that meant you could sleep the last semester and fail it, you will find the following elementary and unnecessary. However, I thought it was kind of cool and this is my blog so I’ll write about it and you’ll like it and sing my praises or I will rain down curses upon your head and frogs will rain from the sky or something weird like that and you might get all sad that you didn’t listen to me in the first place. Before the Roman Empire got going good and proper with the wayward population crucified all over the place, some foreign guys in what is now Iraq were using chemical batteries to ( it is presumed ) electroplate metal.
*
A clay pot about seven inches high held a copper cylinder. The copper tube was sealed on both ends with an asphalt seal. Resting on the bottom seal but sticking up through the top seal was an iron rod. If you filled the copper tube with acid before sealing it on the top you got a primitive battery. The acid could be vinegar or wine or citric acid. Topped off with the acid, a test model recently produced a current at one half volt for eighteen day. This might be just what the doctor ordered for long after the Petroleum Age collapse. You might need to hook up several batteries to get enough current for much more than a LED lantern power source, but it’s nice to know there is a partial answer to how one would get a battery after the last salvaged auto battery died. Of course, once the last LED died you would need to go back to animal or vegetable oil lamps. Ahh, the fun of century long collapse ( if not longer, there is no more coal or oil to rescue us from an agricultural existence the next time ).
*
Now on to reader submitted ideas. Keep them coming. I may not be able to get a complete article out of it but I can pass it on in some form or another. Wasp spray as a substitute for pepper spray. If you are unfortunate to be living in a Totally Socialist Nanny State, be it England or California, which proclaims it unacceptable to defend yourself against thugs, you will be denied access to any weapon, even pepper spray. However, if you lay a can of wasp spray, the kind that shoots ten feet, on the car seat next to you it might serve as a defensive spray during a car jacking or other event. I would also place a receipt next to it. It might not help at all, but it might look like you bought it recently to combat a newly discovered nest. It might be three months old ( my wife bought a can, I was meaning to return this for a refund ) and pass as a plausible excuse. Just don’t try one three years old. It might not be as effective as pepper spray but it should disorientate the guy long enough to escape or get your tire iron out and brain him.
*
Another reader idea. Rabbit crap tea as fertilizer. Take your rabbit pellets and place in water. Allow to sit for a few days. Water the garden with it. The addition to water composts the turds and in just two or three days it will not burn the plants when used. One fertilizer I have read about is human urine diluted for nitrogen fertilizer. The body produces a clean, filtered urine. I have heard both ten to one and five to one. I don’t know which ratio of dilution is correct. Try it strong, then you can cut it back if needed. Big stuff, like trees, I imagine you could just give an instant shower without diluting it. Kind of hard to get a lot of benefit from this if you have a lot of crops, but it should work great for a household size garden.
*
I see Survival Blog has arrived at the idea of bikes for survival. I hope the movers and shakers that write for Rawles are reading me first. The thought of being a trailbreaker leaves me all tingly and warm. The article posted Thursday was mostly bug out only and omitted long term survival information, but all in all a good first start.
*
Creekmore has a new website. It is not on survival but gun rights. Check it out at http://thewaronguns.blogspot.com
*
I don’t know if someone sent me the article or if I ran across it. But I need a link to it if anyone has it. An instruction guide to replace Berden primers with Boxer in surplus ammo. It wouldn’t do any good for the steel cased cases, but would be great for taking Berden primed brass case surplus and making it usable again. I myself have almost two thousand rounds of 303 surplus that is Berden primed. If I could reload it with Boxer I could reuse instead of throwing them away after one use. So please send me the link and I’ll write up an article on it. I can’t believe I didn’t save the thing. What an idiot. I must have been having a bad hair day.
*
Government idiocy on “green” issues is amazing. We all know about the ethanol fiasco, forcing corn prices to rise and thus causing meat and dairy prices up. If we haven’t already reached that point, we will soon have more ethanol plants than we have gasoline refineries ( their age being one reason for high gas prices ). The Feds give so much in subsidies to corn growers, a lot of other crops won’t be planted. The soil will lose nutrients even faster and mostly huge corporations will benefit. Well, now we can add two more stupid ideas. Bio-waste, the dried corn stalks, old vegetation, dead trees and such. Collect them and burn them to generate electricity. Financially they are a net loser once salaries are factored in ( officials ignore that ) but energy wise they are no better. Just collecting the waste and transporting it wastes a lot of petroleum. Another tax payer boondoggle. Lastly, the government buying hybrid vehicles for its own use. A forty thousand dollar, specialty produced SUV being a hybrid still gets less gas mileage than a twelve thousand dollar Suzuki or Toyota ( you know, the cute little ones that would be crushed by almost all other vehicles out there ). Friggin idiots.
*
Here is an idea I had. It may or may not turn out to be feasible, but it is free and takes little storage room. The way I see it, most people, if they own a rifle sling at all, just have one. But most of us own more than one rifle. Come trading time, affordable rifle slings might be a good item to have. When I go dumpster diving, I keep the strap from otherwise trashed gym bags or other carrying bags. It is ugly and some are real crap with plastic clips on each end, but others with metal clips should serve quite well as improvised rifle slings. Something to think on.
END
amazon books, prep items, bison books www.bisonpress.com
Thursday, June 21, 2007
solar heater
SOLAR HEATER
Yesterday I reverted back to norm and ran around in circles and started screaming about the sky falling after Peak Oil hit us. Today I’ll try to take it a little easy on you. Since I covered cheap AC, how about cheap heat? It is not a total answer, not a “replace my oil furnace” type of heat. Just a “keep you alive in the winter if marauding bandits burned down your outhouse and the woods caught fire and there is no wood to burn” type of heat. It’s not even my idea, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t work. A kind reader, not content to simple read the same drivel about the same old crap, forwarded an article about a simple $300 solar heater from, of all places if you can possibly believe it but I didn’t until I saw the picture from the cover but I still rubbed my eyes in astonishment and felt the cold chill of death crawl up my spine since this could only mean that Hell itself had froze over and all the liberal Communist tree-hugging Gore vomited hype about global warming had been a foul lie, Mother Earth News.
*
Yes, the same magazine that focuses on Southern California Hollywood pukes insulating their twenty thousand square foot house, not because it ever gets cold there but to insulate their tender pink skin from the scorching 70 degree heat as well as having the added benefit of keeping the noise of the non-electric vehicles and the unemployed non-Yuppie types kept to a minimum. And of course these same people must have at least fifty thousand dollars worth of PV panels on their roof so they can power up their alarm systems to notify the private security guards that are actually armed with firearms unlike the rest of the comrades in the Peoples Republic Of Kalifornia, who may decide to buy a stolen 38 special from the turn of two centuries ago but if they ever defend themselves against an escaped felon armed with a fully automatic machine gun and having the fresh blood of his last victim still dripping off of his chin, well, not only will the state prosecute him and toss him in prison for life with actual criminals, if by some miracle he has the money to hire a defense attorney from the OJ Simpson team and gets out before he is sodomized and dies from AIDS he will still face a civil lawsuit from the relatives of the alleged felon who although they are all illegal immigrants still can win the lawsuit because our lawyers must not under any circumstances including nuclear war be faced with unemployment and so it is perfectly fine to smear the Constitution with their body wastes and then burn it.
*
In case you are wondering, I think Mother Earth News is a total fish wrap, but once in awhile the clouds part and a divine voice from on high proclaims they will present a decent article of self reliance. The author of the article took a separate building, a garage or workroom, and covered the south side with five or six panels of plastic sheets to heat the building rather than use his propane heater. Actually I don’t know if it was a total replacement or just enough to keep the gas bill down, but it doesn’t matter. For three hundred dollars you could buy ten refills on your five gallon propane canister, or you could heat your building forever more. Who cares if the heat never approached the BTU rating of oil or gas. It is free after the initial investment. But more importantly, in any kind of emergency or disruption of supply, it will keep you alive. Sure, at night you need to dive under a stack of wool blankets or comforters and it will be hell in the morning getting out of bed to a cold house, but that’s your own damn fault for living in a conventional stick built house with almost no insulation that takes three quarters of your income for thirty years to pay off instead of digging a big hole, driving a cargo van down into it, ferro-cementing the whole thing and covering back up with dirt for a constant fifty degrees inside and possibly sixty if you burn a few bear fat lamps. You know the oil is running out and you still are living in a conventional home and commuting to work. But aren’t we all. I don’t commute but I sure burn the fossil fuels to keep it livable in my trailer in winter. We’re all guilty, so in the future the solar heater is all any of us will have.
