Month: December 2007

Odds ‘n Sods:

Delinquencies are soaring: Unpaid credit cards bedevil Americans. (A hat tip to Craig S. for sending us this.)    o o o An Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article was mentioned the at CometGold Forum (at Contrary Investors Cafe) and by nearly a dozen SurvivalBlog readers: Crisis may make 1929 look a ‘walk in the park’. Here is a key quote: “Liquidity doesn’t do anything in this situation,” says Anna Schwartz, the doyenne of US monetarism and life-time student (with Milton Friedman) of the Great Depression. “It cannot deal with the underlying fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt. The banks and …




During a Disaster Event Should You Stay at Home or Leave?, by Grandpappy

Different types of disasters may require a different response if a family wishes to maximize their chances for long-term survival. Therefore each family should have several different disaster plans that they could successfully implement depending on the circumstances. These plans should include: 1. Staying at your home and being able to survive for a reasonable period of time without any outside assistance, and 2. Quickly and efficiently evacuating your home and traveling to a predetermined destination. Staying at home is probably the best overall strategy for most families in a variety of different disaster type situations. However, there are a …


Letter Re: Hunkering Down in an Urban Apartment in a Worst Case Societal Collapse

Hello, In the event of a disaster (I live in New York City) I intend to shelter in place until all the riotous mobs destroy each other or are starved out. I am preparing for up to six months. I have one liter of water stored for each day (180 liters) and about 50 pounds of rice to eat as well as various canned goods. I have not seen on your site anything about heat sources for urban dwellers who intend to shelter in place. I’m assuming that electricity would go first soon followed by [natural] gas and running water. …


Odds ‘n Sods:

Six readers sent us this article about dispossessed Southern Californians: Tent city in suburbs is cost of home crisis    o o o A Rawles family member sent us a link to a web site has all kinds of information on primitive technology    o o o From our friend Michael Panzner, over at the Financial Armageddon blog, comes a chart that tells a thousand words: A Mind-Boggling Data Series    o o o You’ve all seen what has happened to food prices in the past year.Keep in mind that most food storage vendors (including some of our advertisers) are …


Jim’s Quote of the Day:

"If we could condense all the truths of Christmas into only three words, these would be the words: "God with us." We tend to focus our attention at Christmas on the infancy of Christ. The greater truth of the holiday is His deity. More astonishing than a baby in the manger is the truth that this promised baby is the omnipotent Creator of the heavens and the earth!" – John F. MacArthur, Jr.


Letter Re: Retreat Security–Lessons Learned from the Rhodesian Experience

Jim: After giving it some thought [to post-TEOTWAWKI retreat security], I think we need to study many of the homestead/farmstead fortifications used during the [late 1970s] Rhodesian Bush War and to a certain extend in rural South Africa in the present day. Of course, one would need to adjust for legalities so one would not be breaking any laws. – Lame Wolf [JWR Adds: Lame Wolf also sent us a great quote from a letter by “Rhodesian” that was first posted at the Small Wars Journal (SWJ) web site. BTW I recommend the SWJ site–in particular their Reference Library pages–as …


Letter Re: A Twenty-Something EMT with Limited Preps Storage Space

Mr. Rawles, First off I would like to thank you for your profound impact on my life in the last four months. All of my life I grew up with a father and grandfather who were/are minor survivalist men. They believe that the end times are coming and we should prepare for them. They keep about three days of food and water at their homes and plenty of guns and ammo. For the longest time I always thought it was ridiculous and never understood it. Now my thinking has changed to the fact that they are under prepared. When I …


Odds ‘n Sods:

MQC sent us this: Standard & Poor’s Downgrades ACA Capital to Junk Status. MQC notes: “S&P cut ACA’s rating to ‘CCC,’ or eight levels below investment grade, from ‘A,’ the sixth-highest investment-grade rating. It also said it may cut Financial Guaranty Insurance Co’s ‘AAA’ rating.” Here is a sobering snippet: “The entire US economy is $14 trillion or so in contrast to $42.6 trillion in credit default swaps. The entire derivatives trade is now a record $681 trillion.”    o o o Ready Made Resources just added a new photovoltaic (PV) power product to their line. For those of us …




Moon Bounce Communications, by David in Israel

James When you were working at Defense Electronics I’ll bet you came across a few old articles and references to the pre-communication satellite days and how the military especially the navy handled this in a nuclear war scenario. While EMP can be handled by hardening and charge dumping circuits there is still the whole problem with a totally disrupted natural ionospheric layers. Under those conditions, it is predicted that long range HF radio just wont work on most bands most of the time. What started out as a way to listen to Soviet radio and radar transmissions was utilized by …


Letter Re: Coleman Fuel–Uses and Storage Life

Hi Jim, According to Coleman’s web site, Coleman fuel can be stored for 5 to 7 years. I wondered if a chainsaw with the correct oil additive run on Coleman fuel. So I did a web search, and this is what I found, over at the Timebomb 2000 (Y2K) Discussion Forums, posted back in 1998] – E.L.: Coleman Fuel the Final Word! Boy What did I start? I have seen more rumors and half truths about Coleman fuel since I posted that it did work on engines!! Coleman fuel is a very highly refined version of gasoline! It has no …


Letter Re: Comments on the Movie “I Am Legend”

JWR, My wife and I saw “I Am Legend” last night at the local theatre. The movie house was packed. Almost every seat was filled. Of the most interest was the end. As the movie faded to black and credits rolled, there were more than several spontaneous bursts of applause throughout the audience and a few cheers. Wow! The last movie that I remember ever getting applause was the last “Star Wars” installment. Something really hit deep with many in the audience… My wife was weird’ed out by the zombies though, as they were quite scary. So viewer beware. As …