*
The solar heater is a frame of wood on the outside of the building, laid over the pattern of the wall wood frame. You cut a intake hole at the bottom, and one at the top. A few inches tall, from 2x4 to 2x4 of the wall frame. On the outside, the new frame is covered by the sheets of plastic ( looks like the tin sheet but made of semi-transparent plastic ). Laid on the old outside wall are sheets of black metal screen. Seal it all up. It can be one section, one foot wide by six tall, or multiple sheets side by side. Ideally you want to cover the entire south facing wall. The cold air from inside the dwelling is drawn in at the bottom, rises up and is heated by the sun coming through the plastic and hitting the black metal. The warm air goes back into the building in the top opening. No outside air gets in, so the air is constantly heated and forced inside. This is a variation of my old solar heating article, from the excellent publication Dollars From Sunshine. A trough is built, if from nothing else an old door. Put sheet metal on it, paint it flat black. On the edges, place raised wood, such as 1x1’s. Put a sheet of glass over the raised wood. Have an opening at top. Place at an angle, up against a south facing window, the opening in the raised window. Close the window at sundown. Hot air during sunny days.
*
The wall mounted unit has its advantages though. Number one, no one can easily steal it. Number two for the spoiled trophy wife Barbie Princess of the family, it looks neat and clean rather than trashy and junky. Three, it is easier to shut it down after the sun is gone. You just close off a small wall hole rather than manhandling the whole unit away from the window. Of course, it won’t get quite as much sun. The window unit can have reflectors and works at a slant. I like the original concept, but the new MEN article type might float your boat instead. Presented here for your information. If you don’t like it, cancel your subscription to MEN and send that money to me where I will keep visions of sugar plumbs and bolt action war surplus rifles dancing in your head. And please, keep in mind these kinds of projects need to be done before any kind of energy emergency hits. In the 1970’s after the oil shock, insulation was almost impossible to get once everyone else had the same idea. The same will happen with solar heat materials. And, think about replacement plastic or glass in storage. One wind swept particle or one small bullet will kill your heater and Lowe’s will be closed.
END
you know the drill-buy all my crap, and Amazon's. www.bisonpress.com
Yesterday I reverted back to norm and ran around in circles and started screaming about the sky falling after Peak Oil hit us. Today I’ll try to take it a little easy on you. Since I covered cheap AC, how about cheap heat? It is not a total answer, not a “replace my oil furnace” type of heat. Just a “keep you alive in the winter if marauding bandits burned down your outhouse and the woods caught fire and there is no wood to burn” type of heat. It’s not even my idea, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t work. A kind reader, not content to simple read the same drivel about the same old crap, forwarded an article about a simple $300 solar heater from, of all places if you can possibly believe it but I didn’t until I saw the picture from the cover but I still rubbed my eyes in astonishment and felt the cold chill of death crawl up my spine since this could only mean that Hell itself had froze over and all the liberal Communist tree-hugging Gore vomited hype about global warming had been a foul lie, Mother Earth News.
*
Yes, the same magazine that focuses on Southern California Hollywood pukes insulating their twenty thousand square foot house, not because it ever gets cold there but to insulate their tender pink skin from the scorching 70 degree heat as well as having the added benefit of keeping the noise of the non-electric vehicles and the unemployed non-Yuppie types kept to a minimum. And of course these same people must have at least fifty thousand dollars worth of PV panels on their roof so they can power up their alarm systems to notify the private security guards that are actually armed with firearms unlike the rest of the comrades in the Peoples Republic Of Kalifornia, who may decide to buy a stolen 38 special from the turn of two centuries ago but if they ever defend themselves against an escaped felon armed with a fully automatic machine gun and having the fresh blood of his last victim still dripping off of his chin, well, not only will the state prosecute him and toss him in prison for life with actual criminals, if by some miracle he has the money to hire a defense attorney from the OJ Simpson team and gets out before he is sodomized and dies from AIDS he will still face a civil lawsuit from the relatives of the alleged felon who although they are all illegal immigrants still can win the lawsuit because our lawyers must not under any circumstances including nuclear war be faced with unemployment and so it is perfectly fine to smear the Constitution with their body wastes and then burn it.
*
In case you are wondering, I think Mother Earth News is a total fish wrap, but once in awhile the clouds part and a divine voice from on high proclaims they will present a decent article of self reliance. The author of the article took a separate building, a garage or workroom, and covered the south side with five or six panels of plastic sheets to heat the building rather than use his propane heater. Actually I don’t know if it was a total replacement or just enough to keep the gas bill down, but it doesn’t matter. For three hundred dollars you could buy ten refills on your five gallon propane canister, or you could heat your building forever more. Who cares if the heat never approached the BTU rating of oil or gas. It is free after the initial investment. But more importantly, in any kind of emergency or disruption of supply, it will keep you alive. Sure, at night you need to dive under a stack of wool blankets or comforters and it will be hell in the morning getting out of bed to a cold house, but that’s your own damn fault for living in a conventional stick built house with almost no insulation that takes three quarters of your income for thirty years to pay off instead of digging a big hole, driving a cargo van down into it, ferro-cementing the whole thing and covering back up with dirt for a constant fifty degrees inside and possibly sixty if you burn a few bear fat lamps. You know the oil is running out and you still are living in a conventional home and commuting to work. But aren’t we all. I don’t commute but I sure burn the fossil fuels to keep it livable in my trailer in winter. We’re all guilty, so in the future the solar heater is all any of us will have.
*
The solar heater is a frame of wood on the outside of the building, laid over the pattern of the wall wood frame. You cut a intake hole at the bottom, and one at the top. A few inches tall, from 2x4 to 2x4 of the wall frame. On the outside, the new frame is covered by the sheets of plastic ( looks like the tin sheet but made of semi-transparent plastic ). Laid on the old outside wall are sheets of black metal screen. Seal it all up. It can be one section, one foot wide by six tall, or multiple sheets side by side. Ideally you want to cover the entire south facing wall. The cold air from inside the dwelling is drawn in at the bottom, rises up and is heated by the sun coming through the plastic and hitting the black metal. The warm air goes back into the building in the top opening. No outside air gets in, so the air is constantly heated and forced inside. This is a variation of my old solar heating article, from the excellent publication Dollars From Sunshine. A trough is built, if from nothing else an old door. Put sheet metal on it, paint it flat black. On the edges, place raised wood, such as 1x1’s. Put a sheet of glass over the raised wood. Have an opening at top. Place at an angle, up against a south facing window, the opening in the raised window. Close the window at sundown. Hot air during sunny days.
*
The wall mounted unit has its advantages though. Number one, no one can easily steal it. Number two for the spoiled trophy wife Barbie Princess of the family, it looks neat and clean rather than trashy and junky. Three, it is easier to shut it down after the sun is gone. You just close off a small wall hole rather than manhandling the whole unit away from the window. Of course, it won’t get quite as much sun. The window unit can have reflectors and works at a slant. I like the original concept, but the new MEN article type might float your boat instead. Presented here for your information. If you don’t like it, cancel your subscription to MEN and send that money to me where I will keep visions of sugar plumbs and bolt action war surplus rifles dancing in your head. And please, keep in mind these kinds of projects need to be done before any kind of energy emergency hits. In the 1970’s after the oil shock, insulation was almost impossible to get once everyone else had the same idea. The same will happen with solar heat materials. And, think about replacement plastic or glass in storage. One wind swept particle or one small bullet will kill your heater and Lowe’s will be closed.
END
you know the drill-buy all my crap, and Amazon's. www.bisonpress.com
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
its the energy stupid
IT’S THE ENERGY, STUPID
Ah, President Clinton. What a guy! The luckiest SOB to ever rule these fair shores. I would rather shove rusty yet still sharp razor blades up my southern hemispheric body orifice than ever say anything nice about the bastard, but he sure had it good. Oh, sure, he gutted the military and raped the Social Security fund to make the economy function. But more than that the policies of former prez Reagan paid off for him in the form of really cheap and affordable oil. It wasn’t the economy, stupid ( as his saying went ), it is the energy.
*
My adopted special needs reader, my personally appointed heckler, made a comment. Don’t you have anything good to say about this country? Okay, here it is officially. America has one of the most liberal sets of gun laws around. But his main beef was my suggesting that you buy foreign made products instead of American made. So I say to him ( cover your eyes if you‘re underage or turn pink with embarrassment at profanity ), who’s my bitch now? Thank you for the article idea. That’s at least the second one you’ve given me. It doesn’t matter who makes the crap we buy, at least not at this point. From a national security standpoint, it is strategically asinine to give up any sector of the economy that strengthens you militarily ( which would include manufacturing and agriculture ). From an economic point it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Why? Because it is about energy, not economics.
*
I love my job, at least as much as you can like any pointless activity that consumes ten hours a day. Not only is there no stress, not only can I go dumpster diving every day I work since I am tasked with taking the garbage trailer to the dump, not only do I get all the bread products I want, I can also allow my mind to drift while driving. This morning I am driving along and it suddenly hits me. It’s the energy, stupid! Here I spent the last few decades wrestling with the question was an information economy as viable as a manufacturing one. It doesn’t really matter. A Chinaman can make and sell a stainless steel knife for about a buck in bulk purchase pricing and walk away with a nice profit. The company in this country can buy it for a buck and sell it for five, the four buck profit having as much buying power as the Chinese profit. Everybody wins, including the consumer. If the item was made in America, it would retail for five to ten times as much, the company would make no extra profit due to sales volumes falling and the consumer would get screwed. The only winner would be Union workers. That wouldn’t be bad if we were all Union and all made their wages, but as it stands now only a small minority of workers get those benefits. My supporting them does nothing to strengthen this country as a whole.
*
By buying foreign you still provide American jobs. They just pay a rate more in line with global wages. Sad but true. The government encouraged factory jobs to move overseas, starting fifty years ago with Japanese steel. We subsidized them at the expense of our own producers in order to bribe the Japanese to stay out of the Communists camp. So don’t wave the flag and call me unpatriotic by not buying American. Our own government screwed over our manufacturing sector for short term gains. Save the jingoistic blabbering for convincing young kids they need to go over and get slaughtered in Iran, chocking on the depleted uranium rounds dust we put in our own munitions. People like me telling the truth are not as dangerous as our own government, so wake up.
*
Two world wars did not defeat the British Empire. The common excuse is that two wars bankrupted them. Well, why didn’t it bankrupt Russia? She came out of fighting both wars better than ever. Why? She had a butt load of oil. England went from the worlds greatest economy to a crippled has-been largely due to lack of oil. Her coal mines made her great in Victorian times, lack of oil killed her economy later. North Sea oil rejuvenated her to some extent but the damage had already been done. Her seed corn had been consumed. And we are following in her footsteps. Look, don’t write me and curse me out. Oil addiction will be our undoing. That doesn’t make me hate our country, just its choices. I admire all the British have done, but the sad fact is they are over and done as a power. We will be as soon as the oil reserves drop low enough. Energy surplus is what an economy is about. Without it your economy sucks.
*
If it functions at all. Life is energy. Manufacturing is not important. Information economic activity is not important. Energy is important. As soon as it become too dear, both the Chinese manufacture who needs cheap ocean transportation and the US service economy which needs cheap Interstate transportation are equally screwed. Even if we still had all of our manufacturing, even if we still were 100% food self-sufficient ( I’m not sure that we are, but a topic for another day ), when energy becomes dear instead of cheap ( gas is still under the price of the equivalent unit of milk, a local item ) it doesn’t matter. Game over. All this senseless economic activity is to keep us too busy to revolt and keep a minority in power and profits. It isn’t necessary by any means. We would still be on our own dirt farms if it was profitable to the banks and politicians. So stop focusing on all of our goods being made in China, it only matters as long as the oil is abundant. Failing that, what and where for our consumer goods manufacturing origin is not very important.
*
We could go from a service economy today to a telecommuting economy tomorrow. Or everyone being a vacuum cleaner salesman. It wouldn’t matter. As long as the cheap energy was available. Granted, economic activity dictates being able to secure energy. But the ability to become economically and militarily powerful is first contingent on a good oil supply. We had that, we advanced. No amount of other factors would have helped. Japan rose to power without energy, but it was a time of global oversupply and she was able to finesse the system to her advantage. That can’t happen in a scarcity situation. And she never would have become a global superpower without the oil. Same with Germany and even England. Coal and oil geopolitics are two separate animals.
*
Forget paper currencies, trade deficits, economic activity. The answer is in energy supply.
END
buy books, buy stuff www.bisonpress.com
Ah, President Clinton. What a guy! The luckiest SOB to ever rule these fair shores. I would rather shove rusty yet still sharp razor blades up my southern hemispheric body orifice than ever say anything nice about the bastard, but he sure had it good. Oh, sure, he gutted the military and raped the Social Security fund to make the economy function. But more than that the policies of former prez Reagan paid off for him in the form of really cheap and affordable oil. It wasn’t the economy, stupid ( as his saying went ), it is the energy.
*
My adopted special needs reader, my personally appointed heckler, made a comment. Don’t you have anything good to say about this country? Okay, here it is officially. America has one of the most liberal sets of gun laws around. But his main beef was my suggesting that you buy foreign made products instead of American made. So I say to him ( cover your eyes if you‘re underage or turn pink with embarrassment at profanity ), who’s my bitch now? Thank you for the article idea. That’s at least the second one you’ve given me. It doesn’t matter who makes the crap we buy, at least not at this point. From a national security standpoint, it is strategically asinine to give up any sector of the economy that strengthens you militarily ( which would include manufacturing and agriculture ). From an economic point it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Why? Because it is about energy, not economics.
*
I love my job, at least as much as you can like any pointless activity that consumes ten hours a day. Not only is there no stress, not only can I go dumpster diving every day I work since I am tasked with taking the garbage trailer to the dump, not only do I get all the bread products I want, I can also allow my mind to drift while driving. This morning I am driving along and it suddenly hits me. It’s the energy, stupid! Here I spent the last few decades wrestling with the question was an information economy as viable as a manufacturing one. It doesn’t really matter. A Chinaman can make and sell a stainless steel knife for about a buck in bulk purchase pricing and walk away with a nice profit. The company in this country can buy it for a buck and sell it for five, the four buck profit having as much buying power as the Chinese profit. Everybody wins, including the consumer. If the item was made in America, it would retail for five to ten times as much, the company would make no extra profit due to sales volumes falling and the consumer would get screwed. The only winner would be Union workers. That wouldn’t be bad if we were all Union and all made their wages, but as it stands now only a small minority of workers get those benefits. My supporting them does nothing to strengthen this country as a whole.
*
By buying foreign you still provide American jobs. They just pay a rate more in line with global wages. Sad but true. The government encouraged factory jobs to move overseas, starting fifty years ago with Japanese steel. We subsidized them at the expense of our own producers in order to bribe the Japanese to stay out of the Communists camp. So don’t wave the flag and call me unpatriotic by not buying American. Our own government screwed over our manufacturing sector for short term gains. Save the jingoistic blabbering for convincing young kids they need to go over and get slaughtered in Iran, chocking on the depleted uranium rounds dust we put in our own munitions. People like me telling the truth are not as dangerous as our own government, so wake up.
*
Two world wars did not defeat the British Empire. The common excuse is that two wars bankrupted them. Well, why didn’t it bankrupt Russia? She came out of fighting both wars better than ever. Why? She had a butt load of oil. England went from the worlds greatest economy to a crippled has-been largely due to lack of oil. Her coal mines made her great in Victorian times, lack of oil killed her economy later. North Sea oil rejuvenated her to some extent but the damage had already been done. Her seed corn had been consumed. And we are following in her footsteps. Look, don’t write me and curse me out. Oil addiction will be our undoing. That doesn’t make me hate our country, just its choices. I admire all the British have done, but the sad fact is they are over and done as a power. We will be as soon as the oil reserves drop low enough. Energy surplus is what an economy is about. Without it your economy sucks.
*
If it functions at all. Life is energy. Manufacturing is not important. Information economic activity is not important. Energy is important. As soon as it become too dear, both the Chinese manufacture who needs cheap ocean transportation and the US service economy which needs cheap Interstate transportation are equally screwed. Even if we still had all of our manufacturing, even if we still were 100% food self-sufficient ( I’m not sure that we are, but a topic for another day ), when energy becomes dear instead of cheap ( gas is still under the price of the equivalent unit of milk, a local item ) it doesn’t matter. Game over. All this senseless economic activity is to keep us too busy to revolt and keep a minority in power and profits. It isn’t necessary by any means. We would still be on our own dirt farms if it was profitable to the banks and politicians. So stop focusing on all of our goods being made in China, it only matters as long as the oil is abundant. Failing that, what and where for our consumer goods manufacturing origin is not very important.
*
We could go from a service economy today to a telecommuting economy tomorrow. Or everyone being a vacuum cleaner salesman. It wouldn’t matter. As long as the cheap energy was available. Granted, economic activity dictates being able to secure energy. But the ability to become economically and militarily powerful is first contingent on a good oil supply. We had that, we advanced. No amount of other factors would have helped. Japan rose to power without energy, but it was a time of global oversupply and she was able to finesse the system to her advantage. That can’t happen in a scarcity situation. And she never would have become a global superpower without the oil. Same with Germany and even England. Coal and oil geopolitics are two separate animals.
*
Forget paper currencies, trade deficits, economic activity. The answer is in energy supply.
END
buy books, buy stuff www.bisonpress.com
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
frugal AC
FRUGAL AIR CONDITIONING
Remember when you were a young teenager? You had just gotten a license to partake in using up the last of the earth’s resources in metal and petroleum in order to aimlessly wander around and try to impress your friends with a brand spanking new automobile. Actually, judging from fighting the traffic past the High School in the mornings it looks like parents are trying to out perform the Jones’ by equipping their spawn with the latest and greatest ( well, as good as it gets for American sheet metal ) from Detroit in order to make themselves look good. Oooooh!!! Look at me. I’m Mr. Big Shot Hot To Trot Super Lawyer Yuppie Bastard. I can afford to give my irresponsible, long hair hippie drug using pants hanging past his ass crack mascara wearing son a thirty thousand dollar vehicle so his lazy carcass doesn’t have to pedal a bike three miles to school like a dirty lower class poor proletarian swine. Now, in theory, if Dad isn’t as worthless as the son or as big of a canker on the rectal wall of society like most Yuppie’s are, he will warn him before he gets behind the wheel.
*
Don’t drive too fast. Don’t pick up stray tramps from the other side of the tracks ( Yuppie tramps are okay-their families have the medical insurance to combat VD ). Don’t drink and drive. So what happens? Junior, once thought to be first in line to the family fortune, now totally and beyond doubt proves how idiotic he is and gets plastered while being pleasured by a syphilitic whore, goes driving into a telephone pole at ninety miles an hour. The moral of the story, listen to those older and wiser than you. Now, I know, you know, and Ross Perot knows that almost none of you listen to me. You are reliving your teenage years all over again. You are living in a two hundred thousand dollar house, driving a thirty grand SUV, stock MRE’s and I am sure that after you get done reading Rawles Survival Blog you go into your subterranean lair and caress your two thousand dollar semi-automatic battle rifle. Yes. Yes, my pretty. Soon. Soon we will emerge and rule the world. You and me, my love. You will be my queen! I would make sweet love to you now, but unfortunately your seven millimeter orifice is too large for my manhood.
*
So, I figure, you need a break from my incessant chatter on cutting back expenses and living a cruel existence of deprivation and misery surrounded by a sea of plenty. I’m going to take pity on you today and throw you a bone. Instead of being forced to live on the front porch for half the year to get a bit of shade and a breeze, how about some real air conditioning? Not mechanical. We still need to concern ourselves with the grid crashing and the oil running out. But air conditioning nonetheless. And no water is needed, so desert dwellers can partake in this luxury. You don’t even need to have an underground home. I should have written about this sooner, but I was in the grip of a cold winter ( for here, anyway ) and I was focused on warm, not cool. I first ran across this idea when I read “How To Live Without Electricity, And Like It” ( of course available through my Amazon books page www.bisonpress.com ). But the Internet is full of articles on it. Just do a search on underground cooling tubes.
*
The directions on utilizing a small ( 50x50 ) yard and getting maximum cooling from it are a bit more expensive than I care for, about a thousand dollars. Essentially you rent a trencher and make a lot of ditches and bundle pipe together, maximizing the surface of pipe that is exposed to the cool ground. If you take the average winter temperature at your location and the average summer temperature and average them you get the year round ground temperature. In other words, thirty in winter and seventy in summer equal fifty degrees ground temp. All the time. This is the temperature air you can draw in the summer. So almost any area outside of Florida and south Texas will give you under 72 degree cool air for the summer. But even there, eighty in the house is better than 100. The fancy way costs almost a thousand bucks. You’re talking almost eight hundred feet of pipe to get a house to feel like a meat packing plant. Of course, it is a one time expense, and electrical costs are only going to go up. It seems a shame for anyone who has at least a fifty by fifty foot yard not to do this. You might even be able to get just one summer to pay for itself. But let’s talk about the cheaper way. Under a hundred bucks.
*
If you own a small dwelling, say a trailer of a shack, this is perfect. Take at least a four inch PVC pipe and bury it at least four feet down for at least a hundred feet. The outside pipe rises from the ground to a higher level than the inside pipe. You have a U shape. Straight down into the ground, turn toward the house and running towards it underground, then up into the house. Make sure to paint to keep the pipe from becoming sun damaged. Screen the intake and find a way to keep the rain out. When you want to stop the process have a cap to place over the intake pipe. Air is drawn in from the pipe, travels down the earth cooled pipe, and enters the building much colder than when it entered. A natural cooling tube, without electricity. Can you get much simpler? Sure, the digging is going to suck. But then you only need to buy pipe, not rent a back hoe or ditch witch. If you don’t like the idea of digging, at least buy the pipe and store it. One day you might have no choice if you want cooling. And of course don’t neglect shade and insulation. One pipe does not equal a big AC unit. More likely a few rotary fans.
END
Remember when you were a young teenager? You had just gotten a license to partake in using up the last of the earth’s resources in metal and petroleum in order to aimlessly wander around and try to impress your friends with a brand spanking new automobile. Actually, judging from fighting the traffic past the High School in the mornings it looks like parents are trying to out perform the Jones’ by equipping their spawn with the latest and greatest ( well, as good as it gets for American sheet metal ) from Detroit in order to make themselves look good. Oooooh!!! Look at me. I’m Mr. Big Shot Hot To Trot Super Lawyer Yuppie Bastard. I can afford to give my irresponsible, long hair hippie drug using pants hanging past his ass crack mascara wearing son a thirty thousand dollar vehicle so his lazy carcass doesn’t have to pedal a bike three miles to school like a dirty lower class poor proletarian swine. Now, in theory, if Dad isn’t as worthless as the son or as big of a canker on the rectal wall of society like most Yuppie’s are, he will warn him before he gets behind the wheel.
*
Don’t drive too fast. Don’t pick up stray tramps from the other side of the tracks ( Yuppie tramps are okay-their families have the medical insurance to combat VD ). Don’t drink and drive. So what happens? Junior, once thought to be first in line to the family fortune, now totally and beyond doubt proves how idiotic he is and gets plastered while being pleasured by a syphilitic whore, goes driving into a telephone pole at ninety miles an hour. The moral of the story, listen to those older and wiser than you. Now, I know, you know, and Ross Perot knows that almost none of you listen to me. You are reliving your teenage years all over again. You are living in a two hundred thousand dollar house, driving a thirty grand SUV, stock MRE’s and I am sure that after you get done reading Rawles Survival Blog you go into your subterranean lair and caress your two thousand dollar semi-automatic battle rifle. Yes. Yes, my pretty. Soon. Soon we will emerge and rule the world. You and me, my love. You will be my queen! I would make sweet love to you now, but unfortunately your seven millimeter orifice is too large for my manhood.
*
So, I figure, you need a break from my incessant chatter on cutting back expenses and living a cruel existence of deprivation and misery surrounded by a sea of plenty. I’m going to take pity on you today and throw you a bone. Instead of being forced to live on the front porch for half the year to get a bit of shade and a breeze, how about some real air conditioning? Not mechanical. We still need to concern ourselves with the grid crashing and the oil running out. But air conditioning nonetheless. And no water is needed, so desert dwellers can partake in this luxury. You don’t even need to have an underground home. I should have written about this sooner, but I was in the grip of a cold winter ( for here, anyway ) and I was focused on warm, not cool. I first ran across this idea when I read “How To Live Without Electricity, And Like It” ( of course available through my Amazon books page www.bisonpress.com ). But the Internet is full of articles on it. Just do a search on underground cooling tubes.
*
The directions on utilizing a small ( 50x50 ) yard and getting maximum cooling from it are a bit more expensive than I care for, about a thousand dollars. Essentially you rent a trencher and make a lot of ditches and bundle pipe together, maximizing the surface of pipe that is exposed to the cool ground. If you take the average winter temperature at your location and the average summer temperature and average them you get the year round ground temperature. In other words, thirty in winter and seventy in summer equal fifty degrees ground temp. All the time. This is the temperature air you can draw in the summer. So almost any area outside of Florida and south Texas will give you under 72 degree cool air for the summer. But even there, eighty in the house is better than 100. The fancy way costs almost a thousand bucks. You’re talking almost eight hundred feet of pipe to get a house to feel like a meat packing plant. Of course, it is a one time expense, and electrical costs are only going to go up. It seems a shame for anyone who has at least a fifty by fifty foot yard not to do this. You might even be able to get just one summer to pay for itself. But let’s talk about the cheaper way. Under a hundred bucks.
*
If you own a small dwelling, say a trailer of a shack, this is perfect. Take at least a four inch PVC pipe and bury it at least four feet down for at least a hundred feet. The outside pipe rises from the ground to a higher level than the inside pipe. You have a U shape. Straight down into the ground, turn toward the house and running towards it underground, then up into the house. Make sure to paint to keep the pipe from becoming sun damaged. Screen the intake and find a way to keep the rain out. When you want to stop the process have a cap to place over the intake pipe. Air is drawn in from the pipe, travels down the earth cooled pipe, and enters the building much colder than when it entered. A natural cooling tube, without electricity. Can you get much simpler? Sure, the digging is going to suck. But then you only need to buy pipe, not rent a back hoe or ditch witch. If you don’t like the idea of digging, at least buy the pipe and store it. One day you might have no choice if you want cooling. And of course don’t neglect shade and insulation. One pipe does not equal a big AC unit. More likely a few rotary fans.
END
Monday, June 18, 2007
running with scissors
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
Think back to when you were in short pants, a snot nose brat with no thoughts beyond eating sugared cereal and building blanket forts off of the dining room table. Inevitably you would need a pair of scissors for something so you would root around your crayon box, throwing marbles, rubber snakes and plastic army men hither and yon until you came across a cheaply made ( most likely at that time from Japan ) pair of pot metal tin covered kids scissors that had rounded points and the cutting strength of a wet noodle. Any paper actually cut with these instruments was an accidental tear rather than a cut. You grab the tool and go tearing across the house at top speed, intent on completing your project that is so important that not only will it save Western Civilization and look really cool, but it also has your heart racing madly and you bouncing up and down doing the pee-pee dance ( but no time to stop at the bathroom, darn it!, this is too dang important!! ).
*
Well, of course Mom is busy watching daytime TV and baking a cake and chatting on the phone with Aunt Gertrude, all at the same time, but her Mother Radar is working with perfection and somehow she unearths your intent and even before you gain top warp speed she is screaming at you at the top of her lungs, “DON’T RUN WITH SCISSORS!!” If you are lucky you slow down from Race Track Speed to a more respectable Slightly Over The Speed Limit On The Interstate Speed and she is happy and leaves you alone and goes back to what she was doing. If you are unlucky she throws down the phone, whirls about without braking stride and turns down the oven and then chases after you starting a three hour lecture about how running with scissors will be the death of you in a most horrid and unimaginable manner. Regardless, you are now firmly convinced that anything with an edge can cause really cool wounds and so jumps up on your lists of Really Cool Things You Simply Must Have. You have now totally redirected your life into edged weapon acquisition. Doubtless, ninety percent of all memberships into the Boy Scouts are motivated by a Knife Possession. Even a crappy folding knife that cuts you more than any other object is an object on par with teenage car driving or fooling around with those in skirts. Sorry, this is mostly a Guy Thing.
*
As a youngster, we didn’t care what kind of knife we had, as long as we had at least one and preferably more. You didn’t even need to use them much. Just having them fulfilled your desires and made the universe perfectly adjusted. Nowadays, of course, political correctness is castrating young boys. They must be feminine and gentle and caring. Knives are no longer allowed at school. Parents are forbidding toy guns. Excuse me, I never thought toy guns were evil. And I don’t think a normal intelligent kid will confuse gun safety by using toy guns. As soon as my dad joined the Sheriffs Office he took us down to the dump ( at a tender age ) and explained gun safety and allowed us to fire the weapon and feel its power. There was never any “forbidden fruit” problem, never confusing toy guns with real ones. Hell, I even had enough sense to back off from BB gun wars a group of us tried to organize. And I wasn’t even a very smart kid. We are raising a bunch of pussies instead of men. I weep.
*
As soon as we liberated funds from the wife after we had cemented a more or less secure paycheck, our tastes became to evolve. Now we needed quality knifes. Expensive knifes. We studied carbon steel rating like we used to study bra sizing. The whole thing got complicated and overblown. I say, lets partially return to childhood and just celebrate having a vast supply of crappy knives. Any knife is cool, lots of them even better. As I am always saying, so often you cover your ears and scream like a school girl, it is better to have lots of crap rather than one quality item. Quality items will break. Not from lack of good material but just from accident. Running around in the woods, you trip and fall. If you bend the barrel on your $1,200 H&K-91, you are well and truly screwed. If you bend the barrel on your surplus bolt action rifle you bought for $100, you get another one out of storage ( since you could afford to buy more than one ). If you break your $200 Leopold scope, you never take long shots again. If you break your $30 Wal-Mart scope, you have another one on hand. If you lose or break your $100 knife, you must try to build one out of an old car leaf spring. If you do the same with a five dollar, made in China, stainless steel knife, you have replacements on hand.
*
Buy as many stainless steel knives as you can. Wal-Mart has a few of them to pick from. A dollar folder with clip to carry in your pocket at all times. A few $10 sheath knives. A $8 machete. And do an Internet search for cheap knives. There are plenty of companies out there ( I‘ve had luck with www.budk.com ). Try to avoid the fancy, fantasy types with cool looking but fragile designs. Just go with sturdy looking basic knives. And always carry one or two with you at all times. If lost, no big deal. But then you always have one at hand. Now buy all the other kinds of sharp pointy tools you need. Hatchets, saws ( any wood burning home had better have manual saws to replace chainsaws for long term use ), hell, even throwing knives if you want another outdoor hobby. And don’t forget bayonets. Not current production, not stainless steel, but absolutely necessary in a long term survival situation. You can buy my Bison Newsletter Collection e-book, or get the article for free at www.bisonpress.com ( also the link to buy some knives through Amazon ) from the “samples of my writing” link to read the original survival bayonet article.
*
Knife purists hate stainless steel. Carbon steel makes much better knives, able to actually hold an edge. But stainless steel is cheap to make and millions are regularly churned out. Look, you can buy an expensive knife that will butcher an entire animal and keep sharp. Or you can buy a cheap stainless knife that will dull after a few cuts. Keep a small ceramic sharpener with you at all times. The blade starts getting dull, give it a few swipes through the sharpener and start again. Sharpen again after you are done and you are all ready to slash and kill enemy Mongol hoards once again. The money savings are astronomical by sticking with stainless. No, they are not great knives. They are barely passable knives. But by going stainless, with plenty of sharpeners on hand and in storage, you save money while buying a lot more knives. For a hundred bucks you can buy one fancy quality belt knife, or eight stainless steel ones with just as many sharpeners. If you have a thin blade, you can buy $1.25 sharpeners in the fishing section at Wal-Mart. If a thick blade, around $3 in the camping section.
*
Don’t forget garage sales. Cheap knives abound after the chore of sharpening them became too much for our pampered air-conditioned SUV driving, fat retiree living in a recliner Yuppie puke. Flea markets sell hundreds of the cheap knives at a time. Just do your research first to be sure mail order is not cheaper. You can never have enough cheap knives. In the future after the oil runs out and civilization collapses and factories are closed, knives will still be made. But they will be hand crafted and very expensive. A fabulous barter item is cheap knives. And a personal tool also, of course. Remember, better than nothing and better multiple crap rather than single quality. It is philosophically painful, but strategically correct.
END
Think back to when you were in short pants, a snot nose brat with no thoughts beyond eating sugared cereal and building blanket forts off of the dining room table. Inevitably you would need a pair of scissors for something so you would root around your crayon box, throwing marbles, rubber snakes and plastic army men hither and yon until you came across a cheaply made ( most likely at that time from Japan ) pair of pot metal tin covered kids scissors that had rounded points and the cutting strength of a wet noodle. Any paper actually cut with these instruments was an accidental tear rather than a cut. You grab the tool and go tearing across the house at top speed, intent on completing your project that is so important that not only will it save Western Civilization and look really cool, but it also has your heart racing madly and you bouncing up and down doing the pee-pee dance ( but no time to stop at the bathroom, darn it!, this is too dang important!! ).
*
Well, of course Mom is busy watching daytime TV and baking a cake and chatting on the phone with Aunt Gertrude, all at the same time, but her Mother Radar is working with perfection and somehow she unearths your intent and even before you gain top warp speed she is screaming at you at the top of her lungs, “DON’T RUN WITH SCISSORS!!” If you are lucky you slow down from Race Track Speed to a more respectable Slightly Over The Speed Limit On The Interstate Speed and she is happy and leaves you alone and goes back to what she was doing. If you are unlucky she throws down the phone, whirls about without braking stride and turns down the oven and then chases after you starting a three hour lecture about how running with scissors will be the death of you in a most horrid and unimaginable manner. Regardless, you are now firmly convinced that anything with an edge can cause really cool wounds and so jumps up on your lists of Really Cool Things You Simply Must Have. You have now totally redirected your life into edged weapon acquisition. Doubtless, ninety percent of all memberships into the Boy Scouts are motivated by a Knife Possession. Even a crappy folding knife that cuts you more than any other object is an object on par with teenage car driving or fooling around with those in skirts. Sorry, this is mostly a Guy Thing.
*
As a youngster, we didn’t care what kind of knife we had, as long as we had at least one and preferably more. You didn’t even need to use them much. Just having them fulfilled your desires and made the universe perfectly adjusted. Nowadays, of course, political correctness is castrating young boys. They must be feminine and gentle and caring. Knives are no longer allowed at school. Parents are forbidding toy guns. Excuse me, I never thought toy guns were evil. And I don’t think a normal intelligent kid will confuse gun safety by using toy guns. As soon as my dad joined the Sheriffs Office he took us down to the dump ( at a tender age ) and explained gun safety and allowed us to fire the weapon and feel its power. There was never any “forbidden fruit” problem, never confusing toy guns with real ones. Hell, I even had enough sense to back off from BB gun wars a group of us tried to organize. And I wasn’t even a very smart kid. We are raising a bunch of pussies instead of men. I weep.
*
As soon as we liberated funds from the wife after we had cemented a more or less secure paycheck, our tastes became to evolve. Now we needed quality knifes. Expensive knifes. We studied carbon steel rating like we used to study bra sizing. The whole thing got complicated and overblown. I say, lets partially return to childhood and just celebrate having a vast supply of crappy knives. Any knife is cool, lots of them even better. As I am always saying, so often you cover your ears and scream like a school girl, it is better to have lots of crap rather than one quality item. Quality items will break. Not from lack of good material but just from accident. Running around in the woods, you trip and fall. If you bend the barrel on your $1,200 H&K-91, you are well and truly screwed. If you bend the barrel on your surplus bolt action rifle you bought for $100, you get another one out of storage ( since you could afford to buy more than one ). If you break your $200 Leopold scope, you never take long shots again. If you break your $30 Wal-Mart scope, you have another one on hand. If you lose or break your $100 knife, you must try to build one out of an old car leaf spring. If you do the same with a five dollar, made in China, stainless steel knife, you have replacements on hand.
*
Buy as many stainless steel knives as you can. Wal-Mart has a few of them to pick from. A dollar folder with clip to carry in your pocket at all times. A few $10 sheath knives. A $8 machete. And do an Internet search for cheap knives. There are plenty of companies out there ( I‘ve had luck with www.budk.com ). Try to avoid the fancy, fantasy types with cool looking but fragile designs. Just go with sturdy looking basic knives. And always carry one or two with you at all times. If lost, no big deal. But then you always have one at hand. Now buy all the other kinds of sharp pointy tools you need. Hatchets, saws ( any wood burning home had better have manual saws to replace chainsaws for long term use ), hell, even throwing knives if you want another outdoor hobby. And don’t forget bayonets. Not current production, not stainless steel, but absolutely necessary in a long term survival situation. You can buy my Bison Newsletter Collection e-book, or get the article for free at www.bisonpress.com ( also the link to buy some knives through Amazon ) from the “samples of my writing” link to read the original survival bayonet article.
*
Knife purists hate stainless steel. Carbon steel makes much better knives, able to actually hold an edge. But stainless steel is cheap to make and millions are regularly churned out. Look, you can buy an expensive knife that will butcher an entire animal and keep sharp. Or you can buy a cheap stainless knife that will dull after a few cuts. Keep a small ceramic sharpener with you at all times. The blade starts getting dull, give it a few swipes through the sharpener and start again. Sharpen again after you are done and you are all ready to slash and kill enemy Mongol hoards once again. The money savings are astronomical by sticking with stainless. No, they are not great knives. They are barely passable knives. But by going stainless, with plenty of sharpeners on hand and in storage, you save money while buying a lot more knives. For a hundred bucks you can buy one fancy quality belt knife, or eight stainless steel ones with just as many sharpeners. If you have a thin blade, you can buy $1.25 sharpeners in the fishing section at Wal-Mart. If a thick blade, around $3 in the camping section.
*
Don’t forget garage sales. Cheap knives abound after the chore of sharpening them became too much for our pampered air-conditioned SUV driving, fat retiree living in a recliner Yuppie puke. Flea markets sell hundreds of the cheap knives at a time. Just do your research first to be sure mail order is not cheaper. You can never have enough cheap knives. In the future after the oil runs out and civilization collapses and factories are closed, knives will still be made. But they will be hand crafted and very expensive. A fabulous barter item is cheap knives. And a personal tool also, of course. Remember, better than nothing and better multiple crap rather than single quality. It is philosophically painful, but strategically correct.
END
Saturday, June 16, 2007
entertainment
ENTERTAINMENT IN THE ROOT CELLAR
As the fallout from an old Soviet tactical nuclear weapon is raining down on your town that had the misfortune of being downwind from a disliked target of Muslims, say DC or Miami or NYC, you might find yourself huddled together in the root cellar, driven mad by three meals a day of canned beets, being forced to dig a hole in the floor for a toilet and having absolutely nothing to do for hours on end. This is where a pack of cards and a book of game rules comes in mighty handy. They will do nothing to help your diet or your stench but they will keep you occupied enough to preserve your sanity.
*
The old standard advice was to keep entertainment in your fallout shelter to while away the time as you waited for fallout levels to return to safe reading. Farnham’s Freehold covered this subject briefly. You have to love Heinlein, both a Libertarian and a survivalist. Most of us eagerly bought into the fable of the old Soviet Union no longer holding a threat over our head so that we could disperse with the expense and bother of a fallout shelter. But even without one chances are good that some form of entertainment is going to prove useful after the grid goes down. Since 99% of us are addicted to the electronic teet for hours of entertainment a day, we should make plans to replace it come the need. I am just as guilty, glued to the Internet for two or three hours a day and another one or two in front of the TV. But I also have all supplies laid aside for non-electric entertainment. Realistically, I won’t miss TV as it is truly crap. One watches it to unwind and allow the brain to rest after working all day. I will miss the Internet, entertainment specialized for the individual disguised as education.
*
Let’s say that no massive failure occurs but electric service is disrupted for some reason. Only one hour a day will electricity be delivered to your home. You aren’t going to be watching reruns of The Simpson’s. You will be cooking, running hot water, doing dishes, etc. Sound far fetched? If the system is overloaded and fuel gets scarce, we will go the way of Third World nations only being supplied with a few hours of juice a day. Most of us don’t even really need electricity outside of lighting if other fuels are available anyway. And even lighting can be substituted. We might find this out the hard way soon. But there is nothing that guarantees electrical service forever more at affordable levels. Mankind lived a long time before air conditioning, among other luxuries. Most people freak out about the power being lost, but they can always substitute open windows for AC and cans for refrigerated food. I think the biggest fear is losing the electronic entertainment that consumes so much of our lives.
*
The primary means of entertainment is a deck of cards. But entertainment is like food, you need variety. You should also get board games. And paperback books. Life after the norm of working ten hours a day and then falling asleep with Jay Leno will not be all leisure and entertainment, but there will be plenty of down time. Get the non-electronic means to unwind and enjoy yourself. Just think, after a day of waiting in the food lines, then buying a quarter roll of toilet paper on the black market, then dodging muggers on your way home in full daylight at five p.m., it would be nice to put up your feet and relax a bit over a game of Rummy. It’s that or listen to the wife bitch and moan because her soap opera didn’t come in on the battery powered radio that picks up the audio from TV stations. Or that the bugs ate the only plants you had out on the patio. Or that the weekly mail delivery only had slick paper catalogs and no paper suitable for use in the outhouse. Everyone needs distractions and entertainment. And since no one plays the piano anymore, games and reading are going to have to suffice.
*
You can buy two decks of cards for one dollar at the Dollar Tree stores. I would advise getting a two-pack every visit until you have enough decks stashed for decades of card playing. Homemade and worn out cards don’t shuffle well and take the enjoyment out of playing. Now go find a used copy of a book with game rules. Hoyal’s has millions of copies in print sitting around and gathering dust in thrift stores and garages. I find the Readers Digest Book Of Family Games explains the rules easier and with less stilted language, but then I got both free. Just get whatever you can find cheaply. Not only will all the favorites be explained, but also many different forms of solitaire are given. Well worth the price to get variety. The card games in the store such as Skipbo and Phase Ten are expensive and really just adaptations of old regular card games. But they are fun and it might be worth buying new if you can’t find them used. Or just borrow the rules if possible and mark regular cards to duplicate those games. A hundred plus card game of Skipbo costs about six bucks at Wal-Mart, so a buck worth of cards, a marker pen and a few Xerox copies of rules is a lot cheaper.
*
Board games are not as widely available used as they once were as more families adopt the widely advertised concept of Family Game Night. But if you are patient and shop around you can find board games at thrift stores or garage sales for under a dollar. Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, Clue, Life, Trivial Pursuit, dominos, etc. These are fun and cheap and provide hours of fun. Do not discount fun. The brain needs a break, one reason I hate TV but love it at the same time. Brain candy.
*
If you like reading, stock up on mass market paperback books. Lately, an insane fever has gripped our community and all the thrift stores have marked up the cost of paperback books from a quarter to fifty cents. Pure insanity! I refuse to buy along with such outrageous behavior. However, when I daily root through the trash at work I find free paperbacks. And once a month you can find a “buck-a-bag” book sale. So I stock up on plenty of paperbacks. Normally I enjoy non-fiction, but come crunch time I will have plenty of books to read, even if they are less than perfect. Do the same. And you will be surprised at some of the occasional treasures you find.
END
Thank you for the reader suggestion in the comments section for this idea. My stuff-books and gear at www.bisonpress.com
As the fallout from an old Soviet tactical nuclear weapon is raining down on your town that had the misfortune of being downwind from a disliked target of Muslims, say DC or Miami or NYC, you might find yourself huddled together in the root cellar, driven mad by three meals a day of canned beets, being forced to dig a hole in the floor for a toilet and having absolutely nothing to do for hours on end. This is where a pack of cards and a book of game rules comes in mighty handy. They will do nothing to help your diet or your stench but they will keep you occupied enough to preserve your sanity.
*
The old standard advice was to keep entertainment in your fallout shelter to while away the time as you waited for fallout levels to return to safe reading. Farnham’s Freehold covered this subject briefly. You have to love Heinlein, both a Libertarian and a survivalist. Most of us eagerly bought into the fable of the old Soviet Union no longer holding a threat over our head so that we could disperse with the expense and bother of a fallout shelter. But even without one chances are good that some form of entertainment is going to prove useful after the grid goes down. Since 99% of us are addicted to the electronic teet for hours of entertainment a day, we should make plans to replace it come the need. I am just as guilty, glued to the Internet for two or three hours a day and another one or two in front of the TV. But I also have all supplies laid aside for non-electric entertainment. Realistically, I won’t miss TV as it is truly crap. One watches it to unwind and allow the brain to rest after working all day. I will miss the Internet, entertainment specialized for the individual disguised as education.
*
Let’s say that no massive failure occurs but electric service is disrupted for some reason. Only one hour a day will electricity be delivered to your home. You aren’t going to be watching reruns of The Simpson’s. You will be cooking, running hot water, doing dishes, etc. Sound far fetched? If the system is overloaded and fuel gets scarce, we will go the way of Third World nations only being supplied with a few hours of juice a day. Most of us don’t even really need electricity outside of lighting if other fuels are available anyway. And even lighting can be substituted. We might find this out the hard way soon. But there is nothing that guarantees electrical service forever more at affordable levels. Mankind lived a long time before air conditioning, among other luxuries. Most people freak out about the power being lost, but they can always substitute open windows for AC and cans for refrigerated food. I think the biggest fear is losing the electronic entertainment that consumes so much of our lives.
*
The primary means of entertainment is a deck of cards. But entertainment is like food, you need variety. You should also get board games. And paperback books. Life after the norm of working ten hours a day and then falling asleep with Jay Leno will not be all leisure and entertainment, but there will be plenty of down time. Get the non-electronic means to unwind and enjoy yourself. Just think, after a day of waiting in the food lines, then buying a quarter roll of toilet paper on the black market, then dodging muggers on your way home in full daylight at five p.m., it would be nice to put up your feet and relax a bit over a game of Rummy. It’s that or listen to the wife bitch and moan because her soap opera didn’t come in on the battery powered radio that picks up the audio from TV stations. Or that the bugs ate the only plants you had out on the patio. Or that the weekly mail delivery only had slick paper catalogs and no paper suitable for use in the outhouse. Everyone needs distractions and entertainment. And since no one plays the piano anymore, games and reading are going to have to suffice.
*
You can buy two decks of cards for one dollar at the Dollar Tree stores. I would advise getting a two-pack every visit until you have enough decks stashed for decades of card playing. Homemade and worn out cards don’t shuffle well and take the enjoyment out of playing. Now go find a used copy of a book with game rules. Hoyal’s has millions of copies in print sitting around and gathering dust in thrift stores and garages. I find the Readers Digest Book Of Family Games explains the rules easier and with less stilted language, but then I got both free. Just get whatever you can find cheaply. Not only will all the favorites be explained, but also many different forms of solitaire are given. Well worth the price to get variety. The card games in the store such as Skipbo and Phase Ten are expensive and really just adaptations of old regular card games. But they are fun and it might be worth buying new if you can’t find them used. Or just borrow the rules if possible and mark regular cards to duplicate those games. A hundred plus card game of Skipbo costs about six bucks at Wal-Mart, so a buck worth of cards, a marker pen and a few Xerox copies of rules is a lot cheaper.
*
Board games are not as widely available used as they once were as more families adopt the widely advertised concept of Family Game Night. But if you are patient and shop around you can find board games at thrift stores or garage sales for under a dollar. Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, Clue, Life, Trivial Pursuit, dominos, etc. These are fun and cheap and provide hours of fun. Do not discount fun. The brain needs a break, one reason I hate TV but love it at the same time. Brain candy.
*
If you like reading, stock up on mass market paperback books. Lately, an insane fever has gripped our community and all the thrift stores have marked up the cost of paperback books from a quarter to fifty cents. Pure insanity! I refuse to buy along with such outrageous behavior. However, when I daily root through the trash at work I find free paperbacks. And once a month you can find a “buck-a-bag” book sale. So I stock up on plenty of paperbacks. Normally I enjoy non-fiction, but come crunch time I will have plenty of books to read, even if they are less than perfect. Do the same. And you will be surprised at some of the occasional treasures you find.
END
Thank you for the reader suggestion in the comments section for this idea. My stuff-books and gear at www.bisonpress.com
Friday, June 15, 2007
pro survivalists
PROFESSIONAL SURVIVALISTS
Once again, I endeavor to answer my critics. They might be rude and sarcastic, but so am I so I must respond as if the questions are legitimate. You live in a trailer park, they snidely comment, what can you possibly know about survivalism? You’re not in the military, or a shooting instructor, or an EMT, or farm ten acres, you can’t be a survival instructor/writer. Why are you trying to tell us what to do when you don’t follow your own advice? To those that react without thinking, these are valid points. First off, unless I missed something, we have had no collapse of society in quite some time. Those that did experience one had some form of outside help, such as relief food supplies or ammunition supplies from the KGB to allow the fighting to continue. Agriculture societies collapsing due to weather changes were so long ago we have lost most of the records. There is no such thing as a professional survivalist. Dean Ing is a science fiction writer. Kunstler was a magazine writer. Clayton was a biologist. Tappon knew about guns and wild plants and wrote for Guns and Ammo. These people all learned their survivalist craft just as I did. Reading, researching . Not surviving a social collapse.
*
The military turning out survival experts is a joke. Look at their equipment. Mostly crap. Their tactics are taking casualties. The survivalists tactics are to survive without injury. Their training is pathetic. I was in the Army for two tours in the early eighties on. At the time I was going through military police school, the school itself was ranked number nine in the nation for professionalism in training. This shows how recent upgraded law enforcement training is, because if we were number nine I would have hated to see any graduate of lesser ranked schools. The training was pathetic. The military version of “test and forget” from colleges. When it came time to test on all previous learned skills the testing was almost rigged, they made it so easy to guide the people through. Once at a duty station, the training was even worse. Everyone was guided through a dog and pony show for an evaluator so no one in the chain of command looked bad. Once tested, no follow ups were done. Weapons were barely fired once a year. Each post did things differently and standards were far from standardized. Politics ruled the whole thing. And this was when funding was lavish.
*
Even actual military survival experts are lacking in proper training, at least as far as you or I would define it. The people trained to teach the pilots to survive after a crash were only trained in a specific niche. I worked with a wing nut who graduated from such a program and after many work shifts talking, it was apparent there was no real knowledge of preparing for a social collapse. And this from an otherwise “on the ball” gal. Not stupid, just narrowly trained. Please don’t confuse me here. I am not digging on anyone here. No disrespect. They are generally good at what they do. But all of us are narrowly trained. One skill doesn’t necessarily translate into another. Take a gun instructor. A training class such as Front Sight ( site? ). They are geniuses from the standpoint of gun fights. But does that train them to prepare for social chaos? To defend themselves, sure. Are they also good at food storage and preparation? Caching supplies? Running off of alternate energy? First aid? Of course not. Narrowly trained.
*
The farmer is not great for much more that growing a garden. Granted, that will keep them fed and alive. I would love to have the land and the skills. But they are limited in how they gain expertise in other skills. Same with an EMT or nurse. The fact is that almost all of us are limited to a few skills. Robert Heinlein wrote the famous quote on an non-specialized human, being unlike an insect. And I’m sure he had many skills. But far from all. Perhaps a bit more than normal, but I’m sure for the most part he mainly wrote novels. There are plenty of you out there that have skills I envy. But realistically I know I don’t have the time to learn them. I work almost ten hours a day bringing home a check, how much quality learning time does any of us have?
*
Look, I am good at teaching one thing, frugal preparations. I think I do fairly well on economics and politics. Everything else is marginal at best. I have practiced doing this for a long time. I am no wider trained than any other survival writer. I don’t think I pretend to be. I choose to live frugally. I started off working by not caring about income, then I got married and had kids so I buckled down and earned twice as much. Now that the kids are almost grown I can go back to less stressful jobs for less money. Life is too short to piss it away working an empty job. Living in a trailer park is living frugally. I don’t see it as a sign of failure. But, back to my teaching qualifications. Why should you listen to me? My thought is, have you done better? I spend about four hours a day on this. Reading, research, writing. More time, sometimes, just bouncing it around in my brain. So between living on very little, thinking of alternate ways of prepping, and devoting a lot of time to the analytical aspects of it, don’t you think I can do a pretty good job of survivalism/prepping teaching?
*
Am I the best survivalist writer out there? No. Am I the best frugal survivalist writer? Yes. Show me the competition. As far as my daily topics being a bit stale from time to time, no contest your honor. I plead guilty. I have written almost four hundred articles over the years in various formats. Do you really think I can choose a new, different and exciting idea every time? I don’t know enough about a lot of subjects where I won’t write about them. You know, EMP, two way radios, specialized weapons, mechanics, farming, butchering, animal husbandry, generators, trapping, construction, etc. You get a free publication every day. Enjoy it. If you hate it, you don’t need to buy any of my products. Vote with your wallet. As far as being qualified, I think I rank right up there with the best of them.
END
my stuff www.bisonpress.com
Once again, I endeavor to answer my critics. They might be rude and sarcastic, but so am I so I must respond as if the questions are legitimate. You live in a trailer park, they snidely comment, what can you possibly know about survivalism? You’re not in the military, or a shooting instructor, or an EMT, or farm ten acres, you can’t be a survival instructor/writer. Why are you trying to tell us what to do when you don’t follow your own advice? To those that react without thinking, these are valid points. First off, unless I missed something, we have had no collapse of society in quite some time. Those that did experience one had some form of outside help, such as relief food supplies or ammunition supplies from the KGB to allow the fighting to continue. Agriculture societies collapsing due to weather changes were so long ago we have lost most of the records. There is no such thing as a professional survivalist. Dean Ing is a science fiction writer. Kunstler was a magazine writer. Clayton was a biologist. Tappon knew about guns and wild plants and wrote for Guns and Ammo. These people all learned their survivalist craft just as I did. Reading, researching . Not surviving a social collapse.
*
The military turning out survival experts is a joke. Look at their equipment. Mostly crap. Their tactics are taking casualties. The survivalists tactics are to survive without injury. Their training is pathetic. I was in the Army for two tours in the early eighties on. At the time I was going through military police school, the school itself was ranked number nine in the nation for professionalism in training. This shows how recent upgraded law enforcement training is, because if we were number nine I would have hated to see any graduate of lesser ranked schools. The training was pathetic. The military version of “test and forget” from colleges. When it came time to test on all previous learned skills the testing was almost rigged, they made it so easy to guide the people through. Once at a duty station, the training was even worse. Everyone was guided through a dog and pony show for an evaluator so no one in the chain of command looked bad. Once tested, no follow ups were done. Weapons were barely fired once a year. Each post did things differently and standards were far from standardized. Politics ruled the whole thing. And this was when funding was lavish.
*
Even actual military survival experts are lacking in proper training, at least as far as you or I would define it. The people trained to teach the pilots to survive after a crash were only trained in a specific niche. I worked with a wing nut who graduated from such a program and after many work shifts talking, it was apparent there was no real knowledge of preparing for a social collapse. And this from an otherwise “on the ball” gal. Not stupid, just narrowly trained. Please don’t confuse me here. I am not digging on anyone here. No disrespect. They are generally good at what they do. But all of us are narrowly trained. One skill doesn’t necessarily translate into another. Take a gun instructor. A training class such as Front Sight ( site? ). They are geniuses from the standpoint of gun fights. But does that train them to prepare for social chaos? To defend themselves, sure. Are they also good at food storage and preparation? Caching supplies? Running off of alternate energy? First aid? Of course not. Narrowly trained.
*
The farmer is not great for much more that growing a garden. Granted, that will keep them fed and alive. I would love to have the land and the skills. But they are limited in how they gain expertise in other skills. Same with an EMT or nurse. The fact is that almost all of us are limited to a few skills. Robert Heinlein wrote the famous quote on an non-specialized human, being unlike an insect. And I’m sure he had many skills. But far from all. Perhaps a bit more than normal, but I’m sure for the most part he mainly wrote novels. There are plenty of you out there that have skills I envy. But realistically I know I don’t have the time to learn them. I work almost ten hours a day bringing home a check, how much quality learning time does any of us have?
*
Look, I am good at teaching one thing, frugal preparations. I think I do fairly well on economics and politics. Everything else is marginal at best. I have practiced doing this for a long time. I am no wider trained than any other survival writer. I don’t think I pretend to be. I choose to live frugally. I started off working by not caring about income, then I got married and had kids so I buckled down and earned twice as much. Now that the kids are almost grown I can go back to less stressful jobs for less money. Life is too short to piss it away working an empty job. Living in a trailer park is living frugally. I don’t see it as a sign of failure. But, back to my teaching qualifications. Why should you listen to me? My thought is, have you done better? I spend about four hours a day on this. Reading, research, writing. More time, sometimes, just bouncing it around in my brain. So between living on very little, thinking of alternate ways of prepping, and devoting a lot of time to the analytical aspects of it, don’t you think I can do a pretty good job of survivalism/prepping teaching?
*
Am I the best survivalist writer out there? No. Am I the best frugal survivalist writer? Yes. Show me the competition. As far as my daily topics being a bit stale from time to time, no contest your honor. I plead guilty. I have written almost four hundred articles over the years in various formats. Do you really think I can choose a new, different and exciting idea every time? I don’t know enough about a lot of subjects where I won’t write about them. You know, EMP, two way radios, specialized weapons, mechanics, farming, butchering, animal husbandry, generators, trapping, construction, etc. You get a free publication every day. Enjoy it. If you hate it, you don’t need to buy any of my products. Vote with your wallet. As far as being qualified, I think I rank right up there with the best of them.
END
my stuff www.bisonpress.com
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